3 Simple Steps to Consistently Say the Right Things to Your Customers

If you had to sum up your business in a feeling, what would that feeling be? 

Is it motivation? Happiness and fun? Playfulness? Perhaps you want people to think of loyalty, or confidence when they see or think of you and your brand. 

Before we tell you what feelings we try to bring up with our business branding, let’s talk about how exactly you can portray that feeling to our customers. 

A huge part of it has to do with your branding.

Branding is your strongest form of communication to your clients. Your branding can make your business seem bubbly and fun, professional and efficient, or (if you are not careful) messy and chaotic. 

Check out this blog post by The Branding Journal to learn more about the importance of branding.

Before ever getting to know you, your office, or the services you offer, your clients are making judgments and assessments of your businesses based purely on your brand. 

I know that seems crazy, but think about it. Have you ever landed on a website looking for a product or service and left feeling overwhelmed, disoriented, or sketched out? I know I have. A HUGE contributor to that is the branding that they chose to use. Click here to see some examples of how branding can change the overall feel of a website.

What is your current branding saying to your potential clients? 

Do you like what it’s saying? How would you change it?

Sometimes when we create a brand we think we know exactly what it’s saying. It’s important to get an outside perspective. This could mean hiring someone to create your brand or it could mean posting it to various Facebook groups to get good feedback, or maybe taking a potential client out to lunch and picking their brain about how they perceive your brand, and what they would be looking for. 

It’s SO important to be intentional about your branding, and then… you HAVE to be consistent with it. Intentional branding loses all of its potency if you’re not consistent in applying it across all your platforms. 

Being Consistent with your Brand is Key to Attracting your Ideal Clients

So now that I have drilled into you the importance of having a strong brand, let’s talk about 3 ways you can make sure your branding stays consistent across all of your content. 

1. Have a brand guide.

This doesn’t have to be anything formal. All it needs to be is a collection of all the elements of your brand in one place. (a folder on google drive works great!) This includes colors, fonts, images and patterns, or textures. In this guide you need to be really clear about which colors are primary, secondary and accent colors. (See this cool post about colors) The purpose of this guide will help you and your team stay consistent in the way that you use your brand elements. 

Make the guide easily accessible. Everytime you get ready to create content make sure you are referring back to the guide. Do your posts fit in these guidelines? 

If it’s a yes, you are good to publish it! 

Here are some examples of branding guides.

2. Social media graphic templates.

This is such an easy way to make sure your social media posts stay on brand. Take the time to build out enough social media templates to get you through about a month or two (three is better if you are really feeling up to it). 

Make sure you include a variety. (ie: make sure you have some for testimonials, quotes, and your regular content.) 

This makes planning your content for social media a breeze! All you gotta do is pop in the new pictures and copywriting and you’re good to go! You can even make several color variations of each one to keep things new and exciting on your socials. We make all of our social media templates on Canva. (This is an affiliate link, if you decide to try Canva Pro we will get a tiny commission off it with no extra cost to you!)

Canva is a super easy to use platform that allows you to save your color palettes and fonts, making it easy to stay on brand with each post you create. 

On the top left, the top tab is labeled templates. From there you can find one you like and tweak it. Here are a few examples of templates we’ve put together for ourselves. 

3. HAVE. A. BRAND. YOU. LOVE

I saved this one for last because it’s the nearest and dearest to my heart. Let me tell you right now, if you don’t 100% love your branding you are going to keep messing with it. You need to make sure that you love everything about your branding…. Let me say that again so it soaks in: you HAVE to love everything about your branding. 

I speak from personal experience on this one. If you happened to be one of our few followers on our old Instagram account (before we got hacked and had to start all over… 😡) you might remember  this half hearted blue and green color palette with a leaf pattern throughout. 

It was cute… the problem was that neither one of us completely loved it or the message it was sending our potential clients. I kept tweaking it over and over again until all we had left was a mess. I was embarrassed by it to the point that it affected how I showed up on social media. 

That’s when we knew we needed a rebrand. We took MONTHS to nail down a color palette, fonts, and logos. There were so many times we just wanted to throw in the towel and settle for “good enough”. But we didn’t. I love what we came up with. I am proud to show up for my clients on social media because I know that we have a brand that supports us and says exactly what we need it to.

What about A&M Digital Design?

So what do we want people to feel when they think of our business? We really want our business to feel clean, friendly and upscale. (Is it cheating to pick three?)

When people find our business we want it to look professional, and we want to give the impression of simplicity. While that may not be on the fore-front of your mind, it will subconsciously give you the impression that working with us is simple. 

How does your branding need to change? Let’s get connected and chat about it! One of our favorite things ever is to help business owners realize a dream of theirs, and create a branding foundation to make it happen!