Episode Overview:

“5 Mistakes to Avoid When Building Your Brand” 

Building your first brand can be scary, but we promise you it’s 100% worth it. Today we’re discussing, ‘5 Mistakes to Avoid When Building Your Brand.’ We have managed to come up with a complete list of 5 lessons we wish we knew before officially starting to build our first brand, being able to identify these issues has tremendously helped to point our brand in the right direction.

If you’d like to learn all of the essential strategies towards building a powerful brand that works, then check out Shanice’s free online course where she’ll personally guide you through the most effective solutions towards developing or enhancing your personal and professional brand.

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Here are the 5 Lessons we learned when building our first brand:

1. Align Your Personal and Professional Brands
2. Narrow your customer focus
3. Always use strong branded visuals
4. Make sure your message is simple, clear and consistent
5. Don’t assume your new brand will take off rapidly

 

1. Align Your Personal and Professional Brands

It’s so important that whatever values or content that you share for your professional brand is consistent with the overall message of your personal brand. Every post is an extension of your brand and your brand is an extension of who you are and what my clients can expect of you.

Align Your Personal and Professional Brands to be consistent in their message and to demonstrate the ideal image of your brand that your customers want to see. Their trust is the most valuable part of your business. 

It might feel a bit intimidating when you think about bringing your personal and professional brand together. And for some of you it may feel a little weird making them similar in that sense. But it allows your audience to connect with you more.

Plus, if you have already made the bold decision to start your own business, you have already decided to put yourself in the spotlight… so it’s a little late to avoid it now. And I guarantee that your clients, prospects or employees will look you up ..which is why you want to make sure that everything checks out. 

Now we don’t recommend creating a false personal image of yourself, because you should definitely keep your brand authentic. But just make sure both your personal and professional brand are aligned with a consistent message.

1. Narrow your customer focus

Literally every successful business is niche specific. “Specificity breeds success” and it actually works guys! It’s important to speak to exactly the type of audience you’re wanting to market to. 

Key takeaway: It doesn’t do your brand a lot of good if you don’t know who your brand should be marketed to. Determine who your target audience is early on and then make a dedicated effort to research and understand them. Essentially: Build your brand around the needs of your target niche. 

 

You want your potential clients to feel that they NEED your services, and your branding and marketing should be really specific to that. This is such value, value we wish we knew when we started our first brand. And we hope these lessons learned will help you as well.

1. Always use strong branded visuals

Everything from graphics to photos and videos of your brand, should all be consistent. You definitely want to leave a lasting impression and strong branded visuals will definitely help you excel in that arena. But if that sounds like too much work, just check out visualvybzstudios.com where they do literally everything for you! They literally do.

1. Make sure your message is simple, clear and consistent

For instance, if your social media platforms are inconsistent with the content on your website that can be very misleading for your audience. Earlier in this episode we recommended that you focus on a target customer group. For instance, If you have recently decided to create meals for vegans but your brochures still have photos dedicated to meat lovers then i’m sure you see how that can be a problem.

Another thing you want to avoid with this lesson are the chunky hard to read paragraphs that make people just want to close the tab. I’d recommend using 2-4 sentences max per paragraph and try not to use fancy jargon that your target audience does not understand. Keep it short, simple and proof read it before finalizing your content. Once you're done, publish it consistently everywhere.

And by Making sure your message is simple, clear and consistent...we don’t always just mean text. This can be literally everything- from overly complex visuals or videos that are hard to follow or understand to brand logos that don’t make sense. For better or worse, these are things that people will use to form an opinion of you or your brand.

1. Don’t assume your new brand will take off rapidly

For the love of your own SANTIY,  do not put yourself through the anxiety of having unrealistic expectations for yourself and your brand.  Because I think it IS safe to say that most of us are victims of assuming our brand will go viral post launch and unfortunately, that’s not how it actually works. We really wish it were that simple though.

It’s important to understand that it takes time and accept that you have to be dedicated and patient for this to really work. I truly believe that if you learn from these lessons and strategically work towards applying the brand development techniques learned in this podcast, you will create a memorable brand that people will be able to close their eyes and envision when they hear the name of your business.

Subscribe to the visual vybz studios YouTube channel.

That’s all we’ve got for now friends, but I wanna quickly mention that our next episode is extremely exciting! Shanice and I are gonna discuss what happens when visual strategy meets visual psychology.

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Cheers,

Shan & Lacy. :)