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Getting Clear on Your Brand Strategy to Guide Your Branding Decisions

Getting Clear on Your Brand Strategy to Guide Your Branding Decisions

Welcome to episode 124 of The Determined Mom Show. I am your host, Amanda Tento. Today, we have Kelly Wittman with us and she is a brand strategist and designer from Witt and Company. 

We are going to talk about getting clear on your brand strategy to guide your branding decisions and I love this topic because if you’re not clear, then how are you going to do anything? So tell us a little bit about you, how you got started in doing what you’re doing, and your background. 

Sure. I have been in business for about three and a half years and I got started in a pretty organic way. My husband and I bought our first house five and a half years ago now and we started a home renovation blog that was kind of my way to dip my toe into the digital entrepreneurship space through blogging.

I was able to make some connections with other bloggers and started offering them digital marketing services and my background is in advertising and marketing. So it was a pretty good fit and that’s how Witt & Company was born. I made a big pivot in my business to focus on branding and website design and I’ve been doing that ever since and it’s been wonderful.

That’s awesome. So let’s go ahead and dive right in. So what can we do to get clear on our brand strategy? 

Oftentimes, especially as new business owners, I think this is probably the best place to start and we can all relate because we start with looking for a logo first. However, when I end up working with clients who have existing brands, they’ll come to me and say, this doesn’t feel right and I rather have a brand that feels good and makes me confident in how I’m showing up. 

The purpose of having a brand strategy and digging into that before working on your visuals is to have that clarity so that you can have a logo that feels good and the visuals make you confident in your business and confident in how your business is seen.

So starting with strategy is the way that we can create and guide our visuals to create that visual brand that feels good. So the plan for communicating your brand and how you want your brand to show up and the process that we go through with our clients is to dig into the four brand pillars. 

This is; Who you serve, What you’re offering, How you want to show up, and Why you believe in the work. So those are the four places that we dig into and that then guide those visuals, like the colors, the fonts, the logos.

So let’s start with ‘Who’, which again, oftentimes when we’re just getting started we may think, oh, I’m just going to work with everyone. Which isn’t the right approach, the benefit of deciding and determining and getting some clarity around who that is, so that your messaging and then your visuals can attract and pull in that right person. 

If we go in with the mindset of, I’m going to work with everyone, it makes it more challenging to tailor your message later on. So when getting clear on the ‘Who’, I don’t advocate for doing more of the demographics because oftentimes when we think about the buyer persona or your ideal client, people jump into their potential client income and what their gender is, and where they live and that’s more beneficial from an advertising perspective. 

However, when we do it from branding, I like to get into more of their psychological viewpoints of what their pain points are. What’s the story that they’re telling themselves about the problem? 

So, thinking about what’s keeping them up at night, where do they want to be? What does success look like for them, more of those questions that dig into who they are as a person, rather than the demographics of where they live, is the best route to go.

I loved that you differentiated between the advertising persona of the marketing aspect and how you’re doing the social media posts because you need to know who you’re talking to. While for branding, you need to know what their problem is and how you’re going to solve it.

Right and then that guides the marketing and the advertising. So those more personality-driven or character-driven attributes of that person and that ideal client will then help you to decide the advertising metrics of your marketing message. Especially for that thing that you want to offer and thus making it more clear for that person from a demographic standpoint, they will all lead into each other and they all work together.

Well, once we figure out the ‘Who’ the next step is to dig into that ‘Why’ So why do you believe the work matters? Why are you doing the work? Why do you show up every single day? 

Getting Clear on Your Brand Strategy to Guide Your Branding Decisions

By getting clear on this, you’re tapping into an emotional place for your brand but also letting that ideal client, your community, and your audience dig into an emotional level with your brand. 

So when we are clear on that ‘Why’, we’re giving our audience something to hold onto and build a relationship with, on a deeper level. From a trusted perspective, we all know that people do business with those that they know, like, and trust.

So number three is the ‘What’, so what are you offering? What is the problem that you’re solving? By getting clear on this, you’re helping to communicate that transformation of ‘Who’. 

So we’re starting with Who you want to serve, What are they struggling with and Who do they want to become? What does success look like for them as it relates to what you’re offering and then getting clear and articulating what that looks like?

You can then position how you show up and talk about your work and business from that place. Keeping that in mind. I think the best question that I always ask and dig into is what is that number one problem that you’re solving for the person, that potential client, the customer, and identifying what that is so that you can continue to show up and share that message consistently in a way that they understand.

The last and final pillar for getting that brand strategy clarity is how you want to show up. So this is the pillar that has the most direct reflection on the visuals and what I mean by that is, this one focuses on, How do you want people to feel, to think when they experience your brand?

So getting into emotions, which then plays a really strong role in the visuals. So for example, if someone experiences your brand, whether it’s on your website or scrolling through social media, or getting an email and you want them to feel grounded and sophisticated, and elegant. 

So the colors and the fonts that you’ll use, not only in your logo but also in your entire brand identity are going to be a lot different than if you want someone to feel strong and

empowered and loud. So this pillar does a great job of guiding those visuals specifically based on emotions, which gets down to like color psychology and getting into different colors that we use and the types of fonts that we use can evoke certain emotions.

So being intentional about how I want people to feel and think and then use certain colors and fonts and even graphics to achieve that. So are you going to be using straight lines or more abstract elements? You know, they can all help and support the feelings and thoughts you want people to have when they experience your brand.” 

I love that and that goes into the web design part of it a lot, right? Because that’s one of the biggest places where your brand is featured and where your brand lives. That’s why every element of that website has got to reflect your brand. 

Absolutely and it’s an opportunity for you to have fun and showcase that personality on your website because it’s such a large amount of real estate, that’s solely dedicated to your business and your brand.

It’s a great way for you to bring out that personality and to hone in and extrapolate what those feelings are and then with intention, share them on your website. So a great way to use colors and fonts and even get into the brand photography that you have. You can have a lot of fun with it when you have the right structure and outline, it gives you some creative flexibility as well.

Thank you for all of that information on the 4 pillars of branding and I’m sure our listeners and readers have learned a lot. 

If you have any questions, let us know! Reach out to us!

Connect with Kelly Here:

https://www.facebook.com/wittandcompany

Email us at: amanda@tdm-marketing.com

Other Websites: TDM Marketing

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