Why Brand Strategy Matters For Small Businesses
Imagine this...
You start a brand new business, pull together a quick DIY logo, choose a few colours you like, download the first pretty font you find and go on your merry way to building your business.
A few months later, you’re bored of the colours, you hate that font you picked, and you’re attracting the completely wrong people to your business. You want to see a change, so you go through that DIY cycle again, choosing a new font, new colours, tweaking your logo and hoping to see a positive difference. Only nothing changes, and the same things happen again, leaving you feeling demotivated and wondering what the hell is going wrong.
What’s the critical thing you’re probably missing?
Brand strategy.
It’s common for newer small business owners to think about just the visuals of their business, as that's the part you always see, right? But if you want to look beyond the pretty, let’s go beyond the surface and think about your brand from a strategic perspective.
So, what exactly *is* brand strategy?
Your brand strategy is a documented plan of action for how you envision building and sharing your brand. It's how you describe your brand, what the big vision is, what problems it aims to solve and how you communicate it to the world. A brand strategy helps you discover your business goals, customers’ needs, who you are, and how they can be aligned to help you gain a clear idea of how to achieve your big picture goals.
What's involved with creating a brand strategy?
An excellent way to think of your brand as a whole (both the strategy and visuals) is to think of it as a lovely houseplant.
Above the soil, you’ve got the stems, the leaves and foliage, i.e. your logo, fonts, colours. These are the parts that your customer sees regularly and helps to build brand recognition. The bit you don’t see, the plant roots, lie under the soil but are the most essential part of the plant. This is your brand strategy, the foundational aspects that anchor you down and support your growth journey from behind the scenes. This includes your big vision, mission, values, audience, positioning, competitors, brand personality, archetypes, tone of voice, messaging and more.
Before you focus on what your branding should look like, to get started with your strategy, you need to take a few steps back and consider some key questions. What’s your story? Or, in the case of our houseplant, what seeds are you planting?
Why did you start your business in the first place?
What is your brand purpose?
What’s the vision for your business?
Who are your target clients/customers?
What problems are you trying to solve?
What goals are you aiming to achieve?
Having a solid understanding of your brand, who it’s for, what your clients’ needs are, what your business goals are and how it all connects together, is how you’ll find the magic behind your brand. You’ll be confident in where your business is going and be reassured that you’re helping your customers in the best way possible.
Why should you care about creating a brand strategy?
Why does any of this matter? Well, if you’ve heard this once, you’ll hear it a million times:
Having just a pretty logo and some colours will only get you so far if you want to grow your business.
They won’t help you accomplish your big-picture goals or bring in the income you dream of. They can’t help you understand your clients’ problems or how you can help solve them. Your visuals are a part of the system, not the whole.
Without the roots, there’s no plant growth. The same goes for your business.
If you don’t fully know your business purpose or your audience, or you’re just following design trends with no rhyme or reason, you’ll find yourself in a constant loop of redesign hell and stagnation, and do you really have time for that?
By working on your business roots, you’ll become a lot more intentional with how you grow your business. You’ll stop wasting time and energy on the things that aren’t serving you and, instead, be able to prioritize and focus on the things that will help you achieve your goals.
Brand strategy is the starting point for my brand projects. When that is in place, the visuals and every other part of your brand start to fall into place. Everything you create will be more meaningful and purpose-driven rather than solely driven by personal preferences (which can change over time).
It’s all about focusing on what makes you and your business unique, not falling down the rabbit hole of trendy fonts, colours and illustrations.
Strategy first, aesthetics second, my friend.
If you’re looking for a helping hand with all of this, my Brand Clarity Workbook has received a little update and is available as your guide to help you answer some of these key strategic brand questions and more. Join my Soul-Led Letters mailing list below to get your free copy!
