3 Basics to Building a Strong Brand - before opening Canva!

Branding reeeeally matters.

Colours, fonts, logos, of course it is important. It's a huge part of marketing - you want your business to feel like you, to look cohesive, to feel professional.

But if you are spending more time focusing on the aesthetics, i.e. choosing between two shades of green than you are talking to actual humans about your offer then branding is not strategy any more, it's procrastination.

Why endless tweaking isn't helping

I just finished working with an amazing client. She is completely up my street, a musician who works with musicians, running a really cool membership that helps artists grow their careers (and if you know me, you'll know I'm an ex pro-musician, so this was totally my vibe!).

We were revamping two of her websites and we had a long, very detailed conversation about design: colours, fonts, layout, stuff that genuinely matters for your visual identity.

But she struggled to land on one direction. Every time we got close, something just didn't feel right for her.

From my perspective, her brand was already really clear. I knew what she stood for, who she was helping and the kind of energy she wanted people to feel when they landed on her site. But when it came down to picking colours and aesthetics, she was stuck in a loop.

After thinking about it, I realised her brain was working overtime on the branding because there were a few deeper things that still felt a little vagues and undefined.

Branding becomes the safe thing to obsess over when the real work feels uncomfortable.

So instead of coming at your brand Canva-first, I want you to come at it from the inside out.

If you do that, you will not only find branding decisions easier but you'll also end up with a business that is actually built on solid marketing ground.

So, here are three things I recommend you focus on before you lose another afternoon to font pairing.

1.) Validate your offer

Most of the people I work with are a few years into business which means they have offers already and usually more than one.

But quite often, when we sit down to look at their marketing, it becomes obvious that the offer they want to build a whole strategy around has not really been validated yet. It sounds good on paper, it is probably helpful, but it has not been properly tested in the real world with real people.

So this is your step one: get your offer crystal clear, then go and validate it!

That means

• Share it with your ideal customers

• Get on calls

• Ask questions

• Listen more than you talk

• Pay attention to what lands and what does not

Do not just assume it is a great offer because you spent a long time thinking about it.

Once your offer is solid and you have real feedback, you will feel so much more confident backing it. You will know how to talk about it because you are not guessing any more, you are reflecting what your people have already told you.

2.) Know your audience like real people

If you are even slightly confused about who your audience are, it becomes almost impossible to translate that into any kind of visual branding that feels right.

Are you talking to early stage beginners or people five years in?

Are they scrappy and DIY or more polished and established?

Are they overwhelmed and burnt out or ambitious and energised?

All of that is going to shape the feel of your brand, so you need to actually get to know them.

Again, this means talking to people, not just filling in another ideal client worksheet.

Ask questions and get feedback.

Pay attention to the exact words and phrases they use and the problems they bring up over and over again.

And please, do not only ask your friends and family. They love you, which is so wonderful for your heart (and ego, as you'll probably say they LOVE everything you do!), but really bad for your business decision making skills - they are not your focus group.

When you understand your audience on a deeper level your branding choices become ten times easier because you are choosing based on how you want those specific people to feel. Not just what looks impressive or savvy.

3.) Get clear on your business values

For a lot of solopreneurs and small business owners, brand values get mixed up with personal values. Sometimes they overlap completely, understandably so.

But you need to remember, your business is its own thing. It represents something bigger because there is a mission behind it, even if you have not written it down yet.

Some things you can ask yourself to get clearer on your brand values:

• What does this business actually stand for?

• What do I want people to feel when they interact with it?

• What am I not willing to compromise on?

Your values might be three words or five sentences. It doesn't need to be fancy, but they should reflect the different facets of what your business truly stands for.

So now, once your offer is validated, your audience is clear and your values are on the table, then it is a beautiful time to start thinking about how all of that should look on the outside.

At that point, branding is an expression of the work you have already done, it's coming from the inside out.

And here is the thing I really want you to remember: you do NOT need perfect branding to start. You do NOT need the final version of your logo to launch your offer.

There are so many big name brands that started with the simplest of visuals and evolved over time, after they knew who they were and who they were serving.

So don;t wait for the perfect font to get out there.

Talk to real people, test out your ideas and get the golden feedback you need to make the best business decisions you can...then come back to Canva and make it look stunning!