Today I am going to talk about the question that we frequently get asked, which is does branding actually matter for my business?
The answer is yes, it does. It drastically can impact your business.
Here’s where everyone gets stuck on this thing. Right.
Most people don’t truly understand what branding is and they think that branding is their logo it’s not.
The branding of Coca-Cola has very little well, it has a lot to do with the logo, but it’s not the logo. It’s what people feel when they see a logo. It’s how Coke talks about itself. It’s how they represent themselves. It’s how they do their marketing. It’s in their website. It’s in their material, in their voice. It’s on their bottle. It’s everywhere. It’s encompassed in Coca-Cola, which now I’d like to have a Coke, which I’ll do after I do this video.
But for real, it’s super important. It’s critical. But the catch point is that everyone gets stuck there. They’re like, I got to do branding. And so they spend all this budget just doing that. And there’s no action. There’s no point. Right?
If you just have a beautiful disk or a PDF or a USB drive with your brand, how is that brand going to make it’s way to your consumer?And that’s where your website and your social media are your vehicles that need to use that brand.
Initially in your business, the brand doesn’t have as much impact as you would think. Where it becomes critical is when you have developed a website, you’re driving SEO or page traffic to it. You’re starting to do marketing and you’re starting to build your business. All of that stuff circles back and points back to the brand.
I often say the brand or the messaging of your business, like the way that you communicate about your business, is the foundational piece that all campaigns either develop on or crumble on. And having a bad brand can crush all those other efforts. But you won’t know it until you’ve gotten all the way through getting those other things done. You’ll realize, woops, my brand is not strong enough.
Right? So it’s one of those things where, yes, it absolutely matters in your business and it will matter more to you. The bigger that your business grows, the more entrenched your business becomes in the industry. Your brand will become more and more and more and more crucial. But it’s not something that I recommend people get super hung on out of the gate.
Many businesses get a reasonable logo and a nice looking style guide and some really great messaging and some great copy. And they can go from there into all the other things they’ve got to do. And then when the business grows, you can come back, you can adjust or change a logo, you can move your colors around, you can change your big why your purpose in life change two or three years into the business.
It might change every five years, might change every six months. The thing is, if you get stuck there, then you never get to all the other things. So in that case, branding doesn’t matter to you, right? Because that’s all you’ve done. You’ve done your branding, but you haven’t gotten anywhere else with it.
So that’s where it’s like that’s the hang-up point that I think so many people have with branding is that it’s like it’s all or nothing. They’re either going to do it all the way or they’re not. It’s like, yeah, I don’t need branding when you do. You just may not need a twenty thousand dollar branding package to get you from where you need to be now to get through all the other stuff to come back to it.
So that’s why I say it matters in your business significantly, but don’t get stuck there and definitely do not try to brand yourself. It is a huge mistake to brand your own business. I did not brand my own business. I did not do Muletown Digital‘s brand. I did not design my logo. I did not like we weren’t ready for that when we started out right. I had a lot of help. So don’t make that mistake.
Even big businesses do not do it internally because it’s too hard to see the forest for the trees and your own business get help and establish a solid brand to build your foundation on and make sure you constantly go back to it and make sure what you decided
up front still stands. Because if there’s dissonance between your brand visual, your brand voice, your brand language and all the things that you put out, it hurts your business a lot more than you would think.
So make sure you pay attention to your branding, get help where you need it. And I hope this is helpful for you.
Thanks.
