“Where and how to start building a brand?” This is — hands down — the most common question I get from small business owners and solopreneurs.

But while many feel overwhelmed, this one is actually easy to answer, because you start with YOU. Your goal is to attract paying customers — a fiercely loyal tribe, if you will —  to you. And you do that by creating an authentic brand voice that starts with you, your values, your passion, and WHY are you in your industry. If you follow me, you know I talk about this quite a bit.

When you can attract an audience that shares the same values and same passion as you do, you’ve struck gold. So, look no further than inside yourself.

Start with yourself

Starting your branding with yourself may feel intimidating. “This was supposed to be about my business, not about me!” Right? But the thing is, for small businesses and solopreneurs, especially if you are a service provider, that there is little difference between you and your business. Your customers want to relate to a person, not to a corporation.

This is the very reason big corporations and huge brands like Nike hire celebrities to be the face of the business, the brand ambassador. Because they’ve become so huge that there is no human touch, no single person to relate to in the business. They hire someone their customers can relate to and look up to.

So, unless you can hire Colin Kaepernick to be your brand ambassador, I suggest you get comfortable about the idea of being your own brand ambassador. And it may require you shift your mindset from “I’m nobody interesting” to “I’m unique and amazing and people are lucky to get to work with me.”

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The second step is about formulating all that awesomeness and unique point of views to something you can directly use in your marketing and communications: your mission and your vision. The goal is to consistently reflect throughout your marketing and brand communications to communicate why you are in your industry and why anyone should care.

“Why anyone should care” sounds harsh, right? But it actually is a super critical question you need to ask yourself whenever you’re creating any communications (marketing, branding, informational, transactional, etc.) for your business.

This question implies that a) you are putting your customer in the center of your communication and your business and b) you’re only offering them information they need and care about, no fluff. If you can always answer this question, you know you’re bringing value.

Who are you serving?

Of course, you cannot put your customer in the center unless you know who they are. I am a huge proponent of human centered branding. And the humans in the center of your branding should be: your customer and you. We already covered why you are in the center. But what about your customer?

You simply cannot develop effective branding — or a business for that matter — if you don’t know your customers. What do they need? What do they like? What are their biggest pain points? What are they attracted to? Who do they look up to? What are their values? Where are they from? And why would they buy your products and/or services?

Different people will have different tastes and different needs. You will never be able to serve and attract everyone. Nor should you try. The more closely you can tailor your offering, branding, and marketing to a specific ideal customer, the more successful it will be.

Because when your customers come across any communication from your business they need to be able to feel that you are speaking directly to them. That your offering was made for them. That your tastes are similar. That you know how they are and what they need.

When your customer comes across your brand, they should feel like they’re bumping into their best friend.

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Brand Personality

Next you need to define your brand personality. Brand personality are the characteristics that describe your brand and inspire your look and feel. Sometimes in the branding industry we tease out your brand personality by asking questions like “if your brand was a car what car would it be and why?” Or “ if your brand was an animal what animal would it be and why?” The idea is to get you start attaching describing attributes to the brand image you want to build. 

Now, brand archetypes are a super popular tool for DIY branding today. Do I recommend them? I actually don’t. I don’t use brand archetypes in branding. And none of the branding agencies or design studios I worked in in the past 15+ yeas ever used archetypes.

The thing is, you are not an archetype. Your business is not an archetype. And there are much better processes out there to tease out the look and feel and the brand voice of your of branding than using a predefined archetype. 

It’s true that you can find commonalities between brands and characteristics they share. Creating archetypes is a common process in writing scripts and stories. But when it comes to branding, and especially DIY branding, I don’t recommend it.

I would rather have you focus on finding what is unique (and important for your customer) about you and your offering than trying to figure out which of the predefined cookie cutters you should use.

And only when you have your mission, vision and brand personality, you can move to creating the visual identity for your branding. That is the logo, the colors, the fonts, and so forth. 

This is because your mission, vision, and brand personality should direct your visual identity. They should be reflected in the colors and fonts you choose and in the logo you (or your designer) create.

Ok, so the things you need to figure out in the following order are:

1. Why are you in business?
2. What do you offer and why should anyone care?
3. What makes you unique?
4. Who is your offering for?
5. How do you describe it? What are the defining characteristics?
6. What does it look like?
7. What does it sound and feel like?

Ready start building your brand?

In my free 7 step brand strategy framework, I walk you through all the steps mentioned above. The free PDF workbook you get is full of guiding questions for your to start forming a holistic understanding of what makes your brand unique and how you can tackle the entire branding process step-by-step — without the overwhelm or investing big bucks.

Download today and get started!

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P.S. If you haven’t already done so, come check out our free Facebook group DIY Brand Design & Strategy for Soulpreneurs where I teach soulpreneurs like you to build their own branding and create their own designs.