Imagine how it would feel to have your brand finally reflect the vision you have in your head. A vision that will take you and your business to the next level. That’s what we’re going to start working on right now.

Watch the video below and download the Ultimate Branding Breakthrough Starter Kit for free and get to work!

Not only will upgraded branding boost your confidence like only the most amazing branding can, but it will attract your ideal customers to you and inspire visibility that you haven’t experienced before. Because let’s face it: you’re going to want to flaunt this polished up baby of yours on every platform possible.  

And when you reach masses with your newly found confidence, and attract raving fans to your brand, you get to share your gifts with more people than ever before. And you’ll be helping more people to have better lives. Now, that’s something to aspire for!

Download the Ultimate Branding Breakthrough Starter Kit for free and start upgrading your brand today!

By upgrading your brand strategy, you’re realizing the potential of your business. When you align your brand strategy with your business strategy and vision, anything is possible. With a brand that attracts a tribe of fiercely loyal customers and advocates, you’ll have the freedom to say no to clients you don’t feel 100% aligned with and only focus on serving those that light up your spirit. 

Getting started with your branding breakthrough

To help you kick-start your brand upgrade journey, there are three important things you need to decide on. The good news? Once you have all the details (which I’m going to give you in this Starter Kit) they are pretty easy decisions to make! 

#1 – Positioning 

What is the dream future for you and your business? What does your business need to become in order for you to achieve your dream future? How does your business compare to the competition in the marketplace currently? How will your business compare to the competition in the marketplace in your dream future scenario? 

#2 – Transformation

What level of transformation are you willing to make in order to meet that dream future? Is your business currently almost there? Or does it feel like a complete transformation is needed? 

#3 – Execution

Will you hire a consultant or agency to do the work for you? Or will you DIY some or all of the work? Both options (or a combination) are doable depending on your budget. In any case, I always recommend you learn enough branding to be able to direct the process and manage your consultant/designer. 

Download the Ultimate Branding Breakthrough Starter Kit for free and get to work!

Decision 1: Positioning your business for your dream future

When you’re trying to get to a destination, it’s almost impossible to know which way to go before you know where you’re starting from. Same goes with branding. In order to define what level of upgrade your brand needs, we first need to see where you’re at right now. And then we map the road to where you want to end up in. 

To both analyze your competition and to identify your ultimate future positioning, I have the best tool for you: Competitor Matrix. This is a quick and visual tool that helps you not only identify your current and future positions in the marketplace, but also any market opportunities and the biggest competitors you should be paying the most attention to. Let’s see how it works. 

A printable template for the Positioning Matrix is in my free starter kit. Download the Ultimate Branding Breakthrough Starter Kit and get to work!

First list qualifications and factors in your business and industry that you want to use to compare your business to your customers. For example, price could be one. The quality of service might be another one. There might be some industry specific ones as well. For example, if you’re in the restaurant business whether or not the restaurant is family friendly could be one factor. You will choose two qualifications/factors and then you’ll map out how much of that factor/qualifier you and your competitors have. This is done on a visual map.  

Draw x and y axes (like a big plus sign). Add the qualities you want to measure on each end of the axes. One end will be “high” and the other end will be “low.” For example, high touch vs low touch. If the qualifiers you choose have clear opposites, you don’t need high vs low (for example, ordinary vs luxury). 

A printable template for the Positioning Matrix is in my free starter kit. Download the Ultimate Branding Breakthrough Starter Kit and get to work!

Position your competitors on the matrix based on their brand and products/services with gray circles or dots. Then position your current brand with a different colored circle. And finally add where you want your brand to be in the future (your dream future scenario) with a star. 

Now look at the grid. You should have a collection of little markings across your map. Start analyzing. The goal is to identify so called opportunity gaps and your closest competitors. 

An opportunity gap is an area in your industry and your marketplace where a clear opportunity for business lies due to less competition or entirely untapped markets. So, pay close attention to the emptier areas on the map since those are your potential opportunity gaps. These gaps become the potential positioning opportunities for your brand, as they are less saturated with your competitors’ offerings. 

If you choose to position yourself in a more saturated area in your matrix, you will need to be prepared to work a bit more to stand out. Since there’s already a lot of competition in that area, you will have find a unique angle for your branding to stand out. 

The competitors that are closest to you on the map, are likely your biggest competitors. These are the businesses you want to keep your eye on to make sure you’re emphasizing your unique selling points in your marketing and communications. 

I’d also like to point out that, it is critically important to choose the right qualifiers/factors for comparing against on the matrix. Otherwise you might end up with an unattractive or inefficient positioning. Dive into your existing brand or offering to weigh different factors. What are the things that you find important in your business and offering? What are your competitive advantages? What are these now and what would you want them to be in future?

A printable template for the Positioning Matrix is in my free starter kit. Download the Ultimate Branding Breakthrough Starter Kit and get to work!

Decision 2: How big is your transformation?

This question has two sides. On the one hand, it measures the transformation your brand has to go through in order to meet the new position you’ve plotted out. On the other hand, it measures the transformation you as the business owner has to go through to take your business there.

Download the Ultimate Branding Breakthrough Starter Kit for free and get to work!

For many small business owners, especially service providers and creatives, your business brand is your personal brand. When you sell your services or products you’ve made yourself, it’s almost like you’re selling a piece of yourself. This means you will not only prepare your business for the new branding, you have to prepare yourself, as well. 

Depending on the degree of the transformation, the amount of work can vary. When it comes to the strategy part, you still need to go through the same steps. But depending on the outcome of the strategy, the amount of design changes and revisions will vary. 

The rule of thumb is: the bigger the distance on the map between your starting point and your goal state is, the larger the degree of the transformation you’ll likely need to achieve the goal. In other words, if your position changes drastically, your branding will have to change drastically, as well.

It is completely normal to feel a slight push back at this point because change can be intimidating. But change is also good. If your business is not where you want it to be right now, if you’re not feeling confident about your brand, it’s time to upgrade your branding.

All brand upgrades start with thorough strategy work. That will dictate what parts need changing and how. When you consider your newly defined dream future, your ultimate goal state, you’re going to need to ask yourself how different is your brand strategy in your dream future compared to today.

The biggest brand transformation is called rebranding. This implies you are open to changing any and all elements necessary within your branding to meet the goal state. You will literally redo the branding. The degree of the rebranding is determined by the brand strategy. The bigger the changes are to the current strategy, the bigger the changes to the visual identity will likely be.

You might also choose not to do a full rebrand. A more subtle update is often called a “facelift.” Maybe you’re not too far from your ideal state, but you’ve noticed that to fully get there, you need to update some part parts of your brand strategy. And that means updating your visual identity, as well. 

Download the Ultimate Branding Breakthrough Starter Kit for free and get to work!

Decision 3: Who will do your branding?

The third critical decision you have to make is: who will do your branding? Are you going to hire a consultant? An agency? Or maybe you want to do parts or everything yourself. These are all options you need to consider. Let’s weigh the pros and cons of each of the approach.

Hiring a branding agency

Pros: You get a team of people with special expertise working on your branding and making sure all steps of the process are executed with the highest skill level.

Cons: Can be expensive — need bigger budget. Depending on the agency (and budget), you may have less influence on the outcome and the turnaround time. And you may not have full transparency to the process.

Hiring a consultant / freelancer

Pros: Cheaper than hiring an agency. Typically still get to work with an expert. May have easier access to this person and more 1-1 time.

Cons: While cheaper than agency, can still cost a pretty penny. Finding a skillful person who fits on your budget and has time on their calendar might be difficult. You might have to hire more than one consultant as the skill sets can be limited to one specialty. If you end up with a difficult person, the process can be quite painful.

Doing most or all of the work yourself

Pros: You have full control over the outcome. As the founder, you already have most of the information you need for the brand strategy. You can move forward as fast or slow as you choose. You’ll feel deeply connected to your brand. You get to learn lots of new things that will benefit your business in the long run.

Cons: Learning new things can take some time and effort. Before you’ve mastered new skills, you may feel self-conscious about what you’re creating. Without proper guidance or step-by-step instructions, you might not be able to create something you’re happy with.

Hybrid approach: doing parts yourself, hiring some parts out

Pros: You have full control and gain additional clarity over the parts you create. You ‘ll learn new things about the areas you’re focusing on.

Cons: You’d still have to invest in hiring someone to do the parts you don’t want to do – budget required. You’d still need guidance for the parts you’re creating. Hiring parts out would affect your timeline as well.

What does it take to DIY your branding?

The fact that you can actually DIY your branding and have successful and professional looking outcomes often comes as a surprise to most entrepreneurs. The part about doing the process yourself is not the surprise here: many business owners are forced to DIY their branding due to lack of budget or resources. The surprise is the success and professional looking outcome.

The reason for this is that we are accustomed to thinking that especially the visual identity — the design part of the process — requires special expertise. And go back 10-15 years, the resources we have available online these days didn’t exist yet, or were mostly unknown. Today, there are so many design tools online and ready-made design elements for sale (or available for free) that building a visual branding is more doable than ever before.

Don’t let the process intimidate you

So, while I tell people that “yes, you can DIY your branding AND make it successful,” I understand that it can feel intimidating — just like learning anything new does. And I will admit that the branding process does take time, and sometimes you really  have to work to get everything just right. While the process is fairly simple, it’s not always easy. But just like any other big project, breaking your branding project into bite sized pieces will help you get through it.

Also, no one says you have to do EVERYTHING yourself. Well, to be honest, no one says you have to do any of it yourself, if you don’t want to. Although, I do think it’s a good idea for all entrepreneurs to learn branding. In any case, I wanted to give you a quick idea of which parts of the branding process are easier to DIY and which ones might give you a bit more challenge.

Most of it is “brain work”

Another relatively unknown aspect of the branding process is that it is actually more brain and thought work rather than crazy artistic creativity and designing a bunch of visual stuff. But because of the visual nature of one of the final outcomes, the visual identity, our first assumption about the branding process is that it is mostly about drawing logo sketches.

I would even go as far as to say that all the thought work and introspection that goes into the branding process is much more important than the visual identity part. Let me explain a bit further…

I like to divide the branding process in two major phases: the foundational strategy phase and the visual identity phase. Most people skip the strategy part almost entirely when they’re DIYing their branding. This is one of the biggest culprits when it comes to unsuccessful branding projects. The problem is that your visual identity is based on your brand strategy. If you skip the strategy phase, you don’t have all the right tools for making decisions during the design phase.

Furthermore, most people will find the visual identity work more challenging than the foundational strategy part. Yet, most people skip the strategy and jump directly to the hardest part without realizing that had they started with the strategy the rest of the branding would be much easier to tackle. Getting curious yet?

To show you what each step of the branding process takes to accomplish and why it’s important to do all of those steps, I created the handy table in the starter kit handout. The last column will detail the actual actions it takes to accomplish that step in the process. And I promise that you will see that all of it is doable.

To ask questions about this starter kit or anything else branding and design related, come check out my 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.

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Hey, just one more thing… I’m doing a LIVE Website Design & Build workshop ($47) soon. If you’re thinking about building a website for your brand or re-designing your current one, you might be interested in this. Learn more and join the waiting list to get updated on dates, times, and more details.

In the workshop, I’ll be teaching website best practices, what to put on your website, how to design websites, and how to use the Divi theme on WordPress to build stunning website quickly and easily.