5 Clever Ways to Brand Your Business

Business
Written By Annie Franceschi

Here we are in Part 3 of our series on how to "Create More Consistency" in your business through branding. Your brand = how people think and feel about your business. If you missed Part 1 and Part 2, here they are:

Here's today's story --

5 MORE CLEVER WAYS TO ADD MORE CONSISTENCY TO YOUR BUSINESS

We've covered some visual strategies and written ones, but what else can you do to add consistency and memorability to what you do?


I wanted to tackle some additional clever ways to be more consistent that don't quite fall in the visual branding or written branding worlds. Here are 5 things you can also do - making it a total of 19 things we've talked about this month you can take action on!

Here are 5 creative ways to make your brand more aligned and easily recognizable, online and offline.

Dress on-brand: Got brand colors? Wear 'em! Many of my favorite local business owners do this and wear their signature brand colors when they speak, attend networking events, and more. If you've done your homework and your brand colors appeal to your ideal audience- this is a great way for YOU to visually appeal to your ideal audience when you're out and about! It also helps you personally be more memorable.

  1. Create a Google MyBusiness Page: I wish I'd done this so long ago! I made the mistake of assuming that Google MyBusiness listings were only meant for brick and mortar companies. In fact, you can easily register with them as a service-based business - just tell Google that you have a service area (vs. clients coming to see you at your address). With a Google My Business listing, you get a FREE listing on Google Maps and Google search so it's an incredible way for people to discover your business. Take the extra step of adding your logo and pictures that reflect your business to the listing for added consistency and sign up for your listing today right here.

  2. Design and use creative business cards: Do your business cards stand out from the crowd? My card is a folded book and I'm constantly amazed by how many people keep the card and remember it, even years later. It's one of the big and inexpensive ways I reinforce what I do with people and how they remember me. Think about what you can do to make yours unique and tied to your brand. Here's a 6-point checklist to see if your business cards as effective as they could be!

  3. Brand your office background: Do you do video calls or Facebook lives from your office? Consider what the background looks like! Can you add your logo in a frame behind you? Sometimes I have a Greatest Story tote bag hanging on the bookcase in my background. What little touches can you add so our inside peek at your office reminds us of your business?

  4. Create and use canned email templates for client emails: Do you find yourself writing the same version of an email to your clients? Stop and create an email template!! This way you can consistently communicate each point of your process from client to client. My absolute favorite new tool for this is TextExpander! I'll share more about it in the future but you gotta scope it out if you're always typing the same things over and over like I am!

In December, wrapping up the year with a bow!

You may remember last year, I closed the business for the entire month of December to work exclusively on internal business development in an experiment called, "Batch December." It was a time of super powerful reflection that fueled a ton of innovation for my business and led me to my best year ever in business, financially and emotionally!


One of the biggest parts of that experiment was reflection - learning what didn't work so I knew what problems to solve and potentially how to solve them for the coming year. For the 2 blog posts I'll be doing this December, I'll walk you through some simple exercises to do your own post-mortem of 2017 and identify some great ideas for the year ahead to grow your business!

Annie Franceschi
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