The Business, Brand and Marketing Journey
Bring your conscious ideas into the world. Business is an ever evolving realm. Brand is abstract and misaligned marketing can be exhausting.
There is a rhythm to this flurry. Let me introduce to this grounding concept, clarifying descriptions and explore my growing network of providers.
Explore the sections of this blog post:
Watch the Intro Video
Business → Brand → Marketing
EXPLORE MY NETWORK
The Flow of Business → Brand → Marketing
From conscious ideas to grounded impact
The Business → Brand → Marketing Breakdown
This isn’t in strict chronological order. Business is a living entity and you’ll likely bounce around all of these areas — tackling multiple at once or perhaps slowly going through one at a time. There is no right way.
Ideas
As entrepreneurs, we are full of ideas. You know the power behind your work and that is why you’re on this path. So, you pour your conscious work in a business structure. You are making this seed into your life work.
Our businesses are containers for our compassionate ideas.
Business
PLAN
This is where you create the outline of your business and start giving it structure. You shape your primary services, layout the pricing model, understand your inventory, craft a sustainable schedule and begin organizing your business home base. By no means a-one-and-done task — this realm will always be evolving.
MARKET RESEARCH
Then it’s time to test your offer with an audience — perhaps your immediate network, close friends, mailing list, social media following, etc. These insights will help you refine your offer, language, service description, collect testimonials, etc. Market research can be as robust as a detailed survey and 1:1 interviews or as simple as a few poll questions on Instagram stories. Start connecting to the people you want to serve! What are their needs?
STRATEGY
Once you can lay out all of the pieces of your business, how do they connect and inform one another? Ideally, there is a rhythm here, that a person could flow from one resource to a service to another service.
SYSTEMS & TOOLS
What are the tools and applications you are using? Explore this blog to see what business tools I use and recommend. Getting your systems roughly outlined will save you so much time. This can be as simple as a scheduler, like calendly and a mailing list, like Flodesk. Moving away from DM’s and emails will be a game changer for your time and customer experience.
Brand
FOUNDATION
This work may overlap with your business strategy — they are the initial bricks that set the foundation for your business and brand. This includes your story, your why, mission, vision, values, attributes and exploring the potency of your voice. This is where I recommend starting!
I have a self-paced Brand Foundation Course to guide you through grounding into these fundamentals.
STRATEGY
A roadmap to reach your brand goals. How do we actually get from point A to point B through a nurturing brand experience. Brand strategy is rooted in your ideal audience’s needs and values. A conscious strategy is reciprocal — a strong connection to you community and a community’s trust in you. They see that you are tuned in and going to educate, inspire and validate before asking for a sale.
Strategy also includes foundations 👆, brand culture, archetypes, messaging, ideal audience, positioning, competitor research, trends report and a granular catered brand experience.
The impact of investing in strategy has a distilling effect for your creativity. Strategy creates potency which makes the tangible aspects of brand: copy, design, photography and more, so much clearer.
COPY
With the insights gathered from the strategy, writing your copy will be much easier! Either if you’re DIY-ing, collaborating with a copyeditor or completely outsourcing to a copywriter. You’ll start with your story, keywords, archetypes, brand culture and voice for a guide.
I am believer that copy should lead the design. Your message is more important than aesthetics, yes, a designer is saying this! Design should elevate your message, design makes it more digestible, understandable through visual communication.
DESIGN
With the charged insights uncovered in the foundations and strategy, a visual system can be created that is a representation of the deeper vision and values. Design is one of the first tangible touchpoints for your community to interact with your brand. This design ecosystem might include a logo system, color, type pairings, photography style, illustrations, patterns, icons and more.
Once the brand style had been established, this can flow through every touchpoint of your business:
Digital: website, social media, podcast, booking platform, course or membership portal, eBooks, PDF resources, email design, etc.
Physical: business card, postcard, stickers, apparel, signs, wayfinding, books, menus, magazine, etc.
Until this point, you have been distilling and grounding your original idea. This is a narrowest, most concentrated point. From here, this work blossoms!
Marketing
STRATEGY
When you invest in the steps above, there is a wealth to uncover within the realm of marketing. This open-ended space will become far easier to navigate because you can now apply the potency of brand. This same distillation can transform into marketing pillars, engagement strategies, strategic platforms and ultimately a smart use of you energy.
Through a marketing strategy you’ll be able to know where and how to show for your community.
CONTENT
This is the steady rhythm of conversations, education, coaching and connection. These can be hosted on your website and communicated via podcast, social media, mailing list, in-person events, store front, youtube, blogs, etc.
Explore My Business Network
These are all business providers within the Business → Brand → Marketing realm. I have either worked with these folks, have a relationship or see them as a trusted source.
My hope is that you can follow, learn from them, or work with these conscious providers.
