Why You Don’t Have To Have It All Figured Out Before Hiring A Brand Strategist or Coach
When it comes to your business you know first hand how unique and special it is. You are familiar with all the ways you help and serve your customers. You are aware just how you set yourself apart in your market or industry.
However, without an established personal brand, how will anyone else know this? Your personal brand helps to differentiate you from your competitors: setting you apart so your customers can easily distinguish how you can uniquely serve them. A personal brand lets you promote your reputation and skills cohesively through your website, social media and all other platforms.
Your personal brand also helps to establish your credibility. Building trust with your target audience, your brand makes it that much easier to move them through your customer journey!
What is a Brand Strategist?
As a personal brand strategist, I help my clients do more than slap a logo on their graphics for their instagram. I come alongside their goals and their core values to bring their personal brand to life. I am able to help you stand out in the sea of sameness so you can have the impact you’ve been striving for.
Working with a personal brand strategist can help you move from spending all your time on hustling on the phone to attracting the team and growing the business you’ve always dreamed of. Through our work together you will have a complete roadmap to how to use your branding tools, an understanding of who your ideal audience is and how to better align your brand with your mission and goals.
So that leaves just one question…exactly WHEN should you start working with a brand strategist?
How to Discover or Develop Your Personal Brand with Guidance
Have you ever heard the phrase “You’re too close to the problem”? This often is used when a person has been searching for a solution for some time, but because they are so deep in the weeds, they can’t seem to find their way through to the other side. Often, when it comes to our own businesses, this can be the case.
As a small business owner, it’s not uncommon to live, breathe and dream about your business. We spend a good portion of our time WORKING that business and then the other portion of time THINKING about it. This can easily lead to us being “too close the problem” to truly establish your personal brand.
Hiring a personal brand strategist or coach helps give you perspective you wouldn't have otherwise. It invites a specialist in to look at the research, analysis, message and marketing you are using which allows you to be more effective in reaching your audience.
Here are a few ways a brand strategist can help:
Create a full game plan that is unique to YOU:
Just like a football team wouldn't hit the field without a coach’s game plan, the players of your team need the same. Using a brand strategist allows everyone on your team to be on the same page no matter what task they are taking on. Additionally, no two businesses are the same. A business strategist knows that yours isn’t cookie-cutter and neither is your brand.
Create a strong connection to your why:
The purpose of your brand is so much more than simply WHAT you do. It’s rooted in WHY you do it. A brand strategist will help you discover your authentic brand story and infuse it throughout all the elements of your brand.
Create a diversified approach:
Social media is a valuable tool, but it can’t be the only tool in your belt if you want to see success. A brand strategist knows that the priority is on consistency in your message and strategy across all platforms. This includes ensuring your website is dynamic, your customer journey is clear and your message is consistent.
The Perfect Moment to Hire a Brand Coach
So when should you bring a brand strategist or coach onto your team? The first thought for many entrepreneurs and business owners is after they’ve done some of the leg work themselves. This is a common mindset because we are so used to wearing so many hats!
But there is actually a great benefit to getting coached on your branding early on. As a brand strategist coach and designer, I have worked with many clients who had tried to “figure out” their personal brand before reaching out to me.
A great example would be Nicole, a client who had created her logo years before connecting with me. Once she discovered that her brand was more than just a logo and that her logo really no longer served the purpose of really connecting and reaching her ideal audience, she hired me to give her brand a refresh. We worked on her core values, her mission and her purpose first. From there we moved into creating the mood and connection with her ideal audience. Only then did we work on her visual brand and messaging. Once it was all complete, here is what Nicole had to say about her new brand:
“When I met Heather from Branding You Big, I thought I had a brand. I had a great logo that I really liked, but that was it. Heather took me through a discovery journey full of color, focus and messaging. She asked me the right questions to discover visually how I wanted the world to see me. She was easy to talk to and to work with. I knew what the expectations were for both of us at every stage of the process. In the end, she gave me a beautiful personal brand, a pallet of gorgeous colors, and the perfect visual image for how I want to portray myself along with an identity for my business. An identity that on the outside matches perfectly what is on the inside.”
This is a perfect example of how you can leverage the expertise of a professional from the get-go. Not only will they help you shape the brand you love, but they will help you avoid the “restart” when you begin to shift your messaging and the way you show up for your audience.
Unlock YOUR Full Potential With Your Personal Brand
As a business owner, making tough decisions is something we do on a regular basis. However it's an easy decision to hire a brand strategist to start growing. As your coach, I will help you tap into the why that drives your business and bring it to life through all of your branding elements
Ready to take your next steps? To get started, just click here to take my brand style quiz. You can also join my Branding Breakthrough Masterclass 2.0 by clicking here. Finally, you can book a virtual coffee to learn more about me as a branding coach by clicking here!