I’ve found myself using all kinds of analogies over the past couple of weeks to explain why I believe it is important to define and refine your personal brand identity – which is all about presenting YOU and your business cohesively and consistently. 

 

There’s a saying where I come from “She’s all fur coat and no knickers”. According to Wiktionary the definition is “Having a superficially positive appearance that is belied by the reality.” This is not what I mean when I talk about your personal branding 

 

You may have heard the phrase “You can’t polish a turd, but you CAN roll it in glitter” too. This is *also* not what I mean when I talk about your personal branding 

 

Getting your personal brand identity sorted is actually about the ALIGNMENT of your FABNESS. 

 

🦩It’s about conveying who you are and how you might be to work with. 

 

🦩It accelerates the buying process because people feel like they “get you” therefore the know, like, trust factor doesn’t take as long to kick in. 

 

🦩It’s about a picture painting a thousand words. It’s about how you show up in business. 

 

🦩It’s about your “packaging” reflecting the value of the contents. 

 

🦩It’s about your social media presence etc being your virtual “shop window” and magnetically attracting potential clients into your “shop”. 

 

🦩I could go on but hopefully that gives you an idea of why it’s a good idea to get it sorted once your business has got established. 

 

And yes, when you first start off in business you don’t need an all singing, all dancing website or fancy graphics or a professional personal branding photo shoot with a highly regarded photographer. You can make do without all that. What you do need is money through the till, because without any sales your business is a hobby. 

So, you’re in business a while, your sales are consistent, and then what? 

 

There comes a time when the ‘friend of a friend’ website makes you cringe, you have webarrassment and don’t want to send people there. Those cheap template Vistaprint business cards look a bit like a GCSE art project. Using Canva templates doesn’t really help with getting your brand recognised because, although they are pretty, you aren’t being consistent with colours and fonts. 

 

Not having cohesive and consistent branding is like having a beautiful, valuable gift (aka your business) being presented in an Aldi carrier bag. Most people will scroll on by not recognising the value, they don’t have time to look inside the bag – the packaging needs to attract them to be curious about what it contains. You need to stop the scroll and draw potential buyers in. 

I worked with marketing expert Bryony Thomas a couple of years ago and she describes the buying process as this: 

 

 

This process can take hours, weeks, months or years depending what you sell, but is about creating interest, and developing the relationship by providing something for each of the steps until step 6 when a client becomes an advocate for your business and raves about you at every opportunity. She’s written a book called ‘Watertight Marketing – The Proven Process for Seriously Scaleable Sales’ and you can download a free copy of it here.  

 

This might sound harsh, but the truth is, if the presentation of your business appears to be amateur it is going to take you longer to convince people to pay your professional fees. Done is better than perfect. When you and your brand are aligned you will magnetically attract your ideal clients and put others off – it speeds up the whole buying process. Think about you and your brand being the shop window. Your shop window needs to look nice to get people into the shop. Once they are in the shop they will browse. As long as you have a great product and it’s something they want they will buy. 

Personal branding is also about personality not just how things look to convey that personality. It’s about how you speak and write too, this is called your ‘tone of voice’. When I first started in business I kept slipping into ‘education manager’ mode when I was writing. Having worked in education for so long my written communication was much more formal than it needed to be as a business owner. I needed to actively think about writing less formally. 

 

These days I write more or less how I speak in terms of the words I use. I can’t dictate my writing because I lose my train of thought (meno brain fog) and notice I use lots of fillers –‘you know’ – it would take too long to edit lol. I was chatting with a client yesterday who needs to update the copy on her website as she’s moved away from trying to attract the corporate persona she did pre covid. Her ideal client has changed and now it is much more about attracting individuals than big contracts with international companies. She’s much happier showing her quirky side these days and wants her website to reflect that. 

So what happens when you find yourself at the stage in your business where you want to uplevel your personal brand identity (aka packaging or shop window) so that you and your business are cohesive. 

 

Investing in your brand is not an overhead, it is exactly that, an investment. It helps you define and find clarity around your messaging, products and services and allows you to ‘speak’ to your ideal client directly. Without addressing it, you are probably keeping yourself small and holding yourself back. You know you’d feel more confident on every level if you and your business looked the part. You’d feel proud of the packaging – you’d feel more Waitrose than Aldi. 

 

My recommendation would be ideally, before you get to choosing colours for your logo/branding, you know what colours suit YOU best. You’d have a colour analysis reading to work this out. 

 

THEN you start to look at branding colours. As a woman in business, who may want a “branded photoshoot”, it pays to choose a palette that will work in harmony with your own colouring. This way you don’t end up with a mish mash of mismatched images/website/graphics etc. 

 

It’s important too to consider the vibe you want to convey. Colour has its own language, the psychology behind it adds another layer. What are you hoping to convey through your brand aesthetics? Creative and quirky? Warm and approachable? Efficient and business-like? 

 

All this will help you to magnetically attract those ideal clients and create a visual shorthand to the know, like, trust factor, ultimately accelerating the buying process. Perhaps you don’t know where to start with all the different elements – it is overwhelming and you’re worried about investing in, what could be, expensive mistakes. 

This is why I’ve created a mentoring package that includes ALL of the stuff you need to ELEVATE your business to the next level. It’s just £150pcm to access all the training materials and my design, image and style expertise in a private group setting – a one stop shop to get your “packaging” levelled up as well as being part of the FAB Network. 

 

“When you do have your brand/style personality etc sorted out you may find your proposal being viewed as more purposeful, potentially more professional, all ‘on it’. You might find you’re taken more seriously as well and you'll find your confidence will grow. This is where the work you'll be doing with Lisa will be rocket fuel.” Taz Thornton 

 

Your personal brand is how you and your business interact with the world. Getting it sorted will mean you have a cohesive, consistent look with a range of templates. It will be a brand toolkit that saves you time and magnetically attracts those perfect clients into your world. Most of all you’ll feel excited by it and want to share it with the world. If you want more information about what’s included in the silver or gold level membership of the FAB Network let’s book a no obligation chat.