Marketing Mastery Blueprint: The Art of Building an Undeniable Brand

1. Introduction: Welcome to marketing mastery, Blueprint, the art of building an undeniable brand. Your journey to transforming the way the world sees your business starts here. One of my all time favorite quotes is from Simon Cynic. And it goes, people don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it? Simply put, building a strong and purposeful brand is creating a that represents your business while also connecting with your ideal customers. Whether you're just starting out or looking to breathe new life into your brand. This course is designed for you. If you haven't taken my first course in the series Strategic Marketing Foundations for Your Business, I highly recommend you do so. It will give you your building blocks, the key foundations for all of your marketing strategy moving forward. That course will also lock key insights of your perfect customer. That will be the magic or the secret sauce we used to build your undeniable brand. I am the Marketing and Communications Director of a large publicly traded company and I have over 12 years of experience in the marketing industry. I was an entrepreneur for seven years and I know the challenges small business owners face, particularly when it comes to successfully marketing your businesses. I also have an insatiable passion for teaching and helping entrepreneurs and small business owners like you, from conducting a thorough brand audit of your existing business, to aligning your vision with the desires of your customers. I got it all covered. Maybe you're struggling with picking the perfect business name or you're looking to revamp your brand's identity. Don't worry, my step by step guidance will empower you to choose a name that resonates and go a brand kit that represents the of your business. So are you ready to elevate your impact and build a brand that's not just seen but felt? Let's get started. 2. The Power of Branding: Matter what it is you're selling. The fact that you're here with me tells me that you're motivated to create something amazing. The only thing holding you back right now is a strategic marketing blueprint. Let me explain. You can have the best product. I'm talking the most incredible innovation. It really doesn't matter or make any sales if nobody knows about it. On the flip side, you can have a mediocre, or even ridiculous product that can end up selling millions. It comes down to creating the right marketing strategy. Dolia take crock, the slinky pool, noodle snaky, or even the pet rock. I bet you've heard of all these items. That's mass brand awareness. And they have all sold many, many millions. Okay. And out of these ridiculous products that have all sold millions, guess which one is profited? Around $3,000,000,000 The slinky spiral wire that walks down your stairs. Hey, if they can sell billions of dollars of worth of slinkies, you can absolutely grow your business to what you always intended it to be. The sky is the limit. But I have a question for you. How do you refer to the object in the image below? If you answered, you just sparked my first lesson in the power of branding. Because in all truthfulness, this is actually a box of tissues, right? Kleanax is the brand. It's a brand that's become so strong and integrated with customer perception that we use its name Kleenex to refer to an everyday household item is the most novel product. Is it the most groundbreaking? The most innovative? No. But there was an incredible marketing strategy behind it. That position ke to make their brand synonymous with one of the most commonly used items that we pretty much confined in almost every single household. Think about it, how much it is used in the most basic or common conversations, like, do you have a Kleenex? We need to get more Lean X here. Let me give you a Kleen X. Every time this brand is subconsciously uttered, their brand name is being spread again and again and again by word of mouth, and you don't even think twice about it. This is the power of creating your own marketing strategy for your business and a bulletproof brand that really resonates with your customers. This is the end goal, right? Creating something that you're using every single day and its name is your place with your brand name. And Kleenex is not the only one that's done this, and it doesn't have to be a household every day item that its name is changed to something that we use all the time. If you just think about the power of branding, think about some of the brands that you absolutely love. You probably don't even know why, or maybe you do. But it tends to be more of a subconscious thing because it's an emotional connection. When it comes to electronics, say like computers or phones, there tends to be a really big polarization. But it's not between one brand and another. It's between Apple and Android. It's between a brand and all the rest. That's the power of branding as well. You may or may not have a really strong affinity toward Disney, but a lot of people do what's going on there. They've really resonated and made an emotional connection with their customers and they keep driving that home. Why do we still have adults that want to and actively go to Disney World? There's such a strong pull there with their brand and their perception of what it is and what it does for the person in their mind and how it makes them feel. One of my favorite quotes is by Maya Angelo. And it's people will forget what you said, they'll forget what you did, but they'll never forget how you made them feel. I want every single one of your brain interactions reminding people of how your brain makes them feel. I'll see you in the next lesson. 3. Auditing Your Current Brand: All right, in this lesson we are finally getting into the brand audit. That essentially is where we're going to be tearing down your brand and building it back up to make sure it 100% aligns with all the research that we've been doing. All the key insights we've been getting, Everything that we've worked on in previous lessons, we're bringing it all together in this one in terms of your brand and the way that it looks and feels to your customers. I love this quote from Jeff Bezos. Your brand is what people say when you're not in the room. Absolutely. I like to think of a brand as almost almost like a friend. Right. It's pretend like your brand is a separate entity. It's its own person and your brand is looking for its tribe of people. It's best friends. That's we want to perceive it as an actual character. And what would this brand look and feel like, and how would it act? And what would its tone of voice be to attract those best friends? Let's get into it. The first thing that I want you to do, this is going to be your page here. But I want you to add screenshots of your brand currently across all of your marketing platforms. I want you to be sure to include here your logos, pictures from your website, social media profiles, and any other touchpoints with your customers. If you have physical brochures or newsletters, any material, sales materials that go out, if you can take pictures of them with your phone and upload them and put them in this document so we can get a cohesive overview of what your brand currently looks like and how it's talking and touching your customers. Of course, I did an example here of the vegan chocolate brand, Dwarf Stars. This was our dwarf stars logo. This was actually a brand refresh that we had done. It looked a bit different before. This is an image here from our website. It had a scrolling feature on the side that would go through different products on the side, which is really cool. This here was a pop up on our website. When new customers would visit our website, it would say, hey, give this this feeling of it's for moms and kids, and ask them to join our mailing list and they'd get 10% off their first order. Then also here the section, it's hey, what are you interested in? Like what brought you here? And then we list out vegan Kito, sugar free allerge friendly, or you had me at chocolate. This would actually in the back end, then go and filter them into specific e mail lists that had these tags. If I was sending out e mails that pertain more to vegans, I would be able to segment them in the back end. That's for down the line. It's just giving you a heads up there. This was a blog. We had stuff that would talk about the benefits of the vegan diet or things with Keto, because our products were vegan, Keto and allergen free. Then it gives you some ideas of marketing that we were doing in terms of content marketing. We had influencers and we'd send products to them and they would take standing photos that were brand the line for us. This was also a screenshot from our website. Something I wanted to point out here is you get that cohesive look that feel health, nutrition better for you, family and warmth. These were our brand color palette. Then we also like to inject a bit of humor. Again, if you saw here in the pop up, see like, why are you here? You had me at chocolate, right? It's just infusing a little bit of cheekiness in there. This is a photo sheet that I did for our products for the fall time and Halloween. Pumpkin spice, everything. It's a little bit cheeky and fun too. And then down here, handmade with love, also blood, sweat, and tears. We were a small business, we did everything ourselves, very small team. We wanted to remind people because our brand was very professional and it looked really nice. And sometimes people thought we were a much larger company than we were. Which can be good and bad. Bad on the customer service side if they get really upset and then they want free products and all kinds of things. We're like, sorry, it's just a couple of us. We're trying to do the best that we can. This gives you that cohesive overview, the feeling, how we talk to our customers. Consistency and cohesiveness, when people see dwarf stars, they know what they're getting. What we're doing for you again, is you're pulling all years together of what it currently looks like. I'm not expecting it to be cohesive and consistent, and clear right now. That's why we're doing the brand audit. We're looking at what are we doing? Well, where can we improve? How can we align this with our key messaging and be more consistent across all platforms? Again, when someone sees your brand, they know, oh, I know this is brand, the one that I love. I know what to expect from them every single time people love consistency. After we've done that, we're going to start pulling in most of the stuff you should have created in previous lessons. We're pulling it all in and keeping it in one place here together and showing how this is going to build up the brand. First, we'll start off with your brand purpose and vision. What is the purpose of your brand? Why does it exist? What is your brand's long term vision? What do you aim to achieve? This is pulling in that story why you exist, and then where you're going in the future. We've got your unique value proposition. What's your brand apart from competitors? What unique benefits or value do you offer? How will your brand solve the target audiences, pain points or fulfill their needs better than competitors? We should already by now have this nailed down, copying and pasting this in as well with our ideal customer Abatars, again, who are our dream customers that'll keep coming back for more. You might only have one, you might only have two, maybe you have three. Put them all in here. Your brand story. What's the story behind your brand? How did you get started? How did you come into existence? How does your brand story connect with your target audience on an emotional level? And what key messages or narratives will you used to tell that brand story effectively? Brand promise and core values. What promises or commitments does your brand make to its customers when they come and buy your product or service? What can they expect every single time to get out of it? What core values will guide your brand's actions and decisions? What do you expect company values to be in terms of what you're promoting to your key partners or even your employees? What do you want them to embody, build this brand effectively? This can be really helpful for the next piece, as I had mentioned in the beginning, is thinking about your brand like an actual person or a character. It takes it from that abstract and makes it more tangible if we think of it in terms of it's a friend of ours. Karl Young is the one that identified several archetypes of characters that have universal meaning across cultures. And they're really useful for getting clear on how we want our brand to be perceived. We have on the outside of the wheel different archetypes. Then when you get into the colors, it's the emotions that they evoke, values that they carry with them. For instance, if you are a creator archetype, your brand is a creator, then it's about innovation and evokes creativity, imagination, it's non linear and non conformity. If your brand is the outlaw or the rebel, it's all about liberation leadership, risk taking, progressive and bravery. Then if your brand is something about, it's more like caregiving. It's about service, altruism, compassion, patience and empathy. Really good to go through these and it's a great way to start looking at each one and saying, how does that feel? How does that sit with my company? My values, the story that I'm telling, does this fit or not so much. This will help you with the next part in your brand, personality and tone of voice. Again, if your brain was a person, how would you describe its personality? Is it friendly? Is it authoritative? Is it innovative? And what tone of voice would your brain use to communicate with your target audience? Formal casual, playful, silly, funny, quirky. I want you to go through this and then circle any of these that resonate with you below. And feel free to, don't just keep them in this box. It's a jumping off point because sometimes it's like, gosh, I don't even know what exists out there. But you can definitely add your own. I would say sticking to three at most just to get really clear on this. If you can narrow it down to that many, it'll help you a lot more when we're going into the next lesson then, Brand Touchpoints. You will have pulled these in in that first part of this lesson where you had to do screenshots of everything. This is every single place where your brand interacts with your customer. Again, your website, your social media. Remember things like packaging. If you have a product, these are all customer touch points. Anywhere that you put your brand on something, you're talking to your customer. Those are brand touchpoints. And list them here. This is going to help you later on when we revise your brand and we need to go and refresh it. In all these places, you'll have this automatic list. It's boom, boom, boom. It's a checklist. Make sure I get them all. Someone doesn't. For instance, go on your Facebook account that you forgot about, and it's still the old branding and old messaging and they're confused. Your brand experience, how do you want your customers to feel when they interact with your brand? This could be something like say you do have a retail store and they do a transaction with an employee, they buy something. This filters all the way down into the type of sales scripts and customer scripts that we're giving our employees. It's making them feel a certain way and that has to tie in and be cohesive with your brand as well. Lastly, brand positioning. This is a really good chart to use when looking at your competitors. We'll pull those in again from, we've already nailed those down before. Marking them on here with little dots of where they sit in comparison with your brand. It's an amazing way to visualize where your brand sits in regards to the other ones. There's no good or bad here. It's just getting really clear on where your brand sits in relation to your competitors in the market and helps us position ourselves better in the minds of our customers. You should have at least three competitors that we've nailed down before. Go in here, you can mark them with little dots. First your brand and then your competitors. That's it for the brand auditing guide. In the next lesson, we're going to dive into the visual components of creating your brand kit, your brand guidelines, And making sure everything really aligns and resonates with our ideal customers to you in the next. 4. Brand Alignment: Resonate with Your Customers: Okay, in this lesson, I think this is my favorite. It's almost fun because creativity gets pulled in. The quote here says Albert Einstein, creativity is intelligence, Having fun because truly, that's what it is in marketing, it's pulling in all of the research and intelligence and insights that we've collected. And then making a visual representation of that that really emotionally resonates and connects with our ideal customers. What I'm going to go through here first is an example of a brand guideline document. Now I know typically this might be new for a small business owner if they haven't worked with an agency in the past or don't have any background in marketing. But all of the larger companies have branding guidelines which ensures any stakeholder that's involved in doing any marketing receives this document. And this is what keeps everybody on the same page on track using the same fonts, the same colors, the same logos across all platforms. Every customer touch point, someone sees it, it's the exact same. That's just what really takes your brand to the next level. Makes it look professional and ensures that it keeps connecting with your ideal customer every single time they see you. It also really helps cement that brand awareness and customer retention and the affinity for the brand because it just keeps reinforcing it. The more and more they see the same thing, the same brand, the consistency, the more they have opportunities to fall in love with your brand. Firstly, we're going to go through the branding guideline document. Obviously an example, I'm going to give you a few examples actually, then I will walk you through on Canva, a template of yours that you can actually go in and edit yourself. I already have it set up there. I'm going to show you how to use Canva, very simple and user friendly, and then we will create your own very exciting, this was for dwarf stars. This is the first page in your brand guideline document. And essentially these are all the tools that we use on an everyday basis when creating any content for your brand, whether that's on social media, your E newsletters, building your website. This is your blueprint of how everything is going to look. And honestly, it might seem a little overwhelming at first if you've never done any visual or design work. But it's such a relief when you have to go make content or whatever, staring at a blank screen. What am I going to push out there? How's my website going to look? There's so many options out there, it can be really confusing. This really narrows it down. So it takes all of the thinking out of it. Right? It's like, oh, no, I know what my colors are. I've got the hex codes, I know what my logo looks like, I've got the files, I know what Fonte using, and it just really makes it into a science and makes it a lot easier. First, dwarf stars, these were our logos. We had some other variations, but just to keep it simple here, you don't need to see all of them. It was just colors in the stars that would change. Again, this was after a brand refresh. We had our main logo to use on stuff, but if we were using it on a darker background, then we could make it all white. We could also make it black. Typically, with your logos, you want to be able to use them in all white or all black. Have a white, a black version, and then your original colored version of your logo. Then we have our color palette in here. I'll show you how to find these, but these are the hex codes. If you end up doing more design work, Canva, I highly recommend and I'll show you how to set that up. You can put these into Canva, down to the numbers, the hex cos, and it gives you the exact same color every single time. Just interest consistency. We're not a yellow, it's the specific yellow that we're using across our platforms that may've got the fonts. Arfsurs was very simple. We only used one font that we would use, variations of. Bold, regular, and then italics for headlines, Subheadlines, body text. That's essentially what you want here. But some brands have up to three different ones. Sometimes they have a Sera and Sera font. Sometimes they just have one. We only had one here. Then we get into Moodboard inspirations. Essentially, this is just collecting some pictures that have that mood, that feel, the colors that we're trying to pull out with our brand. Again, this is pulling everything together in a document that you're going to be able to share with anybody in the future. We've done this work already. Pretty much, again, it's copying and pasting. But here we have vision, mission, and values, making sure it's aligned always across all parts of your company. It's a really good reminder when you're sharing this with employees or key stakeholders, or anybody that you're working with outside of your company that might be helping you with marketing. To let them in on what your vision and the mission of your company is, what the purpose of your company is, so they can align their work with your brand. The vision of dwarf stars was to be a leading international brand for health conscious consumers to enjoy delicious, high quality treats without compromising their health. Our mission, we believe in creating a world where everyone can share delicious chocolate, regardless of food, allergy, intolerance, or ethical choice. That was our mission. That is what we are about. Then our values were fun, right? We like to pull up that humor. You saw that across our platforms, we have grit, professionalism, we like to have fun. We also take ourselves seriously, what it matters. Obviously, we were creating a treat that had to be allergen friendly. And we had to absolutely make sure we did our due diligence on our end to make sure the food was safe, especially for people like children to eat if they have severe food allergies. And then balance. We definitely believed in work life balance. We learned our lessons very early on, hustling in our company and got burnt out. And that became a really a crucial point for us to live by and also share with our employees as they worked for our company. All right, so then we get into the tag line and messaging. These are tag lines that you're going to create and keep messaging when you're going to post stuff. When you're looking at these messages, all of your content is going to filter through here. Once we have the tag lines and messages, it really, really helps in the creation of the type of content that you're going to be sharing with your customers. It's all going to go through this filter tag lines were scrumptiously stellar and conscious sweets. And then we describe them a little bit like, what do we really mean by scrumptious stellar eccentric? Yet Gm dwarf stars creates vegan chocolates that bring joy to your taste buds and then conscious sweets. Vegan chocolate that can be mind blowingly delicious while also being healthy for you in the planet. Free from dairy peanuts, gluten, and artificial preservatives, Dwarf stars gives everyone the freedom, treat themselves to sweets they love. These were really pulling out the key things that we wanted to shape our brand around and tell people about. As I mentioned in an earlier lesson, when people would see allergy friendly or free from 12 different things, or a vegan, they would say, well, what the hell is in it? What's that going to taste like cardboard? But they were always pleasantly surprised that it tasted actually incredible because we were just using few wholesome ingredients. Natural ingredients can taste really, really good when done right. Conscious sweets, obviously calling out their vegan animal rights, we protect the animals, We protect the environment using really natural products and ingredients and sourcing from high end places that have ethical practices in farming and producing their ingredients. And then also we're conscious that there's a lot of people out there that have food allergies that can't eat what everybody else is eating. You think about a kid that goes to a birthday party and say they have a peanut or a dairy intolerance. Would you see at birthday party? It's always for the dessert. It's cakes or cupcakes that are loaded with sugar, loaded with dairy, and sometimes have peanuts and or gluten in them. If a kid has an allergy to that and they're the only one at the birthday party, chances are they're not going to have an option for them. We wanted to call out to those kids and even adults and say, hey, we're thinking of you, this is for you. We got you. Then we're digging in a little bit deeper to the brand messaging. These will be the key messages that you keep consistent across your platforms when forming all your ideas and your strategy behind the type of content you're sharing. Again, another place for you to come dig in, look at it, and then create content based on what these key brand messages are. We break them down into the why and how. What is it that you really offer us? It's an inner glow. Take your taste buds on other worldly adventure. All of our recipes are lovingly crafted with ethically sourced cocoa, omega fatty acids and little to no sugar. With every chocolate you'll always find astronomically yummy flavors. Again, we're pulling in the things that we do really well and that separates us from our competitors, from the Cadburys or the Nestles that are using high sugar fake ingredients that differentiates us. But we're also aligning it with our brand. Our brand is dwarf stars, right? When you think about dwarf stars, it calls in things from outer space and out of this world and astronomy. We want to tie that in the visuals of that with what we're doing. The Y uncompromising quality, your uniqueness is your power. Like a dwarf star, your shine comes from the inside. Even if your diet restrictions make you a little different, you deserve to indulge in delicious chocolate. You inspire us to create sweets that everyone can love. This is saying, we don't cut corners. Yes, our price point is a little higher, but this is why. Because if you have those diet restrictions or these allergies we're thinking of you and we're scrutinizing those ingredients we use so they're safe for you to eat. Actually, you are the ones that inspired us. You are customer, You inspire us so much. We created products for you. Right. Really resonates and hits on those pain points. If it's that person that can never eat anything at any function and we're creating a product just for you. Wow, how special does that make our customer feel Then how cosmic flavors. Take a bite me'll be blown away. You won't believe that our vegan chocolates are free from dairy peanuts, gluten, and artificial preservatives. That's because we never, ever compromise on taste. Our conscious sweets are healthy for you and the planet. This message ended up going a little bit further down the line because something we realized was a lot of these products that are on the market are either like mass corporations or some people that love treats and chocolates and just wanted to make their own. A key differentiator that we had was Garrett, my business partner. Is a red seal chef. He brought a wealth of experience and expertise to our products that we didn't think of for the first couple of years. That was a massive differentiator. We had a red seal chef that worked in all kinds of incredible restaurants creating these. And that's why they tasted so good and that's why you can expect them to taste really good right before they even have had the chance to try it. It's building that credibility and that social proof. It's like hey, we have a chef creating, the chef created treats and that's why they're so delicious. That is essentially the dwarf stars branding guidelines that we were able to share with anybody else that needed to work on step with us or if we hired new employees. Then I wanted to include some other examples that aren't just dwarf stars that get into different industries and how they put theirs together. This was a life coach, again, keeping the framework really similar. Their branding name, the type of logos and variations on those logos and word marks that they use, color palette, their font, this one had three different fonts. And then Moodboard inspiration, this was for an art direction studio, Mariah John, again, her logo color palette, Moodboard inspiration, you can set it up anyway that you want. In the template, you'll see I created a template for you. Because sometimes we can get so bogged down with what should the design of the template look like, what should I do? And you're so overwhelmed that we don't even get to the actual main part. It doesn't matter at this point what your brand guideline looks like. You can always make it look more like your brand and revise that later. Especially if you're not experienced in design or creating these things or you don't consider yourself a visual person. You might start this and just put the basic things in and then you end up working with somebody that can make it more cohesive or pull it all together. That's more visually pleasing, in your opinion, is a plant health blog, they go by different names, Branding kit, branding guidelines, branding standards, all the same thing. Again, they pulled in their vision here, their logo variations, logo details, letting you know that if you are using a lighter background, use the black one. If you're on a darker background, use a white one. The fonts also keywords, focus keywords are great, you can pull those out. And then when you are writing your blog content or you're writing your Instagram copy, you're making sure that one of these keywords is always in every single one. And it helps focus your content and make it a lot easier for you when you're creating it Salford and company. So another way to display this stuff, but same things in every single one. I gave you some examples here. Now we're going to hop over to the template, which is, you'll see the link below the template inside Canva, and start designing yours. Show you how it. 5. Naming (or Re-Naming) Your Business: Okay. Now that we've gotten really clear on your brand, your customers, and how you want to position it and speak to them. You may find that your business name is not as relevant or impactful as you felt it was before. If you're happy with your business name, maybe that's the case and you're like, no, this is totally in alignment with what I'm doing and I love it and it resonates with my customers. Awesome. That's totally fine. You can definitely go through this lesson and the worksheet and it might help you, I don't know, inspire other ideas for other things. But if you are considering changing your brand name and your logo, there are a few things that I really want you to think about. The first thing is how long you've been running your business for how established your brand awareness is. If it's been many, many years and you have a ton of loyal customers, people can get upset when things change. People don't like change, they like stability in their lives. If your brand and logo is that one thing, then hey, that's fulfilling something for them. I know it can be hard for you to assess, especially when you're a small business. I don't know what my brand affinity is. I don't know what my brand awareness is. How do you even measure that? One way to gauge this quickly that I noticed with our dwarf stars brand was that when I would ask somebody or when someone would ask me what I do for a living and I'd say, oh, I'm a business owner. They'd say, oh, what do you do? And I would say a vegan chocolate company. Oh, what's it called? When I got to the point that I would say dwarf stars, pumpkin seed butter cups, they would know what I was talking about with having to explain it any further. Oh, I've bought those before. Oh, I got those at this market. Oh, I got those at my favorite retail store that I go to. When I go grocery shopping, I always pick those up for my kids. That was an incredible point that we got to where we didn't have to introduce ourselves anymore. Our brand spoke for itself. If that's happening with you, um, I would probably give you the advice to not completely scrap the whole thing because something there is working and resonating with your customers I would recommend is more of a brand refresh. If you haven't really found that you've built a strong affinity or customer awareness, then, hey, the world's your oyster. This is your opportunity to start fresh and create something incredible. I'll give you an example. When we were thinking about just giving our brand a face lift, making it more modern, more clean, more crisp, we decided to do a brand refresh, and I'm going to show you what it started out as. Literally, I made this when we first started our business. I didn't take very long to throw it together. But anyway, I didn't think about a lot of things when I was creating this, how it would look on packaging in different forms of marketing materials. And this was our brand refresh. We actually ended up keeping most of the elements just removing that squiggle in the background. It instantly makes it fresher, more modern, crisp, more professional. Yeah, to change all that much. It was almost there. It just needed a little bit more refinement. I also want to show you our packaging. When we first started, this is how we had to package our stuff. It was clear bags, you put them in, they had stickers on top, that's what it looked like. This is the second iteration. This has gone a little bit blurry on me, but it was better. It wasn't all the way there. We still had our old logo on it. The font that I chosen for the words on the packaging looked really good in a design file. But when it got printed and it's a lot smaller, it's harder to jump off the packaging and read properly. In Canada, we also have to do French and English on all our packaging. It's something to think about. It can make your packaging look really full and busy if you're not doing hierarchies properly. If there's like a lot of words that you need to translate, then this was the final design that we ended up with calling out the most important things to our customers. They're vegan, they're free from the top allergens being really simple. An image of the product I always recommend when it's food or someone doesn't necessarily see the word pumpkin seed buttercups. It's on a peanut butter cup, A better cup. They know what it is, right? They've got that recognition from races. But R, they might say, oh, what's that? Or what does that look like? Or I can't even imagine it's really good to show them. Then your basic call out of what it is. A few things for you to think about. We're going to hop over now to the worksheet that is linked below and work through some considerations for you if you are looking to change your brand name. Okay, here's our Lesson 11 worksheet. I have this quote here by Seth Godin. He is a marketing guru. Very famous in terms of marketing and branding, and actually some other things, just in generally in business. But people do not buy goods and services. They buy relations, stories and magic. That's why it's so important, this branding section of the course really resonating with your customers through your logos, through your imagery, through your brand name. Because that's what they buy. If you're feeling like your brand name is just not working for you, it could be resonating bet, it could be conveying your messaging better. Here are some things to work through and even questioning if you should or shouldn't change it. First of all, the brand alignment, we've talked about this a bit already. But you want to ensure that the name aligns with your brand identity, vision, and your values. And consider how the name reflects the essence and the personality of your business. Think about the emotions and the associations that the name evokes and how they resonate with your target audience. When they hear the brand name, how are they going to think? How are they going to feel? How are they going to perceive what you offer? Relevance and clarity. Choose a name that clearly conveys what your business does or offer. Okay. Yes and no. I think it depends. This is not a black or white situation. Because if you think about you might say, hey, Catherine can chocolate business and he called the dwarf stars, What the hell? That doesn't make any sense. I think this really depends on the type of product or service that you are selling. A level of emotion that is experienced when engaging with your product or service. The buyer motivation behind it. For instance, something like chocolate, people don't buy it for health. There are some things like dark chocolate, whatever. But typically, what are motivating people to buy it? Most people is emotion. It's a craving, which is something they get to meet an emotional need. Chocolate is a very emotional brand, and that's why I could go somewhere crazy and more creative with it, like dwarf stars out of this world, right? And have that incredible brand story behind it. Now, if you're offering something like accounting services, there's a lot less room to evoke emotion for accounting. People need accounting for their businesses or for personal finances, right? It's just something that is a lot more logical for a business like that. For sure, I would be a lot more clear when it comes to the business, name it creative. I know an accounting firm that we worked with was origami. I'm sure there is a great story behind that, with like figuring how things all come together in that way. But you want to stay more to the clear and logical side when it comes to more logical, non emotional buyer motivations for services and products versus something that is more emotional. Consider whether the name will still be relevant and meaningful as your business grows and evolves. That's really important to think about because you might right now offer one product or one service. But where is the future and the vision of your company? That's where that really comes in. Where do you want to be? Does that name still work 510 years down the line? I have a similar story, not exactly, but for instance, when we were starting dwarf stars and I was creating our website, I chose a Shopify theme, which is the way that your website is going to be set up, what it's going to look like and be displayed. I chose a theme that was for a single product. As we grew, obviously we got to the point where we had 30, 40, 50 different products. That theme was not supportive, and I had to do a ton of workarounds and get web development involved to make it work. I really, really regretted doing that. Bringing the vision in really early on in your business helps so much down the line and saves you a ton of time and resources, and money with trying to fix that. Think about it if you have your brand name now and it builds a lot of traction and there's a lot of brand affinity for it, it's a lot harder to change once you grow and scale down the line. Memorability is really important. Aim for a name that's easy to remember and pronounce dwarf stars again. It didn't really roll off the tongue very well, but it was sticky because there wasn't anything like it. People say, why dwarf stars? What, what was that, Dwarf stars. And they would repeat it. And they'd repeat it would cement in their minds, again, making it memorable. Right? Something that is distinct, it stands out. Avoid complex or two overly long names that can be challenging for customers to remember. I would very much encourage two words or less for your name. The longer it is, the harder it is for them to remember or spell out accurately. Then we get into more of the logistics around a brand name. Definitely, we want to be looking for any availability or trademark issues. You definitely want to conduct some thorough research to ensure that the names not already in use are taken by another business in your industry. Again, where that vision comes into account if currently you're operating locally like for us was in Calgary, but our vision was to be international. I'm not just looking at how this business name affects me in Calgary or if there's another business in Calgary that has it. I want to look way beyond that to where I potentially could be going. There was a really popular brand in Calgary who had to change their name as they grew. I think it was something like eight to ten years into their business, they ended up having to change it to Righteous because of trademark issues in the United States. To be honest, I like their original brand name better. Their name before was Fiasco Gelato. I just thought it was more fun, more playful with ice cream, with gelato. But unfortunately, they couldn't use it as they were growing and scaling. A way to look for these trademarks. Availability is in Canada and the US. There are links below. They are government websites that you can search their databases of to see if they are available. Once you do that, you're also going to want to secure the appropriate domain name and social media handles that are associated with your brand name. Social media handles, I highly suggest if it's not available, don't put a bunch of other characters or numbers behind it. Try to add a V or some periods in between the words. Or if you are more local, adding your airport code as opposed to having a bunch of random numbers and symbols. Because we want to encourage people in the easiest way possible to tag us on things and comment and find us on social media. And if you have a bunch of numbers and letters, it's like passwords, nobody remembers the passwords, right? That have all these characters and exclamation points and whatever in them. You want to make that as easy as possible to help your customers find you just quickly. If you're in Canada, the government of Canada website has actually some ways of setting your name, finding out if it's taken, and then registering your business name. They give you some ideas. Search the Internet, of course, Google, see what's out there on the web, and then you can search their national name databases. You just click on this, this one or the business registries, and you go look and see if the name that you're looking for is available or if it's taken by somebody already. The same thing in the US, there's the United States Patent and Trademark Office. You can search their trademark database, see if your name has been trademarked already. Then you're definitely going to want to have a website. So you want to go, there's other providers, but I use Go Daddy, they've been great. Then you can simply create a sign in or find your domain. It's really simple and easy to do. You pretty much just search what you're looking for and then if it is available, you buy it. The last thing you want to consider, which I've touched on a little bit, is the future growth in scalability. You want to consider the long term implications of naming your business as it expands. Think about how the name will translate to new markets or product or service offerings. If you for sure know that you want to expand to a country that has different language than say English, definitely you want to see if it translates in the same type of way. There have been some large scale brands that have been guilty of switching over key messaging into different languages that have very much embarrassed or offended their brand in those new markets because they weren't properly prepared or thought about how it would translate in a different language. You also want to avoid names that may limit your business potential or become irrelevant as you diversify or expand your operations. Again, say your whole business was based on this one product that you're offering. And then you grow and you scale. What are you? Does it still makes sense when you grow and you add more product lines and you expand the scope and vision of your company, all these things are really good to consider. Finally, if you want to start brainstorming names, you might already have ideas that you can write down. If you want to use chat ChPT, which is an incredible way to kick this off, I've given you a prompt here that you can use, type in your information and then see what chat ChpT comes up with. You can also put those names down here and feel free to play around with them, mix and match, until you hit on something that you really like. I'd say pick your top two or three and then start going into the databases, Google and Go Daddy and see if they are available. Awesome. I will see you guys in the next module. 6. Building Your Brand Kit in Canva: Okay guys, when you click on that link, you're going to be prompted to set up an account. Canva is completely free to get started. There are paid subscriptions for Canva. Typically what you get with those paid subscriptions is access to different kinds of content. When you over here, you'll see you start adding like elements and things. There's all different kinds of stuff that you can add. There's pictures, there's video, different lines and shapes. Some of them are only available on Pro. You can still play with them and put them in your document, but when you download it, they're going to have a watermark on them if you don't want that watermark. If you use any of those things, first say you decide to create your own logo, then you have to get the pro version. But to work in here, to do this template, everything is free. This is what it's going to look like when you open it up. And I just made things very basic because obviously every single business brand colors are going to be different. You can keep it very basic like I have it or get totally creative with it. Totally depends on you and how comfortable you are designing. This is the spot that I put your logo in here. You can see you can just click on stuff and delete it to get rid of it. Put that back set. Want to affect the template or you can just plop your logo on here and make it cover everything up. I'm going to be showing you how to set up this brand hub in a second, if you're working in Canva in the future, you'll have your little branding, it already set up on the side. It's really easy for you to go in to your logos. I don't have one set up for this, but let's go into our Rf stars. On here you can see all of our Df stars logos. There was a variations, you don't need that many your brand colors and your font when you go in here say you want to change this color, you click on it. You click on this color square up here. Then you'll see I'm in the Dwarf stars brand kit. These are all my colors. We had blues in there too, didn't use them. We reduced our palette to these, those were secondary color palette. Once we get that brand kit set up, once you decide everything here, we'll set up the kit and then it'll make it even faster for you to use. If you wanted to upload a logo, you'll just go over here. It's covered by this little bar, but right behind the sky it says uploads. Then you're just going to click Upload a file. You'll find your file, you're going to click on it, let's pretend that was my logo and you click open. Then it's going to upload it here. When you upload it, say that was my logo, I'm going to click, drag it, whatever, plop it there, Get rid of the other stuff. You've got your logo inside here. Anything you want to edit, you can click on here, you can delete it. So you want to put your date in? Absolutely. Like I said, Canvas, very user friendly. It's pretty much just clicking, dragging, dropping, expanding, really, really basic. Then here, this is your word mark. For us it was the dwarf stars. Word mark is your logo with your word, your company name, separated from the actual picture of it. Again, for us, it was that dwarf stars with a little start at the end here. We can paste your logos in there. Then when you get down to your color palette, obviously this is not your color palette. This is my marketing mastery, blueprint color palette. But I'll show you how easy this is to change. Say you go in here. None of these are part of your color palette, or you're deciding what you want your colors to be. You can click this to add a new color, and you can do colors in here. All scroll along and just click one. Boom it gets changed. Now how do we find this hex code that we have to change? Okay, I just picked that colors. How do we find this hex code that we have to change? You may have noticed in here this part right here, that is the Hex code that we can just copy and pay. You're like, oh no, I don't know what that color was. Click your eye dropper tool. Click over to here. It's okay. We'll change that background. But now I can copy this. Can we click copy? Command copy. And then you're just going to paste it down there. Also you see this might be a little bit small for you to work and you're like, I can't see that. I typically the person that leans into my computer even though I don't need to. Down here, this little button allows you to make things much bigger. So then you can work in here, change all these text codes when those are done, then you zoom back out, super, super, super helpful in the way that our documents laid out. As well as page after page, you just scroll to find the next pages logo in your company name up here or if you do have a wordmark version of the logo. And then fonts. Again, coming in here, you can choose from all of these fonts. Font one, font two, font three. Typically I do font one. What my headlines are going to look like, sub headlines and body copy. Or if you have three different fonts. Some people do a San Seraph which would be like a Montserrat. A seraph which would be like your times New Roman. They have little cursive things on the end. San Seraph tend to be more just straight up and down. Then a fan for just special titles, then for our mood board inspiration. This is really cool that you can do in Canva. I've already got the frames in place for you here. Let's say we're doing a brand for make up. I could look up make up, then I can click on photos. You can see down here. You can either click See All Or Photos up here, It shows me all the different pictures. All right. I'm like, oh yeah, this really looks like color palette that I'm working with you. Click on the picture, it shows up here. Then hold and drag it. It will boom right in there. Sometimes it's helpful to do your mood board inspirations first, Let me preface this with saying, if you are sticking with your logo, you love it. After doing all the brand auditing, it's perfect, it's absolutely aligned, amazing, easy, drop it all in here. Away you go. If you think it needs a refresh or you don't have a logo yet or you don't like it after doing all your research, you're like, no, it's not really aligning with the messaging that I want. You can hire somebody if you don't want to do it yourself, which you absolutely can, because let me show you here. You can go a design up to this design tab up there, and click in Logo. Oh, actually I think it's going to be in the element section. Go back to all because we're in pictures right now, Tap and logo. They even give you shapes and ideas of what to use here if you want to create on your own or go back to all elements, get rid of this, you'll see there's lines and shapes, there's stickers if you look up certain elements. There's also graphics of all kinds of things that you can use say you wanted to create something. Let's see, our make up brand is called Blush. Making this up as we go, something like that. I just created a quick makeup brand. Blush. Um, you can create your own or like add different pieces here for the logo or I recommend if you're like, absolutely not. I'm not a visual person. I still don't get how all of the research and key messaging that I've done really ties in visually to the design aspect. Which is totally fair. Because not everyone's like that. I highly recommend this platform called fiber or Upwork Fiber just I found seems to be really fast, really easy to use. And you can find people that create logos all day, every day. They have their own profiles on there, they have reviews and you can choose them and work with them to build a logo for you. And there can be back and forth. So it's not like, oh, they'll give you one option and that's it. You have to stick with it. You can actually chat with them back and forth. I like this, I don't like this to help you create your ideal logo. I have that link also below In terms of getting logos created, they're extremely inexpensive options. I highly, highly recommend that if you're just like No, what I currently have is not working. I don't want to make it myself. I want an expert to do that. Perfect hop, one fiber. Find somebody that you like their work and their aesthetic and work with them if you are creating your own and you want your very creative person and you want to try your hand at doing this. I recommend starting with your mood board inspiration. First of the colors and the feelings of what you want your color palette and your logo to look like. We've got some that are aligned. You pick some pictures that are aligned with your industry and the mood and feel and the colors that you like. Then what you can do in here is when they go to build our color palette, click on that square, click on this Color Use your Eyedropper tool. Come in here to this photo and start picking out the colors that are in here to build out your color palette. It's a really, really easy way to build a cohesive color palette that all matches without having to know anything. Whoops. Without having to know anything about color theory really takes the guesswork out of it and look at I've got a beautiful color palette. Now maybe I will make blush. Just some tips for you there. If you're just totally struggling with the visual elements, break down. Make it simple for yourself. Start with the pictures first, because usually it's easier to figure out like, oh, I love this picture, even if you don't know why I like the feeling or the colors of it and then work backwards. All right, then we get into the vision mission and values like I showed you in the previous document. Again, we should have some of these figured out from the brand audit and other lessons that we had previously. But if you are not totally sure yet, there is a prompt here. Vision, what's your ultimate goal or aspiration for your business? Think about the impact you want your company to have on your customers, industry, or society. And then write a concise statement that captures your long term vision and paints a compelling picture of the future that you aim to achieve your mission, the purpose and cotivities of your company, why does your company exist? Right? And then craft a statement that clearly communicates your company mission on how you intend to fulfill it. This is your promise to your customers that you want to constantly remind them of of why your brand exists and then your values. These are core principles and beliefs that guide all of your company's behavior and your decision making. You want to consider the qualities that you want your employees and stakeholders to embody and uphold. And it's really good to stick to three to five that represent the fundamental principles that your company stands for. Put all those in here and then we get into the tag lines. The tag lines convey the meaning and purpose behind your brand. The description communicates your unique selling proposition. Pull your USPs in here from those unique selling propositions. Whatever that is for dwarf stars, it was healthier treats for everyone. Right. And then we were able to do Conscious suites. That's where the tag line came from. It's easier to start that unique selling proposition as your description and then just pull out a couple of those keywords that really embody what you're trying to say here in a couple words. You can also use chat, GPT, amazing for this. You go in there and you can give them your unique selling proposition and say, hey, this is my unique selling proposition. Create a company tag line for me and we'll give you a ton of different options. Pick and choose or just pick out some of the words to help get your mind working in the way that you want it to in terms of the brand tag lines that you want. Then we get into brand messaging. This will be the key messages that keep you consistent on your platforms and keep you in line with your strategy that's really going to speak to your customer, the why and how. Again, pulling out those USPs in a couple of words and then how does it do this, right? For us, we're vegan. Okay. Our product was vegan. That's a differentiator but like how we only source ingredients that are free from dairy, right? From ethical farm and facilities or companies that are ethical themselves, for instance. A huge thing that came up that we didn't realize, people kept asking us if our sugar was vegan. And you might think, well, for those of you that might not be vegan, vegan is somebody that doesn't eat any animal products or by products, they don't eat the meat of the animal but they also don't eat the cheeses. What we found out was some sugars contain bone char and bone grit That's ground down, for instance, in like powdered sugar. It gives the body and the consistency to it. When we ended up researching ours, absolutely, there was none of that in there. But people were asking, that's how specific people can really get when they align with those types of values. And you got to make sure that you're thinking about all those things in your business. For instance, if you're going to say you're a vegan company, you have to make sure all the steps along the way are vegan. For instance, if we were, I don't know, doing a giveaway, we wouldn't go and align with someone that makes leather bags and do a leather bag giveaway because that's just not in alignment with what we do. What, why and your how in terms of unique selling propositions. And then what they are and then how you show those in your brand guys. I hope this helps. If you have any questions, let me know. But by the end of this, you should have your beautiful brand guideline document created, gotten really, really clear on what your unique selling proposition is and the key messages and tag lines that you're going to be shooting out to your customers once this is done. Finally, I want you to go across all of your brand touchpoints that we made a list of and. Date, all of your logos, all of your bios, your descriptions everywhere and your website as well. Everywhere that you see your brand. Talk about your brand on those platforms. Go and change that information. Obviously, if you have passed content that wasn't totally brand aligned, you can delete it or you can leave it. It's fine, because we're going to start populating with new stuff that is alignment. Okay, the last thing in this lesson is I want to quickly show you how to create your own brand kit. Like I previously mentioned, this is if we're going to be using Canada in the future. It gives you that quick access in your brand hub to access on the left hand side, left hand side. When you're designing, let's you add your logos, your color palettes, and your fonts. When you're creating anything, you just go boom, and it's already preset for you don't have to go look for it every single time or adjust your colors every single time. When you log into Canva, this is the main page that you're going to see. You're going to click on the hamburger up those three lines up in the left hand corner. And you're going to click on Brand Tub. I will note this is for Pro. You do need a Pro account, which is a paid account to be able to create this. You don't have to do this for any reason except for it just makes things a little bit easier and faster. If you do want to set it up, you are going to be using Canva Ton to create your own social media posts or content. I highly recommend it just for efficiencies, but all you do is you go into your brand kit and then you click on New. Then you name it. Let's just put that in New company, cool. You put your company name there. You click Create. Here is logos, colors and fonts. Makes it really, really simple. You can also add photos if there's common photos. You've got professional photos taken of your products or company employees, whatever. You can drag and drop them into here, any extra graphics or icons, you can add all of those there. But for now we're just going to be setting up the three basic ones, Your logos. You can upload this from your computer, you just click, drag and drop. Click on one open, going to put your logos in there. Your color palettes, we're pulling those from the brand guideline document, All you do. Click your color, click your color. You can drop your hex codes right into here. You have the exact colors that you put into your brand guidelines document. You want to make sure those are all we're picking funky colors here. I like it. Okay. We've got all our colors put in there. And then fonts again. What do you use for your titles? What do you use for your subtitles? Heading, subheadings, Sectors, Bodies? I pretty much stick with three words, title, subtitle, and body. But you can do all of these if you'd like to. Again, very user friendly, just click on it. You choose your font, you can bold it, You can italic whatever you want. You can put it in a different size, and then you just click out of it. And that saved for you. I'll show you what this is going to do now, is that when I go back into my back to home, I go into a document, say I'm creating a social media post. I go to my brand tub on the left hand side. This drop down and now I can choose my new company. I've got all my colors here. This usually just shuffles. If you click directly on this, it's going to shuffle the colors in here. But my logos will be here. My fonts are all here that I can click. They'll change it to pop that title out if I want to use any of the colors. What I'm going to see now is when I go into my colors, my color palette for my company is here. And you can even change it right in there if you're switching between some. But I've got all my colors makes everything really straightforward and really easy to use. I hope that helps and I'll see you in the next list. 7. Final Thoughts: You made it. Congratulations. Throughout this course, you learned the true power behind an unforgettable brand. How research informs the strategy in building the foundations, while heart creates that emotional connection that connects with and attracts your ideal customers. By now, you should have a clear idea of the intentions behind your business, who your target audience is, and the story your brand will consistently tell. To draw them in like a moth to a flame. I'm so proud of you for taking the time to work on, not just in your business, and invest in your future success. Make sure you submit your final project by sharing with the class what you discovered about your brand story. For those that are brave enough, share your brand kit. One of the most cherished parts of my entrepreneurial journey was connecting with other like minded business owners and learning from them. I encourage you to jump in the discussion, ask any questions or share your insights and be sure to keep an eye out for more marketing mastery, Blueprint courses in this series.