Are you being serious right now? 🤔
The other day we met with a business owner whose website, frankly, was a disaster.
It was built using a bad wordpress template, with no cohesive color scheme, and giant paragraphs stretching from edge to edge of our browser window.
It was too much information, no visual identity and it was completely unclear who this company was trying to reach and why…
So we did what we always do… explain how our process works:
đź’ˇ We spend three weeks in a discovery phase learning about the ins and outs of the businesses we work with.
đź’ˇ We do a competitive analysis of the industry landscape and develop strong positioning to help the business stand out.
💡 We define a business’s stakeholders and craft specific messaging that touches on each one’s major pain points.
đź’ˇ We create a customer journey that leads these stakeholders to get to the specific information they need to engage and buy.
đź’ˇ After we create a solid messaging framework, we design branding assets that makes sense for the target demographic while creating the most compelling visual and tonal experience for our audience.
đź’ˇ Finally, we craft a beautiful website that properly communicates our message and is easy to ingest and navigate.
After our brief but incisive explanation, the business owner’s response was this…
“Well if we wanted pretty colors, we could do that internally.”🤦
Then to make things worse, the client showed us the site of a competitor.
We pulled up the URL and whoa!
It was a beautifully done site. The messaging was clear, the brand was developed and the customer journey was impeccably thought out. It was a site that made us feel like whatever this company was doing was truly revolutionizing the industry.
You want to compete with that and you think you can do “pretty colors” internally?
The competitor’s website looked like, at least, a 150k to 200k site all in. It was a big agency job and took lots of time, energy and money…
We left the meeting feeling like this founder was either completely clueless or more likely not serious about investing in his business.
Branding is (of course) not just pretty colors. If you read our newsletters, you’re likely well aware of this.
Branding is the foundational communication strategy you use to get people excited about and engage with your business.
Investing in branding is investing in your success.đź’Ż
The fact is: you’re competing with businesses that spend millions on their brand.
If you think an intern can cobble together a logo and website for you, you’re not serious.
If you think you can write the copy on your website and that it will actually stand out from all the professional writers out there you’re not serious.
If you think that because there’s a color picker on your wordpress template that you’re going to build a compelling brand, you’re not serious about success.
Building a great brand isn’t easy – even when you’re good at it. But today if you want to rise above the noise and create something truly successful and worthwhile you have to invest.
Rant over!
Get branding! ⚡
