Soul Stirring Branding

When you’re investing your hard-earned money and time into any project for your business, you absolutely want to set it up for success. But what can you do as a client to ensure that your branding or website project is the very best it can be and that your designer or copywriter can understand what you’re looking for? In this episode, I cover four main elements to have in place before you hire someone to help you: Make sure you know who you are as a business - what you offer, who you offer it to, how you offer it uniquely, the problem you solve, and so on. Make sure you know your aesthetic and what “feels like you.” - what’s your personal style? As a personal brand, you’ll probably want this to come through so it captures your essence.Make sure you have the time to devote to the collaboration. Don’t assume because you’re outsourcing it won’t require any of your time. Make sure you have the budget saved up to hire the right person for the job, not just the cheapest. Feel free to DM me @soulstirringbranding on Instagram or jump onto soulstirringbranding.com for more info.

You might be wondering what length of sales page performs better. We’ve all seen the really long-form sales pages a lot of courses use for example. Is that what’s required? Or is it overwhelming for people and “death by scroll”? In this episode, I outline all the considerations you would need to make. Some of the key things to consider are: 1. What is your offer - is it low-cost or high-investment2. Who will be viewing your sales page? Will they be “Warm” or “Cold” leads? 3. How easy is your offer to understand?4. Are you comfortable optimising your sales page to ensure it loads fast even with a longer style page? 5. How urgently do people want a solution? We also discuss the different types of buyers and how to keep everyone happy: Buyer 1: Wants all the information to feel comfortable to make a purchase. Needs a lot of convincing and social proof. Wants to know exactly what they’re going to get in detail. Buyer 2: Doesn’t need a lot of convincing, is potentially a repeat customer of yours or a “warm lead” who knows you well, just needs to know the core info and is ready to buy. Wants the “Fast Track”. And we discuss how our own biases and information-digesting/buying styles can influence how we approach a sales page. Feel free to DM me @soulstirringbranding on Instagram or jump onto soulstirringbranding.com for more info.

Whether it is photo shoots, client meetings, videos or photos that you're taking for social media or other marketing, speaking at events, networking events, basically where you are showing up as the face of your brand, should you be wearing colors that align to your sort of core colors that you put on your website, and into your graphic posts on social media and in your email newsletter?Hopefully, you are using your brand colors consistently in the graphics you’re creating in Canva, or on your website, right? That stuff should be obvious. But showing up as the face of our business, we are an extension of that brand presence. We are another ‘touchpoint’ with our brand. In an ideal world,  your clothing and your clothing style, should ideally align with your brand as a whole, because we want to tell a consistent story. But as I break down in the episode, if having to show up perfectly in the right colours (even if those clothes are in the wash) is a barrier to you being visible and creating content, then that’s not helping your business either! So finding some middle ground is good. In the episode, I discuss how you should consider at least some of your brand colours to be colours that suit you. So understanding what your season is can be helpful. Want a free tool to figure out your personal colour season? Check out this app I reference in the episode here.Feel free to DM me @soulstirringbranding on Instagram or jump onto soulstirringbranding.com for more info.

Personal branding as when you, as the founder, are the public face of the company. The brand is built around YOU - your stories, your lifestyle, your personality, your values.Business branding is not centred around one person’s, or the founder's values, beliefs, lifestyle, thought-leadership, style or personality. The brand is more so CONSTRUCTED to have a personality and style. You create a brand persona for the business and ask questions like “If your brand was a person, what would their personality be?” This will not necessarily reflect the founder at all. This is usually based on research for what will appeal to a certain target market or ideal customer. You get to decide how much of your story you want to share and it is nuanced. And it’s not the black-and-white choice of either:A) your brand and marketing are deeply personal, vulnerable and like a live stream of your personal life or B) you share nothing about yourself and make this a cold, faceless brand. You get to choose how much you weave in. I’m all for making brands feel deeply personal, even with larger teams that I do work with. Feel free to DM me @soulstirringbranding on Instagram or jump onto soulstirringbranding.com for more info.

In this episode, I’ll be covering some of the design, copy and technical mistakes many business owners are making right now, which could be impacting people’s willingness to read and engage with your website and your sales. There are many, many mistakes people make and the process is quite nuanced! It’s a science and an art. The overarching theme of what I talked about today is really understanding and bringing awareness to how you (and others) actually navigate a website. We know that not everyone is going to read your site word for word. People don’t actually read websites, they scan websites. Of course, we’d love it if they did, but it’s not the reality. We need to write copy and design with this in mind. Expect your reader to be lazy and definitely don’t do anything that makes it harder.I go into some of the ways we write and design that make it harder for people. Think: Colour Contrast IssuesText Boxes being too wideToo much centred textNo sectioning of your content No line/paragraph breaks in a section. No headlines and subheadings in your section Copy in a section being too large and overwhelming.I also go into some fundamental copy mistakes where business owners have the tendency to make their websites all about them and aren’t speaking to their reader. And how important our headlines are, but most business owners are making them weak. And how most business owners are writing very short, vague and generic website copy which doesn’t give people enough information. I also talk about the impact pop ups can have on user experience. Do you have a question about how to make your website better? Want me to take a peek? Feel free to DM me @soulstirringbranding on Instagram or jump onto soulstirringbranding.com for more info.

Today, we're going to be diving into everything lead magnets and how to set up a functioning lead magnet from start to finish. Now, this is a topic that I think quite a few of my clients are confused about, and they don't really understand the steps involved. I often have conversations with clients about what we actually have to do to bring it to life. So if they're a little bit confused, you might be too and I hope that this podcast episode today illuminates everything for you, so that you understand what is required. Setting up lead magnets can be confusing and overwhelming because there are so many steps and moving parts required. There are three key stages: 1. Create the lead magnet itself. 2. Inside your email marketing platform: set up the email list and welcome email delivering the freebie link. 3. Set up the landing page (on your website, or in your email marketing program), with the form fields for someone to opt-in. In the episode I break down the considerations for each phase and tell you what to consider from strategy to tech. Feel free to DM me @soulstirringbranding on Instagram or jump onto soulstirringbranding.com for more info.

In this episode, I talk about where you might be going wrong with your client testimonials and how to get really good testimonials instead. I take pride in my client testimonials being really good and I believe that didn’t happen by accident. If you jump onto the testimonials page of my website, you’ll be able to and see what I mean.If you’d like to grab a free copy of the exact questions I ask clients to get really good testimonials, you can nab that here! Here are the top 3 things I see clients and businesses doing wrong with their testimonials. They never bother to request them in the first place! I know, we wear so many hats and this can just fall off your radar. Don’t worry if this is you. You can start from today!They get a testimonial, but not a photo to pair with it. Around 50% of my clients do this before they start working with me! Seeing an actual face behind the testimonial builds trust, and relatability and draws the eye to the text. They ask clients to write their testimonials with no guidance. Most clients simply don’t know how to write a good testimonial and what will be the most help to us. What we want to do instead is to paint the picture of the before and after transformation! And we want them to get SPECIFIC, rather than giving us vague details. You may want to try either creating a fillable PDF form or a Google Form with a set of questions they can answer. You could also try jumping on Zoom with them and hitting record, asking them your questions and then transcribing the call to form your testimonial. Getting on Zoom takes more work on your end, but will likely produce a better result because you can ask follow-up questions. You’ll also learn so much about your clients' experiences that you can learn from! Once your testimonial is formed, you’ll want to clean it up, fix any spelling/grammar, and choose a “headline” for your testimonial, so we’re not just dumping a wall of text on the page with no styling. Remember: not everyone reads every word of your website, testimonials included. But they will likely read your testimonials headline at the very least, and hopefully, it draws them in enough to read the whole thing. Also don’t forget to ask clients to review you on Facebook, Google my Business, Yelp, LinkedIn or anything else that is important to your business. If you’re a product-based business, make sure that you get a great reviews app/plugin/program that will send your customers email reminders to review you. This is well worth the investment if there is a cost involved! Feel free to DM me @soulstirringbranding on Instagram or jump onto soulstirringbranding.com for more info.

Every offering you have will have some kind of promise. The promise is basically the outcome or the transformation that someone can expect from working with you, buying the thing, doing the course, whatever it is.These days in the online world, it’s full of these BIG, sexy, sometimes outlandish promises. Have a 6-figure launch, 5-steps to a $100K coaching business in 90 days, Launch your dream business in just 5 days, write your book in 90-days, 10x your revenue in 1 month, sell out your next event, learn how go viral consistently. Some of those ones I’m mentioning were literally what was in my Facebook feed today that I noted down. Of course, big, flashy promises get noticed. I’m in a coaching program right now where they tell us we need to make our offer so damn good, someone would be stupid to say no. And I’m all for delivering an AMAZING offering to your clients. But I think a lot of people out there are taking that idea and just saying ANYTHING to make their offer sound good, but does it really deliver on it? Or are we over-hyping and over-promising here? And how do we approach this as heart-centred business owners who probably take more of a long-term sustainable results kind of approach rather than a quick-fix solution approach. I’ll be diving into my top tips for this in the episode! Action Item I mention in the episode: Map out those two questions: Number 1: What problem does my ideal client care the most about solving? Number 2: What problem do I care the most about solving? Are they the same? Are they different? Do your ideal clients care about the same things you care about?Ultimately, your intuition should be your best guide to find the best way to balance your personal beliefs and values about the work that you do while meeting someone where they are at with their particular level of awareness of the problem. If you have a question about whether now is the right time for you to work on your branding, I’d welcome you to DM me to chat about it. Feel free to DM me @soulstirringbranding on Instagram or jump onto soulstirringbranding.com for more info.

Our visual branding or our visual brand identity, is, as the name literally says the VISUAL part of how we’re communicating who we are as a part. So what visuals make up our visual branding exactly. There are actually 5 key categoriesYour logo, colour palette, typography (fonts), graphic elements (illustrations, icons, textures, patterns) and photography style. The first place to start isn’t Pinterest. Most people start there, just scrolling down the endless rabbit hole for ideas. You can spend hours pinning ideas, but you’ve got to ask yourself if that is actually time well spent. Especially if you aren’t clear on what you’re trying to say with your visual branding. Before you jump onto Pinterest, the first thing you need to get is actually decide what you’re trying to communicate. What’s the message we’re sharing here? Because these visual elements we choose are more than just red being red, right? Or choosing between a circle or a square for no solid reason. EVERY SINGLE choice you make is actually saying something about your brand and by extension, if you’re creating a personal brand, YOU. So if every visual choice says something about you, what do you want to be saying? Key mistakes to avoid are: Not defining your visual branding at all, so you’re using random colours, fonts, graphics, stock photos etc. Chopping and changing your visual branding on a whim so your brand feels unrecognisable to your audience. Getting so stuck in your head with what everyone else thinks of your brand that you’re constantly second-guessing things. Not bothering to define your brand strategy and direction BEFORE you start your visualsContinuing to DIY your branding with no support or investing in learning how to do things properly if you’re not happy with what you’re producing and it’s affecting your confidence with marketing your business.To rate or review this podcast, please jump into your podcast player, scroll to the bottom and you should see a “Ratings & Reviews” section. I would be ever so grateful!  Feel free to DM me @soulstirringbranding on Instagram or jump onto soulstirringbranding.com for more info.

Is marketing to pain points unethical or is there a compassionate way that heart-centred business women can get behind? There’s been a lot of conversations popping up in my in the last few years or so about not using pain points in your marketing because it’s unethical. So I wanted to share my take as a mission-driven business owner here to bring so much love, support and inspiration into the world through my work (not sleazy marketing tactics and manipulation).Pain points are any struggles, fears, worries, concerns and so on that people have, and in a business sense we’re specifically looking at problems your business solves. This could be any type of pain - physical, mental, emotional or spiritual. I did a bit of Googling and here is how some people online are describing it, which included: “If you're exploiting someone's pain to gain a sale, that's unethical.” or “Pouring salt on the open wounds of your deepest pain.”So should we be leading with our ideal clients’ desires, dreams and goals only? Even if we know from psychology that humans are more motivated to move AWAY from pain points, than we are towards our goals. Or is there actually a caring, sensitive, tactful, compassionate way to go about it? I’ll be sharing my take in this episode! If you have a question about whether now is the right time for you to work on your branding, I’d welcome you to DM me to chat about it. Feel free to DM me @soulstirringbranding on Instagram or jump onto soulstirringbranding.com for more info.