How to assess your current branding
This is a very useful exercise for both young and more established businesses to assess the consistency across business branding elements. Yearly is probably a good frequency and shouldn’t feel too onerous on your time.
To assess your brand as it currently stands:
1. Set up a special folder on your computer.
Start adding screenshots or photos of any items that come into contact with your customers and potential customers (your audience).
This could include anything from invoices, to social media, to business cards, to your website, and so on.
Depending on how many touchpoints there are, this could take some time and you may find it easier to add to the folder by degrees.
2. The next step is to look at everything together, as a collection.
Do the items look like they belong to the same family?
Do they sound like the same person(ality)?
Or does it feel a bit disjointed?
The widest gap can often be between physical items and online presence, especially if different people have created bits and pieces over time.
For many small businesses, the online presence may be populated by templates from Canva. These templates are extremely handy but are also used by a lot of people (180 million around the world to be exact!), and won’t do much to help you stand out.
This exercise helps you see what your audience is experiencing.
It’s not that disconnected elements are a reflection of your business, but the overall effect may not be supporting it either.
Branding that is consistent is more effective, and works harder on your behalf to get you to where you want to go.
