Hi friends, and happy New Year! We are so excited to be in 2024 and share new and exciting updates with you all! To kickstart the first podcast of the year, we have guest Emily Foster of Emily Foster Creative joining us in a 3 part mini-series. Emily is a website and brand designer based in Portland, Oregon with an extensive background in event and digital design experience. Her focus is helping event-based businesses get clear and strategize their online presence through their website and social media.

In this first episode of the mini-series, Emily is chatting about how vital branding is and what kind of message you can relay to your ideal client or audience before you even chat with them. You want to speak to your client in a way that resonates with them and by having a strong online visual of who you are, that is going to help pave the way for your ideal clients and audience. 

The Psychology Behind Your Brand

Branding goes much further than your color palette, typography, and graphics. It truly sets you apart from the rest in the bunch, so you want to make sure you do it in a way that truly reflects you. Your visual voice speaks for itself with the way it is presented online. Whether you’ve invested in branding or not, your business has a brand. How you show up and present yourself online matters more than you would think. Everything you are putting out there will help the building blocks of creating trust in your brand and your brand message.

It is okay for your aesthetic to change over time and we can expect that, but having that strong brand voice from the very beginning is what is going to help carry you along the way. Copywriting is even more important when focusing on your brand message and how you want to communicate with your audience — knowing and understanding how you communicate is key to maintaining your brand message.

How Do I Know Who I Want To Work With

Even before launching your business, it is important to nail down who you think you will want to work with. You can go down a list of your clients or jobs and make note of who you enjoyed working with, who you may prefer not to work with again in the future, and how you want your book of clients to look from there on out. Whether you agree or not, having a few of those red-flag clients is helpful when it comes to nailing down who you want to work with, or perhaps learning what personality types you don’t mesh with. Simultaneously you can sort out who you loved most and what worked the best. From there you can weed out what you do and don’t want to do. Another thing you can do is check your pricing and see where you are in the range of what your services or products cost as that plays a pivotal role in the type of consumers you attract. A lot of event pros have competitive pricing but check your market and see how you can stand out while also aligning in the market of your industry. There are many pillars to look from when you are working to pin down who you want to show up for and work with. You just have to be willing to do the work and find what works for you.

The Key To Brand Strategy

In the book Building A Story Brand by Donald Miller, you can find helpful tips and an engaging read that assists you in the ability to nail down your very own story brand and learn how to do that. There are so many great resources out there and by taking the time to do some internal learning, you will retain many ways to do this for your own business. So what can you do to create your brand and strategically maximize that? How can you showcase your brand as well as tell the story about why someone should buy from you or book your services? You will attract what you put out and doing the work to understand what your clients and audience needs is going to help you gain their trust and bookings. Understanding what the needs are and placing yourself as the “hero” in the situation should be done strategically. If you are using terminology that points or directs the readers to “I do this” or “I do that”, that can become hurtful to what you are actually trying to accomplish.

Position yourself in that place of the one who needs the help and acknowledge the struggles, validate the feelings, and make sure you iterate how you can help get them that final win that they want in their business. You need to make sure that you are fulfilling their need and providing a solution. 

Emily offers a lot of great feedback about what you can do to ensure that your branding is on point and how you can really fuel your business to drive sales from your marketing techniques. In Maslaws Hierochy of Needs book, you can find more of an internal, psychological look. It separates the needs of the needs that we as humans have and how we can integrate them into our ideal client. 

We are so excited to have had guest Emily Foster of Emily Foster Creative join us on today’s episode of The Render Podcast. You will be able to learn more about our mini-series by following along on Instagram and make sure you follow Emily on Instagram to get an insight into her community! Be sure to join us next week for the second episode of the series! Thank you for being here and we look forward to seeing you soon!

Joyfully,

Raven Scott | Podcast & Marketing Coordinator