What is branding ... and is it worth it?
As a wellness website and branding expert, sometimes even *I* find it hard to explain what branding really is, so I don’t expect other health and wellness entrepreneurs to have any clue, either. When you hear others say “brand yourself” and “your brand is your business”, you get an idea that yes, it’s important, but is it really worth it to brand your health business … and what IS branding, anyways?
One of the best explanations of branding I’ve ever heard is:
“Your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room.”
Excuse me while I go barf a little bit because I quote Jeff Bezos. OK, back to the blog post.
In short, your brand is everything that someone can see, hear, read, or experience about you and your business that gives them a feeling about what you do and who you help. It helps them develop a gut feeling that they’re in the right place.
That’s probably still too esoteric and vague for you, so here’s some real, tangible, and visible things that your brand is made up of:
Business colours
Logo
Fonts
Photos
Website images
Copywriting on your website
Social media images
Social media captions
Video content
As you can see, your brand isn’t just your logo. I wrote an entire blog post over here showing different ways that specific choices of colours, fonts, photography, and writing styles can affect your brand and how you’re perceived to potential new customers.
But is it really worth it to brand your health business? And can you even measure exactly what it’s worth? What about rebranding … is that worth it? Let’s dive in!
Is it really worth it to brand your health business?
When it comes down to worth, we can think of it in 2 ways: money and time.
It’s easy to measure how much something is worth in money, because you either spend X amount and make X amount back … or you don’t. More on measuring exactly what a brand is worth below.
What I want to talk about right now is the time aspect of branding, and I’m going to do that with an analogy.
When you were a kid, you most likely were expected to graduate high school, then go to college or university to get a useful degree to get a “good” job? After all, that’s the North American dream, that anyone can get an education, work hard, and go on to do much bigger things than previous generations, right? But in today’s day and age, is it really guaranteed that you’ll get a good job just because you have a degree? And are you really going to make back the $50,000, $100,000 or more that you’ll end up with in student loans?
If there’s no guarantee that you’ll make a good income for spending all that money, what is the point of all that school?
For me, I graduated with an Honours Bachelor of Science majoring in Geophysics, and was accepted to do my PhD at MIT and Arizona State right out of my undergrad. I graduated with $24,000 in student debt that took me over 5 years to pay off (and that’s pretty quick, only because my husband was making good money and all my income could go to debt repayment). I then went on to nutrition school and graduated as a Registered Holistic Nutritionist.
And now, as a wellness website and branding expert, I’m not doing anything related to most of those things.
So what was the point of all that schooling and all those thousands of dollars?
It taught me how to think critically, advanced time management skills, and most importantly, how to learn on my own without anyone holding my hand.
By taking the time to be immersed in an environment where I had to master those skills, they became a part of who I am and how I do everything, including how I run my business today.
I had to take time out to learn something that would catapult my success years later.
The same is true of branding.
When you take the time to brand yourself and your business, you’re putting yourself through a process that forces you to focus on who you are, who you want to serve, and what those people need to see, hear, and feel from you so you can connect with them.
During that process, you might discover things that make you pivot your business to go in a direction you never thought it would go, but you would have done it eventually … down the road, after wasting months or years because you didn’t take the time to define your business in the beginning.
For example, I’ve had students in my branding and website building course email me to let me know they’re behind on their website because they decided to go in a new direction, one that they realized they were meant to go in the first place, but they didn’t have the courage to embrace it until they went through the exercises in the course where it inevitably revealed itself. In every case, they were incredibly thankful that they decided on their new direction before they wasted the time and effort designing their website and spending years focusing on something that, while it fulfilled them, it wasn’t their true passion.
That is the true gift of branding: while trying to simply design pretty colours and images for others, your own passion is revealed to yourself along the way.
I don’t know about you, but I’d rather do some self introspection now to save me loads of time in the future.
Since we’re talking about time, I also wrote a blog post about 4 ways to save time in your health business with a brand & website, but in short, when you have your colours, fonts, and brand images already chosen, this can save you hours when it comes to marketing on social media.
When you look at a syndication model, like I shared in this blog post here on how to create 2 weeks of social media content in less than 4 hours, it’s integral to the process that you’ve already chosen your visual branding.
Imagine how much quicker the process will go, having to make 3 Pinterest pins, 6 Instagram posts, and 6 Instagram stories, when you already know what colours to use, fonts to plug into a template, and a collection of images to drag and drop from a folder on your computer.
One of my Instagram posts from the last year with the highest reach was a simple quote in my primary brand font that only took me 2 minutes to design. It’s been seen by over 17,500 thousand people (I have less than 3,000 followers), was saved 41 times, shared 35 times, and resulted in 69 profile visits, 16 website clicks, and 9 new followers.
From 2 minutes of work. Because I took the time to brand my business.
Can you measure exactly what branding is worth?
This is a hard question to ask, because it’s almost impossible to measure the return on investment (ROI) of branding.
Much like creating videos in your business, you won’t know if it made you real money unless you directly ask paying customers exactly how they found you, and if they would have purchased from you if they hadn’t seen that video.
However, when we take a step back, we can see that branding is absolutely worth thousands in your business with a couple of examples from my own business:
Example #1: doTERRA business
branding = generated $50,000+ in income
When I joined doTERRA, I was only going to use the oils and I had zero intention of doing the business. That quickly changed when cold and flu season hit.
If you know anything about network marketing, you know that you have to “place” someone in your organization within a certain timeframe after they enroll. I had a call with my upline on day 14 after my first purchase, the day she had to place me.
She didn’t know anything about me, but during that call, I mentioned how I was a Registered Holistic Nutritionist and had an existing business, but that I didn’t want to do a doTERRA business.
This was shortly after my huge $20,000 professional re-branding and custom website design, so when she inevitably clicked over to my website and saw how high end it was, she decided to keep me on her front line, a key spot in her organization, even when I said I didn’t want to do the business.
When I ultimately decided to “try it” a few months later, my business took off quickly because I had already spent 7 years building my nutrition business … but it wouldn’t have reached the level of success it ultimately did unless I was on my upline’s front line.
That decision led to me reaching higher ranks much quicker than I would have myself, and that has made a difference in my income of tens of thousands of dollars. If I had to put an actual number on it, I’d say it’s created at least $50,000 in additional income for me.
Example #2: mama mojo online course
branding = generated $5,000 in income
Just after that fancy rebranding mentioned above, I launched my first large scale online course called Mama Mojo, which was an 8 week course to help moms balance their hormones and regain their energy.
I purposely priced the program at $497 because of the high end branding, which is why I re-branded in the first place.
I figured I could keep the branding I had and sell the course for $297, or I could sell the same number of spots at a higher price point because I increased the perceived value of the course by adding in luxury brand assets, like a gorgeous sales page with custom copywriting, high-end photos, and touches of gold foil.
The difference in price after all sales would have been about $5,000, which can be directly attributed to the branding, and not the content of the program itself.
You can see that the one re-brand and custom website I invested in for $22,500 generated over $55,000 in additional revenue.
Of course there’s no alternate universe, but I have a hard time believing that my doTERRA upline would have kept me on her front line if I had no website or online presence, or a crappy, inconsistent one at that.
If you think about other businesses, the same applies. What is the only difference between yoga leggings you buy at Lululemon and some from a discount store? The branding.
How about buying furniture from a designer store versus Ikea? The branding.
What about a luxury car versus a more affordable one with the same features? The branding.
We perceive luxury purchases as “better” because we think we’ll have a better life by using them, all because of the experience, feel, and story telling ability of those brands over other ones, not because they’re actually better.
Here’s a joke for you: what’s the only difference between yoga leggings from Lululemon and ones from the Dollar Store? Branding and your bank account balance. 😂
Is it worth it to rebrand your business?
As someone who rebrands fairly frequently (every 2 years or so), but who has also seen other businesses use the same brands for upwards of a decade without change, do I think it’s worth it to rebrand your business often?
First let me introduce you to a new term: procrasti-branding.
Procrasti-branding is when you spend time branding your business instead of creating something else new that could grow your income, and the most important part to know is that it’s driven by fear.
Fear of putting out your new offering, fear of your business growing beyond your wildest dreams, fear of more visibility, and fear of success. Yes, those are all fears that myself and every other entrepreneur I know has suffered from.
Only you can know if you’re procrasti-branding instead of doing the other important things to grow your business, but here’s 3 questions to ask yourself to know if it’s time for a re-brand:
Has your ideal client changed?
If you’ve pivoted your business and your ideal client has changed, or the problems that you solve have changed, then it’s most likely time for a rebrand, as any of the current messaging on your website will be out of date.
For example, if you want to pivot from helping young moms get more energy to helping menopausal women reduce their hot flashes, you’re not only going to have to change all your copywriting, but you might even need to change your colours and fonts used on your website that will connect with an older audience.
This was the case for me in the past few months, as I’ve stepped back from my doTERRA business and I’m focusing 100% on the website, branding, and business coaching side of my business.
Do you need to update your website from the tech side?
If you need to update your website and either change platforms altogether (for example, change from Wordpress to Squarespace), or if you need to change templates within your platform that will essentially require you to reformat all the content that you have currently (this happens when you change templates within Squarespace), then you might want to ask yourself if it’s worth it to put in 1-2 more weeks to update your brand while you’re changing everything else.
Along with my changing ideal client, this is also the case for me. My previous version of my website wasn’t on the Brine template (the most flexible version of any templates on Squarespace), and it had a few features that weren’t available on my previous template that would be useful with my upcoming products and services I’d be offering.
Will you be able to charge more?
It’s going to take time to complete a rebrand of your business (possibly including a website redesign), and it’s either going to take you 1-2 months to do it yourself OR you’ll have to hire it out for upwards of $5,000+. Why would you invest that time or money into something you might not have to do?
Because you’ll be able to charge more for your current offerings OR you’re introducing a new, higher priced offering that would benefit from a more sophisticated, up levelled branding, how long will it take you to make up the difference?
For example, I’ve taken 2 months out of my schedule to complete my rebrand and new website (FYI: this would have probably taken me 1 month if I wasn’t focused on also resting and healing my body, and if I hadn’t publicly announced stepping back from doTERRA, causing a temporary set back in my anxiety and a few extra missed days of work), which reduced my ability to work on other projects and temporarily earn perhaps a $2,000.
However, I’ll be introducing my new business coaching in a few months that allow me to make significantly more than that, so for me, this new brand that’s focused solely on that ideal client is worth it.
If you’re hiring out your rebrand, and it costs $5,000, can you increase your prices per client or online course sale to make that back within 3-6 months? If yes, it’s a no brainer to me to rebrand.
Only you can know if you’re procrasti-branding or if you have a legitimate need for a rebrand, but either way, move forward with something.
If you recognize that you’re procrasti-branding, then kick your own butt into gear on the project that you should be working on (but it feels hard). And if you recognize that you do actually need a rebrand, then get your butt into gear, schedule it, and get it done!
