How to Integrate Your Branding into All Aspects of Your Company | MP 52

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How is your branding theoretical and visual? What can you do to integrate your theoretical and visual branding in a way that best connects you to your clients? Why is it important for your employees to know the branding of the company?

In this podcast episode, Sam Carvalho speaks about how to integrate your branding into all aspects of your company.

Podcast Sponsor

TherapyNotes! It makes notes, billing, scheduling, and telehealth a whole lot easier. Check it out and you will quickly see why it’s the highest-rated EHR on TrustPilot with over 1000 verified customer reviews and an average customer rating of 4.9/5 stars.

You’ll notice the difference from the first day you sign up for a trial. They offer live phone support 7 days a week.

So when you have questions, you can quickly reach someone who can help, you are never wasting your time looking for answers.
If you are coming from another EHR, they make the transition really easy. TherapyNotes will import your clients’ demographic data free of charge during your trial so you can get going right away.

To get 2 free months of TherapyNotes,  no strings attached including their very reliable telehealth platform click on www.therapynotes.com and enter the promo code: Joe

In This Podcast

Summary

  • Put together a brand style guide
  • Make your branding assets accessible
  • Make sure your company brand is seen
  • Make proper use of templates
  • Regularly remind your employees of your branding

Put together a brand style guide

Creating and having a brand style guide is an effective way to integrate your branding into all aspects of your company.

A brand style guide is a document that contains everything someone needs to know about your company; the mission, vision, core values, brand voice, logo, and logo uses, color palette, image guidelines, and hierarchy.

Your brand style guide is essentially a visual representation of all the work that you have done on your branding all gathered together in one spot. It’s a great way to ensure brand consistency throughout all marketing platforms but also within your company. (Sam)

Make your branding assets accessible

Your branding assets are all the documents and content around your branding, and have them all be available to anyone in your company.

Put all these assets into a shared Google Drive or Dropbox so that any employee can access them when necessary. This means that all your employees share the same branding style in their work, and therefore any client in your business will experience the same branding throughout their experience with your employees.

Make sure your company brand is seen

Place your logo on any piece of marketing material; digital, flyer, adverts, and on social media. Stick up your company’s core values in the office space or share them with your employees online so that these core values are remembered and practiced every day.

Branding is theoretical as well as visual. Branding is theoretical in the sense that it explains what your company is based on, what the core values and its mission are: these theoretical branding principles are then represented visually through your brand style guide across your company’s appearance.

Make proper use of templates

On helpful websites like Canva, you have access to lots of free templates that you can update with your own branding. Having these templates on hand will make it easier for you to create social media posts from time to time.

Take the time to create the initial set-up that you can easily turn back to and use whenever the time comes for you to create a new post.

Regularly remind your employees of your branding

This can be done in a quarterly session with your employees, or by providing all new employees with a starter pack containing your brand style guide; having your employees understand and remember the core branding principles of your business will ensure that it develops in a unified manner.

Branding is not only about what you want your business to look like, it is also about the experience that you want clients to have and the standard that you want your clients to uphold.

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Meet Sam Carvalho

Samantha Carvalho DesignSam Carvalho is a graphic designer living in Cape Town, South Africa, with over five years of experience in both design and marketing, with a special interest and experience in the start-up environment.

She has been working with Practice of the Practice since 2016 and has helped over 70 therapist entrepreneurs take their practices to the next level by enhancing their visual branding. She loves working with a variety of clients on design-intensive tasks and is always up for a challenge!

Follow Sam on Instagram to see some of her work. To work with Sam, head on over to www.practiceofthepractice.com/branding.

Thanks For Listening!

Feel free to leave a comment below or share this podcast on social media by clicking on one of the social media links below! Alternatively, leave a review on iTunes and subscribe!

Podcast Transcription

[SAM CARVALHO]: Is managing your practice stressing you out? Try Therapy Notes. It makes notes, billing, scheduling, and tele-health a whole lot easier. Check it out and you will quickly see why it’s the highest rated of EHR on Trustpilot with over 1000 verified customer reviews and an average customer rating of 4.9 out of five stars. You’ll notice the difference from the first day you sign up for a trial. They offer live phone support seven days a week so when you have questions, you can quickly reach someone who can help. You’re never wasting your time looking for answers. If you are coming from another EHR, they make the transition really easy. Therapy Notes will input your clients’ demographic data free of charge during your trials, so you can get going right away.
Use the promo code [JOE], that’s [J O E] to get two free months to try Therapy Notes for free, no strings attached, including their very reliable tele-health platform. Make 2021 the best year yet with Therapy Notes.
Welcome to the Market a Practice podcast with me, Sam Carvalho, where you’ll discover everything you need to know about marketing and brand and your business. To find out more about how I can help you brand new business visit www.practiceofthepractice.com/branding. And if you’d like to see some examples of my design work, be sure to follow me on Instagram at Samantha Carvalho Design.
Hi there. Thanks so much for joining me today on the Marketing a Practice podcast. Today’s episode is most likely going to be short and sweet, but I’m excited to run through it with you. So today I wanted to talk about how to integrate your branding into all aspects of your company. We’ve spoken previously of the importance of putting a lot of time and thought into your company’s branding. But what do you do after this? How do you effectively integrate your branding into all aspects of your company? It’s important for your branding to be cohesive when presented to both your clients and your employees. So I’ve put together some helpful points on how to integrate your branding into all aspects of your company.
First and foremost, make a brand guide. And you’ll probably be sick of hearing me say this, but a brand style guide is a great way to start to ensure your branding is effectively integrated into all aspects of your company. As a reminder, for those of you who aren’t sure a brand style guide is a document usually designed by a creative designer that tells you everything you need to know about your specific branding. It usually includes things like your company purpose, your vision, your mission, core values, brand voice, logo and logo uses, color palette fonts and typography placement, image guidelines, and hierarchy. So your brand style guide is essentially a visual representation of all the work that you’ve done on your branding and kind of gathering it all together in one spot. And it’s a great way to ensure brand consistency throughout all marketing platforms, but also within your company.
So a great way to start integrating your branding into all aspects of your company is by putting together a brand and style guide. Next you want to make your branding assets accessible. So now the great tip is to ensure that all your core branding assets, for example, your brand style guide, logo files, brand imagery, et cetera, are available for everyone within the company to access. Put all of these assets into a Google drive or Dropbox folder and share them with your employees. That way everyone has access when necessary and your client experience remains consistent. So making sure that you’ve kind of organized your branding assets in a folder.
This is also helpful if you find yourself working with different designers. You can kind of send them the link to that folder and they will have everything that they need to create, whatever it is they’re creating for you, whether it be marketing material or your website, anything like that. They’ll have all they need within that one folder. So it’s also just a nice way to organize your branding.
Third, you want to make sure that your company brand is seen. So this may sound like an obvious one, but once you’ve spent so much time developing your brand, you want to make sure that you use your branding assets everywhere. So ensure that your logo is on every piece of marketing material, whether that be print with social media, ensure that every social media post has your logo included, every flyer has your logo included, make sure that you’re using your brand imagery where necessary and ensure that your core brand messaging is stuck up in the office as a reminder to your employees. Making a constant visual reminder to employees helps keep your core message and values always in mind.
So as we’ve mentioned, previously, branding isn’t just visual. It’s theoretical as well. And that’s where your brand style guide kind of merges those two things. So it includes the visual aspect and the theoretical aspect. And when it comes to including your branding or integrating your branding in all aspects of your company, we’re kind of speaking of making sure that the visual side is kept consistent, but also that all your employees have a really good understanding of the theoretical side of your branding. So what your company is based on, what are your core values? What is your mission? What is your vision? Because all of that will then feed into how they relate to your clients, how they relate to each other. And you want to just make sure that that is consistent across the board.
Number four is to make proper use of templates. So again, this is jumping back to the visual side. Once you’ve created a number of branding assets like we spoke about previously, and you put them in a nice folder that everybody can access, including your logo, icon, brand imagery, typography, color scheme, et cetera, these can then be mixed and matched in various templates. For example, when it comes to social media, you can hire a designer to design every social media post. Unless of course you have an in-house designer and you could hire a designer, but there are smarter ways to go about it. So, on platforms like Canva, for example, which I’ve also spoken about previously, I think I actually did an episode on DIY design and I mentioned how to work with Canva, or kind of run through how to work with Canva in that episode. So check it out if you haven’t, but on platforms like Canva, there is a number of free templates for you to use and simply updates according to your branding.
So you’re basically going to log into Canva, and you’re going to find the team that you want to use, and you’re then going to replace all the elements in that template with your own branding in it. So you’re going to include your logo, you’re going to update the color scheme, you’re going to update the fonts accordingly. You’re going to include any brand imagery that you may have, and you’re essentially going to turn it into a template that suits your branding. Then after you can easily save the colors and logos, et cetera of your brand for you to use whenever you create a new set of posts. So it’s maybe a little bit of time to create that initial setup, but once you have that, it’s really easy for you to jump in once a month, create your posts for the coming month and be sorted and make sure that your branding is consistent across your social media.
You can also do create things like flyers and that on Canva. That’s where I would maybe recommend getting a designer involved when it comes to the more kind of complex print marketing material, but it’s obviously up to you and your budget. But when it comes to kind of the digital social media creations, I would say Canva is a great way to keep your branding consistent.
And finally regularly remind your employees of your branding. So I touched on this a little bit earlier, but whether this plays out in a quarterly sessions to review the brand style guide and core company values or results in the brand style guide being included in a new employees’ welcome pack, make sure that each and every member of your company is able to recite both the visual and theoretical standing of your company. Once you’ve achieved this, it will ensure that your branding becomes visible at every entry point. So remember that as a business, you have a number of touch points, you’ve got digital touch points, you’ve got print marketing touch points, and then of course, you’ve got your relational touch points of if somebody is walking into your practice, what is their experience? Does that experience match the experience they had with you, when engaging on your social media page or on your website? You need to make sure that that experience is consistent across all fronts and across all touch points.
And that’s what we speak about when we speak about branding. It’s really sitting down from the get-go and deciding yes, what you want your logo to look like, but also how you want, if it’s maybe future employees or current employees to interact with your clients, because all of that and everything in between is speaking into what kind of brand you are positioning yourself as in the marketplace. So through your print marketing, digital marketing, office environment and employee client relationships, you want to make sure that your branding is consistent across all fronts and that you’ve kind of thought into what you want that to look like.
So again, just to recap, how to integrate your branding into all aspects of your company. Number one, put together a brand style guide. It doesn’t need to be anything fancy. It can be a simple document that just includes the important information that we discussed; things like company purpose, vision, mission, core values, brand, voice, logo and logo uses, color palette, fonts and topography placement, image guidelines and hierarchy. Of course I’m available if you need help putting that together.
Number two is making branding assets accessible. So creating a Google drive or Dropbox folder where everyone who works for you has access to it. Make your company brand seen, ensure that your logo and brand assets are on every bit of marketing material and that your core values and kind of theoretical side of things is up somewhere in the office for people to see and be reminded o. make proper use of templates like Canva, the ones that canva.com offers and regularly remind your employees of your branding, both the theoretical and the visual side. So, as I said, this was going to be a short and sweet episode, but I hope it was still valuable. And I look forward to seeing you in the next time, enjoy the rest of you.
Once again, thank you so much to Therapy Notes for sponsoring this show. It makes notes, billing, scheduling, and tele-health a whole lot easier. And if you’re coming from another EHR, they make the transition really easy. Therapy Notes will input your client’s demographic data free of charge during your trial so you can get going right away. Use the promo code, [JOE], that’s [J O E] to get two free months to try out Therapy Notes for free.
Thanks for listening to the Marketing a Practice podcast. If you need help with branding new business, whether it be a new logo, rebrand, or you simply want a print flyer designed, head on over to www.practiceofthepractice.com /branding. And if you’d like to see some examples of my design work, be sure to follow me on Instagram at Samantha Carvalho Design. Finally, please subscribe, rate, and review this podcast on iTunes if you like what you’ve heard. Talk to you soon.
Marketing a Practice podcast is part of the Practice of the Practice podcast network, a network of podcasts seeking to help you market and grow your business and yourself. To hear other podcasts like Beta Male Revolution, Empowered and Unapologetic, Imperfect Thriving, or Faith in Practice, go to practiceofthepractice.com/network.
This podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regards to the subject matter covered. It is given with the understanding that neither the host, the publisher, or the guests are rendering legal accounting, clinical, or any other professional information. If you want a professional, you should find one.