Picking your brand colours every few months (and STILL kinda hate your visual brand)? You're a procrastibrander

Let’s have a quick refresher about branding:

Branding is, at its very core, the message of your business, and the WAY you share that message with the world in order to align with your perfect, soulmate, sent-from-heaven clients.

Branding is NOT just logos, colours, websites or deciding between a standard or puzzle grid on Instagram (side note: puzzle grids are shit. Don’t do them).

That’s not to say that you need to ignore the visual side of your brand – hell no! But you need to understand that the visual stuff is the tip of the branding iceberg.

If there isn’t a core message being shared REGULARLY, you aren’t branding, you’re just pushing pixels around a screen in a hope that you’ll attract people who want to see you.

So, how DO you get to your core message?

Ask. Yourself. WHY.

Why do you do what you do? And when you get an answer, ask, Why is that important?

It’s the difference between “I empower women” (Boring! Snoresville! Everyone’s scrolled past already!) and “I had an amazing high-powered job in finance, worked so hard that I burnt out and had a nervous breakdown, slowly built my life up again using origami, and now I support other women coming through that time in their life with local art meet-ups, because it’s a fucking isolating time and you need to be surrounded by people on that journey. I know that if I can manage it, others can too, and quicker bevcause there’s someone who has their back.” Way more emotive, right?

What’s the message you’re trying to send?

This is tough for a Procrastibrander, but you need to hear this:

I’m cutting you off at the source. No. More. Working. On. Shit. That. Doesn’t. Directly. Move. Your. Business. Forward.

Not forever, but for NOW.

Know why? All that time you have spent picking colours, you could have spent writing your story and sharing it with hundreds of ideal people.

All those hours spent tweaking your website when you could have emailed a whole bunch of prospects and pitched your business to them and made some bank.

All the minutes you took deciding between two basically identical fonts took time away from talking about your work to perfect potential clients at a networking event.

My betting is that you haven’t been in business more than two years, but you’re struggling to get traction. Know this: your ideal clients care way less about what you look like because right now they barely know who the fuck you are.

Procrastibranding is a way of hiding. But the success of your business REQUIRES you to show the fuck up. Fonts, colours, Instagram grids and websites can be refined over time, but what creates success is the showing up part.

I’m also willing to bet that you AREN’T a master graphic designer or web developer, either. If you are spending too much time in areas that AREN’T in your zone of genius, you are HIDING. And what you’re hiding from is helping amazing clients, more money, success, and ultimately, your own happiness.

Share your message. Share your message relentlessly. Share your message imperfectly. Otherwise? You will continue to sit in the murky puddle of visual branding overwhelm instead of riding the turbo-powered iceberg of Branding Awesome.

The simpler the brand, visually and message-ly (IT’S A WORD. SHUT UP), the better.

When I have a client who asks me about what their branding colours should be, or what fonts they should use, or even which areas of their business they should be promoting or social media platforms they should show up on, I say this:

Pick one.

Pick one colour for your brand. You can match it up with a white and/or black, but just pick one colour.

Pick one font. Just one.

Pick one social media platform.

Pick one service you want to promote.

Pick. Fucking. One. And go really deep with it.

From a visual perpective, most of the huge brands we see today use one main colour: Facebook, Twitter, Starbucks, Coca Cola, McDonalds, Kelloggs.

You’ve got to stop the Pinterest colour scheme research wormholes that use up masses of your time. You don’t need five fucking shades to make a brand work! Your clients literally couldn’t care less if you used Dysentery Beige with David Dickinson’s Arsehole Orange (not real Pantones)! They would prefer to just see one colour, one font, one service, ONE MESSAGE, so that when they see you showing up all the time, they say, “Oh, I love that brand!”

Going deep with one of everything means this: you get more time to create content and get yourself out there, and the people who see you, KNOW who you are because you’re showing up consistently.

So, just pick one.