Your brand is what the consumers can see, hear, smell, touch, and taste. It includes the visual, written, spoken, and tactile aspects of your brand.

Visual Brand

Your visual brand encompasses all aspects of your brand that are represented visually. From your logo, business card, and brochures, to your invoices and envelopes, to your Facebook photo, avatar, and Twitter background, to your website, email newsletter, and blog, and even the clothes you wear, every time your brand is seen it is sending a message.

Learn The Difference Between Your Brand and Your Branding

This week I published my newsletter on Saturday instead of our normal day Friday. It may not seem like a big deal… but it was!

In our first issue this year, I made a commitment to send our newsletter out every week and to never sacrifice quality to do so.

To protect our brand, it is more important to provide quality and value, than to send out something that isn’t great.

So this week, with some crazy, insane rush projects and last minute deadlines, I’ll be honest, I was going to try to crank something out yesterday to just make sure it went out on Friday. But then I started thinking about the advice I give our consulting clients.

Protect your brand at all costs.

Last night I had the wonderful opportunity to share my story about my journey from “feast or famine” freelancer to multi-six figure brand with the Art Director’s and Artist’s Club of Sacramento. As I was speaking and sharing my story and the lessons I had learned along the way, I was reminded that my success has been due to the fact that I have been able to create a brand that is becoming bigger and more important than me.

Learn More About Protecting Your Brand

Every successful business has a strong, memorable brand supporting their message because smart business owners and entrepreneurs understand that their brand is this foundation that all of their marketing, products, services, and programs are built on. And without a strong foundation, over time, the empire you’re building will either start to crack and fall apart or you’ll reach a point where you can’t build any higher without fixing your foundation!

To answer the questions, “What is a brand?” and “Why is branding important?” I must share the true goal of a brand:

The primary goal of your brand is to get your prospects, clients, and customers to see you as THE ONLY SOLUTION.

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Your small business brand is made up of three branding elements:

1. The written brand
2. The spoken brand
3. The visual brand

As you can see a brand is so much more than a single logo design. The visual portion of the brand is the most well known and is made up of the brand logo design and support marketing materials such as business cards, letterhead, brochures, email newsletters, websites, blogs, and more!

The key to and starting point for all of your marketing materials design is the brand logo. A small business brand logo is made up of three different parts:

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