How important is brand strategy for spiritual entrepreneurs?

By Guy Anderson

Branding and brand strategy have the reputation of being both expensive and mysterious. As a spiritual entrepreneur or small business owner you need to keep your costs down and spend wisely when it comes to marketing your business.

In this article you'll find...

Most spiritual entrepreneurs we speak to think they need to spend more time on social media – despite not liking social media. That doesn’t sound like fun! Some spiritual entrepreneurs we speak to know that SEO (search engine optimisation) is important, although they’re not exactly sure how or why.

Almost no-one we speak to thinks that branding is important for their small business. In this post we’re going to explore what brand strategy is and why it’s especially relevant to small wellbeing businesses, like yoga teachers, therapists, counsellors, retreat centres, meditation centres and more.

In fact, it’s so important that it’s the first thing you should address before doing any other marketing. Why? Because without a clear strategy how can you communicate clearly with your customers? You can’t!

What is branding?

Your branding is made up of several parts that should all fit together seamlessly, presenting your business to the world in a professional, consistent way. Good branding makes it crystal clear to people what it is you do, why you do it and how what you do makes their lives better.

Good branding also makes your business instantly recognisable whether it’s on your website, emails or social media. Branding your business should have three benefits to your business:

It helps clarify what you do and why.
It makes your business instantly recognisable.
It helps you be more consistent with your marketing.

Good branding expresses the intention, values and personality of your business in a way that others can easily grasp and understand. This essence is expressed through your 3 visual branding elements:

Logo and strapline
Fonts
Colour palette

It’s important to note that your logo, fonts and colour palette are not your branding. They’re expressions of your branding. Creating a brand strategy for your business will help you create the right logo and choose appropriate fonts and colours. In the next section we explore what brand strategy is and why it’s important.

What is brand strategy?

As mentioned above, it is different from your logo, fonts and colours. It’s the essence of your brand. Your why. We help our clients create their brand strategy in a 2-hour workshop. This format really helps you unpack your business and see it in a whole new light.

Many clients find this process surprisingly enlightening. It’s often the first time they’ve spent so much time talking about and exploring their own business. For a spiritual entrepreneur, who is flying solo, this is even more important because working on your own often leads to blind spots in thinking.

Here’s what spiritual entrepreneur, Julie Hanson said about working with us:

A new light of awareness...

“Wildheart Media asked just the right questions, to bring different answers and therefore solutions to how I could move my business forward in a new light of awareness of who I really was and what my business was giving to my clients. The 2-hour session and the brilliant report that came back afterwards was invaluable. The session was also great fun. What other time do you get to talk to somebody for 2 hours about your business, which in itself was a marvellous experience! Thank you all at Wildheart.”

At the heart of our process we help our clients to create their own business one-liner. You can download our How to create a one-liner for your business guide to find out more and work through the exercises.

When creating your brand strategy, you need to clarify:

What makes you and your business unique?
Who are your target audiences?
What’s your brand positioning?
What’s your brand messaging?
What are your channels?
What marketing challenges does your business face?

If you’re wondering what some of the items in the list above mean, don’t worry! We address all of this and more in our Brand Strategy Package.

How brand strategy affects your marketing

Without a clear strategy for your business, it’s impossible to be consistent in your marketing across your website, emails, social media and beyond. Your brand strategy is also a great asset you can give to a designer as part of a brief for creating a logo or a website.

It also makes it much easier for potential customers to understand your brand and clearly sets you apart from your competitors. This is very important, especially for small businesses where there’s often a lot of competition, making it harder for customers to make a decision to buy your services.

When it comes to spiritual entrepreneurs, it can also be an anchor that helps keep you aligned with your business and help you more effectively work with designers, copywriters and marketers.

Having a clear strategy should also make content creation easier, because you can more easily create content like blog posts, emails, videos and online courses that are on-brand. Being on-brand is another way of saying that what you’re doing is aligned with your business values.

Simply put: Having a brand strategy helps you stand out from other businesses and helps you do better, more consistent marketing.

This is what Danette Watson had to say about working with us:

Eye-opening...

“I found the Brand Strategy Package so worthwhile and eye-opening. Hannah and Guy guided me through a process that helped me really understand myself, my motivations, my business, my expectations and hopes so much better. It was so useful to see it all laid out and the questions and framework they provided made things so much clearer. It seems crazy to launch into a new website without the clarity this brings.”

Conclusion

In this post you’ve learned how important brand strategy is for spiritual entrepreneurs and small business owners, because it helps you stand out from the competition and be more consistent. We’ve also unpacked what branding is, what brand strategy is and how it affects your marketing. The key takeaways are consistency and alignment in everything you do.

If you’d like to know more, check out our Brand Strategy Package.