Shownotes
Are you stuck in “learning mode” and not taking action? We all struggle with it from time to time: learning without doing because hey, learning is exciting! I get it. One of my core values is to never stop learning. But there comes a time when learning more isn’t helpful; instead, it’s action-taking that you need to be doing.
In this episode, I’ll share 10 quick, actionable steps - each taking just 15-30 minutes - that will help you fall back in love with your brand and get things moving.
From designing a sleek email signature to updating your bio and organising reusable content, these small but mighty steps will give your brand a profesh edge.
Plus, we’ll talk about higher-level strategies like repurposing content, crafting templates, and discovering your unique “you-isms” - those special touches that make your brand unmistakably yours.
So if you’re ready to take your brand from “hot mess” to “hell yes”, this episode is jam-packed with practical, doable steps to get you there!
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EPISODE MENTIONS:
⚡ Create your email signature with Scribe
⚡ Grab the checklist to take your brand from a hot mess to hell yes!
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WANT MORE?
🎧 64. The ultimate guide to creating a consistent brand experience that wows your customers
✍️ The fundamental principles every creative needs to know to design their own brand
📰 Join the Moxie Musing newsletter
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CONNECT
📷 Connect on Instagram @makerandmoxie
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Transcripts
Are you someone who will learn and learn and never actually do anything with the information you have been gathering? Maybe you have been meaning to put some of the things that you have learned about branding from this podcast into action but still haven't. In this episode, I'll share ten quick tips for loving your brand. Each takes under 15 to 30 minutes. If that sounds good, let's dive in.
[:Okay, there are a lot of us who love to learn. I am one of those. One of my brand values is all about learning. I just love to learn, but one of the things that I have tried to teach myself is to be a just-in-time learner. I'm trying to learn things as and when I need them rather than trying to learn all the things all the time and then never doing anything with them. However, Branding is really important, and we should learn about it. As business owners, we need to learn it along with many other things. But it's not useful if we're not actually doing anything with that knowledge. Like anything, right? If you're just learning all the things but then not doing anything about them, it's not really helpful at all. So, I want to talk to you today about some actionable things that you can do to actually learn—to put what you have learned into action.
So to start doing some branding to get some quick wins, go okay, how can I do something in 15 minutes or 20 minutes or half an hour that will help the brand that will take me from this hot mess that I feel like I am or that maybe I feel like there are things all over the place or that I'm not doing enough or that, yeah, I don't know where to start or all of this. Mentor stuff is going on okay; I've made progress. I've done something. I've taken action. It's looking better. It's feeling better. I feel better. That's where I want you to be. So, let's dive into these quick, actionable steps to quickly take your brand from hot mess to hell. Yes. Okay.
[:Number one is to design an email signature. This is something that I thought was obvious or something that I just do all the time because I design email signatures for clients or I'm just a nerd, and I want my email signature to look really good.
But I was talking to a creative who I had emailed, and they were like, "Oh, I saw your email, and I didn't even know my email signature could look that good. I didn't even know that was something I could do." So I wanted to give that as an option: Here's something you can do that's really quick and really easy.
I'm going to tell you how to do it. It will make your brand look good and elevate it in a really quick and easy way. I use a tool called Scribe. If you look up a tool called Scribe mail, we will link it in the show notes as well. It's free if you are just one person.
When you look at all the marketing, it will say it's great for teams and all of that stuff because it is. That's what it's designed for. If you have multiple people on your team, all signatures look incredible, match, and are consistent. But it's also great if you are just one person and you want a really Nice, easy, beautiful email signature.
So you want to sign up for free, plug in your information, add in your colours, and decide what template you want. And then. Pick if you want a button to be a call to action so that people can buy your stuff or join your email list or whatever it might be. And then you're done. All you have to do is click whether you use Gmail, Outlook, or whatever tool you use.
I use a random separate email, so I had to download the code, but even that was easy. It will take 15 to 30 minutes, including signing up for the new software so that it will look professional or like you've put some thought into it. And if you add a new call to action.
That will also get people to buy your stuff, join your email list, download your opt-in, book a call with you, book a commission, hire you for a speaking engagement, or do whatever you want them to do. You can put a button. So, I have mine to download my ultimate branding checklist.
You can have yours to do whatever you want to do. Number one, design your email signature. It's fun, it will take 15 minutes, and your signature will look so good that when you're emailing clients, wholesale people about speaking, like anything, anyone you want to show off and look good in your emails, too, it will look good. It will do that for sure. Okay.
[:Number two, update your bio. I know that updating your bio is something that people say to do all the time. You've maybe heard me say to do it before, but I just want to remind you that it is a super powerful branding tool for multiple reasons. It's a really quick and easy way to upgrade and uplevel your brand. So, it communicates. In multiple ways, like communicating what your brand is all about through what you write and visually. So you want to look at what your bio is right now, whether that's on Instagram or your website or wherever. I'm thinking about Instagram right now. So, if you just get in the head of Instagram on your social media, you want to ensure your bio is easily scannable. So if someone is just scanning through and they're not reading properly, they can get the key things about what you do from your bio. You want to make sure that it's clear. I think sometimes, especially with branding and copywriting, people can get carried away with trying to be clever instead of clear. You want to avoid doing that and make sure that it is clear as well as maybe a little bit clever, but Make sure it's clear what you do, what you're all about, how people can work with you, that type of thing and then you can use like on brand emojis That use your brand colours as a really easy way to communicate your brand visually off the bat on your social media platforms. So I do that on mine. If you go to my social media profiles on Instagram and threads and Twitter and all over the place, I'm using the orange heart emoji. I think I used the lightning bolt and something else. But that orange heart emoji, especially maybe the pink one, I can't remember. Definitely, the orange heart emoji is Hollie and Maker and Moxie coded to the core. And so right off the bat, I am visually showing you think orange, you think Hollie. You think Hollie, you think orange. And I'm sending that signal, and I'm just reaffirming in people's mind and setting that up from the beginning that if they see me for the first time, they're going Okay, Hollie orange if they see me for the hundredth time. It reminds them. Yes, Hollie likes orange, and Hollie's brand colour is orange. So it's just a really easy way to Reiterate your brand through your bio, and it's not just through the colours. It can be through the actual emojis themselves. Yeah, if you are associated with a certain thing like Skulls or, I don't know, lightning bolts or something.
You can use emojis to really help communicate your brand as well. So, have a look at your bio and make sure that it's doing all those things. It's scannable, clear, and uses emojis. Make it consistent across all the platforms, wherever you can. Obviously, not all of them have the same number of characters, but as consistent as you can. And yeah, it can be a 15-minute activity, but updating it can give your brand a whole new lease on life. It can feel really good to have a new bio that you can screenshot and share, like a new bio unlocked. Maybe not that. You can tell people I've got a new bio. Check it out, and come and see what I'm all about. Okay?
[:Number three, make an image of your colour palette. This is a quick cheat sheet. It's one of the easiest things you can do if you still need to do it to help make your brand consistent on social media. It helps make your life easier, and it also helps.
Make things look professional and like you are taking things seriously, thinking things through, and going the extra mile on social media. As we know, one of the best ways to communicate your brand and to be memorable is through colour. Colour communicates your brand and makes your brand; it increases reach.
Brand recognition by 80%. So colour is really important. One of the best ways to make your brand seem put together and like you know what you're doing is to use those colours throughout everything you do, especially on social media. So that includes things like on your Instagram stories, making sure that if you have a Background to your text, that background is your brand colour, not necessarily.
Or not necessarily, but not just the colours on Instagram that Instagram gives you, but your exact colours. So what you want to do, if you haven't already, is create an image of your brand colour palette that you keep pinned on your phone. So you can keep it in your favourites folder or a specific brand folder you create for yourself.
That means that every time you create reels, stories, or whatever you're making, you can add it in, use the colour dropper, and then make your text, stickers, or anything else on brand. And I don't know if this is a little-known fact, but people sometimes message me when I do it because they didn't know that you could.
You can make the question boxes, the polls, and everything else, but mostly the question boxes. You can make the question boxes coloured, too. They don't always have to be white. I'm pretty sure you can make them all different colours, and then you can use the colour dropper as well.
Then, if you want bonus points, Create the graphic. Then, every time you want to create a post or a story add text, just drag in your image and use the colour dropper. You can create all your things to be on brand and use your colours. But then, if you want bonus points, you can also create some backgrounds for Instagram stories.
You can keep those in a folder on your phone and then whip them out anytime you need to create something else on Instagram stories. So I do this if I am creating an Instagram story that has a lot of text or if I'm doing a question poll or something, and I don't want a photo in the background. I will just put one of my premade backgrounds behind it.
I put it behind photos. I've put them behind all sorts of things. You can create backgrounds for specific things. I used to do things like Q and a Friday, and I had a background for Q and a Friday. So you can have backgrounds for specific things, but even just some generic patterned backgrounds—that's all minor. I have eight of them. A few of them are the same but in different colours, so I can switch them up. But yeah, I just have a set of them, and it makes it easy on brand. It looks like I am a professional, and I know what I'm doing. It's all cohesive and consistent. You can add your logos onto your phone so that you can add those in when you need them, and any other brand elements you have if you have illustrations or icons or little blobs like I have, you might want to add those onto your phone. These are things you could do to go the extra mile. So, just make sure you have all your brand assets to hand on your phone to make it easy to keep things consistent on socials. You could, like, even if you wanted to, make some stickers or GIFs that you could also keep on your phone, but that might take a bit longer. That was just a little bonus one, but yeah, those are the main things. The colour palette is the main one, and it will really only take you about five minutes. You can do it in Canva. Just draw some rectangles and export them. It will take you five minutes to put it on your phone. Then you'll be done, and it'll help you so much. Okay, number four. We're only at number four. There is so much good stuff already.
[:Okay, number four is to create Folders of reusable images and videos on your phone. You can do this one while Netflix plays in the background.
I know for a fact because I sit all the time organising the photos and videos on my phone, and I have many photos and videos on my phone. I can't even tell you. We want to stop making content creation harder for ourselves and ensure that we are trying to help take our brand from a hot mess to hell yes.
And make it feel and look like we have our shit together, and we are posting somewhat consistently and posting things that are on brand and communicating what we want them to. And that is so much easier when we have. A plan and we have things to hand, and we're not like panic posting, right? A way to help you do that is to have these folders of images that you already have to use in those moments. If you are anything like me, you probably have tens of thousands of photos and videos on your phone that could be working for you. So spend 10, 15, 20, 30 minutes going through your phone and seeing what could be used again.
Then, you can create folders on your phone to find things when needed. So you could create a folder of videos of you working, maybe a folder of work in progress sketches, or a folder of packaging videos. You can split them up however you want. I have a folder of b roll videos.
So that's a folder of videos that I know I can pull from and put into Instagram reels. These are general videos of me doing generic things, like sitting down at my desk or working away or walking or things like that. They are easy for me to just pop into a reel, or pop behind some text, or pop onto an Instagram story.
It's helped me so much to know that when I'm going to create something, I don't always have to create it from scratch. Just set some time aside and take 15 minutes. You could do a little bit here and there, 15 minutes one week, 15 minutes another week, and just keep adding to these folders.
And it will just help you over time.
[:Okay, number five is to set up an email list signup form. I'm betting that creating an email list or maybe emailing my list more might be on your list of things to do. It's usually on. Most people's list. It's either setting up an email list or emailing my newsletter more.
So I'm not telling you to go and figure everything else out. Everything, including everything about your email list and your email newsletter, right now. I'm not telling you to create your email list, do all the things, set up all the automation, or start emailing your list every week from now on.
That's not what I'm trying to tell you to do. What I'm suggesting is that you set up a way for people to join your list so that you can start gathering subscribers. I personally use ConvertKit, which is soon to be called Kit, and I can tell you that once you have signed up for free, by the way, it's free up until you have 10,000 subscribers.
It takes ten minutes to create a free form or landing page, so it doesn't have to be complicated, just like the email signature that I was talking about in the beginning. If you go into kit or whatever email service provider you want to use, you just sign up and pick a template for a form or a landing page. In ConvertKit, they also have to create a profile.
You can set up a landing page. Pick one. Pick a template, put in your colours, pick a font, and publish it. It should take just over 10 minutes, maybe a little bit more, including signing up and all of that stuff and writing some copy to say sign up, here's what you get, and blah, blah, blah.
But 10 minutes. Approximately. You can set up a landing page or a form and just start sharing that with people to get them to join your list. And yeah, as I said, not telling you to start emailing them or doing anything with it right now. But at least you can start gathering those people. You can just put it as a link in your bio.
You can have the form at the bottom of your website or wherever, or as a link on your website navigation, wherever you want to put it. And you can just start gathering those people because right now, without one, You're not gathering anyone. If you want your brand to be a hell yes, then you want to have an email list that people can join so that they know that there is an option for you to get in touch and for them to stay up to date with all of your goodies. If and when or whatever they happen not to be able to follow you on Instagram anymore, or whatever happens, you want to start gathering those people by email as soon as you can.
So that's number five.
[:Number six is to check the links in your bio. One of the biggest mistakes I see creatives make is not thinking about the experience that people have with their brand. And I have whole article about brand experience and an option. I have a download that helps you audit your brand experience.
So I will leave those links down below. But one of the key experiences that people will have with your brand right now is finding you on social media and then wanting to either find out more or take another action, right? Whether that's buying from you or booking in with you or emailing you or something. They want to do that. The next thing. What that experience is is going to impact how people interact with you and view your brand in the future. So you want to make sure that is a good, if not incredible and amazing experience. What you don't want is it to be bad, frustrating, annoying or just stops them in their tracks or anything like that. Spend some time, go through this experience yourself and see what happens. Put yourself in the shoes of the people that you want to engage with you. So think about who are your clients, your customers, your ideal people, and what do they need from you? What would that next action be? So if you want people to buy your work, what is it that they need?
They need a link to your shop. They need and they need that to be clear, right? If they're clicking from Instagram, it needs to say Visit my shop, or buy my work. Or something really clear. If you want people to reach out for speaking opportunities, or to for you to be on their podcast or something like that. I experienced this all the time because I'm trying to find people to be on my podcast and I want to get in touch with them and I can't because they don't have contact information anywhere.
So do you want to be contacted? If you do have that information there, if you want commissions, what are those people need? How's their experience? Getting from your Instagram to being able to book a commission from you. So have a look at that experience and update the links accordingly. You want to make sure that whatever links that I needed are there and that it's really clear what those actions are and what the links are.
Don't have them, the links be really vague or confusing or like inside jokes or like I said about clever copy before. You can be a little bit clever, but it needs to be clear. Like I need to know that I'm going to your shop or that I can buy from you or that I can book in with you or whatever I'm doing.
So, look at the links and update them in your bio. Make sure that the experience is good and easy for whoever is going through that experience. And again, that can be a pretty, hopefully, quick activity, as if you just sit down and spend 15 minutes just going on Instagram. What links do I have there? Some of them, you often I go, and I'm like, Oh, that's an old link for a webinar that I hosted like a month ago. I need to take down or do things like that. Have a look at that. I've been on a lot of artists' links and bios, and they have 30 links. And I'm like, too many.
There are so many links, and they are confusing. Nobody needs that many links. You want to think, okay, how do I make it easy for people to take the next step? Check the links in your bio. Okay, number seven.
[:Create a template for one thing in your business. Instead of creating things repeatedly, I want you to take 15 minutes to create a template.
This will not only save you time going forward but also make things more consistent. It will make your brand feel professional and thought-through and establish expectations and trust with your audience because they know they'll see that same graphic or template, they'll have seen it before, and they'll go, "Oh, that's that thing, right?"
If they've seen a graphic you've posted for a sale before and then see the same graphic but with updated content, they'll be like, "Oh, they're running a sale again." So it helps to establish those expectations, build trust, and obviously make it easier for you.
As I said, if you have a sticker club that you promote every month, you could create a template for that graphic. If you run a Patreon, you can create graphics that promote that every time you post on Patreon. Or, if you run a sale every quarter, create one for that so your audience knows what to look for.
When creating the template, you do not have to start from scratch. You've probably created something for this type of content before, right? Because you're thinking about creating a template for it. So, use a design you've created before and think about how you would use it again going forward and turn that into a template in a few of your brand colours or in a few varieties so that you can change it up at least.
[:Number eight: Repurpose some previous content and start creating that habit. So, instead of stressing and spending hours creating one piece of new content, take 10 minutes to pop into your feed and find a previous post that you could repurpose. This is a great way to save some time, share some content, and make the most of stuff that you spent time doing previously, and chances are not all of your audience saw it before.
You've gained new people in your audience since then, and the people who did see it appreciate seeing it again. It's a good reminder. So keep sharing stuff that you've created before you put the time and effort into it. You might as well get the most out of it. It's a shame when things like this get created, and you put so much heart and soul into them, and then they only get used once.
It made the most of repurposing, and next time you schedule something in your social media scheduler, whether you use Twitter, Later, Buffer, or whatever tool you might use. I'm using Metrical right now. But if it is something that makes sense, like a piece of content that makes sense to be repurposed that can be posted again in the future, that doesn't only make sense today.
Then, also schedule a draft version for three to six months in the future so that you can repurpose it then and in the future. You will thank yourself because you've already set up the repurposing. You've put what you've created to use again in the future, and you're setting up that repurposing habit.
[:Number nine is to find some of your you-isms. If you haven't heard of you-isms before, you're welcome. This is one of my favorite super quick ways to inject your personality into your brand is to use you isms. So when I say that mine would be Hollie isms. Yours might be like Jess isms or Ryan isms, for example, whatever your name.
So how you do this is to take some time to scroll through things that you've written. So it could be social media, captions, messages, emails, client communications, whatever voice notes even. So not even just things you've written, but it could be voice notes or transcriptions of meetings, et cetera.
And note down things that you say all of the time. Could be words, could be phrases, could be memes. You can also ask your friends and your family what are things that I say all the time that you notice that I say these become your you isms. This list, then. becomes a cheat sheet for injecting you into otherwise like boring or stale copy or when you're feeling stuck or when you're looking at a piece of copy that just doesn't feel right.
So if you're writing a caption and you're like oh this just doesn't feel like me or it doesn't sound right or I'm just stuck on how to write this in a way that feels right or yeah it just feels good you can look at your list of you isms and go okay. If I added a few of these in, if I reworked it with some of these you isms, me isms, would it feel a little bit more like me?
That's what I would recommend, is giving it a go, setting aside, yeah, 15 minutes and just scrolling through some of your stuff. A little bit more. If you want to go a little bit deeper, like I said, into like transcriptions and voice memos and comms with your clients or anything like that.
[:But at least scroll through some of your social media posts and see if you spot any that will definitely help and last but not least is number 10 and that is to spend a little bit of time learning about the eight design principles. In particular, there are two that I would love you to see. To learn about one of the best things you can do to help make things in your brand, look a little bit more profesh is to learn some design fundamentals. I went to design school for four years and spent a lot of money to learn this stuff. And a lot of designers do, and they spend, yeah, a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of efforts to learn this stuff, you don't have to do that.
I'm telling you. Of the cheat, eight of the main things that underpin all of design. There are eight principles. I will link another article that I wrote all about them. You can learn about each of all of the eight of them, but the main two that I see making things like messy alignment and white space.
So with alignment is like how things line up with each other and it needs to be intentional so that each element on the page needs to line up with something and that could be with the border or with another element on the page with the margins. And if it doesn't line up with something, then it needs to be on purpose.
So it might be aligned with a grid so that it's off-centre or it's off skewed, but it's on a grid. So it's on purpose. But when things are just slightly not aligned, it looks really messy. And that is how you can tell when things aren't done professionally and when things don't look good. So when you align things well.
And they do line up with each other really well. Then that's how you can very quickly make things look professional. And with text, you almost always want to left align your text. So make sure that they line up on the left-hand side and that they are not centred. This is because it's way easier to read. It's scientifically proven to be easier to read when text is left aligned, not justified, so not spread out to both edges of the page, but left aligned, so aligned on the left. And when it comes to white space I just often see that people don't leave enough white space. You often need more than you think and white space helps give a design space to breathe.
And that is often what makes something look a little bit more professional, is when there is more white space. Not always and I don't necessarily mean just white, I just mean that there is. space around the elements. That's not a hard and fast rule. Like I said, like there are a lot of maximalist designs where there are a lot of things going on.
But I just think in general, A lot of designs that I see that don't look professional and that look a bit messy is because there's just too much going on. There's too much on the page. There's too much tried to be jammed in and there's not enough space between elements or between the elements on the page and the edge of the page.
There's just, everything feels squished. You often just want to give everything a little bit more space to breathe than you think. So when you are maybe eating your lunch or next time you're scrolling on your phone, definitely have a read of that article and look up some other info on the eight design principles and in particular alignment and white space in design. It will make the world of difference when you understand and start to practice those design principles.
Okay, so I've chatted for a long time today. I've given you 10 actionable steps to quickly take your brand from a hot mess to hell yes. I've given you tips on how, those were to design your email signature. Update your bio, make an image of your colour palette, create folders of reusable images and videos on your phone, set up an email list, sign up form, check the links in your bio, create a template for one thing in your business, repurpose some previous content and start creating that habit, find your you isms and learn about the eight design principles. So what I'm going to do for this episode is I'm going to create a checklist and I'm going to leave a link to that in the show notes that you can download this checklist and you can go through and work your way through this checklist so that you can start taking some action.
Towards actually, finally taking your brand from hot mess to hell yes. So head down to the link in the show notes in the description and grab the checklist. And as always, please come and chat to me on Instagram or on threads. Tag me in your Instagram story and tell me which one of these actions you're going to be taking this week. I would love to know. And I will see you in the next one. Okay. Bye.
