How a Branding Agency brings your vision to life

Hi friends - For anyone located in the LA area, my heart goes out to you. The devastation was hard to watch and comprehend. If there is anything I can do to support you personally, please don’t be shy. I mean that.

I hope everyone has been enjoying and, most importantly, learning a lot from our amazing guest, Bill.

If you’re new here - you can catch up on anything you missed at this link.

So far this year, we’ve covered -

• Common misconceptions about brand

• What is brand, and how does it (actually) drive growth

Next up, Bill is going to pull the curtain back a bit and walk you through the internal process a brand agency goes through to bring your vision to life. 👀 

How a Branding Agency Brings Your Vision to Life

Branding isn’t just about creating something that looks good; it’s about crafting a brand that truly works—for your audience, your goals, and your future.

For small businesses, this process might seem overwhelming or even mysterious. That’s why the approach matters as much as the outcome.

At Focus Lab, our process is designed to bring clarity, efficiency, and collaboration to what can often feel like a scary undertaking. In this newsletter, I’ll pull back the curtain on a few key parts of the branding journey and how they set the stage for success:

1. Strategic Audit: A Deep Dive Into Clarity

Before you and your agency start designing things—you need to clearly outline your business, your market, and your customer.

Without a strong strategic base, you’re never going to get the impact you’re after.

💡 Tip: Don’t create an outline of where you are today, think in terms of where you want to be years from now.

Here’s what we always examine:

• Your desired audience: Who do you want to reach and resonate with? What do they care about? What other brands do they align with–outside your industry? What are their pain points?

• Your competitive landscape: How can you differentiate yourself from others in your space? You must look, sound, and act differently, or you'll just be more noise.

• Your desired persona: How should people perceive you? Are you the safe, trusted choice? Or are you the innovator game changer?

These points of focus ensure your branding effort isn’t a vanity journey but one that aligns with who you are, what your audience needs, and how you can stand out.

Put simply, you can’t win the hearts of your customers (or team) if you don’t know who you’re talking to or how to set yourself apart.

Action Step: Ask yourself, “Does our brand identity align with our future desired customers, or is it still stuck in the past, only relating to your earlier clients?”

2. Your S.M.I.T.

Branding projects have a lot of moving parts—and opinions. That’s why having a clear S.M.I.T. is so important. It stands for Single Most Important Thing.

It’s the simple, easy-to-digest guiding light that keeps everyone around your project centered, especially when things get complicated.

The SMIT when we worked with Amplify was…

“Sincerely Spirited”

This statement matched the three core attributes we were targeting with the new identity - Vibrant, Sincere, and Tactical. And it matches the energy Jess brings to everything she does.

From there, we were able to use Sincerely Spirited as a lens for decisions like color palette, typography choices, etc. A SMIT leaves room for interpretation while also giving you direction.

Action Step: Ask yourself, “What is the single most important thing I want people to feel when they think about my business?” Then ask yourself, “Does our brand match the DNA and energy of our company, or is it misaligned?”

3. Mood Boards: Alignment Before Action

Before design begins, mood boards help to capture the potential look and feel of your future brand without moving too far in a direction only to realize it gives you heartburn.

These curated visual concepts help both parties agree on a direction without waste. All you have to do is grab images from around the internet and pair them together until you get what feels like a collective language that sparks a feeling.

Mood boards cover everything from color palettes to typography styles to photography tone, providing a shared vision before any real design begins.

Here are a few examples from recent projects…

A mood board for a client who wanted BIG BOLD ENERGY:

A mood board for a client that wanted INDUSTRIAL DATA DEVELOPMENT:

A mood board for a client that wanted APPROACHABLE PROFESSIONALISM:

As you can see, you can really get a feel from these boards that allows you to say, “YES, that feels exactly like us and how we want to be perceived” or, “NO, I don’t like that at all” – and you get the chance to do that before anything is actually created.

Action Step: Have some fun creating a mood board for your brand this week. Use it to dream up the feeling you wish your company expressed.

…Then ask yourself: Would anything in your current brand's identity show up on it? Or is your board a completely reinvented version of your brand? This is another way to determine how large the gap is between what you wish you looked like and your current reality.

4. Iteration: Collaboration Over Silos

The magic of any successful branding project is rooted in collaboration, period.

Don’t expect to hire a branding expert and have them disappear for months, then emerge with all the answers to your brand challenges/opportunities.

Branding is a two-way street of information, instincts, execution, and refinement. To get that right, both parties need to be engaged. From the strategy phase to mood boards to delivering your final assets with a brand guidelines document, you should expect to be part of the journey. It’s fun, I promise 😉

The keystone of that collaboration is iteration. It sets the pace and drumbeat for the entire project, which is crucial. Without that beat, projects feel disorganized and confusing. Weekly touchpoints and reviews ensure that ideas stay on track and feedback is incorporated in real-time.

Branding is a journey, and no one knows your business better than you. Iteration requires your voice in the process every step of the way.

Action Step: If you’re considering partnering with an agency on your brand, ask them how often you’ll collaborate and review work. Avoid teams that suggest you won’t be needed much or that they’ll be heads down for a month at a time. We ship work weekly, every Friday, and find that to be the sweet spot of doing the deep work while staying close to our partners to keep both parties in a good rhythm. We’ve learned this over 600 projects in 15 years.

Takeaways and Action Steps

• Define your SMIT to keep everyone aligned, especially when opinions and ideas diverge.

• Use mood boards to establish clarity and direction early in the process.

• Embrace iteration. Weekly collaboration ensures the brand is built with you.

• Bonus: Take this FREE Brand Archetypes quiz to start understanding your brand's DNA.

In the next and final part of this series, we’ll explore how to roll out your new brand in stages, ensuring maximum impact and minimum chaos.

Want to learn more about how I help startups increase their revenue by 150-590%? 👀 

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With love and gratitude,