How to Supercharge Your Brand Appeal with Ali Hicks-Wright

I want you to speak directly to your ideal customer. So instead of thinking, hey, all you followers, I want you to think of one person, like your dream ideal customer and speak directly to them. Because the way that you're going to speak to one person is going to feel different and more resonant than it will if you're speaking to a group of people.

Every Wednesday, fast foundations.com office hours. Join us. Get. Get in the room. Meet some new people, learn something new. We do it every single week on repeat. And then we turned into a podcast and YouTube just like this. So I'm RT, this is Jim. We're gonna hop right in and introduce our guest speaker. All right. I have the pleasure of introducing Ali Hicksright today. She's a brand strategist and founder of Amare Creative, but she is also a friend. She's been in Fast Foundations, but I've known Ali. For Ali. It's going on a decade at this point. I was going to say eight years, maybe.

Yeah, at least eight or eight or nine. I would say.

Yeah, we go way back. Thank you, Ali. It's great to see you. Thank you so much for being here. I'm going to read your bio just to make sure everyone knows how cool you are. Ali is a brand strategist, business mentor, and the founder of Amare Creative, a branding and design studio that builds strategic brands and websites for ambitious entrepreneurs through engaging copy and striking design. Channeling her passion for small business and obsession with design, Allie started Amare Creative to help small business owners and entrepreneurs build their dream brands. Known for her minimal and timeless design style, Allie has a unique ability to capture her client's vision and bring it to life through intentional and beautifully functional logos and websites. Allie has years of experience as a brand designer and is known for her unwavering attention to detail and knack for helping her clients create a successful brand strategy. We have the pleasure of welcoming Ali today. Allie, take it away. Thank you so much for being here and sharing your knowledge with Fast Foundations.

Yes, of course. Thank you so much. I'm excited to be here. I am going to share my screen. All right, we good there? Perfect. And so we're going to walk through today. I know that of course we have Jim here who is the king of AI and is always talking about ChatGPT and leveraging it for copywriting. And so I wanted to take a step back from that, like, ChatGPT point and really talk about how to craft a really solid foundation for your brand messaging. So first things first, I want to introduce Myself, I know RT just gave a wonderful intro, so thank you so much. I am Allie. I am the founder of Amare Creative. I started Amare about seven years ago and didn't look back since and brought on Rachel, who is also my best friend of over a decade and she is our creative strategist and copywriter. So we really work in tandem on the majority of our projects. And I will drop this in the chat, but what we're going to be working through today is what we call our brandstorm workshop and it's really hands on in terms of building your brand messaging. And so I'll drop a free link to our brandstorm workbook. This is a workbook that Rachel and I created a few years ago that takes the entire branding process and distills it down into a fillable workbook. And I wanted to give you guys a free version today so that you can print it out and follow along as we go. And so you can get that link at amaricreative.com,/free-workbook. And I'll also drop that in the chat once I stop sharing. Everything that you do within your business should go back to this strategy. So getting hyper clear on your vision, then your voice and then your visual. So we often see our clients jumping ahead, trying to design their social media posts before really knowing the strategy behind it, or writing the caption before they know, like, what the intention of the post is. So getting hyper clear on the vision. So who your ideal customer is, your mission, your values and all of that. And then once you know who your ideal customer is, then figuring out how to speak to your ideal customer through your brand voice. And that's what we're going to be chatting through today. And then once you have the vision and the voice, then bringing it to life through your visuals, because the way that your copy is structured really ends up determining the way that it comes to life in design. So when it comes to your brand voice, these are the pieces of the foundation to your brand voice that we're going to be going through today. And with the workbook, we're going to be actually brainstorming them out. Like I said, feel free to print it out and kind of circle back to the workbook and really brainstorm out those pieces of messaging. So first things first, what is your brand voice? It is the purposeful, consistent expression of your brand's core values, messages and personality through words. Like I said, once your ideal customer, once you know who your ideal customer is, you want to speak directly to that person. And so what we'll be crafting in this workshop is what we call a brand script. It's a guide to all of your brand and maybe even spoken brand content that defines what you say and how you say it. Ultimately, it serves as an outline to help you get crystal clear on your story, your communication style, and your essential copywriting elements. This is a really great document to especially if you have a team within your business to hand off to people so that you're making sure that your brand is used. Your brand voice is used consistently everywhere. So if you have social media managers or maybe a VA and other people speaking on behalf of your business, establishing a really consistent brand tone and voice will help things really stay consistent throughout your brand messaging. So the first piece of that is your brand personality. Just like people, brands have a unique set of characteristics and qualities that form a distinctive personality. That and that personality ultimately drives the way that they speak and the messages that they share with the world. And so when it comes to brainstorming out your brand personality, I want you to think about how your customer feels before they experience your product or your service, and then thinking about how you want them to feel while they're interacting with your business, and then ultimately how they may feel after. And then the way that I love to think about brand personality is to actually think about your business as though it was a person. So what would their personality be? Would they be very trustworthy and credible? Would they be more calm and collected or maybe confident and a little sassy? That's a really good distinguisher of what your brand personality is. And then once you know your personality, you want to get clear on your tone of voice, which is how you embody and express your brand vision to your ideal customer. And so if your brand personality is more peaceful, then you probably come off with a more calm tone of voice, whereas if you're more trustworthy, then maybe it's more educational and credible for your tone of voice. So when it comes to brainstorming your tone of voice, in the Brainstorm workbook, we have this chart of different tones of voices, and I want you to take a look and circle D tone of voice that best represents your brand personality. So for us, you can probably tell by the way that I'm speaking that we're very casual in the way that we talk to our audience. We like to strike a balance between comedic and serious. We like to show it very conversational and energetic and also very approachable. And then from there, once you have your personality and your tone, then you can actually start writing some, some foundational copy for your business. And again, this is really crafting the copy in your voice so that then if you are using things like AI, you're training AI how to speak within your brand voice. And so crafting your brand bio, which is similar to an elevator pitch that articulates who you are, what you do for who and why is super important for that foundational messaging. And your brand bio should go at the top of your website and it should, I think studies show it's about five seconds that when someone lands on the site where they decide to stay or go. So including your brand bio at the top of your website is super important. So people know who you are from the get go. And it should be in all of your social media bios. It should also be in the footer of the website. So if someone navigates from the home, navigates away from the homepage, they still have a sense of who you are. It can be in any print collateral and it serves as a really good elevator pitch for when someone asks you, you what you do because we can't always have AI speaking for us. So when it comes to brandstorming, your brand bio, I want you to start just with one simple adjective. So one word that describes what makes your products or your services different than others in your industry. So that might be something like quality, custom. Your products might be organic or handmade. And then from there I want you to as directly and short as possible, state your product or your service. So say you're a wedding photographer, then I want you to think of the short term benefit and the long term benefit of what you offer. So for that wedding photographer, that might come together into something like custom wedding photographer that captures the most important day of your life so that you can remember your special day forever. And so pulling it all together so that you have my or our, the adjectives, your product or service, short term benefit and long term benefit really helps to pull together a concise brand bio that explains who you are, what you do and for who. So for us, when we created the bio for our shop that looks something like our creative brand, studio and shop will help you launch your brand at lightning speed so that you can live out your entrepreneurial dreams. The next piece is your tagline and your slogan. So first the difference. A tagline represents your business as a whole. It tends to be a permanent statement so you can think of Nike's just do it. Whereas a slogan is based on a single product, a campaign or maybe a season and it can be ever changing. Slogans are punchy lines of copy that lead you in to the rest of the copy. So think website headers, like social media captions, kind of those hook statements that get you interested to keep reading. And so when it comes to brainstorming your taglines and your slogans, I want you to inject a little emotion, make your message as clear as possible, and get creative with phrasing and word choice. And so in the workbook, we have a few different examples of taglines, like Southwest Transparency, which is more of a clever tagline to more of a persuasive tagline from Disney. Like dreams come true, where dreams come true. Or I would assume that RT and Jim, your favorite would probably be Gatorade. Is it in you? And I'll just skim past the dad joke there. So when it comes to brainstorming your tagline, I want you to start by just brain dumping your entire business into a couple of sentences. Like, literally just write out everything that you do. So for us, we did this for our shop. We're a creative studio with a shop. Our shop has tools and templates for small businesses, solopreneurs to build a brand with clarity and confidence that's super wordy, very jumbled. And so when you trim it down, start looking at what words jump out to you. So when we trimmed it down, it became branding tools and templates to help you brainstorm a striking brand that takes the world by storm. So we're using a lot of brainstorm words. We say branding a lot. So as you might have guessed, based on the name of this workshop that pulled down to let's brainstorm. And then the next piece of your brand messaging is your brand story. So your brand story is a clear and compelling story that explains how your brand got to where it is today. And this is an important piece because I think as business owners, we get caught up with where we're at in our business and we forget about everything that came up until this point. And we're an expert at what we do, but we're. We forget that our ideal audience isn't an expert at the thing that we do. And so we want to have a really clear story that can take them on that journey and share where you're at today. And so thinking back to what prompted you to start your business, was it creative freedom? Was it for financial reasons? Was it to help people? What really prompted you to start? And then was there some sort of turning point? Like kind of that breaker, make or break moment? And then what's the end result? Like, where are you at today? Pull that into a story where you can really showcase your ideal audience, who you are and how you got to where you're at today so they can have a really clear understanding of your journey. And this tends to be really great about page copy. Now, the second to last piece is your keywords and phrases. And keywords and phrases are so important for your SEO, essentially for your findability online. And so it's super important to have a list of at least five to 10 core keywords that you can incorporate into your brand messaging. And there's two different types of keywords. There's brand keywords and broad keywords. So brand keywords are words and phrases that are super specific to your business, whereas broad keywords are a little bit more related to your industry or your product or your services. So when it comes to brainstorming out your brand keywords, I want you to start with the brand keywords, which this could be your business name, your location, using your tagline, your slogan, your ideal customer, anything that's specific to directly specific to your business. Whereas then broad keywords are a little bit more industry related. For us, that's something like brand design, logo design, website design, brand messaging, custom branding, and then some of our products as well, like our logo shop and this in our workbook. So then once you have these keywords, you can even tell, you know, chatgpt that, hey, these are my keywords. Can you sprinkle them throughout my website copy so that we make sure that my website copy is super keyword rich and has a really good SEO strategy behind it. So having this bank of keywords is super helpful and it also is great for social media because you can take them and convert them into hashtags. And same thing with captions, you can say, hey, sprinkle these keywords throughout my social media captions and also create a branded list of hashtags based on these keywords. Now, the final piece of your brand messaging and the brand script is your brand thesaurus. And so a brand thesaurus is a selections of words, a selection of words that you use consistently and intentionally in your brand, or it's words that you choose not to use. And so I want to walk you through a few examples. The first is that we call ourselves a brand studio. So to me, the word agency, it's a little bit bigger team typically and has a brick and mortar location. So I whereas studio is a little bit more of an intimate process. It's smaller, it's creative and so we are a branding studio, not an agency. And so we always use the word studio over agency. Same thing with shop for our shop. It's a digital shop. And so it we always use the word shop because to me the word store feels more like an in person brick and mortar location. When it comes to the words that we use and don't use within the brand, we get so specific that we are even thinking about spelling and punctuation and stuff like that. So mood board can be spelled two different ways as one word or as two words. And honestly, neither is right or wrong. It's just, and I don't have a preference between either of them, but we are so consistent in our messaging that we make sure that we spell it the same way every single time we use it. So a long time ago I just decided to spell it as two words and that's how we spell it. And every single time. And again, if you're training ChatGPT to write for you, then I don't know which spelling of mood board it would pull. But if I say mood board as two words, then it's going to respond back to me with two words and use my voice consistently. The other thing when it comes to our parenthesaurus is that we again like our tone of voice to be very approachable. So we don't use any acronyms or phrasing of any words that could confuse our audience. And so instead of saying an AI file, we always say an illustrator file. And lastly, we identify as brand designers just because we really specialize in the branding process. And so we always call ourselves brand designers, not graphic designers. So getting clear on the words that you use and don't use is super important. And, and again, you can train ChatGPT to say, hey, let's avoid any of these words because they don't resonate with me and my business. And when it comes to brandstorming out your thesaurus, I want you to think about what words you use to describe your business and then think if there's any words that you will avoid using in your business. So this could be anything that feels cringy or overused or just really doesn't resonate with your business. And then thinking about what types of words you're using. So does your brand cuss, do you use slang and do you use abbreviations and acronyms? And then just a few copywriting tips before we wrap things up. The first is to say less is more because in our fast paced world, people don't really have time to read and people most likely will skim your content until they find what you need. So get your point across as fast as possible. If you get stuck, just start writing. This is the biggest place we see our clients get caught up, is they just, they won't even try to start writing. So start plugging things into ChatGPT or just start writing and get some ideas down and just see where it flows from there. Be crystal clear with your messaging. I think it's Alex Altamozi who says that he writes all of his newsletters and website content at a fifth grade level and that's where he's seen the highest conversions. And so as much as we love, especially as experts in our industry, to get super technical and fancy with our language, you want to just be as clear, clear as possible and so that everyone is really understanding what you do and the words that you're using. So be as clear as possible. And then I want you to speak directly to your ideal customer. So instead of thinking, hey, all you followers, I want you to think of one person like your dream ideal customer and speak directly to them. Because the way that you're going to speak to one person is going to feel different and more resonant than it will if you're speaking to a group of people. And make your copy visually appealing. So use headers and a body font and color to really create some hierarchy within your messaging so that you're driving the user's eye throughout your messaging so they know what pieces of copy are most important and where to start with your copy. And of course I'm biased here, but if you're getting stuck, hire a professional. I am the designer of my team and I actually think that copy is the most important piece of your branding because you can have a gorgeous brand, but if it's not speaking to your ideal customer, then it's not going to convert. And copy is really the most important piece of your brand, so don't underestimate it. And if you feel stuck, hire a professional to help you out. And that is a conclusion on your brand voice. And I just want to say thank you guys so much for having me. As a reminder, we specialize in brand strategy, brand messaging, logo design, website copy and design. And I'm more than happy to hop on a free consultation for anyone who has questions. And for the FM community, I want to extend a special $250 off any of our branding packages.

All right, thank you so much, Ali. That was awesome. We're going to do a quick rapid fire takeaway. Zach, are you ready to share what you learned and give us a takeaway and do an intro? Are you prepared for that?

Absolutely, man, absolutely. I super appreciate your time today and I've actually had the pleasure of working with Ali has done my website and did for actualized potential wellness coaching when I created it last year. And so it was actually really cool to get to work through this workshop with her today because I've done this process but last year and I'm actually going through some shifts in some not major ones, but small shifts in messaging right now and what the services offered in the business are. And I think the overarching message and reminder that I appreciated today was being crystal clear on the why. I think that it can be easy the further you get into business to just keep implementing the next thing and get stuck in the weeds before you know it. Always have that really clean, detailed eye for why I'm making this change, what the change is trying to communicate to my ideal clients. Pretty much all throughout. Ali speaking today, she reminded us that having that crystal clear vision is super important. Really appreciated that reminder today because it hit home with stuff that I'm working on right now. And yes, I referenced there a little bit. But Zach, I created actualized potential wellness coaching last year. I help driven and passionate people create sustainable and long lasting impacts in their wellness so that they can bring their best to their passions in life.

Thank you, Zach.

You're already nailing it on the messaging.

Yeah. And that's. And that's what we do. If you're not here, if you're listening to a recording of this, this is Fast foundations office hours. Fastfanations.com office hours. Come and join us live so you can have an opportunity to do what Zach just did and hear from like Ally. That's what we do here. Every Wednesday, every week, all the time. Jim, you're up next. Rapid fire takeaways. What do you got?

Yeah, Ali, thank you so much for being here. I appreciate it. I love learning from you every time. One thing that you said that I love that you kind of zoom through, but it was really important to me. Not just from the SEO side, but it's a realization that I never actually thought of was when you said about adding your brand bio to the footer of all of your pages. And I realize some of the biggest sites I always see more about the business in the footer every time, but I never actually recognize that. And from all the years I've been in SEO too, I never really put that together. So what's great about that is if you're not on the homepage and you land on one page where that brand bio really isn't there, it's one more opportunity to really understand that brand. And it also is a really great way to put those correct keywords on every page. So I took that as one of the biggest ones. So I appreciate you sharing that.

Yeah, I love that. I love that I was able to teach you something because you're the AI and SEO master, me rt.

And I love learning just as much as we love being part of this and teaching with everyone else. So we appreciate you well.

And like, you know, Ali the when you stare at something long enough, I've spent so much time looking at Vortex website, there's only so many times you can make a little change where it's like you just zone out and you just end up seeing the same thing. So you always learn something new every time. And I think audits and just having a second set of eyes on something that you did, whether it's to Zach's point, just fairly recently or years ago, I think audits are so valuable and having a second opinion is just massively valuable. So thank you.

Yes, of course. Yeah, that's so true. And I call it Design Brain for myself because there's a time like when I'm designing, I'm looking at the way that the words look. I'm not reading what they say. And so there's times where there's a glaring typo, but I just didn't even notice because I'm looking at the way that it looks versus the way that everything reads and flows. So you kind of have to switch back and forth between that design brain and the copy brain.

Hey, this is Jim Carter. Thank you for joining the Fast Foundations podcast. We're excited to try this new format. We're grateful you were here to be part of it with us. If you missed the live event, you can join us every Wednesday. Sign up@fastfoundations.com office hours, and we'll see you next week.