When it comes to branding your business you need to be consistent in all of the visuals that represent you and the copy that you write. If you aren’t, your brand will appear unprofessional and wishy-washy, and ultimately your audience will be confused.

So, you need to nail down your brand’s personality — or the key adjectives that best describe your business as if it were a person so that your brand appears cohesively on your website, your email campaigns, social media, your courses, your free downloads, your ads, etc.

One of the best ways you can make your business stand out is by appearing consistently across all of your marketing materials.

When your audience knows what to expect from you, they’ll begin to trust you and when that happens, they’ll be more likely to work with you. So always remember, consistency equals trust.

Let’s go over how to determine your brand’s personality in 4 simple steps.

Step 1 — Collect

Start by writing down all of the adjectives you can think of to describe your business. Think of your business as a person.

You’ll want to be sure you add words that describe both your brand’s personality, such as whimsical or down-to-earth as well as its purpose or what your business can do for others, such as empowering or educational.

Step 2 — Refine

Now that you have a collected list, it’s time to refine.

Go through the list and cross out any word that should be true for all businesses, like “professional” or “trustworthy.”

Then remove any words that sound like your competition or other brands in your niche. Remember, the goal with these words is to help you stand out from the competition.

Lastly, nix any words that are obvious for what you do like “neat” or “orderly” if you are a home organizer, for example.

Step 3 — Group

The next step is to group the remaining related words into columns, but make sure you don’t have more than 4 columns. For example, “Appealing” and “Compelling” would go together. “Contemporary,” “Modern,” and “Cutting Edge” would go together in the next column, and so on.

Step 4 — Select

Now, select the one adjective that BEST reflects your brand from each column.

You should now have 4 adjective to sum up your brand’s personality that will function as guideposts to refer back to as you create ALL of your materials moving forward.

If you’re finding it to be challenging to narrow down your list to only 4 words, think about your main objective and how you help your clients resolve their problem. Then think about what you want your audience to remember you for.

Now that you have your 4 personality traits, pin them on the wall in front of you where you work and make sure everyone you work with knows them by heart. And use these words to guide every single social media post, email, blog post, and layout that represents your brand.

Now that you’ve clarified your brand’s personality, you may be starting to think about creating your own brand and website. And if you’re wondering, “Can I really DIY these things? The answer is YES! Let me bust the common myths about doing it on your own.