Now perhaps more than ever before, you need to have a strong brand to showcase your homestead business. With the rise of AI technologies and AI power search, it’s easy to ignore budding small businesses who can’t compete with big names.
To find a measure of success for your homestead brand, you need to choose a strong set of core values, and craft a brand around those. Plant your flag and encourage those who share those values to join you.
Choose a clean logo to represent your brand
A logo can often go unnoticed. It seems like such a small insignificant part of your branding.
But it’s a visual queue to indicate your style and personality. Little key details that you might not think much about are really signals to potential customers.
When you go about creating (or hiring someone to create) a logo, you need to start with a few questions. Don’t rely solely on what you like and enjoy crafting some random picture to work from. Or even worse, something you thought was cute, but no one else will get unless you explain it – no one will dig that far, especially online.
- What will your brand be providing as a primary offering?
- Who is your target market?
- Are there key visuals you target audience likes or are drawn to?
- Is there aesthetics you need to represent in your logo?
- Will logo style, such as cartoon or blocky, matter to your audience?
- What key colors do you and your audience look for in a logo?
A good designer will be able to take these questions and answers, some of the things you like, and your audience needs to craft a great logo. While the logo is the face of your brand, it’s also often the first interaction you get.
At a farmers’ market, many place their logo on a banner in their tent. And you can bet that people analyze the logo before stepping inside. It’s introducing what the brand is before they feel trapped in a tent with the seller.
I strongly recommend that you pay someone to build a real logo if you don’t have the skills. And I am not talking about doodling on paper. A graphic designer will create a logo that can be used on all your branding, scaled to any size and be adaptable to your business over time.
It might cost some up front, but believe me, it costs a lot more to rebrand your logo down the road or attempt to have it recreated just so you can order some sales materials.
Making a good first impression here can lead to lots of sales later.
Standardize your brand
Colors matter. Fonts matter.
You now know how important a logo can be. But colors and fonts are just as important. They build a cohesive look across your brand.
When you are sharing on social media and everything is comic sans and yellow, but your website is Times New Roman and Purple, there is a brand inconsistency.
Inconsistency leads to lost customers. They don’t get you anymore.
When you line up everything you do around a core set of colors, styles, fonts, and look, you make it easier for people to remember. They remember that you are the plant person with purple logo and fun quotes every Monday.
Choose your core brand elements and visual style and stick with it. Avoid confusion.
Stick with real homestead visuals
Not everyone lives a homestead life. And depending on your offering, your customers might be interested in the details of what your homestead life looks like.
When you share content on social media, it needs to accurately reflect life on your homestead.
If you look at Instagram, there are two kinds of homesteaders. The showy ones, who seem to have this perfect farm, always wearing a clean dress to gather eggs, and the picturesque life. Then there are the rest of us. The ones sharing how life truly goes. Down in the mud reality.
It’s easy to get discouraged when you look at numbers on fake profiles compared to reality. But likes are not the end of all of marketing. Conversions are what matters. And those that like your down in the dirt photos are more likely to convert, because they are more in touch with reality.
Those are the people who will buy from your homestead, because they see exactly what goes into producing the product you have. If they are buying a side of pork, they see the life of the pig they are going to eat. If you sell eggs, you are showing exactly how your chickens really live, and what they eat.
Reality TV has been a hit for years because people enjoy seeing real life instead of fake stories. So, stick with real life on your homestead.
Your homestead story matters
I have said this a lot over the years. Your story matters. The true unvarnished story.
Stories are a key aspect to marketing anymore. And perhaps they always were.
Think about ads from the 1950’s, and compare those to ads from the early 2000’s. Before AI took over the world, and our cell phones were trapped in a car or large bag. Newspaper ads told a story about how that product would save our dirty laundry from being the talk of the neighborhood by getting those stubborn stains out.
It was a story of how you could end up at a BBQ with either a clean shirt or be the brunt end of some hot gossip over how you clean or rather don’t clean your laundry.
Not much has changed. Stories still intrigue us. They have since birth. And they do every day on the TV shows we watch or games we play.
A compelling story, like the clean shirt, is one worthy of gossip. And gossip is just a convenient way of saying people are talking and sharing your story. Provide them with a good one to share.
Don’t have a story?
Maybe your homestead business doesn’t have much of a story. This is not the time to get creative and make something up. Nor is it time to steal the neighbor’s story.
But maybe you are not digging deep enough.
If you sell handmade soap, why did you choose to do that? What drove you to the choice of I want to make soap? Why on earth would it matter if you made your own soap?
The best brands use their story to draw others to them. The ones who feel the same way.
If you ditched store-bought soap because the ingredients are toxic, then right there is your story. You learned about that fact through research. Why did you do the research in the first place? What stopped you from living in soapful ignorance?
Look at others for inspiration
If you are having trouble uncovering your story, look at some of the others that you follow. What is their story?
Remember, we are not out copying them. But rather, you could look around and see aspects of their story that tugged at your heart strings. And start to uncover key parts of what makes your brand unique, different and even the same.
Your story is often related to your mission
Your brand should have a core mission. And the story will convey that mission. If your mission is to remove toxins from not only your home but others, then your story will reflect how bad toxins are and what drove you to change your thinking.
Story can be the bridge to take someone from not knowing why your mission could matter or how that mission could change their lives to living on the same island as you. Mission success.
Understand your audience
Branding is not just about you and your business. It’s about knowing who you are serving.
Determining what values your brand will uphold also determine the audience you can serve.
Two real world examples of this in today’s society are Hobby Lobby and Chick-Fil-A. Both have chosen a stance to be closed certain days, uphold family values, and Christian beliefs. This segments their market, driving those away who don’t like those values and enduring those who share the values to them.
You don’t have to share every value with your audience. But when you know the values of your ideal audience, you will likely find you have a lot in common.
And it’s not just values. It could be lifestyle, likes, or any other common factor. I work with homesteaders because I understand them and am one. We exist on Instagram because it’s a platform I understand and lots of my audience are there too!
Common threads help you understand and connect to your audience.
Beyond the audience is a community
When you go from a general audience to community, amazing things happen.
Think about the last time you went to the movies. Did you pick a movie because of the show times available to you or because you wanted to see that movie? And then after the movie, did you rave about it, or did it fade away into space like you never saw it at all?
Going to the movies makes you part of an audience. You and a bunch of others were going to be entertained by a movie in a theater. You were captive of a general movie, an idea of entertainment.
When you rave about a move after you see it, you are joining a community. Your movie community cares deeply about the film and wants others to experience the same excitement that you did. Think Star Trek fans, who have built a community that call themselves Trekkies, and go to conventions year after year.
In this same line there are naturally minded people who have banded together to share the latest natural remedy.
If you can build a community of people sharing values, they will become your biggest fans, shouting at the ends of the world that everyone needs to try your brand. Community takes time to build and gather strength, but once it does, the force can be unstoppable.
Why are you different?
One of the key factors that makes a strong brand is difference.
When you are just like everyone else, there is no draw to you. When you choose to be unique and take a stance, you develop a strong brand that stands out.
Think about this as you are driving down the road. All the cars are blue, black, silver, green, etc. Then along comes a pink one. And this one has a logo on it. I bet you will remember that pink car with a logo. It’s different.
Difference makes you stand out. Difference makes you remembered. And being remembered makes you grow.
Some might call this section niching. When you niche, you choose to primarily serve a single audience. It allows you to know that audience intimately and then serve them better than anyone else. It also gives you the ability to speak their language.
When we chose to serve homestead business owners, it was based on the knowledge of their challenges. Who better understands than someone who is doing the same thing.
When everyone offers the same service, the same way, there is nothing special. But when you know your exact audience, you can change your service to meet the pain points they have, speaking directly to them.
Find the difference, become unique and stand out from the masses.
Conclusion
Building a strong brand takes time. It takes identifying who you will talk to. It also takes sticking to your values.
But when you get all the pieces of the puzzle together, your homestead brand can shine like a beacon to those who don’t know you yet. Get everything right and new customers become fans, bring in new people, driving your business to growth even faster.
