Our Creative Agency’s Best Practices, Plus Brand Exercises You Can Try Now
Too often, businesses evaluate their brand based on their own preferences. Of course, there’s nothing inherently wrong with this. After all, business owners are creatives themselves who seek to build their business exactly how they envisioned it.
It’s a natural instinct to shape your brand’s media to your liking. Yet it’s also a reason why many brands’ visuals don’t convert into business growth.
Much like you as a business owner, a buyer is on their own journey. When they encounter your brand, they’re likely to see something different than you planned, their own vision of who you are and what you can do for them.
We’ve found that until a business learns to look at their brand, visuals, and videos through a buyer’s eyes, they will keep spending money on creative that may work internally, but doesn’t resonate out in the world.
To help make your brand better, our creative team has put together some tips, reminders, and exercises you can try today. Each one will help you look at your creative materials from the perspective of the person who matters most: your customers.
First, a Reminder: Your Brand Is Not a Logo!
The most common and expensive misconception that businesses have is that their branding consists of a logo and a color palette. These are important and memorable elements, but they get their power from something deeper.
An effective branding process creates a rich understanding of who you are, your story, why you do what you do, and why you do it better than your competitors. Branding turns this identity into messaging and visuals that are unmistakably yours.
A logo is the surface. Your brand is everything underneath it. When a brand is fully developed, it can be understood. When it’s understood, it can be remembered. When it’s remembered and consistent, it earns trust.
And trust is what compels people to do business with you.
Exercise #1
Look beyond your logo and colors. Review your homepage, sales materials, social media, ads, and video content together. Do they all express the same story, value, personality, and reason to believe in your business? If the pieces look connected but do not communicate a clear story, your brand identity may not be resonating with your ideal customer.
The Buyer Doesn’t Care About You (Yet!)
Here’s the uncomfortable truth that creative marketing agencies know about businesses: at first, the buyer isn’t thinking about your story or your brand the way you are. They want to know one thing, and one thing only: how you can help them.
This is where we see a great deal of creative materials fall short. Too often, ads focus on emphasizing the brand instead of the customer. These kinds of ads typically announce how great the company is at delivering your products or services, rather than empathizing with the problem the customer is trying to solve.
The brands that win answer two questions immediately and clearly:
- How are you solving my problem?
- How are you more effective at solving it than the competition?
When a buyer first encounters a company, the reaction is emotional. They respond instinctively to a logo, a product, or a person representing the company. Trust is built quickly when the visuals show:
- An awareness of what the audience needs
- Subject matter that’s relevant to what they’re actually searching for
- A personality and strength that feels more experienced and elevated than its competitors.
When you miss the mark here, you get instant resistance from your customers, and you may not get a second chance.
Quick tip: if your ads seem to focus on “We” (your business) and not “You” (the customer), your business isn’t focused on your buyer’s needs).
“We Like It Internally” Is Always a Warning Sign
When you share your visuals, videos, branding, or ads with your internal team, they may do the most natural thing in the world: fixate on their own preferences. This instinct, normal as it is, is the enemy of effective creative work. What matters far more than personal taste is the trust signals and visual language of your industry. Buyers have certain cues that they want to see.
Just as important is what you avoid. Repeating other brands in your space is something to steer away from deliberately, so you never risk looking or sounding like someone else. At our creative agency, we understand that standing out requires knowing exactly what everyone else looks like and how to create a brand that’s distinctly you.
Exercise #2
Ask someone outside your company to look at your website, social profiles, ads, and sales materials for 30 seconds. Then ask three questions: Who do you think this ad is for? Does it represent their problem? Does it provide a unique solution? If they can’t answer clearly, your creative may be reflecting internal preferences over buyer understanding.
Buyers Notice When a Brand Feels Outdated
Design evolves like fashion. People can recognize the era of a brand the same way they can date a photograph by the clothes people are wearing. When a brand feels outdated, the visuals usually give it away first, as they carry the symbols of a previous era.
A useful rule of thumb on whether to refresh or rebrand: if a brand has never gone through a proper brand development process, or it’s more than five years old and isn’t one of the top three players in its market, it’s a candidate for a rebrand. If the brand is already established and successful and simply wants to feel current and connect with modern audiences, a refresh is the right move.
A Helpful Perspective on Video
Video does something static graphics and copy can’t. It connects with the emotion and imagination of the audience almost instantly. It’s the fastest way to shape a first impression and express your full personality.
But video can amplify mistakes as easily as your strengths. A well-written script, performed well through acting, graphics, or animation, makes the audience trust the message. A video whose subject and style align with the audience earns their attention.
The most common failure is the same one we’ve already mentioned: the work is too self-focused. Too often, videos run long, feel generic, and talk about the company instead of the customer. The recommendations we make at our creative design agency often start here: focus on the customer, and make the style unmistakably your own.
Exercise #3
Watch your most important video with the sound off first. Can a viewer understand the subject, tone, and value quickly? Then watch only the first five seconds. Does it create interest, or does it begin with company language? If the video takes too long to matter to the customer, it’s probably serving the company more than the buyer.
Seeing Yourself Clearly With Help From Our Creative Agency
The hardest part of viewing your brand through a buyer’s eyes is making an honest self-assessment. You may find that you’re too close to your business to see what the market sees.
At our creative marketing agency, we educate clients on the qualities of their creative that matter most, then guide them through analyzing themselves honestly and in the full context of their industry, through workshops that encourage clear-eyed self-evaluation and competitive analysis that reveals where they truly stand.
Investing in your brand and creative materials isn’t just “the cost of doing business.” Seen through a buyer’s eyes, it’s one of the most direct investments your business can make for its own growth.
