The Biggest Branding Mistake Etsy Sellers Make

if you're not getting any sales or your sales are trickling slower than you want them to one of the biggest mistakes that you might be making is not working on your brand the truth is the first few sales are the hardest people don't know who you are yet and when they see a low number of sales they don't know if they can trust your products or your business having a strong brand is something that can not only help you get your first few customers in the beginning but to keep a strong relationship with your existing ones in the future in this video i'm going to be going through three steps that you can do that can really solidify your branding i'll also be making a fake brand from scratch using these steps so that you can see a real-life example of the difference that it can make in helping increase your sales if you're new to the channel my name is tim and i started a sticker business about a year and a half ago i've had some pretty good results so far and one of the biggest reasons that i think my shop does well is because i have really strong branding compared to the rest of my competition this channel is all about sharing my journey running a side business as well as general productivity and finance tips that have helped me along the way but first why is branding so important if you've been watching my videos for a while you'll know that i'm always talking about how you need to differentiate yourself from the competition in your niche customers today are looking to buy the best thing that they can for their money and you have to show them that your store deserves their hard-earned money over competitors you can do this by having better products better pricing better customer service but you can also do this by having better branding so let's just get right into step one and that's choosing your brand name if you spend a lot of time browsing etsy shops you'll find that a lot of them don't put much effort into their name a lot of people just use their own name with a generic word at the end like tim shop or tim's studio but i think that this is a major missed opportunity your business name is the first impression that some customers will see and it's a chance to be remembered try to come up with something unique that stands out from the crowd what i like to do is to look at other shop names in your niche and try to come up with something that's completely different so let's just search greeting cards so here you'll see names like art by anna little boy design co wilda heart art shop paper hood co cards by nathalie creations by tan true north creations so you can already see that there's kind of a common theme in the names that we're seeing here for this niche i'm seeing a lot of the owners names as well as other words like art studio or creations so for me personally i would try to avoid using these words and please don't be mad at me if you have a similar name to one of the ones that i mentioned i'm not saying that these are bad or anything but if you want to stand out and be more memorable to your customers it might be a good idea to have something that's a little bit more unique another thing that you want to keep in mind when coming up with your name is something i like to call the hear spell read say rule this basically just means that if somebody hears the name they'll be able to spell it and if somebody reads the name they'll be able to say it or pronounce it correctly word of mouth recommendations are so important when you're trying to grow a business and you don't want to add any unneeded resistance to people recommending it to their friends and family so yeah after doing research on competitors names and keeping the here spell read say rule in mind i would just do some brainstorming sessions to see all the words or names that you can come up with so like i've said before i'm gonna actually show you by making a fake brand so let's do a brainstorming session right now so let's type name brainstorm and let's just write everything that comes to mind when it comes to greeting cards so greeting cards you get them in the mail sometimes like letters mail you get them for holidays special occasions [Music] it's not high spell occasions there you go um special message telegram um some emotions maybe like joy when you receive one happiness love you you get cards when you get cards when people give you gifts or presents okay so fast forward a couple minutes i came up with the name lovegram which is a combination of the word love and telegram which i think is not bad it's pretty decent i'm sure i could have come up with a better name if i spent more time on it but for the sake of the video i think that's a pretty good name and don't worry if your name sounds weird or unnatural in the beginning they tend to grow on you over time i remember when i first heard the name facebook i was so confused i was like facebook like a book of faces it just sounded really weird and unnatural to me but eventually i got used to it like everybody else so yeah if it sounds weird in the beginning just stick with it and maybe it'll grow on you okay so now that you have your name it's time to move on to step two which is making your logo generally speaking there are two types of logos logo types and logo marks logo types are centered around a company's names or initials for example you can think of companies like google coca-cola or fedex logo marks are a little more abstract and are centered around a symbolic image or icon for an example of these you can think of companies like apple twitter or target while there are pros and cons and different use cases where one type of logo might be better than another for new businesses i would really just focus on creating a logo type since your company is so new most people that come across your logo for the first time aren't going to have any idea what your business is or what your business is called logo types are generally better in this case because when somebody sees your logo they're instantly gonna know your business name and if your name is good they might be able to guess what you do logo types are generally easier to design as well it's something that you can even do yourself as most of the time you can get by with just picking a nice font and doing some minor altercations to it if you're looking for fonts that you can use i'd recommend google fonts or dafont.com they have a pretty huge collection of fonts that are completely free to use and i'm sure that you can find one that fits the vibe of your company if you're interested in them i'll link everything down in the description below so here we are on google fonts and you can just type in your business name here and you can just go through the different fonts and find something that you like so i think i found one that i liked here and it's called molly so you can just go ahead here and click the download button and install the font into your computer so here we are in photoshop and if you don't have photoshop you can use something like canva as well but today we're just gonna use photoshop and we'll type in lovegram and change the font to the mali one that we had so personally i'm liking the semi-bold version here and i think we're gonna change this to a lowercase just to make it more handmade like and what i like to do here is just to adjust the kerning so that it just looks a little better there we go and usually i like to add like a tag line at the bottom just so people know what your company makes so handmade cards and then we'll just make this a little bit smaller maybe around there and we'll change it to a lighter weight there we go and usually for the tag line i like to increase uh the letter spacing like that it just adds a little bit of an extra touch so there we go it's pretty much that easy but another thing that i like to do is come up with a brand color that can tie everything together so you know how like target has that really signature red or twitter has that really signature blue i like to come up with a signature color for every brand that i create so one of the resources that i use for this is a site called design seeds so they're really cool blog and what they do is they make color palettes out of existing photos and usually if i'm looking for a nice color i'll just take a scroll and i'll pick a color that i like and i'm seeing one already like maybe this one like since our company is love graham when i hear love i instantly think of pink so let's just choose this pink color here so let's just grab this color and put it into our logo [Music] whoops [Music] there we go and then maybe we can change the text to white so there you have it that's the logo for love gram it's really as simple as that it might not be the best logo or the most expensive looking but it's so much better than what most etsy shops are doing most etsy sellers are not branding their shops at all this is a logo that you can put on your store page as well as your products and your packaging it just gives you a better shot at standing out from the competition and not only that if somebody likes your products and they're seeing this logo on everything when they get their order they're way more likely to remember you they're way more likely to remember this name lovegram than they are if my shop name was tim's art creations or something like that hopefully this helped you see how big of a difference having a proper name and logo can make but we're not done yet there's still step three which is branding your messaging branding is more than just a logo it's really the overall perception customers have of your business think of some of the strongest brands in the world nike for example they don't even mention their products in most of their advertising their messaging is to bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete around the world think of apple and their messaging of thinking different they often go against the grain with what other companies are doing some people might not like it but it's so ingrained in their brand that people have come to expect it even if these companies lost their logo people would still know what their brand is about when coming out with your messaging to customers some of the things that you can think about is what goals and values do you have as a company what do you hope to achieve or how do you hope to bring value to your customers do you want your messaging to be really professional or is there room to be fun and quirky i'm sure that if you follow these three steps you'll be well on your way to creating a really strong brand that will help you get customers that love to support you i think the worst thing that can happen is somebody liking your product and recommending it to others by saying i got it from etsy when somebody says that that means that you're actually building etsy's brand and not your own as good as etsy is as a platform to help you get started eventually you really need to get off of it you don't really know what's going to happen to etsy in the future they might come out with some policies that are not so good for you or some other company might take over them someday having all your eggs in one basket is never a good idea so it's really important that you start building your own brand that has its own loyal customers but that's it for the video guys if you found it useful be sure to check out the video i made on seo just like branding seo is a super important part of growing your business because it's the main way that customers are finding you in the first place in that video i go through what the basics of seo is as well as a whole bunch of tips to help you improve it so that you can be well on your way to boosting your sales and making more money but yeah thanks so much for watching guys take care of yourselves and i'll see you in the next one bye [Music]

Channel: Tim Koa

Views: 1,232

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Id: 6WfkyEVvS-M

Length: 12min 16sec (736 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 29 2021