EPISODE DESCRIPTION

If you’ve ever wanted your brand to light up the room (and the internet), this episode is for you. I’m sharing in The Hayley Osborne Show my personal strategies for building a standout brand that looks incredible, feels aligned, magnetic, and unmistakably you.

This is me giving you your permission slip to sit down, have a think and create a brand that’s cohesive, elevated, and deeply personal. We’re going beyond just logos and into the heart of what makes a brand truly unforgettable.

If you’re just beginning or refining what you’ve already built, this episode is packed with creative prompts, clarity, and inspiration to help your brand shine in all the right ways. What I’ve found is sometimes we are so close to our brands and businesses that we can no longer see them for what they are, good or bad. This is your reflection time. Let’s sit for a minute and chat while you listen. You’re welcome!

SUMMARY

0:00:01 – Podcast Intro

0:00:55 – Episode 160 Introduction

0:04:30 – Strategy 1: Sitting with Your Messaging

0:06:30 – Strategy 2: Matching Personality to Brand

0:08:30 – Strategy 3: Choosing Colors

0:10:30 – Strategy 4: Fonts and Visual Anchors

0:12:30 – Strategy 5: Brand in the Wild

0:14:30 – Strategy 6: Branding is Not Static

0:16:00 – Closing Thoughts

0:17:30 – Podcast Outro

Hayley

Hello and welcome. Welcome back to Episode 160 of the podcast, I am thrilled to be in your ears for yet another week bringing you the best of everything that I know to help you to be able to build your brand with you know, the right amount of magnetism, the right amount of knowledge bombs, the right amount of your expertise, the right amount of all the things, and that’s what I know, and that’s what I love sharing with you. So today I wanted to kind of talk about how to build a standout brand, not kind of, I want to talk about my strategies to build a standout brand, because it matters, and it’s going to matter more and more.

It’s going to matter more and more for you to stand out right? For you to think outside the box, for you to think with your own brain, for you not to use AI to think, for you to use AI to do your research for you, but not to think for you. And I think that there’s a completely different like things there, because we’re going to end up in a sea of sameness, and your voice is your hero and your standout, and the thing that sets you apart, especially as we move through the motions of really using AI for good and to help us.

And it’s amazing, and I think, to be able to build a standout brand that has to come from up here. So today, I’m recording this podcast episode during the day. I know, oh my goodness, cheers to me, because I’m not doing it at night today, but I am solo, which is so nice. And so it’s, yeah, I just, it’s, it’s different. So it’s, it’s really, I mean, it’s really bright in here anyway, because I have all my lights around me, but here we are. I’ve got a beautiful cup of peppermint tea here, and I’m actually very sore today, because not yesterday, but the day before, I did a full-on weight session, and I increased my weight, so I was like, I’m going to just go all in, and I have the biggest DOMs ever.

And so I’m sitting here feeling sore, but not sorry for myself, because it’s such a good saw, and I knew I needed to rip the band aid off this next level of myself and just go all in. And so that’s a bit of a theme in my life at the moment, just ripping the band aid off and going all in. And you’ll start to see how that theme unfolds over the next few weeks, which I’m excited to share with you, but not yet, because it’s not ready.

And if you sort of saw last week, I drip fed on my Instagram that change is coming, and I’m excited, so we’ll park that for now, but it is exciting, and if you want to know, just send me a message on Instagram and I will let you know what is going to unfold in my world. But anyway, I sit here, I’m stuffed. I’ve got a beautiful cup of peppermint tea. I love to be healthy from the inside out, and I’m always curious to know, like, what works, what makes you more energized? What are the things that will increase your dopamine and release those endorphins just to make you perform better.

Anyway, this is one of them that does it for me. So let’s get into today’s episode. My strategy is to build a standout brand. The first one I want to talk about. So there’s six I want to talk about, all together, and all I’ve got is dot points, because that’s how I roll with these . Now, because I know exactly, I’ve fully stepped into myself.

So I’ve been doing this brand and marketing thing for around 15 years now. It’s a really long time, and I have seen things come and evolve and change, and it’s beautiful. So it puts me in a position to be an authority on this subject. So the first thing I want to talk about is sitting with your messaging All right now, I mean, sitting with it away from almost your computer, okay, what is your tone of voice? Do you’re messaging really reflect how you talk? Is it playful? Is it friendly? Is it welcoming? Um, or is it robotic? So have a look at your messaging, which I mean, the first thing people are going to do is read about you.

So that means that will be either on a brochure. It’ll be either on your website, on the captions in your social media, you’re about sections in your bio, on your Instagram, on your Facebook, your LinkedIn, like, sit with your messaging and have a really good, hard Think of how it makes you feel. Now, if it makes you feel a bit, eek, a bit, oh my god, like I do sound robotic, that kind of thing, maybe you need to have a think about rewriting it and adding your flavor. And what happens over time as well is you might have started with something on your website, and that tone of voice might have worked for you at the time, but since then, you’ve now evolved.

You’ve upskilled, you’ve learned, you’ve taught yourself different things, and now you sound a little bit different too. So has that kept up to date with how you are moving, evolving and changing. So sitting with your messaging is really important. Now, I’ve been looking at my website recently, which is the birth of this podcast episode, which gave me the idea. And some things do sound a little marketing and a little bit too confusing, not for me, but if I was reading that, if I wasn’t sitting in these shoes, I would think that. And so that has gotten a whole refresh, not live yet, but it’s going to be because I’ve changed, and I realized that some things on the website needed to be more conversational and more.

You know, I am a glass half full person, and everything should reflect that. So sitting with your messaging is really important. Number two is thinking about your personality, okay, and how it matches your brand or how it doesn’t. Now, what I tend to see, and what I found with a lot of business owners that I’ve worked with, is if you position your business in a way as a small business that doesn’t reflect your personality, you’ll become further and further removed from it. Okay? So you need to be able to reflect your brand like reflect, reflect your personality through your brand, because then it’ll keep up with you as you evolve.

And you don’t want to have this massive gap and this massive disconnect between who you are and who your brand is. Now I understand if you are not a personal brand, that’s fine. But even so, I see huge disconnects come about when you know you are one personality, but your business is another, it just doesn’t work. And I feel like it creates misalignment, and then it creates a disconnect. You become disconnected with the business, and it really starts to show through how you show up, which then reflects, obviously, your bottom line, right?

So thinking about your personality and how it matches your brand, or how it doesn’t match your brand, is something that I think you need to sit with and see how that evolution takes place, and you’ll see some of the biggest brands in the world. And why does my strap keep falling down on my onesie today? I’ve got this cool denim, wide leg, gray, kind of onesie that’s great for breastfeeding, but it, um, yeah, how annoying I keep hoping for it anyway. If you’re watching on YouTube, you’ll see so sit with that.

The next one, number three, is thinking about what colors really light you up. Now, for me, when I started my business, I was like, I am going to appeal to men and women. I’m going to have no pinks on my branding whatsoever at all. It’s going to be neon red, green, yellow, blacks to showcase the neon. Hence the neon signs behind me. I’ve got Hayley Osborne with a big afro to represent my curly hair on the wall in neon. It was made bespoke for my business. But you know, the neon just didn’t work anymore, and the black wasn’t working anymore, because essentially, I’m a girly girl, okay? So I was like, I can’t do this anymore.

I was becoming further and further away from my business and my brand, and so the colors that really lit me up had to be changed. So I stripped all the neon out of my business, added in some fuchsia, and here we are. These colors match my personality, and you know what? I attract men and women. Still, it didn’t make a difference. So, you know, awesome. It just goes to show that if you’re holding back on a certain color, then don’t because. Those, I’m proof that doesn’t matter how you show up, you still attract your tribe.

The fourth one is sitting with different fonts. All right, so sit with the fonts that you’re using, and make sure you love them, and make sure they’re tiered, okay, which means that make sure you’ve got, like, a bigger, bolder font, a serif and a sans serif. You’ve got your body font, which is your paragraph font, and they’re kind of like, make up your heading one, two and three, and you use those same fonts in your website and your socials, but sit with them and make sure you love them if you think you want something more script as, like a, you know, little standout Hero Piece.

Then add a script in, okay, but make sure it’s consistent, and make sure you love them, because when you love them, everything else shows and it’s the little things, okay, it’s this subconscious that really works with this stuff. And I also think about what those visual anchors look like for you, beyond like the fonts and the colors. Okay, so what I mean by that is how you show up, what your style is, what the lighting looks like, are you more natural, or are you more polished in your approach, or are you a combination of both?

That’s me. I’m a combination of both. So I show up like supernatural and don’t care, whatever. But then I show up very polished. And you can see that through my branding. You can see that through my photos, the ones that are professional, it is polished and I am serious. But then you see the other side of me, which is, you know, I don’t wear a lot of makeup. I’m pretty low maintenance. Well, some would say, except for my hair, which needs quite a lot of maintenance, but think about those things, whether you know, soft and warm, light and dark, crisp or editorial or natural, like, what does that look like for you, and is it reflective?

So think beyond fonts and colors. The fifth one I want to talk about is, what does your brand look and feel like in the wild? This is a big one. So what do I mean? I mean by that, think about it even if you’re not doing it already. Imagine you on stage. Okay, how does this brand appear on stage? What does that look like? What does that then follow through and look like in an email, in a podcast, what about a billboard, bus shelters, catalogs like, think about your brand in the wild. So that’s the best way I can explain it, instead of saying, out of home, okay, or above the line, like there’s full on marketing terms.

But what does it look like in the wild? Out in the wild, doing your thing in full flight. What does that look like for you? Does it hold up? Is it cohesive? Does it match everything else that you’re doing? Think about that. And the sixth one is, you know, just a note to self to check in. Branding isn’t static, okay? And I’m evolving at the moment and doing the work and going through some things on how I want to show up and who I want to talk to, and I’m excited beyond measure to share that with you. But you know, branding can evolve, and it should evolve as you do, as you grow, as you learn, as you educate, as you evolve.

Consistency matters, but I think more than ever. So does being human, because being human is the thing that’ll win you the race more than anything in the whole wide world. And so they’re my six things, five things, really, with a nice cherry on top at the end, which is six to build a standout brand. They’re my strategy. Sit with them. It’s work. It’s hard work, and that’s why a lot of people don’t because it’s too hard, okay? And that’s, that’s the standout that what, that’s what makes the great people and those that move fast better because they sit with it, they make decisions, they change, they evolve, and they’re nimble.

Consistency matters, like I said, but so does being human, so you make sure you have that beautiful contrast and connection in and outside of your brand. And think about the things that I’ve said and maybe sit with them this week and challenge yourself and question yourself. Does it feel right? Because one thing that I know is that when you’re so close to your business, you can’t see it anymore, okay? And so sometimes it takes someone else to come in and be like, hey, have you thought about this?

And you’re like, oh my goodness, I see it now. How come I didn’t think about that sooner? Or why do I keep doing this? Just because I’ve always done it? That’s not the answer. Anyway, guys, I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of the podcast. Message me if you have one. I always love that on Instagram, that’s where I hang out the most, and I’ll see you next week. Love you guys. Bye. I hope you’ve enjoyed listening to this episode. If you have hit subscribe, so you don’t miss any new episodes released every Tuesday, and while you’re there, leave me a review.

I would absolutely love to read it. Also don’t. Forget to tag me @hayleykosborne over on Instagram and share this post with your audience so they can get learning too. Sharing is caring. If you want more, head to hayleyosborne.com/category/podcast for today’s show notes and links. Catch you next week for another episode of The Hayley Osborne show.