Constantly tweaking your brand is harming your business… here’s how to stop.
I want you to imagine something for a moment…
You wake up ready to work and open your laptop, full of ideas and plans for the day, but then… it starts. You see your website, your logo, or your Instagram feed, and suddenly, you want to change everything. Before you know it, instead of finishing that email for your list, creating your new reel, or working on your webinar slides, you've fallen down the rabbit hole of tweaks, re-designs or maybe even an entire re-brand.
On a bad day? You might find yourself avoiding opening or looking at your website or social feeds entirely, because every visit triggers a cascade of doubt and desire to overhaul everything from your color palette to your business name.
Maybe you don’t have to imagine… this might be your every day 🙈
This relentless urge to revamp your brand at every turn - not so affectionately known around here as The Change Everything Disease 🦠 - is a common syndrome among creative online business owners and creators just like you.
In my experience working with clients and observing my wider community, people suffer from The Change Everything Disease for two reasons:
1. A shaky brand strategy.
If you've skipped over parts of the brand strategy puzzle, it's easy to start overthinking and questioning every decision. This happens because, rather than measuring everything against your strategy, you’re left to create every individual piece of content on the fly.
2. A gap in your design knowledge.
You don’t have to be an expert, but having even a basic understanding of some key design principles is crucial. Knowing the basics can help you judge your own work objectively and empower you to make confident decisions about your brand visuals.
Sometimes it’s one more than the other, but it’s incredibly common to struggle with both.
All of the constant tweaks and changes aren’t just a waste of your valuable time - they’re also bad for brand recognition.
When you frequently change your brand's visual elements — like your logo, color scheme, and fonts —your audience struggles to form a consistent mental image of your business. We only have such a short time to capture peoples’ attention online - and that’s only half the battle. Once you’ve hooked someone once, you’ll likely need to keep their attention before they trust you enough to purchase your course or sign up for your program.
If all of your social media, emails, free resources, etc are visually consistent, your audience will recognize them as yours before they even read a single word. They might even know it’s you by color or font choice alone. But if your work looks different every time you hit publish? You’ve essentially hit reset on that brand recognition meter.
The good news? You can absolutely overcome this affliction.
Here are some of my top tips + resources:
Revisit your brand strategy. If your strategy is solid, it should guide all of your branding and design decisions. Feeling the change bug start to bite? Consult your strategy first. If the change won’t move the needle on showcasing your value to your audience, it’s probably not worth doing right now. Need to audit your strategy? Start with my Brand Clarity Checklist.
Set aside time to learn the basics of design. Again - you do not need to know the ins and outs of every design program or become a brand designer overnight. Simply having an understanding of some basic principles and concepts like scale, balance, color theory, or hierarchy can help. You can check out this reel for 3 simple steps to uplevel your design skills, or this reel for some fixes for the most common design mistakes. You can also check out my Starter Logo Font Guide for some free video tutorials to help you better understand fonts!
Take advantage of templates for your most common designs. You can make some simple ones yourself, purchase a set, or have some made by a designer. They don’t have to be a work of art. And you don’t have to reinvent the wheel on every PDF, carousel or slide deck.
Embrace imperfection. Remember, the lifespan of most digital content, especially on social media, is fleeting. It's more crucial to get your content out there and start growing your audience than to agonize over every last detail.
Give these steps a try and see how much easier things get for you. No more second-guessing or endless changes and updates. Instead, all of that time wasted worrying about how things look can be spent in your zone of genius - delivering value to your audience and growing your brand.
If you’re looking for more guidance on nailing down your brand strategy or want to improve your design skills, check out my Brand Clarity Checklist and Starter Logo Font Guide. These resources are designed to help you refine your brand strategy and enhance your design knowledge, giving you the confidence to make decisions that align with your business goals.
I’d love to hear about your journey in overcoming The Change Everything Disease. Feel free to share your experiences and how you’ve implemented these strategies with me in the DM’s!
See you in the next one!
Emily Banks
