Ep. 48 How to Build a Brand Ecosystem That Supports Growth
There are a ton of moving parts and pieces when it comes to your brand, and a lot of them are constantly evolving. But here's what most online business owners don't realize: the order in which you build and create those things matters. A lot.
Most business owners have pieces of a brand. They have a logo, a website, some social content, some photos. But they're still saying things like:
"My brand feels like it's been Frankensteined together"
"Nothing really fits"
"It feels kind of amateur"
Because hose pieces were not built together or intentionally. This creates what I like to call brand breakage.
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What Is Brand Breakage?
Brand breakage happens when you hire multiple contractors in your business to do things like design your logo, create your website, develop social content, or take your brand photos, and they're not working out of the same rulebook or strategy document.
You probably have no cohesive brand strategy at all, but you have one person doing your SEO, one person doing your design, one person writing for you. Everything is done in a silo. None of these people actually talk to each other.
They could all be excellent, excellent service providers that get killer results for their clients. But if they're not talking to each other, they're just going to be off in their corners doing their own thing, not building something that's pointed in the right direction.
The Car Analogy
It's kind of like if you had a team of five people who were supposed to build a car. One person's building the wheels, one person's building the engine, one person's building the seats, one person's building the body panels. You all know you're building a car.
But what kind of car?
If they're not working from the same blueprint, then all of those parts and pieces, while they might be the best of the best, are not going to fit together to accomplish a goal.
A brand ecosystem only works when each of the pieces are built in order, on purpose, and to work together.
The Right Order: Building Your Brand Ecosystem
Let me walk you through the proper sequence for building a complete brand ecosystem that actually supports your online business growth.
Step 1: Brand Strategy
Of course, we start with brand strategy. This is the foundation.
The point of your brand strategy is to clearly define:
Why your business is here
What your goals are
Who your audience is
What direction you're going in
This is the blueprint, the rulebook that all of your other service providers are going to work from.
Brand strategy should answer questions like:
Who you serve
What you do
Why it matters
What you want to be known for
Where your business is headed
It's super important because it becomes that shared language. It becomes the thread that ties everyone working in your business together, from your designer to your copywriter to your SEO specialist, your photographer, your social media manager, and on and on.
Without it, everyone is just guessing and probably doing their best work. But if their best work is not all pointed in the same direction, not all intended to accomplish the same goal, then you have everyone's best work pulling you in different directions.
Step 2: SEO and Copy
Once you have your strategy nailed down, I'd say next you should probably invest in SEO and copy. Sometimes this is two different contractors, sometimes it's one.
The goal of SEO is to help people find you. The goal of copy is to help people understand you. You can see how those go hand in hand.
Why SEO Matters
SEO is about:
Search intent
Using language that your audience uses
Being visible in places where people are already actively looking for help
Your brand strategy informs what keywords to use, who that audience is that you're trying to speak to, which pages you need to focus on for your website, and how you're positioned in those search results.
Trying to do SEO without strategy leads to:
Lots of website traffic that doesn't convert
A website that's difficult to navigate (which makes it hard for Google to crawl)
Misaligned keywords
Potentially investing lots of money on things like paid ads that aren't getting you the right type of clients because you haven't done that research
Why Copy Comes Next
Copy's job is to communicate your values and your offers and to sell them to your audience. SEO brings you the audience. Copy converts them.
Copy translates your brand strategy into:
Clear messaging
Strong positioning
Confident offers
And this becomes the foundation for your design.
I've said this before and I've had lots of copywriters on the show. I mean it wholeheartedly: copy needs to come before design. Not necessarily before brand design, but 1000% before website design.
If you can't clearly communicate what you do on your website, it doesn't matter how pretty it is. The best design in the world is not going to save you.
Step 3: Brand Design
Now you can see how we're layering. First we got brand strategy, now we have SEO and copy, now it's time to work on design.
Logistically, you could (and might) be working on brand design at the same time that SEO and/or copy is happening in the background with a different contractor. These steps are not necessarily linear. You can pick and choose if there are steps you're not ready for yet.
Brand design can be done immediately after brand strategy if you choose. Website design needs to be done after SEO and copy.
What Brand Design Does
Brand design is what brings your brand personality to life visually. It's how you express your brand's personality, positioning, and values.
Its job is to:
Build trust quickly
Create brand recognition and visual consistency
Draw in those ideal clients using things like color psychology
Why the order matters: When design follows strategy and copy, it feels aligned, confident, and timeless.
Your clients can tell because:
It feels more aligned
You come across more confidently
It feels timeless and not trendy because it's personalized to you and not what everyone else is doing
As an online business owner, design is super, super important because it's really all you have. Your brand design is your first impression. You don't have a brick-and-mortar store where people come in or billboards on the side of the freeway. You have your brand design, which shows up on your social media and on your website.
You need to make a really intentional impact with that, and using strategy to inform your brand design is the way that you do it.
Step 4: Website Design
After brand design comes website design, which should incorporate all the SEO work and copy you've already completed. This ensures your site isn't just beautiful, but functional, findable, and converts visitors into clients.
Step 5: Brand Photography
This is a super important one for two reasons.
First, I strongly believe that good brand photography is one of the best ways to really bring your brand to life and build trust online. My clients who do invest in brand photography are 99% of the time more successful, more quickly than the ones who don't.
Second, brand photography has to come after brand design.
I just went on a rant about this on Threads a few weeks ago. Somebody asked, "Well, why can't I get my photo shoot done before my brand designer is finished with our project?"
My answer? Colors and vibes.
Why Order Matters for Photography
Your photos are one of the best ways to visually reinforce that trust, authority, and brand personality.
If you book a brand photo shoot without having your brand design done first, it makes it really hard for the photographer to know:
How your photos should look
How you should dress
What colors you should use
What the overall vibe of your brand is
Without that, you run a big risk of investing several thousand dollars in a photo shoot, and then you hand them over to your brand and website designer, and they say, "Well, these don't work at all."
For example, your brand colors are blue, green, and brown, but you're wearing black and red in your photos and they just clash so much that it's going to look terrible on your website.
Investing in a brand photo shoot is a big deal. Both emotionally (I know a lot of us don't love getting our photo taken and it's kind of a whole thing) and financially. Photos are expensive.
I would really, really encourage you to not jump the gun on this. Wait and take the time to have your brand designed first before you invest in brand photography. It's going to make it so, so much more impactful.
This is how you get photos that:
Fit seamlessly on your site
Feel like a good representation of you
You actually want to use
Nothing is worse than paying for a brand photo shoot, getting all your photos back, and hating them and not wanting to use them.
Step 6: Social Media Strategy
Now you've got brand strategy, SEO, copy, brand design, website design, and photography. Next is social media.
You can pay for somebody to help you with social media or not. I don't really have a lot of skin in that game. But the job of social media is to increase visibility and build brand recognition.
How do we do that?
Clear core message (comes from your strategy and copy)
Recognizable visuals (comes from your brand design and photography)
Targeting your audience using keywords (comes from SEO)
You can see how everything we've done already culminates in: now I'm ready to really get strategic with my social media.
Why People Burn Out on Social
I always preface these conversations with: I am not a social media expert. I'm a branding expert. I've had a couple of social media experts on the show, and you can go back and listen to their episodes if you want some really social media strategy-heavy content.
But here's what I know: social media works best when you have:
A clear strategy
Consistent messaging
Cohesive and consistent visuals
Photos that are super unique to you with lots of personality
People burn out on social media and say, "Oh my gosh, I can't get off the social media hamster wheel" or "Social media doesn't work for me" because they're hodgepodging things together. They're just trying a bunch of stuff and jumping on all these trends.
They have not done the foundational strategy work to know who they're talking to, what to say, how it should look, and how to say it.
When you approach social media with the understanding that its job is to reinforce your brand, not invent one, it gets a lot easier. And you need to have all those parts and pieces in place before you really put a lot of effort into social media.
The Complete Brand Ecosystem
To recap, a complete brand ecosystem includes:
Brand strategy
SEO
Copy
Brand design
Website design
Brand photography
Social media
Now, there are other things that go into this that are really important, namely client experience. However, client experience is something you kind of create organically as the business owner. It's not something you're necessarily going to invest in or hire somebody to help you with (at least not until you reach a certain level in business).
For the purpose of this post, I'm leaving that off, but I want to be really clear: client experience is one of the most important parts of your brand ecosystem. It just doesn't fall into what we're talking about today.
What Happens When You Skip Steps or Hire in Silos
What usually happens is you hire an SEO specialist, a designer, a photographer, or a social media manager (whatever shiny object you see that you think is going to solve all your problems). They fill out their questionnaire, they go to work, they do their thing.
I'm sure they're really great at what they do. But when they're each doing their work individually and not working as part of a more collaborative team, all pointed in the same direction (working out of the same strategy rulebook), things start to fall apart.
The Results of Siloed Work
Since they don't have a shared strategy and they're not communicating with each other, everyone's trying to solve a different problem in a different way without any regard for what anyone else is doing.
You end up with:
Confusing messaging in your business
Visual inconsistency between platforms (your social media manager might be using your same colors and fonts, but they're doing it in a totally different style than your website designer)
Wasted money because you walk away from all these experiences thinking "this still doesn't feel right" or "it's still not working for me"
It gets really easy to just blame the service provider. But the problem isn't the people you hire. It's the fact that there's no connection between them.
What to Do About It
The short answer: Do brand strategy first, share that strategy with everyone you hire, and have them at least working out of the same playbook.
The better answer (and yes, I'm going to be unashamedly self-promoting here): hire Specht & Co. for an Ultimate Brand Experience.
Introducing the Ultimate Brand Experience
I just talked you through about six different people you're going to need to hire in your business to build a professional and intentional brand ecosystem.
I'm going to be real with you: that is a lot to coordinate and manage.
Think about it. If you interview two or three people for each of those roles, that's like 20 interviews. Then you're coordinating with each of them and making sure they're all coordinating with each other. It's just a lot on top of already running your business, managing your team, and working with your clients.
That's where the Ultimate Brand Experience comes in.
What It Includes
The Ultimate Brand Experience is a six-month done-for-you project designed to build this entire ecosystem in the correct order with all of your people talking to each other, pointed in the same direction.
It's very high-touch and hands-on, with me as your guide and project coordinator, strategically building your entire brand ecosystem with a ton of intentionality, care, and foundation of strategy.
Here's how it works:
We start with a deep brand strategy session (the Stand Out Brand™ Strategy Session). At the end of that, we have your Standout Brand Strategy Guide, which becomes the central playbook for your entire project. Every single decision we make moving forward is made through the lens of your brand strategy.
From there, we bring in:
My trusted contractors for SEO
Copy (optional add-on; you get really killer copy templates as part of the package, or we can do done-for-you copy)
Me and my team for your brand design and website design
Help planning your brand photo shoot with our vetted and trusted photography partners
Social media strategy, all guided by the brand strategy we created
You can see this follows the exact same process and order we've talked about: strategy → SEO and copy → brand design → website design → photography → social media.
Every single piece is connected. It's built with each other piece in mind so we're able to create something really:
Comprehensive
Cohesive
Customized to you
And none of your contractors are working in a silo.
The Benefits
The benefit to you is that:
You're not managing a team of 85,000 contractors
You get to use the ones I've already vetted who have done work for me and my clients and knocked it out of the park every single time
They're not working in a silo
Me and my team are communicating to keep everyone on the same page
I take care of:
Pulling in the right specialists
Coordinating the timelines
Making sure everyone's working out of the same strategy
Acting as your creative director and strategist for your entire brand ecosystem
You're not running into issues of:
Conflicting opinions from service providers
Difficulty scheduling
Duplicated work (where you have your brand strategist doing messaging strategy and your copywriter also doing messaging strategy, and why are you paying two people to do the same thing?)
Telephone game between service providers
Having to explain your brand over and over and over again to each person you hire
Rather than hiring five or six separate contractors, you're getting one cohesive group of contractors who are all working on the same team: your team.
Ongoing Support Through Six Figure Brand Society
That's a six-month process, but support does not end at the end of six months.
You get to stay in the Six Figure Brand Society for 12 months (six months beyond when your project ends). This is where we really get to work hand-in-hand with you to refine, adjust, and answer questions that come up as you start actually using your brand and supporting that ongoing implementation.
One of my big pet peeves in the design industry is when I hear from a client or another service provider: "Well, this person designed my brand and they just gave me a style guide and kind of sent me on my way. I haven't implemented a lot of my new branding because I don't know how to use it. I know what my colors and fonts are but I don't really understand how to put them together."
The Six Figure Brand Society is for that.
You get:
A couple hours a month of done-for-you design support
A lot of access to me and my team to answer questions and help you build upon things
At the end of those 12 months, you will be so confident in using your brand.
This is also important because branding is not something you finish. It's ever-evolving. Likely a year from the completion of your branding project, there are going to be some small tweaks you want to make or things you want to use in a different way than we had intended. That's totally fine and normal.
That's why you get that continued support so you have someone to ask: "Hey Morgan, am I doing this right?" or "What do you think about this?" or "I have this crazy idea." And I'm here for all of it.
Why This Model Works
This model of super high-touch brand design and brand ecosystem building coupled with ongoing support in the Six Figure Brand Society is really awesome because:
It removes decision fatigue. Your input and time investment really comes on the front end with that brand strategy session. After that, you're just reviewing things and giving feedback. I'm the one driving the ship, moving things forward, making sure things are getting done, making a lot of those decisions for you.
It prevents brand breakage. No more everyone working in a silo, pulling you in different directions, forcing you to continue spinning your wheels and never getting traction.
It allows you to focus on running your business instead of managing five or six different creative contractors and logistics and timelines and things you're just not an expert in.
It gives your brand the space and room to grow and evolve without completely unraveling.
The Ultimate Brand Experience is not about doing more. It's about doing things in the right way, in the right order, and with the right people.
Limited Availability + Special Bonus
As you can tell, this is a super high-touch way to work with Specht & Co. As such, we only take on four of these projects every year.
When the four spots for 2026 are gone, they're gone.
Exclusive Bonus for First Two Clients
I also want to formally announce a really special bonus that I'm doing for this package because I just believe in it so much.
I mentioned earlier that brand photography is one of the best ways to really bring your personality to life in your brand and elevate your brand visuals.
For our first two clients who book an Ultimate Brand Experience in 2026, you are getting a full free photo shoot.
I help you plan your brand photo shoot as part of this package. But if you are one of the first two people to book an Ultimate Brand Experience in 2026, you will get a custom brand photo shoot done with the one and only Workplay Branding.
If you're not following them, you should be. They are the best in the business. They will fly a photographer out to wherever you are, or you can take a trip somewhere you'd like to go. I will be in on the planning process and you are going to get photos that will blow your mind.
Investment Details
The investment for the Ultimate Brand Experience is 12 payments of $1,697. There is also a pay-in-full discount, which we can talk about on our brand chat.
Not Ready? That's Okay Too
If you're not ready to hire for some of this stuff or you want to do it yourself, that's totally cool too. I'm here to support you and cheer you on from the sidelines.
Now you know what order to build your brand ecosystem in so it makes the most sense, is the most impactful, and you can stop going back and having to redo things because they don't make sense together.
Final Thoughts
If your brand feels messy, disjointed, like you've outgrown it, like it's been duct-taped together, or you're tired of tinkering with things and nothing makes sense together, it's probably just that all your parts and pieces are disconnected.
And that is something we can fix.
Book a brand chat using the link below to talk through what the Ultimate Brand Experience could look like for you. Feel free to DM me any questions you have about your brand ecosystem on Instagram. I say this every episode, but I really love hearing from you, and these are the conversations I want to have in the DMs.
Strong brands are not built all at once, but they are built intentionally, with one connected layer at a time.
Ready to build a brand ecosystem that actually supports your growth? Book a brand chat to explore the Ultimate Brand Experience and see if it's the right fit for you.
🔗 Links & Resources Mentioned In The Episode:
➡️ Follow me on Instagram @spechtand.co
➡️ Learn more about The Ultimate Brand Experience
➡️ Book Your Stand Out Brand Strategy Session (use code SFBPOD for $100 off)
➡️ Book A Brand Chat
🎧 Listen to episode 48 of The Six Figure Brand Podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and YouTube
