Ep. 78 The Branding Advice I Keep Repeating Like a Broken Record
Last month I celebrated my birthday by giving away free brand reviews. My original goal was to do 32 of them since I was turning 32, but you all had other plans. I ended up reviewing 44 brands in a single week: 44 websites, 44 sets of social media accounts, 44 businesses, and 44 honest Loom videos with real feedback.
About halfway through, I started noticing something. Every business was different. Different industries, different styles, different offers. But the problems and frustrations everyone was experiencing were almost identical across the board.
After completing all 44 reviews (somewhere between 15 and 20 hours of work total), I went back through every Loom I recorded and pulled out the patterns. What I found boiled down to a handful of themes that I was repeating over and over again. This post is those lessons, why they matter, and what to do about them.
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1. Accessibility Is A Serious Issue
Accessibility was the single most common issue I flagged, and I flagged it on 36 out of 44 websites.
I do these reviews on a 27-inch iMac screen. I have 20/20 vision. If I am struggling to read your text because it is too small, you have a serious problem. A lot of your website visitors do not have perfect vision, and people with visual impairments still want to spend money with you. If you make it too hard for them to consume your content, they will go find the next person who makes it easy.
There are formal standards called the WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) that cover things like font size, color contrast, and metadata for screen readers. You do not need to become an accessibility expert overnight, but the basics matter: make your fonts bigger, make sure there is enough contrast between your text and background, and add alt text to your images.
My rule of thumb: never go below 14 point for body copy, and your headings and subheadlines should be significantly larger than that. And I want to be clear about something: a beautiful website that people cannot read is not an effective website. Your website exists to communicate. We are not making art. We are selling services. People need to be able to read your words to buy from you.
2. Put Your Pricing on Your Website
I know all the reasons people do not want to do this. Custom quotes, range of project scope, not wanting to scare people off. I hear you. But here is the most striking data point I gathered from all 44 reviews:
Every single person who told me they were struggling to get leads from their website, or struggling to close the leads they did get, had no pricing information anywhere on their site. One hundred percent of them.
That is not a coincidence.
When someone comes to your website wanting to hire you, they need to know if they can afford you. They do not need the exact number. But if their budget is $500 and your packages start at $5,000, they need to know that before they fill out your contact form and get on a call with you. Wasting their time and yours does not serve anyone.
A starting-at price or a range is enough. Something. Pricing transparency is not just about numbers. It is about building trust and helping people quickly self-qualify. When you have nothing on your website, people assume the worst and move on.
3. A Linktree Is Not a Website
A concerning number of people submitted a Linktree, a Notion page, a Substack, a Canva site, or just a booking link as their website. In a few cases, there was nothing at all beyond social media.
You can build a business without a real website. I have seen it done. But a legitimate website hosted on a domain that you own should be in your top three priorities in your first year of business, and here is why.
Every time someone clicks your Linktree or your Notion page, you are giving SEO value to Linktree and Notion. Three years of sending people to those platforms means three years of building their SEO authority instead of yours. Meanwhile, you are starting from zero whenever you eventually build your own site.
You are also at the mercy of those platforms entirely. They are your landlord. They can have outages, change their terms, raise their prices, or go out of business. A website you own cannot be taken from you.
And just to flag one specific thing: Substack's terms of service explicitly state that you will not use Substack to sell paid products. If you are running your business through Substack, that is a risk worth knowing about.
You do not need to build an elaborate, expensive website to start. One single landing page on a domain you own is enough to get started and to start building SEO value from day one.
4. We Need to See Your Face
A lot of the websites I reviewed had no photos of the business owner, or had one photo used in every single place. This is a trust problem.
The "people hire people" idea is not just a cliche. Your audience is not booking you because of your logo or your stock photography. They are booking you because they feel like they know you well enough to trust you with their money and their business. That trust requires seeing your face, hearing your voice, getting a sense of your personality.
This does not mean you need to become a full-time influencer. You do not need to do daily stories or dance on TikTok. But you do need to show up in a way that gives your people an actual human to connect with. That might be showing up more on video, getting brand photos taken, or being more candid in the content you are already creating. Start where you are and build from there.
I understand this can feel vulnerable. It has been a journey for me too. But this is one of those areas where you have to do the uncomfortable thing in order to build the connection that leads to bookings.
5. "I Hate Social Media" Is Not a Marketing Strategy
About a quarter of the people I reviewed either did not share social media links because they were not using any platforms, or preemptively apologized for how inactive and terrible their accounts were before I even looked.
I completely understand not loving social media. I have a love-hate relationship with it myself. And you absolutely can build a successful online business without Instagram or TikTok or Threads.
The problem is that most of the people who said they hated social media were also struggling to book clients, and could not tell me what they were doing to market their business instead. That is the issue. It is not that you are on the wrong platform. It is that you have not replaced it with anything.
You do not need to be everywhere. You need to be somewhere, consistently. Here are some options that are not Instagram:
SEO and blogging
A podcast
Pinterest
LinkedIn
Dedicated relationship-building and networking
A referral program
Speaking in other people's communities and memberships
Building your email list
YouTube
Pick one or two that you can actually tolerate and put your effort there. You cannot write off every marketing channel and then be frustrated that no one can find you.
6. The DIY Trap Is Keeping You Stuck
A recurring theme across many reviews was some version of: I know my brand needs work but I do not have the time to fix it myself and I do not have the budget to hire someone.
I have a lot of empathy for this. I have been there with other parts of my business. But at some point, something has to give.
If you are going to take your brand to the next level, you have to invest either time or money. You can DIY updates to your brand, which is very doable and I have resources to help with that. Or you can invest in hiring someone to do it for you. What you cannot do is keep deferring the decision indefinitely and expect things to change.
Indecision has a cost, even when it does not feel like it. Every month you tell yourself "I'll do it later" is a month of clients not booking, leads not converting, and revenue staying flat. If you are not ready to act right now, that is okay. But give "later" a specific date. I am going to address this in Q3. I am going to work on this when the kids go back to school. A deadline makes it real. An open-ended "someday" keeps you exactly where you are.
7. The Most Polished Brands Were Not the Highest-Earning Ones
This one surprised some people when I started sharing it, but it did not surprise me at all.
Several of the most visually polished, clearly professionally designed brands I reviewed were also the ones whose owners told me they were struggling to book clients, not connecting with their audience, and unsure what they were doing wrong.
Meanwhile, some of the businesses I reviewed that looked a little scrappier, a little more DIY, were performing much better. They were booked. They had a clear ideal client. Their messaging was sharp. Their positioning was specific.
The difference was not the visual design. It was authority, messaging, trust, and differentiation.
To be clear: the scrappier brands still met a baseline of professional and readable. They were not a mess. But they were not winning on aesthetics. They were winning on clarity and connection.
A beautiful brand without strategy is still a weak brand. A strong strategy can carry a mediocre visual brand further than a stunning brand with no substance underneath it.
8. AI-Built Websites Are Forgettable
I reviewed six to eight websites that were clearly built by AI. And I will tell you honestly: I do not remember a single one of them.
They were clean and readable. They were technically fine. But they were emotionally flat, generic, completely lacking in personality, and entirely interchangeable with each other. I could have shuffled all the AI websites around, assigned them to different businesses, and not known the difference.
That is a problem. If someone leaves your website and cannot remember your name or what you do ten minutes later, your website is not doing its job.
AI can build you a functional, reasonably attractive website. It cannot infuse your personality, your spiciness, your opinions, or the specific things that make you memorable. If you are going to use AI to build or update your website, here are three things that will help:
Give it reference websites you actually like, so it has something specific to draw from rather than generating the most average possible result. Put real photos of yourself on the website. Almost every AI-built site I reviewed had either no photos or a single image of the owner. And give it examples of your actual voice, whether that is voice notes, transcripts from client calls, or social media content that has performed well. Your personality has to get into the website somehow, and you have to give it that information.
An AI-built website is better than no website. But please do the work to make it feel like you.
9. Professional Does Not Mean Memorable
A recurring struggle I heard was people feeling caught between wanting to sound professional so clients take them seriously, and wanting their actual personality to come through so people connect with them.
My advice in almost every case: let go of the professional standard.
If you are an attorney or a therapist or a physician, yes, there is some baseline professionalism that matters. But for most online service providers, nobody is looking for formal and polished. They are looking for someone they like, someone they trust, and someone they can imagine working with. The best way to create that is to let your actual self come through in your brand, your website, your content, and your marketing.
The brands that stood out the most across all 44 reviews were not the most professional. They were the most human: the most specific, the most unapologetically themselves. The ones with the purple hair and the strong opinions and the cat in the background of every video.
When you try so hard to sound professional, you remove the things that make you memorable. Your stories, your quirks, your perspective, your weird little enthusiasms. Those are the things that stick. Those are the things that make someone call their friend and say, you need to work with this person.
You are your own differentiator. That is not a thing to hide. It is a thing to lean into.
10. Every Single Person Had the Same Core Frustration
I included a question on the brand review form asking what people were most frustrated with around their brand. Every single person said some version of the same thing: I am not sure if my brand accurately represents who I am, the level of service I provide, and the people I am trying to reach.
If you are feeling this way, you are not alone. So is everyone.
And here is the important part: this is fixable. The fix is brand strategy.
When your brand does not feel like an accurate representation of you, it is usually because your purpose, mission, vision, and values have not been clearly defined, so they cannot come through in your messaging or your visuals. When your brand does not reflect your expertise, it is usually because you have not articulated your differentiator or done the competitive research to understand what actually makes you stand out. When your brand is not connecting with the right people, it is almost always because you have not done the ideal client research to understand who they are, what they need to hear, and how to reach them.
All of this is what brand strategy addresses. It is not about your logo. It is about clarity, cohesion, differentiation, and conversion. Making it easy for the right people to understand you, trust you, remember you, and hire you.
After 44 reviews and nearly 20 hours digging into everyone's brands, I am more convinced than ever that almost every branding problem can be traced back to one of those four things. And none of them are solved by obsessing over your logo.
I included a question on the brand review form asking what people were most frustrated with around their brand. Every single person said some version of the same thing: I am not sure if my brand accurately represents who I am, the level of service I provide, and the people I am trying to reach.
If you are feeling this way, you are not alone. So is everyone.
And here is the important part: this is fixable. The fix is brand strategy.
When your brand does not feel like an accurate representation of you, it is usually because your purpose, mission, vision, and values have not been clearly defined, so they cannot come through in your messaging or your visuals. When your brand does not reflect your expertise, it is usually because you have not articulated your differentiator or done the competitive research to understand what actually makes you stand out. When your brand is not connecting with the right people, it is almost always because you have not done the ideal client research to understand who they are, what they need to hear, and how to reach them.
All of this is what brand strategy addresses. It is not about your logo. It is about clarity, cohesion, differentiation, and conversion. Making it easy for the right people to understand you, trust you, remember you, and hire you.
After 44 reviews and nearly 20 hours digging into everyone's brands, I am more convinced than ever that almost every branding problem can be traced back to one of those four things. And none of them are solved by obsessing over your logo.
🔗 Links & Resources Mentioned In The Episode:
➡️ Follow me on Instagram @spechtand.co
➡️ Book Your Stand Out Brand Strategy Session (use code SFBPOD for $100 off)
➡️ Book A Brand Chat
🎧 Listen to episode 78 of The Six Figure Brand Podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and YouTube
