The Design Business Show 121: The Importance of Foundation in Brand Development with Nita Scruggs

Director : Melissa Burkheimer | November 19, 2020
Check out episode 121 of The Design Business Show with Nita Scruggs to learn about the foundational work needed to create a brand!

Nita Scruggs is a Brand and Marketing Strategist who partners with CEOs, executives, and solopreneurs to grow their personal and professional brands.

With 6 years of experience in design and marketing for established brands and startups, Nita knows what truly drives conversions and sold-out launches.

Nita has landed coverage in print, acquired for in-person business presentations, and has solidified her knowledge in brand design by working with well established online business professionals. In addition to her extensive design and marketing experience, she is also a trained Set Up for Success online business consultant.

Here’s what we covered on the episode:

  • How Nita is in my Facebook group for designers and how I asked her if she’d be interested in coming on the podcast to talk about building a cohesive brand and the importance of design consistency
  • Nita shares how she got into network marketing as a stay-at-home mom and realized she would have to make herself stand out in an industry where everyone looks the same, which led to her discovery of branding
  • What branding means to Nita: being unique and embracing those qualities about yourself that other people can resonate with and tapping into who you want within your space
  • The story of how Nita learned to create her own WordPress blog from one YouTube video
  • How people started noticing her blog which led her to create brands for other people, and then she transitioned her into becoming the branding guru she is today
  • How Nita’s creativity, connecting with clients and getting to bring their vision to life really drove her to continue to learn and contribute to someone else’s vision because she knew what having a vision felt like
  • Nita’s first website project she tried to avoid because she was terrified about doing websites for other people, but eventually accepted it
  • How through that project she learned as she went, and the client ended up loving it and they are still connected today
  • After Nita’s first project she worked on a design campaign for a county council member, which was a great experience for her because she didn’t know a lot about local politics at the time
  • How working with this local politician opened up the local area as an option for Nita, which she had never considered before and how it also led to her working with the senator
  • The specifics of what Nita did for the local politician’s campaign, like helping her with visuals, create a brand identity that matched her messaging, and everything for print collateral
  • A pattern Nita started noticing was that people wanted a cute brand, but had no foundation
  • How that pushed her to learn more about branding beyond a logo and color pallet to really help the people she was working with
  • One element most people are missing when it comes to their own brand Nita says is owning who you are, who you want to work with and the type of clientele you want to maintain
  • Nita explains that many women in design, and business in general tend to go towards what they think everyone else needs and forget about what they want or need
  • How people try to do something quickly because they see others having success with it but forget to evaluate their own personal situation to see how they can have business flow with their personal life
  • Nita talks about how she has found harmony between her work and personal life during 2020 and has let go of the need for perfection while still being able to show up and deliver the way she wants to while being able to care for herself
  • How Nita balances being a mom and running a business from home and shares “jobs” she lets her younger daughter help with
  • Nita has always wanted to help people with the foundation of their branding outside of the design, which she had already been doing but was not getting paid for it, so she decided to transition into consulting
  • Nita’s new business model where she’s able to help people build their brand and get the foundation set up, like who you serve, how you want to serve, what your business model is, creating a signature offer, and more
  • After doing the foundational work with clients, Nita does design work, and even offers ongoing coaching
  • One of Nita’s offers is 6 weeks long and her ongoing coaching is for 10 months, which is a maintenance coaching and ongoing support from the initial 6 weeks
  • Nita shares that she does 10 months of coaching because it’s easy for people to fall off without that ongoing support
  • Where Nita gets most of her clients is from referrals and Instagram and shares how she likes Instagram because she feels that it’s easier to make connections and conversions
  • What Nita does specifically on Instagram includes sharing her brand pillars, talking about her process, standing firm on her values and what she believes branding is, educating and a lot of motivation
  • Nita discusses the strategy behind her posts, the time of day she posts and how she connects her posts to her audience
  • Nita shares that creating a polished presence on Instagram has to do with sticking to your brand elements and standards and shares that she’s only changed hers once
  • Nita likes to create templates to drop content into and explains that she likes to content plan but isn’t so strict on it, some days she’ll plan it and other days she’ll create the day of
  • When figuring out your service, Nita says it’s best to map out your skill set, where you see the most results and what brings you the most fulfillment and shares an example of a client who switched things up because she found her passion and what fulfilled her
  • When people think about rebranding, Nita says it’s amazing how many people go straight to the visuals instead of going back to the foundation of their business and says that the other elements won’t matter unless you know your foundation
  • Connect with Nita on Instagram, her website, or Facebook

Links mentioned:

Connect with Nita on Instagram 

Nita’s Website 

Connect with Nita on Facebook 

 

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