Does this sound familiar…

You have an amazing service to offer your clients but for some reason they can’t see the value in it. You know your website and branding are a bit dated, so you start looking through creative marketplaces for templates to give your brand a facelift.

After hours of price shopping and comparing, you think you’ve found the perfect match — the design is modern, vibrant, and professional but still exciting. You checkout and download your files, and spend a few hours installing, updating, and fine-tuning the design to your liking.

You save and publish, both excited and relieved that you’ve found the solution to your dwindling supply of leads. You announce your “brand refresh” on all of you social media accounts, waiting for the inquiries to roll in. And…

Crickets.

Not a single new lead. Now you’re back at square one a week and several hundred dollars poorer still no closer to what went wrong in the first place.

What happened?

If this sounds familiar to you it’s because design templates are not the solution to brand strategy problems. While they may be cheap and beautiful, they’re not designed with your specific audience and personality in mind.

Putting on a professional and modern appearance is important but if it doesn’t fit your audience it can actually push you further away from them. Imagine showing up to friend’s beach barbecue in an Armani suit — beautiful but out of place.

You’ve got the right idea — updating your branding is an important step in attracting more customers. The next step is figuring out how — not just new branding, but branding that’s tailor-made to resonate with your specific customers.