I can’t tell you how many agency owners I’ve met who confuse branding with building a website.

They slap together a logo from a trending design, put it on a website and boda bing bota boom, they’ve branded. Or so they think.

Sorry for the bad news, but branding is not a logo. It’s not a website. It’s not your color palette or your font choices. Those are surface-level assets.

Branding runs much deeper. It’s how people feel about you and your company. It’s what they say about your agency when you’re not on the call. And it’s the reason they decide to pay more to work with you rather than shop for the lowest bidder.

Effective branding aligns with your identity, your behavior, your positioning, and your reputation. Academics and entrepreneurs have been telling us this for years. Jeff Bezos famously said, “Your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room.” Marty Neumeier, author of The Brand Gap, defines branding as “a person’s gut feeling about a product, service, or company.” And he’s right…it’s emotional. That “gut feeling” is built slowly and reinforced in everything you do.

None of my agencies are branding agencies. Even so, I recognize the power of branding. We brand through behavior.

Our messaging architecture starts with a bold, long-term vision: To create unlimited opportunities for our clients and team as a $100 million portfolio of agencies. That’s not fluff. I believe it, and I regularly reinforce it to our team. Everything we do supports that goal.

Our mission defines the outcome: To provide world-class digital marketing that allows our clients to generate more revenue, employ more people, and serve more customers.

We exhibit the vision and mission through our core values: Transparency, Quality, Urgency, Winning, and Passion.

These aren’t just words on a wall. We use them to hire, promote, fire, and operate.

One behavior we’ve created to support our brand is the kudos system, where employees award points (kudos) to other team members based on core values. Here’s a recent example from Nina, “+10 to Everett and Allison for quickly checking on a client's ad account and making the appropriate changes. #urgency #quality” The top kudo-getter for the month receives a cash bonus. Every quarter, we present glass awards to the employee who best embodies each of our values.

That’s branding. That’s how you imprint the identity of your agency into your team and your clients. The logo is just the stamp. An effective brand is built on how you behave when no one’s watching.

In my mastermind, we teach agency owners how to build genuine brands, not just visually appealing websites. Brands that scale. Brands that create loyalty. Brands that win.

If you’re serious about growing a profitable agency that gives you more time, freedom, and authority, then you need more than Canva and WordPress. You need a roadmap, a strategy, and a mentor.

~ Erik

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