Is it time for a wedding business rebrand? With Katie Lake

Let's get going with today's episode. Today I'm chatting with Katie Lake, owner of Studio Lago Design. Having worked in the wedding industry for eight years, her world shifted entirely during the pandemic. Katie now provides creative design solutions for other businesses, offering both branding and web design services. Her goal is to help business owners revamp their online presence and give them the confidence they need to thrive and to grow. Katie, welcome to the podcast.

I've always been a designer and And actually it just kind of came to me this idea that I would set up a business helping other, I think in, in the, in the beginning it was other wedding professionals and helping them to, you know, recreate their branding and update their websites because I started doing that during the pandemic for myself and it's something I've always done. And so I went through a rebrand and, created a new website for my own business. So that was Malarkey Cakes at the time.

And had a few people comment and say, Oh, who did your branding and website? And I was like, actually, actually it was me. And, you know, I had a few people saying, would you do the same for me? And so it just kind of grew organically from there. And I thought, you know what? I've got nothing to lose. Let's launch forward with this. And it's just become a really big passion because I now get to help people who are running businesses.

Just like the one I, I've been running with Malarkey Cakes and, you know, helping them with the same kind of issues, the same kind of problems that I was having. So I can really relate to them, relate to, you know, people in the wedding world, small business owners, and all of the issues that they face with, with branding, websites, and, you know, how to stand out online and get visible. So, yeah, that was the kind of the transition between. from one to the other.

Yeah. And now, you know, I absolutely love what I do. It's, it's so nice to be serving people that are so similar to me and kind of helping them essentially like fall back in love with their businesses. So yeah, that's kind of how it went.

So the two businesses work, they work alongside each other quite well. So malarkey cakes is still very much in operation, but on a smaller scale than it was before. Yeah.

So they're a service based business owner, but equally, they're ready to kind of take their business to a new level to elevate things to really, you know, get Get themselves out there, get visible online. So, I help a lot of coaches, I've helped educators, all kinds of service based business owners now.

But I'm lucky and I'm really happy to say that I do also help wedding professionals because I love that world and I love still having, you know, a part of me still very much involved in that world.

And so, if you really want a website... that really works for your ideal clients, it's got to be bespoke, it's got to be, it's got to really talk to that person to a certain level. And so, I do see lots of websites that are kind of, you know, they can feel like they're just sort of out of the box, and not particularly bespoke, and not particularly tailored to speaking to that ideal client. Perhaps they're not put together strategically enough, I would say, in that.

They don't look at how the customer journey would work through the website. So I create all of my websites strategically which would mean that I plan out or help my clients to plan out customer journeys through the website to think about the best way that you can guide people on your website to your goals. So say if you're a business. a service based business owner.

For example, if you're a wedding professional, it's highly likely that the biggest goal for the website is for people to get in touch with you. So you need to make that as simple and as easy and quick for people to do as possible. So we see a lot of websites that, that actually you would land on on the website and it's not entirely clear, not only what you do, but also. What to do next and how to get in touch with you.

So I'd say, yes, a lot of websites are created possibly for the aesthetic rather than the strategy. But a website that can really work for your business with a strategy can make such a huge difference.

And then I click through to their website and it's like, What happened to this? Like what, what happened to this? What should we be doing to make sure that we keep our website up to date and looking on brand?

What are the reasons behind that? And I think there can be so many reasons, you know, if you've built your own website. Maybe you found it hard, maybe you found it laborious, it took you months, and then the last thing you want to do is go and log into your website and make changes. Or, you know, perhaps you taught yourself how to do all of it, and it's been a year, and...

You can't remember and you haven't got time to go back in, log back into the website and make those changes because you're going to have to re learn everything all over again. So, there are different ways, I think, with this and I think it's so important to think about your online presence as kind of one entity.

So rather than having your Instagram over here, your website over here, I always say to people, It's so important to have your website as the center of what you do in your business, rather than a lot of people put too much emphasis, I think, on Instagram. And I always say this to people because, you know, at any, at any time, Facebook, Instagram could come along, just pull the rug from underneath you and change everything.

So see your, your website as the biggest asset that you actually have in your business. And I'd recommend even just having a really simple strategy for updating your website, whether that's I don't know, setting a reminder once a month to log in and make any changes or, you know, with my clients, I also, if they work with me, they get like half an hour, it's even half an hour a month with me.

I check in with them and I literally say to them, right, any content that you want me to add to your website this month. So I keep them. Accountable to it. They have to do it.

So that's one way of looking at it But I think it's essentially a seeing kind of your website and your instagram as an interlinked thing Therefore you shouldn't really have one without the other so yeah I'm kind of on a bit of a campaign to help people to be more aware of the importance of updating their websites and I'm a firm believer that You know, I, I build websites that give my clients access to edit them themselves and to empower them to do that.

I hand over with tutorial videos, and I make sure, you know, that, you know, they've logged in, they've watched them, and they've made sure that they can, they can do things themselves on their site, because I think that's also really, really important. So, I think it's about empowering, and I think it's about having a really simple strategy. to updating the site frequently.

So if, if you haven't already, or if you haven't recently, I highly recommend reviewing and reviewing again who your ideal client is. And how they would view your website. So, that includes things like language, so the copy that you use on your site. All the way down to how it works and those sides of things. But also one thing that would be really, really good. And I do this in my business. I am literally do market research calls. So I speak to.

previous clients who I've had a great time working with but I also speak to people in my audience and I say to them would you mind hopping on a 15 minute call with me and answering some questions and what you could do is ask people to go through your website. And give, you know, give them, give you your, their honest opinion on how things work. Because sometimes when you're working on your own website, your own marketing, you can't see the wood for the trees.

And so it's really, really good just to have that outsider perspective. You know, and they might even pick you up on, Oh, this button's not working or this link's not working. So it's just super helpful to incrementally from time to time to be doing an activity like that.

Whereas actually if we just tell someone I went on your website and the button didn't work, then they can fix it. But we're all too scared to tell each other anything vaguely critical. So if you're listening to this and people share their websites, go and look at their websites and if you find something that's wrong, tell them it's wrong. Is there a way on your website that you can find out whether the buttons are.

working rather than just going through every page and clicking on all the buttons.

You can run your site through a kind of like user experience checker and you can, you can check for all of these things. But I would say it's important to kind of have a real human doing stuff on the site as well. Because actually... You know, with SEO, one of the most important things now to Google and how it's ranking sites is all about user experience. It's all about, like, websites being human and speaking as a human and being relatable and being easy to navigate.

So there's nothing quite like having a real human going through it and just checking it out.

So how do we know as wedding business owners when it's time for us to dive in and go for a rebrand or go for a website change? How do we know that we need to evolve in that direction?

But actually, the process of working on branding and certainly how I work with branding is a lot more strategic. So actually what we do is start right from the beginning and we really dig deep on what the business goals, values and vision are first before we even look at the visuals. So we look at going through, I hopefully essentially help my clients fall back in love with their business and remember why they're doing things in the first place. So, you know, it might not need. a new logo.

It might not need a new bunch of colors and that sort of things. You might need to rediscover what's going on with your business and remember what those values are. Remember what the reason why you started your business in the first place and if those things are no longer working for you, then reassess them. And then if you kind of look at the visual brand and you go, hey, do you know what those values and that brand no longer align, then perhaps it's time for, it could even be a brand refresh.

It could be sort of not completely overhauling the brand, but some aspects of it. But as I said before, it's so important just to be thinking of it from an ideal client point of view. So What kind of thing will they want to see and what kind of thing will they be attracted to? So I think it's, it's a, it's a, sort of an easy go to if you like. Like, oh, it, you know, it must be the visual brand or the website that need updating.

But often, it's about rediscovering... the very basics of the business and making sure that all parts of it are then aligned as well.

So if people are doing that exercise at the end of this year and they're thinking, okay, I can see that my brand isn't quite aligning anymore with my values. Do you have any quick fixes that they can do to try and uplevel their brand, get it back to where they want to be?

And you can look at what you're doing visually and perhaps think, well, What, what aspects of what I've got here are working, what perhaps are not. There are really simple things that you can do. You can kind of go back and create a mood board, perhaps. Mood boards, I create mood boards with every single project that I create. And sometimes just going, and don't go too far down a Pinterest hole here. Big tip. So do that.

But simply just go and kind of research visuals and really think about the kind of the visuals that your ideal client would potentially want to see. Really get inside their heads as much as you can and then look at what you have and see if those two things are aligned or if the mood board kind of then leads you on to Something different in terms of the brand

You can do some things to bring the website to life by adding, you know, more kind of. stylized Aspects to the website and there are loads and loads of amazing templates out there that you can use that are already You know, they look incredible.

And all you need to do is then Your spin on them and your brand and your copy, but you can also go beyond that and really think about you know making sure you Consider what your business needs really are and make sure you consider that Navigational journey of your ideal clients through your site as well but I would say in general some top tips for your website are You know, sometimes a lot of people don't realize the importance of a homepage, so your homepage is probably one

of the most important pages of your site, so I want to give you some homepage tips. So, think about your homepage, people land probably the first Place they land on your site will be your home page and that top section of your site is called your home page hero section And it essentially is called that because it is designed to grab people's attention super quickly pull them in and And then tell them to take action.

So, in that section, you really need to concisely, and clearly say exactly who you are, what you do, and who you do it for. And that can be in the form of a header, a little bit of text, and a call to action. And that call to action should consider your... Overall website goal for, as I said, for a service based business, that is probably to get in touch with you or to go via your services to get in touch with you. And it also includes some super on brand visuals there as well.

So if you've got some epic visuals from weddings you've done to make sure that that top section of your site is. It's like super, super on brand and really working hard to pull people in because people also, they make a decision to stay or leave your website super, super quickly. We're talking within like 2. 6 seconds or something like that is the current stat. So this is a really important part of the site to get really right, completely right.

And then I would always though make sure that there is another opportunity for them to get in touch with you, whether that is. Right at the bottom of the page or potentially in your footer. Make sure that there is always an opportunity on screen for people to get in touch with you. You can also have on a website, you can have a header navigation that Kind of scrolls down with you. Now that's one option. There are lots of people that love that, other people that don't.

But you can also have side buttons and things that mean that you've always got a contact button on the screen. So another tip as well is to make sure that you don't have any website dead ends. So what I mean is once they get to the bottom of the page, there then needs to be something for them to do. So if they run out of things to do and you don't tell people what to do, there's every chance that they will get bored, get distracted by their sandwich or whatever and leave.

So you've got to make sure that there's always an opportunity for them to do something, to take an action.

So obviously you have your own business, but if you were to give an outside perspective and someone was coming to you with the same questions. What would you suggest to them? How would you help them go about finding the right person with the right prices for their situation?

It's not always about the kind of the style of websites they, they create. It's also, I would say, it's important that they're actually considering you as a business and that, you know, I think there are a lot of website designers out there who will just go and throw together a website for you in a couple of weeks. And I think that works to a point.

But I would say... to have a, you know, a really successful website that really reflects your business vision and your goals and your, your ideal clients, et cetera. It's so, so important to look for someone who considers strategy in what they do as well. But it's also important to consider what stage you're at in your business, because obviously that affects, you know, how much budget you're going to have.

How much you're going to be able to spend and and often a lot of website designers will have different packages that cater to those different things as well So for example, they might have an entry level where it might just be the standard sort of four or five page website That will help you get online versus It's a kind of all singing, all dancing, 15 page website, which is for someone who's already online.

They've already got all of that content, but it needs to be recreated in a bigger website essentially. So questions to ask a potential web designer would be things like, have you worked with business owners like me before? And make sure you can find evidence of that and then yeah, just make sure that you kind of.

Get each other, have a call with them, and don't be afraid to ask them questions about your specific business and how they think they can really, you know, tailor their service to help your business.

And now it's making a lot of sense to me. So obviously when you work running your own business, you wear a lot of hats. And that's, it's tricky, it's tricky to be wearing all of those hats, but it's also so important to kind of eject yourself from that personal, Oh, this business is me and kind of really see it from an outsider perspective and be that, you know, CEO or big boss or whatever you want to call it and be really running your business as a business.

So one thing I really learn, and I think. I would say to myself at the beginning of this business would be Okay You're actually winging it here. You're winging it here in terms of If you get to the end of the year and you don't know how to set out your goals for next year or they feel a bit arbitrary it's because you don't have a plan on how to execute them, how to actually make them happen.

So, and I'm going through this business, this process again with my business at the moment which is literally going back to basics. reframing everything and creating an actual business strategy so that I feel more confident and more, I feel more clarity around what I'm doing rather than say, getting to a Monday morning going, Oh my God, I don't know what I'm posting on social media. I don't know what I'm doing in any.

given day, week, month, and I don't know how to project how much I'm gonna make next year, next month, et cetera. So, it's kind of about seeing things from a CEO point of view, rather than, Oh, I've got some inquiries through, thank God for that. It's not the winging it side of things, I actually feel like now I'm running a proper business, rather than just waiting for business to come to me, if that makes sense. So that's been a massive learning curve for me.