Life Coach Beth

When Beth approached me for help, her existing business brand The Career Stylist was in the strongest position it had been in two years. She was fortunate to have an exceptionally strong organic SEO benefit, appearing high for the keywords ‘life coach London’ and ‘career coach London’. Additionally, Beth received lots of positive feedback about this brand: that her clients related to the down to earth tone and found Beth herself inspirational.

Beth found this fulfilling; however, she knew she wanted to be running her business on a wider level: to inspire women to change their outlook to their whole life, not just their career. Beyond that Beth wanted to change the business model – rather than depend on her for 1-to-1 sessions, she wanted to grow the business online to reach women globally and create a community following. 

Beth was unsure how to take the next step without compromising everything she had worked so hard on.

DISCOVERY

In order to help Beth create a strong business brand it was essential we started by assessing the strengths of her existing brand.

We had several strategic consultations in which we reviewed The Career Stylist’s website and business model, then assessed similar businesses, and influences for the brand.

“It gave me clarity on my brand and who I’m speaking to.”
Beth Reacher

One of the core aspects of the new brand would be educating people about the mindset shift that occurs when we open up to a more spiritual way of being in the world. We discussed what this mindset involved and how it should be presented. Based on her target audience of ambitious urban women in their 30’s we faced one big challenge: the Beth Reacher brand should at all times remain accessible and down to earth; even if the subject being communicated was very abstract or spiritual. 

The new brand needed to be both accessible and inspiring

Since the core audience for both was so similar, we considered merging The Career Stylist with the new brand, but ultimately it was essential Beth was positioned as a thought leader, so we decided to treat the brands separately. 

POSITIONING

We devised a way that Beth’s marketing could maintain The Career Stylist and also allow her to grow her personal brand, Bethreacher.com. This involved creating a simple brand hierarchy where BethReacher.com would be seen as the main/larger brand and The Career Stylist as a more targeted community for women wanting to start their own business.

We made a change to the existing logo for The Career Stylist, a small change with high impact: by putting ‘with Beth Reacher’ beneath the logo new visitors will become familiar with Beth’s name and the position of The Career Stylist as a brand within Beth’s wider portfolio is clear.

VISUALISING

To help visualize the brand we created a moodboard and Beth had a professional photo shoot to put herself at the centre of the new brand image.

We devised several ways to use the success and popularity to support and leverage BethReacher.com, this included visual ‘signposting’: simple adverts that would feature on The Career Stylist and attract people to the message for the wider brand, Beth Reacher; and ads that would appear on Bethreacher.com that would make people aware that a more specific website for career needs existed.  

TAGLINE AND TONE OF VOICE

From the brand philosophy ‘Be free to be who you really are, live your inspiring life’ we brainstormed taglines and came up with the options ‘Be free’ and ‘Love life’.

Beth decided to go ahead with a simpler tagline: ‘Love life’.

We decided that the look of the brand would be premium but very personal and warm, conveying lots of Beth’s personality. In line with this we worked on several writing exercises to create a tone of voice guide.

LOGOTYPE

With a name, tagline and framework ready for the brand, we began creating a look and feel. 

The look needed to be aspirational, elegant and contemporary to appeal to the target audience of urban, driven women aged 25-35.

WEBSITE

We worked with Lex at Girl & Boy Studio to create a visually engaging responsive site.

Attention was given especially to a section called The Letter - an introduction to Beth’s key philosophies, which would later become a book.

RESULT

BethReacher.com launched on February 1st 2014 to a great response. She has successfully built up a strong social media following for her new brand (over 3,000 Facebook fans and 6,000 Twitter followers). 

As a result of clearly defining her audience and her content, she has succeeded in creating a high engagement audience for the non-career focused posts, which had sometimes disengaged her previous brand audience. 

With both brands now distinct from one another, Beth is achieving success in both areas, in early stages of discussing a publishing contract for BethReacher.com and winner of Cosmopolitan's Career Blog of the Year 2014 for The Career Stylist. 

2018 Update: After 8 successful years as a life coach, Beth has since decided to take a break from coaching following the birth of her two sons.