Business mood board

How To Create A Mood Board For Your Business

What is a business mood board?

A mood board is a visual representation of your business. It can be in physical form, or hosted online via a platform such as Pinterest. A business mood board should focus on your ideal customer; it should contain representations of their wants and needs, as well as the things they enjoy or are drawn to. It can contain images, words, even music, and can be as in depth as you’d like to make it.

Why is it useful?

Creating a mood board for your business helps to hone your brand identity, and gives you a focus when creating new work. It’s a simple tool that can be used to communicate your business values, goals and ideal customers to employees and contractors. It can be a source of inspiration, and help you stay on track when it comes to your marketing strategy.

How to create a business mood board

There are four main steps to completing a business mood board. Collect, refine, pause, evaluate.

Collect

The first thing you’ll need to do is to collect your inspiration. When you’ve decided on whether your board will be physical or online, start collecting anything that relates to your business and your ideal customers. This could be words, phrases, colours, photographs – anything at all!

Make sure you spend some time looking in a variety of places for your inspiration. While google images and Pinterest are great, think outside the box too. Is there an online magazine or website that relates to your business? What about forums or networking meetings? Could you find inspiration on other product websites or pages dedicated to tourist attractions?
It’s worth spending a week or so collecting all the inspiration you possibly can. Then it’s time for step two.

Refine

Now you have everything together, it’s time to throw out most of it. We’ve found the best way to do this is rely on your gut instinct. Go through every piece you’ve collected and put it into a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ pile – instantly. If you spend more than 3 seconds looking at a piece, it’s a no.

What this should leave you with is 20-30 pieces that represent your business. If this isn’t the case, repeat this step until you have fewer pieces on your board.

Pause

This is such an important step as it gives you time to reflect, without being overloaded with imagery. Walk away from your business mood board for a week. Don’t look at it, don’t add to it, and don’t think about it if you can help it. This will make the final step much easier.

Evaluate

After a break from your business mood board, you’ll now need to do another cull, this time to get it to 10 pieces or less. First go through every piece with your gut instinct as we did before. Then, with your ideal customer in mind, go through it again. These final pieces should be a good representation of your business and your ideal customer.

Revisit

Make sure you revisit your mood board regularly. Twice a year works for us, but you can choose to come back to it annually or quarterly, depending on how quickly your business is changing. Keeping it up to date will help in all your future work.

Do you need some help getting started with your business mood board? Get in touch and we’ll be happy to talk you through the steps over a cuppa.