In the marketing and sales world, your brand is your power… it’s more than your logo or image, or recognising your company name, but rather a collective experience and overall perception of your company, its products and services. When you get to the point where you have brand awareness, and coupled with this, brand loyalty, then you make that important crossover where you don’t have to work as hard to attract customers, but instead have customers attracted to, and approaching you! This should be your ultimate goal in all your strategy and marketing endeavours.
This article highlights four key aspects you should bear in mind as you build your company, or personal brand:
1) Decide on the first, or most important ‘thing’ you want to be recognised for. You may believe, or even know that you or your company does a number of things well, but when establishing a brand, promoting a number of strengths gives the impression of you being a ‘jack-of-all-trades,’ but ‘master-of-none.’ This may be the furthest thing from the truth, but particularly when developing brand identity, perception is everything. It is far better to focus on one message, and when you attract clients in on that message, you can make them aware of the rest of your offer. Develop one strand, expand to others.
2) Be consistent. This really is key. Maintain consistency with your offer, your image, your USP, your tone and your approach. Everything that you ‘put out there’ should have the same feel, and give the same message. This is essential for brand recognition, and allowing for brand awareness.
3) Keep up to date with what’s relevant, and ensure that this translates across through your message. It’s of utmost importance that you know your audience, recognise what it is that’s important to them, and use these insights to ‘speak’ in a way and language that best connects with them. Your communications should always have relevance to your audience in mind.
4) Make your offer a motivational one. You want to gain attention, be memorable, and you want interest to convert to engagement and ultimately sales. In order to do this, your offer and message should be clear, relevant to your brand and the audience, and needs to move your prospects to action, motivating them by giving them a reason to engage with you, your product or service, talk and think about it, (this is when you know you’re getting brand recognition and loyalty), and buy!
Whenever a prospective client comes into contact with your brand, they will on some level acknowledge an experience of your brand. These experiences, however subtle or stark, will fall somewhere on the spectrum between completely positive and completely negative, and will add to their perception of your brand. These experiences and perceptions will be brought to the forefront of their mind, when they next encounter your brand, irrespective of whether this is through marketing, a conversation or when the time has come to make a purchasing decision. Bear this in mind when working on every aspect of your branding, marketing and sales pitch, all of which are closely aligned… think of how it is that you want your brand to be remembered and thought of when a prospect is considering a purchase, and then work to consistently create and maintain the relevant messages, experiences and perception.
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