Branding. What Are You Selling And Why Would I Buy From You?
Your key function as a business owner is to problem solve. Your brand is your shop window. It sets up the expectations of potential clients or customers. It’s the old adage ‘First impressions are lasting’ At a glance you branding needs to convince that person to delve deeper. You literally have three seconds to make people stay, or loose them.
As you work through the branding process, knowing, or finding out which markets you want to serve is key. It is critical to your branding success. By defining your markets, your brand can better appeal to and serve your markets’ needs, whether generally or specifically. You need to know, broadly speaking who are your potential clients / customers, then you need to narrow it down to who specifically. So for example, my client is a vegan samoosa maker, broadly speaking she’s appealing to people who love samoosas. Specifically she is appealing to VEGAN samoosa lovers. So her brand needs to showcase, one, that she’s selling samoosas, but, specifically that they are vegan. That way that vegan samoosa lover will know that her business is the one to choose.
Its a good idea to know where you will be offering your service and investigating the relevant norms and styles of those areas. Is you product or service going to be locally available or internationally. What are the hooks that you can add that will draw your potential customer to you and your product. Trust is part of the equation and a feeling of familiarity in your branding will go a ways to put a potential client at ease.
You have to know WHO you want to attract to your business, in an almost intimate way. What are their likes, dislikes, beliefs. Where do they live? Are they male, female, home owners, travelers, do they have children? Married or not. Might sound odd, but, you need to develop a picture of that person and then make you brand speak to them. Make a inspiration board of him or her — or both and put it up above your desk. When you’re thinking about your brand, speak to that person. This may all sound a bit ‘niche’ but, I cannot express enough how important it is to know who your client is, and this is how to start that process, once you’ve attracted them, then it is easy to start a process of expanding outwards.
Knowing your strengths and weaknesses allows you to pitch with confidence. Your brand is telling YOUR story. Bossbabes say the following, “Don’t buy into the old story that there are too many businesses like yours and that your niche is too saturated for you to be successful. Your unique story, expertise, life lessons and superpowers are valuable and cannot be duplicated. There’s only one you. Saying there’s no space for you in your niche is like saying “we already have Oprah, so why do we need Ellen DeGeneres?” Or “we already have Jennifer Lopez, why do we need Shakira?”
When you know that you are the best at your job it shows up in your branding, remember branding isn’t only your logo, it is your social media accounts, quality images, fabulous reviews. I’m going to buy from you because I know that you are going to supply quality, be it a website or a samoosa. So when comparing apples with apples — you need to be the all singing, all dancing apple wearing the top hat and tutu. Unforgettable.
Lastly, what are others saying about you. Customer service is key. Get those reviews. When building your brand, write a mission statement and keep reminding yourself of what you set out to achieve and how you meant to to do it. Your brand is your image, and customer service is key to getting people to be loyal customers. It’s a well known fact that it takes much less to keep a customer coming back than it does to get a new one.
At JacciR Design we take you through these conversations when we guide you through your branding project. It’s homework, but, your business will be better for it.
