Your brand is more than a logo and aesthetic look. It’s that gut feeling people have when your name or business is mentioned. And that gut feeling – that perception – is what determines the action they’ll take. You can’t tell people what to think and feel about your business. But you can do a lot of things to shape their perception. And that is what branding is about.
Whether you are a freelancer, solopreneur, small business or big corporation, managing your brand is key to your long-term success. Here’s the good news: there are many tools to manage your brand – which means many opportunities. And here’s the bad news: there are many tools to manage your brand – which often results in overwhelm.
This blog addresses that potential overwhelm by giving you 3 steps you can follow to start building your brand today.
1 | Figure out what problem you solve
The problem you solve is not the same as the product or service you sell.
People don’t want the thing you have made. They want what it can do for them and how it’ll make them feel. Your potential customers have a problem, something they struggle with, something they aspire to achieve. And they are buying the solution. They are buying the desired outcome. Your product or service is simply your way of delivering that solution. It’s your way of getting them where they want to be.
As Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt put it: “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill, they want to buy a quarter-inch hole!” And more than the hole, they are buying the space and the tidiness the new shelf will provide, they are buying that sense of achievement of doing it themselves.
The people
Once you identify the problem you solve, you can focus on understanding the people who face that problem. You then start narrowing down the characteristics of those you can help the most. This is how you arrive at the definition of your ideal clients. It all starts with the problem.
More than one problem
What if working with you provides the solution for more than one problem for your clients? That’s great. But it also means you have more work to do. Because what you’ll often find when you dig deep into those problems is that behind them is one overarching desire. There’s one major obstacle and when you tackle that the result will show in the form of various benefits for your clients. Find the overarching problem that’s behind all the others.
Product and message clarity
Just going to scratch the surface here as product/service description and brand messaging deserve a standalone blog post each but know that understanding the main problem you solve for your clients will make your communication more effective. Marketing and sales become easier. Content creation becomes easier. And you’ll have a much better chance of grabbing your target audience’s attention as they’ll feel seen and understood.
2 | Figure out why you care
You could do so many things to make money. Why are you choosing to help people solve that particular problem?
Maybe you have a deep-rooted personal or philosophical reason. Maybe you don’t. Maybe you’re ‘just’ really good at that particular thing and you want others to benefit from your expertise. You are not after the correct answer here. What you are looking for is YOUR honest why.
At its core, this question is not about a fluffy purpose statement to put on your website. It’s for YOU to really understand why you are in this. Yes, it will lead to a purpose statement and it will be part of your brand story too. But most importantly, it is to help you keep going when the going gets tough. It is to help you overcome obstacles, adapt and innovate instead of giving up and walking away.
When you are clear about your why, that passion will shine through in everything you do without you hardly making any effort. It’ll give your brand – and your business – an energy that only genuine passion gives.
3 | Decide who you are in your business
You can create a persona that you think will work well for your business. Like a “how I should look, sound and act” version. But that means you’ll end up becoming another one of the same. You’ll be like everyone else who follows “the right way”.
Best case scenario: you’ll be constantly stressed and worried about staying in character. Worst case scenario: you’ll feel inauthentic and a sellout. None of those is great.
There’s a better, easier way: be yourself. I know it’s scary. But understand this: who you are is a great part of why working with you is a success for your clients. It won’t work for everyone. You won’t be loved by everyone. And that is fine. The people you attract will be the ones who’ll get the best results from working with you and the ones you’ll enjoy working with.
Being yourself doesn’t mean sharing everything unfiltered. Identify which are those character traits of yours that your clients benefit from the most and bring those into your branding. Use those true and beneficial characteristics as the foundation to build your brand persona, your voice & tone and your brand look.
This is how you’ll be able to really own your brand and feel empowered to show up consistently as yourself. And by doing so, you’ll attract the right customers for you.
Conclusion
Too often people jump ahead and focus on the looks. They say “I got my logo and my website done – I have my brand.” Graphic designers like to use the word branding when they mean visual identity design. But you know what, the wording doesn’t matter. What matters is that a logo in itself is meaningless.
Maybe a ‘professional’ look will give you a burst of confidence and you’ll start putting yourself out there. But when that confidence fades – and it fades quickly – what’s left is a pretty website that no-one visits, and an un-engaging social media profile that is one of many.
What brings lasting confidence is when the logo, the persona – all the exterior – is the representation of a clear essence. An essence that is the driving force behind the whole business.
What problem you solve for your clients, why solving that problem for those people matters to you and how your clients are benefiting from who you are might sound like the type of questions big companies’ marketing department will come up with to generate some marketing materials. But in reality, no matter whether you are a one-man-band, a small company or big business, the answers to those questions are the foundation to build a successful brand and business.
In my experience (both as a business owner and a brand strategy consultant), these are the very questions we like to rush or skip them altogether in order to get working on what feels more like the “real stuff” (designing the website, creating graphics, photoshoot, etc). But taking the time to really find your answers to these questions is something you and your business will benefit from for years to come.
And if you need help defining your brand and creating a brand strategy that is aligned with the essence of who you are and the true purpose behind your business, check out my brand strategy consulting program – Brand Yourself Confident – it might just be exactly what you need!
