To its core, brand building is the practice of defining your company’s image in the minds of the clients you are trying to reach. However, the dirty little secret is that there’s a monumental shift in the works, and ye olde marketing practices are losing ground with consumers. For your business, this is actually a fantastic opportunity (if you stay ahead of the shift, that is).
What Are the Big Brands (outside of the fitness and coaching industries) Are Teaching Us?
Take a look at most of the Fortune 500, and you’ll see that they’re enduring a massive identity crisis. Gone are the days when you could simply purchase an advertising spot on a major TV network and watch the profits roll in.
Consumers just aren’t paying attention like they did, even a decade ago -and when companies like Procter & Gamble, spend a whopping $2.95 BILLION on advertising in 2011, you have to wonder if the ‘throw buckets-o-cash’-method is beginning to lose its mojo. Why is this the case? Well in 2010, they spent roughly $3.1 billion, which means that they’re getting the hint that shelling out loads of money might no longer be the end-all solution.
But let’s bring this back around to your own small business…
Why Brand Building Is Exceptionally Difficult (But You STILL Have the Advantage)
While your small business might have a modest sum of cash to throw at marketing, which is probably a far cry from a multi-billion-dollar corporate budget, the real question is…
What can Procter & Gamble teach the solo-entrepreneurs and driven world-changers like us?
The lesson is simple: effective brand building isn’t JUST for the ‘big guys’ anymore, and you no longer have to follow their rules in order to achieve success. The difficult part is that the web has opened the marketplace floodgates and competition is EVERYWHERE; however, your advantage is that your brand, your idea, can gain huge attention in a very short period of time if you challenge the overarching status quo in your marketing strategies.
The key to harnessing this advantage is simple: you’ve got to be unique, remarkable, and memorable. Here are 3 critical steps to getting that done.
Step #1: Nail Down Your Own Branding Goals
“People with goals succeed in life, because they know where they are going.”
–Earl Nightingale
First thing’s first, you absolutely need to nail down your brand-building goals, because that’s going to provide you with direction for your marketing strategy. If you’re simply hoping to build a brand, but aren’t completely sure what you’re hoping to accomplish through it, then you’re likely going to end up resorting to the “throw buckets-o-cash”-method (which, we already know, is failing).
Here are a few honest questions you need to ask yourself about your business’s brand…
- Specifically, what does my small business do?
- How does my company differ (both positive and negative) from my competitors?
- What makes my product or service unique, remarkable, and memorable?
- Why would clients prefer my brand over my competitors?
That last question leads us into Step #2 …because every business is in the people business.
Step #2: Identify Your Target Market
“No matter how busy you are, you must take time to make the other person feel important.” –Mary Kay Ash
Mary Kay Ash, one of the greatest marketers of all time understood this single, most fundamental, aspect of brand building. Your brand has very little to do with how you see your company -it has everything to do with how you want your potential customers and clients to see it.
With that said, the makeup marketing guru herself knew these three extremely important factors that would ultimately impact her market’s perception of the Mary Kay brand:
- The only way to win someone over is to make them feel important and gain their trust.
- In order to make them feel important, you have to know who they are.
- In order to gain their trust, you have to win over their thought leaders.
Essentially, you have to build your brand around the consumers you’re trying to reach. So, instead of attempting to indiscriminately engage the masses, in this attention-drained market, you need to be focusing on a select group of people that could already be interested in your brand. This means, constructing a series of demographical personas of the people that would most likely become your clients.
With that said, you also need to learn who their thought leaders are, and get them buzzing about your brand. There’s a reason why extreme sports companies pay dearly for a Tony Hawk endorsement. You get brand credibility through those willing to share your company with others, and especially from those with authority in that respective industry.
That’s how Mary Kay did it, and she’s built an empire almost entirely from that very concept.
Step #3: Stand Out By Making #1 and #2 Come Together
As I stated above, effective brand building is about…
First, defining your company’s image; and second, doing so effectively in the minds of your potential clients. Once you’ve got an idea about what makes your business different from your competitors, then that will help you zero in on the exact persona demographics that will become future clients and spread your brand to other future clients.
However, the most important point that I’d like to stress is that you cannot simply look like everybody else. You have to stick out like a sore thumb, like a black sheep in a flock of white ones. Your brand building must be centralized on the task of defining how you do things differently, the new way, and the smartest way. Step #3 is no more than the combining of #1 and #2, but this is where the big picture comes into view.
Effective branding doesn’t need a big advertising budget. It simply requires the ability to stand out and be ExtraOrdinary, because of your company’s inherent uniqueness, remarkability, and memorability. This will come down to your tone, style, logo design, and product –and how that will mesh with your select demographically targeted market, based on your pre-determined client persona’s. Therein lies the attention you seek, and as the great one put it…
“Marketing is a contest for people’s attention.”
–Seth Godin
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