Be Your Brand

by Regan Hillyer

  On the other hand, a center for fitness with a headline that has a competitive statement focuses on:

  Defining your service or product: the health club

  Focusing on your target customers with children and their mothers

  The strongest competitive advantage is someone to watch the children

  “Take care of yourself. We’ll take care of the kids.”

  “Our top grade health club focuses on the needs of moms and their small kids.”

  EXERCISE

  Write down two to three headlines and sub-headlines that you feel will be motivation enough for your target customers. Make sure they include the 3 discussed components:

  Define the service or products

  Focus on the target customers

  The strongest competitive advantage that differentiates

  In addition, your headlines can be focused on the problem of the prospect or on the positive benefits. There are 8 elements that your brand promotion needs to include:

  A self-serving, specific benefit headliner and sub-headliner or 1st paragraph

  The specific outcome or benefit they will get (service or product features and benefits)

  The reason why they need to purchase your item from you

  The action you specifically need to take including terms and price

  The specified action they need to make

  A bonus or incentive that is compelling

  How you will eliminate or minimize risk

  The headline of the headlines which is your offer’s key elements

  Be sure to discuss all the relevant competitive advantages.

  The script for the Fitness Club may be:

  “Take Care of Yourself. We’ll Take Care of the Kids.”

  Our top notch health club focuses on the needs of moms with small kids.

  (Specifically, the self-serving headline benefits are: enabling women to work out)

  Attempting to keep your commitment to a routine for working out is hard enough without being able to find someone to watch your kids every time. At XYZ Fitness we cater to moms with small kids aged 2 and up.

  2-year old Tommy and 7-year old Melinda’s mom, Anne Johnson, says, “It is not possible to go to a health club 3 times a week if it wasn’t for the children care center and activity center. The kids love it and I can work out in peace.”

  There is a complete staff for the kids’ area from nine to seven pm daily and fun activities for kids of any age. There is even a computer and homework area for children!

  Plus, special programs that include crafts and exercise are available for kids to enroll in.

  Special workouts are also available for moms-to-be. (Special benefits they get and why they need to buy this from you).

  There is also a fitness center that features a separate aerobics area so that you can work out in private. (Secondary features and competitive advantage)

  Separate men and women whirlpools, saunas and the latest high-tech equipment.

  There is also a professionally staffed yoga center where you can get beginners or advanced lessons.

  Thirty-day trial free. Come bring your friends and their kids and experience the difference for an entire month. (Risk elimination)

  The first fifty people who sign up, get a free trial and get a personal trainer provided for them for 2 hours in their free month. (Specific action and compelling offers to take)

  Call us today, or just walk in to avail of your thirty-day trial free membership.

  Here’s to Your Health!

  Mary Susan Jones

  Program Director for Mothers

  PS—Those who bring their husbands can make this a whole family bonding experience as men get the opportunity to work out in exclusive areas made for men.

  WORKSHOP

  Draft an outline of your script with the template provided including the eight key elements.

  When it comes to explaining the details of your business, keep it short rather than lengthy.

  THE SUCCESS MODEL CHECK

  It is vital that you check your brand and any of your ideas / products / systems through this model: Validate, Viability, Scalability, Sustainability, Duplicity.

  What must people do to help their brand stay in the market and remain successful? There needs to be a brand check with regards to validating ideas, checking they are viable, scalability, sustainability and duplicity.

  Validate

  While some brands simply throw their programs out into the world to see whether or not it will click with the public, you need to validate and test your product before its actual release. This does not mean that it won’t get released. All it means is that you won’t scratch your head later on and wonder why your product did not stick.

  As a brand marketer, make sure that there are working programs that meet the objectives of your business. This is true for both entrepreneurs and small business owners. Continue to make sure that your brand meets business objectives.

  Needless to say, validating your brand is part of the equation. This means you need to do an examination about whether or not your brand delivers on the set of goals you have set. The moment you establish what your brand embodies, and the type of emotional benefit it gives consumers, will help make sure you are on the right path. Use one-on-one interviews, attitude studies and perceptual maps that help you maintain the brand you are establishing.

  Viability

  In order for a brand to be viable, a brand developer needs to identify, develop, maintain, or enhance a brand’s products’ or services’ distinctive characteristics. Distinction is a positive connotation, including special qualities, style, or attractiveness resulting in a perceptual difference in the nature or prominence of something.

  When it comes to viability, a brand should be aspirational and invoke a positive feeling as well as a sense of pride. The brand development process should be focused on identifying, communicating, and delivering a brand’s distinctive characteristics, those that are important to all its stakeholders and especially to its customers and prospective customers, while being beneficial to the customer. Distinctive characteristics must be apparent. The problem today is that many organizations’ intended differentiation holds little meaning for customers. If a brand desires to be distinctive, there are endless possibilities and countless options. The secret is to select or develop distinctive attributes that customers and prospective customers will value most and prefer over other choices.

  Value is not just price. Perceived value is the combination of customers’ perception of the time involved and how they feel about a transaction and the price paid. Customers’ perceived value generally has a lot to do with risk factors. Typical risks include customers’ thoughts about what the competition has to offer and whether they are getting value for money.

  Keep in mind that a key to success also involves the necessity for associates to feel that they are part of a brand’s strategy and that they are passionate about delivering the promise. To be passionate about a promise is to believe in it and to desire to deliver it. However, it seems as though many organizations are possessed by policy-mania, that is, having a policy to control every possible occurrence. Organizational policies are obviously important, but only to the extent necessary. A merchandise return policy cannot by itself create the desired customer emotional perception. Empowered associates make the difference in delivering a brand’s promise. One thing is for sure: if your organization, company, association, or nonprofit doesn’t make a promise, then your associates may not know how they are supposed to make their customers or members feel.

  The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas, as in escaping the old ones. The idea of keeping promises in terms of what your brand promises to offer is fundamental to our methodology. It’s important to acknowledge that that’s not always easy, but what could be more important? Imagine how different things would be if publicly-held companies voluntarily released their quarterly earnings with an independent report of their custom
er satisfaction scores. How about executive compensation plans that require exceptional customer satisfaction levels in order for workers to receive a bonus or stock-related benefits? These may seem like wild ideas. However, the paradigm shifts caused by eBay, Amazon.com, and others have occurred because consumers wanted a “better way” to shop. In fact, prior to the beginning of the internet retail craze, research indicated that over 75 percent of consumers wanted a better way to shop. Consumers love to be able to see whether sellers keep their promises before they buy in the new online world.

  Ask your friends to share their recent exceptional experiences as a customer, and it’s easy to understand why trust may not be the first thing that springs to mind when consumers think of certain products and services in the marketplace. You can trust the companies and organizations that make a promise and keep it. The goal of any organization should be to enhance its customers’ lives.

  Scalability

  Your marketing strategy core is your brand. When your business happens to be in the growing mode, it is not hard to spotlight operations, which means keeping customers happy by delivering the product. Of course, it is critical to address operations. However, there is only so far that the company will experience growth this way. Begin at the foundation of your core in order to support the rest of your brand structure. When companies begin smaller and grow to become more complex, often, the market investments also grow proportionally to revenues. As your company grows, acquiring new clients becomes the priority. This can lead to a fast organization growth in such a way that the core values of your brand may be lost. When it comes to scalability, remember what got you growing in the first place.

  It is particularly important in personal branding to be aware of scalability as many entrepreneurs get caught in the trap of developing products and services that are not able to be scaled on a large level. For example, with someone running a live workshop, there is only so many people you can put into one room, live, hence, a cap or limit on how big that product can grow. Always ask yourself: in order to create a truly scalable product, what can I develop, where I can sell one unit or one hundred thousand units, at the same time, without using any more of my time?

  Sustainability

  How long with your brand be around for? As long as you have a market for your brand, there will be a demand for it. The moment your brand stops being a benefit to others in terms of a service or product, this is the time your sales will see a decline. Sustain your product by knowing what the market needs and meeting every demand.

  Brands that are sustainable are services and products with specified brands signifying extra added values in terms of social and environmental benefits to the clients, and thus enable being different from the competition.

  Branding with sustainability in mind is the method of maintaining and creating a specific identity for a business, service or products reflecting extra additional value that the customer finds relevant. A brand with sustainability needs to have a culture that is integrated for success. The secret to a brand that is sustainable is trust between the brand and the consumer. Only when you achieve this can a brand be sustainable enough to truly reap the benefits of a unique selling proposition.

  Your business is synonymous with your clients. One key aspect of success is when you enhance and maintain a good relationship with them. For future business and for referrals, preserving these relationships can be good for them as well as making the time spent on each project more satisfying and enjoyable. To foster important relationships in business, there are a few things you can do.

  For example, asking questions will enable you to comprehend circumstances better. Take the time to inquire about what clients think and how they feel. With regards to the progress of your performance and the progress, let them share their observations. When individuals take the time out to ask each other pertinent questions and learn about what interests them, you get to help make a good relationship even better.

  To sustain successful relationships, it is important to have a clear contract. Knowing what your role is and what it is not will help set boundaries that automatically improve a relationship. Both you and the people you work with should know when the project is done and how success is to be measured. Once clients understand the role you play, the better they will tend to feel about you.

  Focus on what you are supposed to deliver and what your contract stipulates. This is one great way to build and maintain the relationship you have with your client. When you truly deliver your project, you not only enhance your relationship but also build your credibility.

  When you approach each project, use new approaches that you learn along the way. When you immediately find solutions because you assume every project is the same as the last one, this may turn off your client. Instead, realize that each situation has a nuance that makes it different from every other project. Take time to integrate them into your solution after inquiring thoroughly about them.

  Sustaining a relationship is synonymous with sustaining your business. After all, it is your network of people, past clients, relationships and future clients that make a business thrive. For this reason, taking the time to create and apply methods to sustain business relationships will help you remain successful year after year.

  Duplicity

  It’s important to think about how you are going to duplicate your brand from the beginning. Too many people who start brands or companies skip this step in the beginning and then they have challenges growing and developing in the future.

  There are two options when it comes to your brand and growing your brand in the future. You can either duplicate yourself / your brand out, which means creating exact versions that function as a part of the larger whole, or, you can amplify yourself up.

  A clear example of the duplication model is franchises. They take an exact replica of the business or brand that is working and recreate it to function in it’s own right, using the exact same system as the original. An example of this is Subway. It started with one and duplicated the brand out through various stores throughout the world, all based off exactly the same brand and model.

  The other option, is to amplify your brand up, which in one sense, ultimately means “celebritizing” yourself and growing your one brand bigger and bigger and bigger. Some good examples of this are Tony Robbins and Oprah. There are just one of them and they grow their brands bigger and bigger every year.

  BUILDING YOUR LIST

  Having a list of email addresses to market to is so important. Build your network through compiling a list to market by collecting emails, giving away freebies or even writing blog articles, among other things.

  Why is developing your network or creating a list so crucial for your brand development effort? Network development or creating a list is essential for your efforts of brand development. Many companies launch a crowdfund campaign with the belief that the moment they sign up on one crowdfund platform, supporters will begin to flock to support them. They feel that all they need to do to develop a network would be to post their project. This could not be further from the truth. The fact is that you need to build your network systematically in order to effectively advertise your brand development campaign. This is where supporters like your family and friends come in. As a matter of fact, here are a few things you can do to build your network.

  Ten Percent

  In sales, there is a saying that one in ten people will be sure to make a purchase. In the world online, you will most likely need to gain even more than ten viewers to get one sale. Based on the rewards lists of your backers and your finance goal, you might need at least two hundred fifty backers. Being able to reach ten thousand people and finding methods of meeting this many potential financers is something you need to do. Look at businesses, blogs and organizations and see if there are any who would likely want to support your product or service and are aligned with the same values.

  Talk

  Discussing your plans with your network, family and friends, mo
nths before launching your brand development campaign will help build customer trust due to brand familiarity. In other words, people who have already heard of your product will feel more secure and will confidently offer support on the platform. Attending events and talking constantly about your product is going to help you get on the radar of the ‘crowd’ before they even see it online. This is also a great time to ask for connections and if anyone may know anyone in the media. If there are prominent communities you can reach that have to do with your product, now is the time to do that. Once you reach media outlets, this may be just the thing to boost your product’s popularity with the crowd even further, causing your brand development campaign to potentially take off like a skyrocket.

  Be Active

  Based on how many people you want to reach, you might want to do research of the top bloggers that are related to your brand values and your product. It is important to become an online community member before you go ahead and put your project forward. Otherwise, why would anyone really give you a second thought? It is a good idea to be authentic. Speak to the people who are online with you. Think about what your brand values and product have in common with everyone else. Engage in topics that will bring your product up on the topic. In other words, to become successful at brand development for your project, your network is important. It can be the one thing that makes a difference of whether you make it or break it on the brand development platform.

  How to Get More Online Reviews for Your Business

  So you want to learn how to get more online reviews for your business. Whether your business is online or actual, or both, one thing for sure is that you won’t be able to generate any positive reviews if your customers are not happy in the first place. If you have been in business for years and know for a fact that the reason for this is that customers do come back to get more of what you have to offer, now is the time to ask for some great reviews. To do this, put a link they can click on in your website or a sign in your store that shows them what to do to post a review.