If you want to know how to create a brand for your business, this story offers some useful insights.
A deliberate branding exercise on my own business led to an invitation to write my book, Double Your Business, for Financial Times Publishing.
There are ideas here that any business could use to increase sales and customer loyalty.
When I tell people I’m a published author, they often ask how long it took to find a publisher.
I didn’t find a publisher, I say. They found me!
I then explain that Financial Times Publishing approached me and asked me to write the book for them.
This wasn’t a complete accident – I was deliberately spreading my brand message on the web, and it caught the publisher’s attention.
It was all because of developing my personal brand by using big-business branding tactics.
Here’s the full story.
You see, while several well-known small business marketing experts say that branding is only useful for large corporations like Coca-Cola, and that you should stick to purely direct response methods, they’re missing a really easy and practically free extra marketing tool: brand promise and brand recognition.
But don’t make the mistake of thinking that branding is something that your graphic designer does for you: that’s just creating a logo and choosing how to colour it in.
How To Create A Brand – What Do Customers Really Want?
Your brand is all about what your customers get from you. It can take a lot of hard thinking to get it right.
So it’s not about you being established since 1983, it’s not about you having a red background with white writing on and it certainly isn’t about having a tagline that says something vague, like “quality, choice, value”.
This kind of twaddle says nothing to anybody, but corporate executives like it because they think it’s clever and captures the brilliance of their business.
So I got to thinking, what is it that my clients get from working with me?
A testimonial that Chella Heyes wrote about me on LinkedIn, said it best, “In two years, Lee helped me to double my turnover, motivate my staff, and work half the hours I used to.”
It got me thinking about how to get my message across. I wanted to keep it really simple, to focus on what I most like doing.
Helping ambitious business owners to double their businesses in two years or less.
Or at the very least, to achieve substantial double-digit growth for their businesses.
So I decided to go from being one of hundreds of business coaches, to being the only Double Your Business Coach.
It didn’t come to me overnight – your brand is something that will rarely, if ever, change.
Next I wanted to create a brand logo.
My graphic designer came up with 20 or more ideas for logos, but none of them felt right. None of them said double your business.
Finally, over a two month period, I came up with the little bar graph showing a small bar and the next one twice as big.
But that’s not the whole story…
Nine months after rebranding, I commented on a blog that I know is visited by publishers. I signed my post as The Double Your Business Coach. While I’m not a big fan of social media for business, this targeted action produced a huge result.
The Editor Notices My Branding…
Within a few days, an editor from Pearson Publishing (the owners of Financial Times Publishing), the biggest name in business books, signed up to my list to read more of my writing. The invitation to write Double Your Business arrived a few short weeks later.
Of course there is an element of luck to this story, just like there is in all parts of our lives.
But when you load the dice in your favour, lady luck smiles more often.
So now you now how to create a brand for your business, you can get started.
What do your customers really want from your kind of business?
If you don’t deliver what they want right now, fix that before you mess with your branding.
Then get to work – make your branding reflect it.
Your Brand Creates Loyalty and Trust…
Every single piece of marketing that you produce needs to use your branding.
It reinforces the reasons that you give your customers to do business with you.
The more familiar your brand is with your customers and target market, the more trust and loyalty you will earn.
It will differentiate you from your competition.
Make sure your brand reflects your customers’ needs and it can even become your unique selling point.
Coca-Cola is just a fizzy drink, yet it controls over 50% of the cola market on the strength of branding alone.
In blind tasting tests, far more people prefer the taste of Pepsi, yet most of us still buy Coca-Cola, even though it costs more.
Don’t let anybody tell you that branding is irrelevant; your brand can make a direct impact on your sales.
It generated a book offer for my business.
What will it do for yours?
If this post has given you some ideas about how to create a brand for your business, perhaps you’ll also enjoy my download guide with 21 ways to increase your sales.