Today, the world that we live in seems to have an infinite supply for our needs. Anybody can start a business with just a few clicks. Anybody is able to create products, build an online store, publish ads, ads reach an audience online. This means that every market is becoming more and more flooded with businesses which offer similar products, features, and solutions. In order to stand out, it’s necessary to build a brand that your customers are able to connect with and care about deeply. Read on to learn more about some tips and strategies to help you build your brand and help your brand stand out from the competition. Also with offices in Miami, MyCity Social is a top Orlando marketing agency. Call MyCity Social for your personal branding and SEO needs today!
Make Your Personal Branding Stand Out
Before we discuss some strategies and tactics for creating a brand your customers are able to truly care about, let’s first talk about what exactly a brand is. The word “brand” is thrown around constantly in marketing today. But what exactly does “brand” really mean? While this may sound like a simple question, it is actually quite complex, and there isn’t an answer that is one-size-fits-all. Famous advertising executive and writer David Ogilvy describes a brand as “the intangible sum of a product’s attributes.” Marty Neumeier, an author and speaker who specializes in branding and innovation, notes that “a brand is a person’s gut feeling about a product, service, or organization.” Camille Baldwin, one of the founding team members of Pattern Brands, proclaims that “brand to me is identity. It’s all of the things that make up identity, your values, your principles, who you are, your characteristics and your intention.” At the end of the day, your brand is the identity of your business, and how it makes people feel.
Ways To Make Your Brand Memorable
Know what your consumers really care about– A lot of people are quite good at explaining the “what” and “how of their business. If you’re an accountancy company, for example, then describing the what and how is fairly straightforward: WHAT you do is to assist individuals and businesses in making sure that their finances are in shape. HOW you do it may vary slightly from firm to firm, but it tends to involve some form of account management where you assist with invoicing or balance the books every month or quarter. The thing that will help one accountancy company stand out from its competition is being able to transition from the what and the how to the why. What will make a potential customer choose your business over another is the “why,” as the “why” is your differentiating factor. Overall, consumers aren’t too worried about how you accomplish your work- the tools that you utilize, the internal processes involved, and all of these things. What consumers want to know is: Why does this business matter in my life? To reflect back on the accountancy example, the what and the how are laid out, but the “why” may not be so obvious. If an accountancy company mostly caters to small businesses, for example, then their “why” may be to free up time for the business owner to spend with their family and friends rather than balancing books.
So how do you find your why? Often, customer research is a great starting point. Research interviews are a good resource to learn how your product helps your customers, and to better understand how they describe the benefits of your product. Some companies even send employees to spend the day with customers at their offices in order to see first-hand how their product fits into the routine and workflows of their company. It’s absolutely key to know the customer in order to build a brand consumers will care about. Take Sweetgreen, for example, a successful restaurant chain selling healthy salads and grain bowls. When branding specialists work with the Sweetgreen brand to try and understand its customers, they spend many hours at Sweetgreen restaurants, watch how the staff prepares salads, and listen to how customers place orders in order to immerse themselves in how the company works. They were basically trying to get a thorough understanding of every detail about what made Sweetgreen unique and special in order to craft a brand that typically emphasized what customers were looking for from Sweetgreen and helped them to find their “why.”
Find the technical, functional, and emotional benefits of your business– After you’ve done your customer research, you can start to think about the different kinds of benefits that your business offers consumers. The brand pyramid framework has been around since the later nineties and still plays a key role in brand strategy in helping to define these benefits. Three of the key elements of any brand pyramid are the technical, functional, and emotional benefits that your business provides consumers.
- Technical benefits- The base of the pyramid is formed of the technical benefits of your brand. Basically, this will assist in defining what you do as a company. At this stage, the key questions are: How is this business benefiting the consumers? How will it make money? What are we offering? The technical benefit of Orlando marketing agency MyCity Social, for example, is to offer SEO services and digital marketing efforts.
- Functional benefits- With the technical benefits of your brand laid out, now you should look at the functional benefits that you are able to provide for your consumers. Functional benefits are basically what your customers receive when your customers receive when they purchase your product or service. Functional benefits usually focus on things such as how a product is able to improve your life, assist with you staying connected to others, or help you to make forward progress.
- Emotional benefits- Emotional benefits are really what makes one brand stand out from another, and how your brand makes somebody feel based on the stories you tell consumers. Take Nike, for example. One emotional benefit of Nike is that its equipment will make you feel like a professional athlete. As your business goes through everything that you’ve learned during the initial customer research phase, you should start looking out for emotion-based words for your customers, or potential customers, in order to describe your company or the problem that you have at hand. Whenever somebody says “I feel” or “it made me.. Happy, proud, or successful,” for example, they are identifying the emotional benefits your company delivers.
Craft a simple tagline and message– There are lots of great brand taglines floating around out there that you can look at. Nike’s “Just Do It,” McDonald’s “I’m Lovin’ It,” Maybelline “Maybe it’s Maybelline.” By saying just two or three words, clients are able to know examples of what business is being talked about. That’s what’s so powerful about being able to boil down your message to something simple, and memorable. You can do years worth of research in marketing, but if you are unable to boil it down to this thin sliced tagline then it doesn’t matter. However, this is not something that is easy to do, as simple as it seems. Boiling your whole business down to one sentence, or even just a couple of words, can be a difficult task, especially since you can’t force it. One of the best ways to craft the perfect tagline is to create a space where ideas are free flowing and have healthy brainstorms. Oftentimes, the best ideas will occur to somebody outside of the office. Don’t be afraid to think outside the box and away from your desk. To start with, our marketing experts recommend writing down exactly what your business delivers for customers in as many words as it takes. This can be a paragraph or two, or maybe even longer. Keep in mind the emotional benefits, not just the technical and functional benefits you provide. Next, you’ll want to take what you’ve written down and cut it down to just one or two sentences. Keep cutting as much as you need to to get it down to just a few words. Take this final bit of copy and play with a number of different versions. This process will assist with distilling all of the thoughts that you want your business name to convey into a short, memorable tagline.
Make sure your business lives and breathes your brand– For consumers to trust your message, you need to be able to live your brand yourself. To go back to the accountancy example we discussed above, if your “why” or emotional benefit is giving small business owners more free time to spend away from work, you could ensure all of your messaging and content supports this goal. This could mean Instagram posts with clients enjoying their free time away from the office or blog posts about disconnecting from work. You can rethink the imagery and copy on your website to reflect this.
Contact Us Today
As we discussed in the post, personal branding is the identity of your business and how it makes people feel. Every single touchpoint where somebody can interact with your business should represent what your brand is, and how you want people to feel about your company. MyCity Social is a top Orlando marketing agency here to help you grow your brand. Call MyCity Social at our Miami office for a consultation today!
