If you think only big corporate names need to think about things like brand names, think again. Your brand says a lot about you and your business, and that’s as true for a one person home- based operation as it is for a multinational conglomerate. In this article we look at how creating a strong brand for your business can help you set yourself apart from the pack and lay the right foundation for the future growth of your business.
WHAT IS A BRAND?
Your brand is more than just the logo on your letterhead and business cards or your business name. It is your corporate identity. An effective brand tells the world who you are, what you do and how you do it, while at the same time establishing your relevance to, and credibility with, your prospective customers.
Your brand is also something more ethereal. It is how your business is perceived by its customers. If your brand has a high perceived value, you enjoy many advantages over your competition, especially when it comes to pricing. Why do you think people are prepared to pay stupid money for items of clothing with the initials “CK” on them? Perceived value. Perceived value as a result of very effective brand promotion resulting in very high brand awareness.
Now, I’m not saying we all need to rush out and start creating brands that are going to be recognized the world over. Most of us simply don’t have the time or other resources necessary. What I am suggesting, however, is that it is possible for your brand to dominate your niche.
WHY DO I NEED TO CREATE MY OWN BRAND?
=> Differentiation
We touched on this in the previous section when we looked at what a brand is and how it can be used to increase the perceived value of your products and services. The main reason for creating your own brand is to differentiate yourself from your competition. New websites are a dime a dozen. So are home-based businesses. You need to constantly be looking for ways to set yourself apart from your competition. Your brand can do that for you.
=> More Effective, Efficient Marketing
Another good reason for creating your own brand is to make your sales force (even if that’s a sales force of one – you) more effective and efficient.
Imagine if you didn’t have to spend the first 50% of your time with a new prospect explaining who you are, what you do and how you do it. What if your brand had already communicated that for you? You can spend 100% of your time focusing on sales rather than educating your prospects about your business
Another benefit of branding is that the efforts you expend increasing your brand awareness through promoting and marketing your brand to your target market automatically transfers to your products and services. So, even when you’re advertising your brand, you’re indirectly also marketing your products and services.
HOW DO I CREATE MY OWN BRAND?
OK, so you’re convinced you need to create your own brand. Where on earth do you start?
We saw earlier that your brand needs to say who you are, what you do and how you do it. It needs to do all these things at the same time as establishing your relevance to, and building credibilty with, your prospective customers. Needless to say, it is absolutely essential, if you are to build your own brand, that *you yourself* have a firm grasp of who you are, what you do and how you do it. If not, you’re going to have the devil’s own time getting that message across to anyone else, let alone establishing your relevance and credibility.
=> Write A Mission Statement
So, let’s start by creating a mission statement. What is the mission of your business? Obviously you’re in business to make a profit. But making a profit is a byproduct of a successful business. Focus instead on how you choose to achieve that profit. What are your core values?
A good place to begin thinking about your mission is to put yourself in the shoes of your customers. Put yourself in their target market. Let’s say your business is web hosting. If you’re in the market for a web host, what things are important to you? Different people will be looking for different benefits but you can bet that they want their website to be accessible to site visitors so reliability will be high on their list. Price is also likely to be high on the list as is 24/7 technical support. What about add-on features such as unlimited email aliases, cgi support and what-not? These things will be highly important to some and less important to others. So focus on the benefits that are likely to be highly relevant to the majority of your target market. Let’s settle for our purposes on reliability, price and technical support.
Your mission statement might read something like this: “I strive to earn a fair return on my investment of time and money by providing affordable webhosting with guaranteed 99% uptime and 24/7 telephone technical support”. That’s a pretty general statement and if you decide to focus on a particular niche of the webhosting market, such as small business, you may want to more narrowly focus on that group in your mission statement.
Now that you’ve written your mission statement, you can begin thinking about creating a brand that reinforces and supports your mission. So, getting back to the fundamental questions of who you are, what you do and how you do it, you can now begin to think of your business in these terms. You’re a webhosting provider, you host websites of small businesses and you do that by offering cost-effective webhosting solutions, guaranteed 99% uptime and 24/7 telephone technical support.
When you create your brand, you need to keep the who, what and how firmly in mind but also use the brand to establish your relevance to your target market and build credibility with that market.
Let’s turn now to the nuts and bolts of creating your brand.
=> Describe What You Are Branding
List out your business’s key features and characteristics, your competitive advantages and anything else that sets you apart from your competition.
Using our webhosting example, you’ll focus primarily on the objectives from your mission statement namely, reliable, cost- effective webhosting solutions supported by 24/7 technical support.
=> Identify and Describe Your Target Market
Decide whether you want to target the entire webhosting community or only a segment of it such as small business websites. Describe your market.
=> List Names that Suggest the Key Elements from Your Mission Statement
The key elements from your mission statement were reliability, cost-effectiveness and customer service. List names that are suggestive of these elements. Let’s use Reliable Webhosting for our example. (I don’t claim to be a creative genius.)
Don’t limit yourself to real words, though. A coined name with no obvious meaning is a perfectly legitimate name provided it conveys something about your business. You will find coined names easier to trademark and secure domain names for too – a definite plus!
=> List Tag Lines that Reinforce Your Mission Statement
We’ll use: “Outstanding reliability and technical support at a price your small business can afford”. I know, I know. You can do much better, I’m sure.
HOW SHOULD I USE MY BRAND?
=> Create a Logo for Your Brand
Your logo is NOT your brand but your logo should allow your brand to be instantly recognized by those familiar with it. To this extent, your logo helps create and reinforce brand awareness.
The logo you create should be able to be used consistently in a variety of different media. It should be suitable for corporate letterhead and business cards, as well as for your website and corporate signage (if any). You do NOT want a confusing mishmash of logos and banners and heaven knows what else. Everything you produce needs to use the same, consistent style of logo so that, over time, your logo becomes synonymous with your brand. Instant recognition is what you’re going for here, so don’t dilute it by using several different logos for different purposes.
=> Consistent Usage of Company Name, Logo and Tag Line
Going back to our webhosting example, putting the brand name and tagline together, the physical manifestation of your brand will be:
RELIABLE WEBHOSTING Outstanding reliability and technical support at a price your small business can afford.
To establish brand awareness, this branding needs to be used consistently and frequently in everything your produce, whether that be letters to clients, business cards, brochures, quotations, invoices, advertising, promotion, on your website, on the front door of your principal place of business and on your products. And don’t forget to be consistent in your use of color schemes. These can be powerful brand reinforcers.
=> Marketing and Promotion of Your Brand
Once you’ve created your brand, you need to market and promote it, in addition to your products and services. This is how you establish your credibility and relevance to your target market. You can hopefully see why your brand needs to be suggestive of your mission statement. If, at the same time as you’re selling your products and services you also push your brand, your brand becomes synonymous with your products and services. And vice versa.
A properly descriptive brand and high brand awareness amongst your target market will allow you to more easily introduce a wider range of products and services when they’re developed without having to start by again selling who you are, what you do and how you do it first. Your brand has already presold YOU. Your job then is to sell your products and services.
——
** Reprinting of this article is welcome! ** This article may be freely reproduced provided that: (1) you include the following resource box; and (2) you only mail to a 100% opt-in list.
Here’s the resource box to use if reprinting this article:
——
Elena Fawkner is editor of A Home-Based Business Online … practical business ideas, opportunities and solutions for the work-from-home entrepreneur. http://www.ahbbo.com
To be honest, the answer depends on whom you ask. If you ask the branding experts, they will be up in arms if you dont nail down the name, feeling that branding should be the first order of business. But if you ask me, I am more of a content gal and feel that its better to know what you are offering and get that all worked out as your first priority. In my practice over the years, I find too many people get into perfection paralysis around their business name, their tagline, their website, and so on.
Id rather see you get started now, rather than wait for the perfect branding. As an example, my company started out as Self-Employed Success, then it moved on to The Ideal LIfe and next was Rainmaker Coach . That lead me to where I am now. The branding has evolved as my business and material has evolved, becoming more encompassing of everything I offer.
If you can come up with something thats good for now, that is what Id go with. Just know that it will evolve along with your whole marketing message over time. And that is totally acceptable and to be expected. Focus on coming up with your proprietary system and your content, which is how you will be earning your money.
Dont get me wrong, I do believe branding is important, just not at the expense of holding off on getting started. Spend some time with your branding, but after a while, decide on something and start using it. The more you work with your new business format and model, the more evident the name will be. And it will likely change and grow over time as the work does.
Your Client Attraction Assignment
Have you allowed branding perfectionism to keep you from getting started with your business? Heres my suggestion if this has happened to you. Work on your branding to come up with one to three names that you like.
Next, talk to people about them to help you narrow them down. Pay attention to see if there are any patterns in the feedback. Sometimes you can get as many opinions as the people you ask, which might not be that helpful. Other times a favorite name will emerge.
Either way, dont let too much time slip by before you select a name that works for now. Then get started building your business. Being of service is what its all about and you cant do that if your progress is hindered by worrying about your branding.
SEO is important to keep your workflow bountiful. Owner operators that want to expand there businesses can foster growth by automating their SEO from a reputable source.
As an owner operator you are going to want to spend your time making money cherry picking your calls not writing articles, finding links, social posting, and updating directory listings.
SEO can be described as votes back to your website from other sources which hold their own weight online in regards to reputability.
The oldest and purest form of SEO are directory listings. Having current and optimized listings will benefit your rankings. Plumbersbyzipcode.com is the 1st ever Multi- Channel Hyper-focused Plumbing Directory get your free listing today.
Our recent new client that is a one man band owner operator plumbs in a low competition area and has great returns at a low monthly cost.
4 months in...
We have this plumber set on our local directory package 298$ setup fee and 150$ a month. Paired with Google My Business listing we showed 25 calls, 800+ views & 1.22k actions.
Best part is not everyone searches on Google so our client almost had double the calls Google showed.
Our client is happy and is gaining valuable time and resources to help him move forward. He can literally throttle his own results by posting on his companies social profiles. You can notice the sharp spike in the chart we were told he wanted more work
Aug 18 2021
Branding Your Business
Branding Your Business
© 2002 Elena Fawkner
If you think only big corporate names need to think about things
like brand names, think again. Your brand says a lot about you
and your business, and that’s as true for a one person home-
based operation as it is for a multinational conglomerate. In this
article we look at how creating a strong brand for your business
can help you set yourself apart from the pack and lay the right
foundation for the future growth of your business.
WHAT IS A BRAND?
Your brand is more than just the logo on your letterhead and
business cards or your business name. It is your corporate
identity. An effective brand tells the world who you are, what
you do and how you do it, while at the same time establishing
your relevance to, and credibility with, your prospective customers.
Your brand is also something more ethereal. It is how your
business is perceived by its customers. If your brand has a high
perceived value, you enjoy many advantages over your
competition, especially when it comes to pricing. Why do you
think people are prepared to pay stupid money for items of clothing
with the initials “CK” on them? Perceived value. Perceived value
as a result of very effective brand promotion resulting in very high
brand awareness.
Now, I’m not saying we all need to rush out and start creating
brands that are going to be recognized the world over. Most of us
simply don’t have the time or other resources necessary. What I
am suggesting, however, is that it is possible for your brand to
dominate your niche.
WHY DO I NEED TO CREATE MY OWN BRAND?
=> Differentiation
We touched on this in the previous section when we looked at
what a brand is and how it can be used to increase the perceived
value of your products and services. The main reason for creating
your own brand is to differentiate yourself from your competition.
New websites are a dime a dozen. So are home-based
businesses. You need to constantly be looking for ways to set
yourself apart from your competition. Your brand can do that for
you.
=> More Effective, Efficient Marketing
Another good reason for creating your own brand is to make your
sales force (even if that’s a sales force of one – you) more effective
and efficient.
Imagine if you didn’t have to spend the first 50% of your time with
a new prospect explaining who you are, what you do and how you
do it. What if your brand had already communicated that for you?
You can spend 100% of your time focusing on sales rather than
educating your prospects about your business
Another benefit of branding is that the efforts you expend increasing
your brand awareness through promoting and marketing your brand
to your target market automatically transfers to your products and
services. So, even when you’re advertising your brand, you’re
indirectly also marketing your products and services.
HOW DO I CREATE MY OWN BRAND?
OK, so you’re convinced you need to create your own brand.
Where on earth do you start?
We saw earlier that your brand needs to say who you are, what
you do and how you do it. It needs to do all these things at the
same time as establishing your relevance to, and building credibilty
with, your prospective customers. Needless to say, it is absolutely
essential, if you are to build your own brand, that *you yourself*
have a firm grasp of who you are, what you do and how you do it.
If not, you’re going to have the devil’s own time getting that
message across to anyone else, let alone establishing your
relevance and credibility.
=> Write A Mission Statement
So, let’s start by creating a mission statement. What is the
mission of your business? Obviously you’re in business to make
a profit. But making a profit is a byproduct of a successful
business. Focus instead on how you choose to achieve that profit.
What are your core values?
A good place to begin thinking about your mission is to put
yourself in the shoes of your customers. Put yourself in their
target market. Let’s say your business is web hosting. If you’re
in the market for a web host, what things are important to you?
Different people will be looking for different benefits but you can
bet that they want their website to be accessible to site visitors so
reliability will be high on their list. Price is also likely to be high
on the list as is 24/7 technical support. What about add-on features
such as unlimited email aliases, cgi support and what-not?
These things will be highly important to some and less important
to others. So focus on the benefits that are likely to be highly
relevant to the majority of your target market. Let’s settle for our
purposes on reliability, price and technical support.
Your mission statement might read something like this: “I strive
to earn a fair return on my investment of time and money by
providing affordable webhosting with guaranteed 99% uptime and
24/7 telephone technical support”. That’s a pretty general
statement and if you decide to focus on a particular niche of the
webhosting market, such as small business, you may want to
more narrowly focus on that group in your mission statement.
Now that you’ve written your mission statement, you can begin
thinking about creating a brand that reinforces and supports your
mission. So, getting back to the fundamental questions of who
you are, what you do and how you do it, you can now begin to
think of your business in these terms. You’re a webhosting
provider, you host websites of small businesses and you do that
by offering cost-effective webhosting solutions, guaranteed 99%
uptime and 24/7 telephone technical support.
When you create your brand, you need to keep the who, what
and how firmly in mind but also use the brand to establish your
relevance to your target market and build credibility with that
market.
Let’s turn now to the nuts and bolts of creating your brand.
=> Describe What You Are Branding
List out your business’s key features and characteristics, your
competitive advantages and anything else that sets you apart
from your competition.
Using our webhosting example, you’ll focus primarily on the
objectives from your mission statement namely, reliable, cost-
effective webhosting solutions supported by 24/7 technical
support.
=> Identify and Describe Your Target Market
Decide whether you want to target the entire webhosting
community or only a segment of it such as small business
websites. Describe your market.
=> List Names that Suggest the Key Elements from Your
Mission Statement
The key elements from your mission statement were reliability,
cost-effectiveness and customer service. List names that are
suggestive of these elements. Let’s use Reliable Webhosting
for our example. (I don’t claim to be a creative genius.)
Don’t limit yourself to real words, though. A coined name with no
obvious meaning is a perfectly legitimate name provided it conveys
something about your business. You will find coined names easier
to trademark and secure domain names for too – a definite plus!
=> List Tag Lines that Reinforce Your Mission Statement
We’ll use: “Outstanding reliability and technical support at a
price your small business can afford”. I know, I know. You can
do much better, I’m sure.
HOW SHOULD I USE MY BRAND?
=> Create a Logo for Your Brand
Your logo is NOT your brand but your logo should allow your
brand to be instantly recognized by those familiar with it. To
this extent, your logo helps create and reinforce brand
awareness.
The logo you create should be able to be used consistently in a
variety of different media. It should be suitable for corporate
letterhead and business cards, as well as for your website and
corporate signage (if any). You do NOT want a confusing
mishmash of logos and banners and heaven knows what else.
Everything you produce needs to use the same, consistent
style of logo so that, over time, your logo becomes synonymous
with your brand. Instant recognition is what you’re going for here,
so don’t dilute it by using several different logos for different
purposes.
=> Consistent Usage of Company Name, Logo and Tag Line
Going back to our webhosting example, putting the brand name
and tagline together, the physical manifestation of your brand
will be:
RELIABLE WEBHOSTING
Outstanding reliability and technical support at a price
your small business can afford.
To establish brand awareness, this branding needs to be used
consistently and frequently in everything your produce, whether
that be letters to clients, business cards, brochures, quotations,
invoices, advertising, promotion, on your website, on the front
door of your principal place of business and on your products.
And don’t forget to be consistent in your use of color schemes.
These can be powerful brand reinforcers.
=> Marketing and Promotion of Your Brand
Once you’ve created your brand, you need to market and
promote it, in addition to your products and services. This is
how you establish your credibility and relevance to your target
market. You can hopefully see why your brand needs to be
suggestive of your mission statement. If, at the same time as
you’re selling your products and services you also push your
brand, your brand becomes synonymous with your products
and services. And vice versa.
A properly descriptive brand and high brand awareness amongst
your target market will allow you to more easily introduce a wider
range of products and services when they’re developed without
having to start by again selling who you are, what you do and
how you do it first. Your brand has already presold YOU. Your
job then is to sell your products and services.
——
** Reprinting of this article is welcome! **
This article may be freely reproduced provided that: (1) you
include the following resource box; and (2) you only mail to
a 100% opt-in list.
Here’s the resource box to use if reprinting this article:
——
Elena Fawkner is editor of A Home-Based Business Online …
, opportunities and solutions for the
practical business ideas
work-from-home entrepreneur.
http://www.ahbbo.com
To be honest, the answer depends on whom you ask. If you ask the branding experts, they will be up in arms if you dont nail down the name, feeling that branding should be the first order of business. But if you ask me, I am more of a content gal and feel that its better to know what you are offering and get that all worked out as your first priority. In my practice over the years, I find too many people get into perfection paralysis around their business name, their tagline, their website, and so on.
Id rather see you get started now, rather than wait for the perfect branding. As an example, my company started out as Self-Employed Success, then it moved on to The Ideal LIfe and next was Rainmaker Coach . That lead me to where I am now. The branding has evolved as my business and material has evolved, becoming more encompassing of everything I offer.
If you can come up with something thats good for now, that is what Id go with. Just know that it will evolve along with your whole marketing message over time. And that is totally acceptable and to be expected. Focus on coming up with your proprietary system and your content, which is how you will be earning your money.
Dont get me wrong, I do believe branding is important, just not at the expense of holding off on getting started. Spend some time with your branding, but after a while, decide on something and start using it. The more you work with your new business format and model, the more evident the name will be. And it will likely change and grow over time as the work does.
Your Client Attraction Assignment
Have you allowed branding perfectionism to keep you from getting started with your business? Heres my suggestion if this has happened to you. Work on your branding to come up with one to three names that you like.
Next, talk to people about them to help you narrow them down. Pay attention to see if there are any patterns in the feedback. Sometimes you can get as many opinions as the people you ask, which might not be that helpful. Other times a favorite name will emerge.
Either way
, dont let too much time slip by before you select a name that works for now. Then get started building your business. Being of service is what its all about and you cant do that if your progress is hindered by worrying about your branding.
By PBZC.Name-Devloper • Blog