Your Branding Baby Steps
Good branding is half the battle in business. If you run your own successful business then you already know this anyway. As a service provider people come to you because of what you stand for; how you make them feel about their needs; and how you manage to connect with them on an emotional level. In its deepest essence, branding is about your business being recognized by those who seek your services or products from a trusted source.
Branding is built on trust
Before you can establish your brand you need to build up trust with your potential clientele. This happens by design if done well and involves faultless customer service, great feedback, a strong portfolio and consistency.
If branding goes wrong, you are not only in danger of losing your reputation, but you could also lose your business as a direct result. In fact, you could lose your carefully crafted brand with the one shoddy job - just like that.
In the offline world I see many occasions of branding gone wrong. I guess it is because I happen to live in a town where there are limited choices for anything. This means I’m forced to go back to the same shops time and time again whether I like to or not. Often I don’t like it but have no other choice. Online branding gone wrong is harder to distinguish unless we deal with the same service provider on several occasions and suddenly he or she fails us entirely.
Plus when buyers get crappy, shoddy service they simply move on to the next provider and often we wouldn’t even know that we let down our customers because many elect not to complain due to simplicity issues.
Your branding baby steps
If you are stuck because you have no idea on how to build your brand try to start off with simple baby steps.
You need a portfolio to start with: If you want to secure customers and clients you need to have a portfolio where they can go and look at your work. Whether you are a freelance writer, a designer, a photographer or else doesn’t matter.
Get your work in front of potential clients and the best way to do this is with a portfolio.
For those of you strapped for cash, choose a free blogging platform, an article distribution service (for writers), Flickr (for photographers), or whatever platform will help you to establish yourself with your own brand.
Once you have dealt with your first few clients, ask them for feedback and testimonials to showcase on your portfolio site. This is essential if you want to establish yourself as an expert in your niche and build trust with your potential clients.
Moving into your branding teenage years
Once you have established yourself with your own brand it’s time to go shopping for clients. Finding clients in a young business is time consuming but essential if you want to grow your income.
This is where you have to become a full fledged networker, using social media to promote your brand. Please note that this doesn’t mean you have to pester people with your links and services. Instead, make connections, friendships and business contacts based on common interests because they might help you grow your brand. Remember, subtlety is everything!
Expect networking to be time consuming. But this is where you want to really knuckle down and build your presence because it is where the key to your branding success really lies. It’s all to do with…
Word of mouth marketing
Your brand will only ever become successful if enough people talk about it. This happens entirely through word of mouth marketing. Unless people know you even exist they won’t want your services and that is WHY you need to network your ass off your back in young business.
Success is a numbers game (I learned this in network marketing) and the more people you connect with, the bigger your success will be. It sounds simple and it actually is.
Your business success is branding by design
If you want to reach high levels of success in any business you can. Brand yourself well and spend a considerable amount of time to grow that brand and you will see results! In the last year or so I have seen several new, up and coming freelancers do exactly that and guess what – they are now successful entrepreneurs thanks to their online business branding efforts. Like me they branded their business with seemingly tireless effort which eventually helped them become noted service providers and led to an ever increasing amount of work.
Each one of us are simple, normal people like you. None of us have special powers, knowledge or ability but we do SHARE ONE COMMON ground;
We all TOOK ACTION and WORKED HARD at our success design! Are you READY to do the same?
Monika
About the Author: I'm a passionate freelance writer and problogger. To further build my business I'm also in the process of building my own niche empire which pays me residual income.
Cath Lawson | Mar 7, 2009 | Reply
Hi Monika – This is excellent advice. As you say, getting more customers is definitely a numbers game and you can make it happen, by making the necessary contacts.
At the beginning of my second business – nobody knew who we were, or what we did. And I always made sure I asked our customers how they’d heard about us.
One of my most exciting moments was when I asked someone the question and they started rhyming off all the different places they’d heard of us and told me we were a really well known business.
That was way more exhilirating than any money we made. And thinking about it makes me want to do it again but I want to do it on my own. I really need a long break from employing people. In a lot of ways, it’s like having a heap of extra kids. And with 2 of my own and 3 step-children – anymore is hard work.
Monika | Mar 7, 2009 | Reply
@ Cath: I remember you talked about your last business in some of your posts. I totally understand where you are coming from. I see this at my hubby’s workplace right now. He’s had nothing but trouble trying to get good people who actually want to work and to me it looks like they are building a family of employees then something happens and whoosh they are gone again. You are obviously doing the right thing.
Brett Legree | Mar 7, 2009 | Reply
I love that you mentioned the offline world and living in places with limited choice – I know that first hand.
When I think of branding I am reminded of a successful restaurant owner who sadly moved on from our town about 18 months ago (for other reasons – the business was booming!) – he did all of these things, and he had quite the brand even when his business just opened.
Now that he is gone, we are stuck with the same-old, same-old negative branded places but what choice do we have if we don’t want to eat at home?
Places like the one Friar described, where it is “too late” to serve you breakfast, but they’ll sell you a fried egg sandwich for lunch!
(And then they won’t improvise either – the fried egg sandwich is on the menu, but they wouldn’t put a fried egg on a hamburger for me…)
Monika | Mar 10, 2009 | Reply
@ Brett: I have a feeling that your little township is even smaller than mine and your choices are more so limited due to the size of it. I remember those places friar described, LOL, heck i even remember the supermarket odyssey. I have to say though, it isn’t as bad here.