Running a business is exciting. It’s also challenging. You provide goods and services that you love and believe in. But when it comes to managing the business side, it can feel like a lot of guesswork. Removing that guesswork is a huge part of what we can do with a well-researched, carefully-crafted Brand Strategy.
Overcome your challenges and grow
As entrepreneurs, we’ve all encountered our share of hurdles and stumbling blocks. Yes, they can be frustrating, but they also give us our best opportunities to grow and improve.
As Brand Strategists, people sometimes think we just make logos, but our deep and intensive approach gets down to the core of your business and your identity. As such, we are able to address and resolve a wide range of challenges that business owners are unable to solve with a quick fix.
Issues with image
The number one reason people come to us has to do with their professional image. Often, they think that’s really all we do. (But as we’ll see, your logo and color scheme are just the tip of an elaborate iceberg.)
Designing and developing a “look” for your business can feel like an impossibly mystifying task. How do you create a logo that communicates the kind of business you’re in, but also makes you stand out from the other competitors in your industry? And then you need to choose a color palette and some brand typography that will consistently appear on your signs, brochures and website.
Without the deep dive that goes into Brand Strategy, making those choices is like reading tea leaves while blindfolded. And that’s why so many people come to us and say they’re frustrated or disappointed with their image.
“It’s just not me,” they say. Their brand or their look just doesn’t convey their level of professionalism, or expertise, or anything about their personality. And they have no idea how to fix it.
The thing is, most people think they can just hire a talented designer to create a beautiful logo and select some attractive colors, and Voilà!, they’ve got a brand.
Confession: We used to make logos that way, too. It felt fun and creative, but we also spent a lot of time running in circles, aimless and ambivalent.
That’s why we started doing Brand Strategy. (And we no longer offer just a logo.) Brand Strategy is a profound process of soul searching that helps the business “find itself” if you will. We might even call it a journey of self-discovery.
Through the guided process of research and exploration, you can devise a business brand that makes sense, with an image that suits your vision and appeals to your ideal client.
Communication breakdown
When it comes to generating content, whether it’s a weekly email, an extended blog article, or a simple social media post, we all encounter those paralyzing bouts of writer’s block. In the age of information overload, what can you possibly add to this saturated ecosystem?
If you try to write in a way that addresses the general public and appeals to everyone, you’ll probably end up appealing to no one. Readers and viewers don’t have time for messaging directed at everyone. In order to grab their attention, they need to know that you’re speaking directly to them.
But how do you do that?
Once again, guesswork is not likely to get you there. It takes diligent, concentrated research to identify your specific audience and know what makes them tick. You might have to play part Sherlock Holmes, part stalker, and really get into their heads.
Now, this is critical, because this is how you get to know your ideal client, or your target audience. And once you know who you’re talking to, and what they’re going through, then you’ll understand just how to reach them and how to connect with them.
Remember, most purchasing decisions are made on a subconscious and emotional level, not at a rational, logical level. So before you start listing the features and benefits of your superior services, you need to make that emotional connection.
Trying to create consistent, engagement-worthy content can be enormously frustrating without a well-defined audience in mind. But through Brand Strategy, we not only identify your audience. We create an imaginary persona that embodies their key traits and characteristics, especially their hopes and fears, and all the emotional circumstances that come into play as they approach your product or service.
With this priceless tool, you’ll know exactly who you’re addressing and how to make that vital, emotional connection with them. And ultimately, with that understanding, you are able to provide them with a more personalized and satisfying service.
Trouble with conversion and retention
Another huge challenge we hear about from our clients has to do with patient conversion and retention. Most of our clients are chiropractors or natural health practitioners, and they see a lot of potential customers.
Generally, they run a successful practice and produce excellent results for their patients. But it happens more often than they’d like, that a person comes in for an initial assessment, or maybe just a few visits, and then never comes back. Why is that?
The fact is, there are millions of people out there who could benefit from the effective treatments our clients provide. But like we said earlier, if you try to satisfy everyone, you’ll end up satisfying no one. It’s like casting too wide a net and hauling in all sorts of leads that may or may not pan out.
Here again, Brand Strategy helps business refine both their audience and their offering. This allows you to zero in on what you do best and on those you can help the very most. Oftentimes, businesses – especially new businesses – are eager to serve every client they possibly can, and reluctant to let a paying customer fall through the cracks.
But trust me, you and your clients will both be much happier if you can focus on quality rather than quantity. Give it some serious thought and identify your ideal client. You know who appreciates you the most, and who you enjoy working with the most. So why not target them with your branding, your image, and your style of communication?
In the end, you’ll save yourself all kinds of time by not investing your valuable time with clients that aren’t a perfect fit for the gifts you have to offer. You’ll avoid a lot of disappointment and uncertainty when you leverage your Brand Strategy to pinpoint the right people who share your values and appreciate your unique talents and abilities.
The war of attrition
In the same way that a vaguely defined business pursues quantity over quality, generating a surplus of lukewarm leads and a scarcity of lifelong customers, it also makes it hard to build a strong and loyal team. Here is one more challenge that probably every business owner can relate to: finding good help.
When we build a Brand Strategy, we invite you to look deep into your soul. Apart from making money, there’s a reason why you chose to be a baker rather than a candlestick maker, or a chiropractor instead of a chemist. There’s something in what you do that makes you sparkle, and makes you feel good about getting up and going to work each day.
Your purpose, your vision, your mission, and your values. This is what we call your Brand Essence, and it’s the foundation of your business, the core of your identity.
These days, savvy shoppers who grew up with a Google at their fingertips know how to research their brands. And more than any previous generation, they want to know that they’re supporting a brand they can believe in.
Moreover, employees and job seekers are not interested in selling their time to a company they can’t respect. We’ve all seen enough corporate corruption, in the news and on film. And most people aren’t interested in working for companies like that. They too want to be part of something meaningful, something with integrity.
Employee retention is one of many benefits you can reap when you and your business are clear about what you stand for and why you do what you do. Getting crystal clear about these ideas and beliefs will boost your confidence and help you build a stronger Company Culture.
When people know where you stand and see that you’re not afraid to speak up for it, then you’ll more easily attract the right customers and hire the right employees. No one wants to follow a leader without understanding their drives and beliefs, so the first thing we do in Brand Strategy is to define and clarify those essentials.
Direction and decision making
Have you ever gone to Netflix and spent an hour looking for the right movie or show to watch? You had nothing special in mind and you thought you’d just wait for something to jump out at you. If you’re like me, it happens a lot. (Insert embarrassed emoji!)
Spinning your wheels on Netflix is one thing. But unfortunately, a lot of entrepreneurs run their businesses with the same wishful strategy. Just keep plugging away, and hope that your hard work will take you somewhere special.
Still, every webinar you watch and every colleague you speak to has a new trick to take your business to the next level. It’s probably not the first time you heard this, but if you don’t know where you’re headed, you’ll never get there.
Yet again, Brand Strategy enables your hopes, dreams and values to coalesce, and provides you with a clear and cohesive map of where you’re headed, and why. It’s more than just a big goal that you write in block letters at the top of your whiteboard. This is a vision built on careful introspection and thorough research.
Brand Strategy makes every other business decision straightforward because you have a solid foundation to stand on and a brilliant North Star to look up to. There’s no need to get distracted and thrown off course by every shiny object that crosses the horizon. When your course is clear, you can pursue it directly, without chasing every rainbow and being pulled down every maelstrom.
A lot of our clients have a pretty clear vision already. And that’s enabled them to grow their businesses to impressive levels. But that growth can also produce confusion. With multiple offices and multiple brands, they’re trying to reach a variety of target audiences. Sometimes those audiences overlap, and sometimes they don’t.
It’s a struggle to know whether to keep everything under one brand, or to differentiate with multiple brands. And is it possible to maintain a certain degree of consistency across those multiple brands? Indeed, Brand Strategy can help you sort out all those moving parts. Together we can see what makes sense, and we can implement it, with strategy and clarity.
Conclusions
No matter how long you’ve been in business or the size of your practice, Brand Strategy gives you a powerful and valuable tool to grow your business upward. Leveling up your business isn’t as simple as following a recipe and baking a cake.
That’s because every business is unique, and each one has its own set of challenges and opportunities. We realize that. And we also realize that a small business, in many ways, is an expression of its owner. There are layers upon layers, with an array of factors at play.
Our distinctive approach looks at all of those features and factors to produce a comprehensive Brand Strategy custom-tailored for your individual goals and your unique offerings. We sort out all the moving parts, and then put them back together like puzzle pieces, fitting tightly, logically, and intuitively.
If you’re ready to go first level or next level, we’d love to help you get there. We have the tools and the experience to deliver a quality product. More importantly, we have the passion and curiosity to get beneath the surface and explore your business in ways you never dreamed possible.
Put your best face forward
Ready to get started? Or curious to learn more? The Brand Strategy Workbook will give you a good starting point to answer some questions regarding your brand. And if you have any questions, feel free to reach out for a Discovery call or join our online community. It looks a bit confusing and overwhelming, but if you take it one step at a time, it all makes sense in the end. You got this!
- Schedule a Discovery Call with Pacha
- Join our brand strategy Facebook Community: Balanced Brands
- Get professionally designed and curated content for your social media channels: Sign up for Social Stream
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