If you tried to sell a service or a product and got poor results, it's probably because you still have to build a brand for your business (or yourself.) In this post, I will show you the five key areas of every strong brand, and I will give you a step-by-step process you can easily follow to build a brand that sells.

This article is the first of a long series about business recognition and personal branding, so if you find this post valuable, bookmark it and visit us every time you want to fast-track your way to success. I will link most of the upcoming articles here.

First things first, though, who am I, and why should you listen to me? Of course, if you already know that, you can skip to the meat and potatoes of the article.

My name is Deniero, and I started selling marketing solutions as a Google Premier Partner in 2012. In 2015 I worked on a partnership with Shopify (the e-commerce giant), and right after, I built two e-commerce brands on Amazon. In 2017 I opened a digital marketing agency and helped my clients generate millions in sales through branding, public relations, influencer marketing, and product placement. Then in 2018, I launched a podcast and a coaching program that allowed me to help entrepreneurs in over 50 niches. I get invited regularly to speak at government-funded business events, I often have the pleasure of networking with and interviewing best-selling authors and 9-figure entrepreneurs, and best of all, I can easily sell my high-ticket coaching programs because people trust me. If you want to know more about me, click here to open that post on another tab.

I'm not sharing this to brag but to show you the power of brand awareness. In fact, all the successes I mentioned were due to the brand I was representing at that time.

Now let's get into the brand-building framework:

But what is a brand? In short, a brand is a series of traits that differentiate you from your competitors. For example, if your business were a person, her brand would be the way she dressed, what she said, the people she hung out with, and how she spoke. In other words, a brand is the "lifestyle" and personality of your business.

That's why it's essential that you get clarity around your brand and you stick with that model in the long run. So to show you why that's important, let me ask you this. Do you like dealing with people that change their minds every week? Or people who seem very positive one day and incredibly negative the following one? If your answer is "no," you are not alone. People need to know what to expect when they deal with their friends, and the same goes for the brands they buy from.

So, now that you know the importance of being consistent let's start the branding process.

Develop your brand identity

This is the step where you get to combine the visual component of your brand with its messaging and mission. 

As best-selling author and marketing hall-of-Famer, Seth Godin says, "every interaction, in any form, is branding." So that means that you need to get very clear about what you stand for, who you want to associate with, how you want your clients to feel when they interact with your business, and, most importantly, how you are going to represent these traits with your design and messaging.

For example, Apple has built a technology empire around a few key concepts, including ease of use, great design, and customer experience. And for that reason, everything they do aligns with those traits. Think about their packaging! If you've ever unboxed an Apple device, you know the feeling I'm talking about. And the same goes for their website design. It's sleek and simple, just like their products. And what about when you walk into their stores? Do they look like other stores, or do they feel like an extension of their products? The same goes for Apple Music and all their apps. The Apple experience is different, and that's not by chance that their slogan is "Think different."

That level of consistency across different media and the quality of their offer builds a brand identity that sticks.

So think about how you want your brand to be perceived. Work with a branding expert, or benchmark your competitors, and then build your brand identity as if all the items were part of one single package.

Build your brand strategy

If your brand's identity is the looks and character of your business, the brand strategy is the long-term plan that allows you to bring your vision into reality. That encompasses everything from the products or services you sell to how you deal with your employees and the events you may choose to sponsor. Every time you or someone else acts on behalf of your business, that activity will either align with your long-term brand goal or deviate from it.

Take my podcast, for example. The Remote CEO Show is all about building lifestyle businesses, and we stand firmly against burnout. That means that when we pick guests for our show, we're only interested in lifestyle entrepreneurs or authors of books that fit our mission. If we did otherwise, it wouldn't be long until our listeners would get confused. After all, would you listen to a show that sends you mixed messages and contradicts itself? The same thing goes for our partnerships. We only work with and/or promote brands that we believe in and that we'd buy ourselves.

And just like my podcast, your brand needs to follow a set of guidelines to keep the messaging and customer experience uniform.

Here are a few questions you can ask yourself when laying out your brand strategy.

• What is my pricing strategy?

• Which social media platforms should we focus on?

• What niche are we going after?

• What's our plan to generate referrals?

• How are we collecting our testimonials?

• Should we focus on blogging, video content, audio, or all of the above?

• What type of businesses should we partner up with?

You can come up with even more questions to get a clearer picture of what to work on to bring your vision and mission to reality. 

I want to issue a warning here. Some entrepreneurs don't feel the need to compile a brand strategy document because they call the shots on all the critical matters. But, if that's your approach, what will happen once your team grows and others are in charge of the day-to-day? They'll either ask you the same questions repeatedly or guesstimate the correct answers.

That's why you must build your systems early. That way, you can easily pass the baton to your new hires, and they'll know exactly what to do.

Create brand awareness

This is the most visible step in the marketing process because the main objective here is to get people to pay attention to your brand. Unfortunately, this stage can also be very costly, and due to the lack of instant feedback (sales may not come in for months after you invested in your brand's exposure), you need to plan carefully for it.

The most effective brand awareness strategies in 2022 include influencer marketing, video content on social media (especially Instagram Reels, TikToks, and Youtube Shorts), social media marketing, referral programs, podcasting, and magazine or blog features.

Before we move forward, though, let me take a second to differentiate between lead generation or conversion campaigns and brand awareness campaigns. 

A lead-gen or conversion campaign is a type of marketing that's geared to get a sale for a specific offer. For example, if you are an accountant, you could run Facebook Ads to get fractional CFO services leads. Again, this is a specific ad for a specific service.  But what if, instead of doing that, you purchased a billboard on the highway that said "GG CPA Services Inc.  Austin's #1 Accounting firm." That's a brand awareness campaign. You are not selling anything in particular yet, but you are getting your brand's name out there.

We live in a noisy world, and your prospects won't magically buy the minute they get exposed to your content. That's why it's essential to get exposure first and then follow up with email sequences, retargeting ads, or social media content.

I can't stress how important it is to execute this step correctly. One of the most common mistakes I see new entrepreneurs make is to go straight to paid ads to sell something before building a solid brand. Then, after months of getting poor results, they wonder why their campaigns were not profitable. 

Drive store sales (or leads)

This is the most prized step for entrepreneurs. It's where the rubber hits the road, and you start seeing the results of your hard work. Calls get booked, people start buying, and you get to fulfill your offer.

If you followed the step-by-step process above, your prospects should already know who you are and what to expect from the transaction. They already saw your testimonials and case studies. They have been receiving valuable newsletters from your company, and they like what you offer. But most importantly, they have no doubt you can help them.

I will stop for a moment and let the last sentence sink in. Entrepreneurs that try to close the deal (or get the sale) too early don't allow time for the correct number of brand touchpoints. And when that happens, the likelihood of a transaction happening decreases drastically. 

If you run lead generation campaigns, you know you've done a good job if :

• Your option rate for your lead magnets and booking pages are on par with or above your industry average.

• Your prospects show up to the calls they book,

• Your prospects are qualified and understand what you sell,

• They are in buying mode, and they know the call may end in a sale,

• They can make a buying decision, and if they can't, they brought the decision-maker with them.

Instead, if you are running conversion campaigns to an e-commerce store, you know you did the right preliminary work if:

• your site visitors stay on your website for at least 30 seconds,

• your site visitors keep on growing the site instead of bouncing off after viewing one page,

• your return customer rate is on par with or above your industry average,

• your store conversion rate is on par with or above your industry average.

If you experience any problems related to the steps above, you may want to stop your conversion/lead gen campaigns and focus on building brand awareness. If you sell high-ticket items, consider building credibility with influencer marketing or getting your own PR (don't hire a PR agency!) If you sell low to mid-ticket items, consider partnering with complementary brands in your niche to gain credibility.

And if problems persist, go back to the brand identity stage and benchmark your successful competitors. Try to find out if they are doing something you are not. Do they have a faster/better website? Do they get most of their traffic organically or through paid ads? Do they have a solid social media presence? If so, take some time to analyze their followers.

Getting sales to a new brand is not a linear process. Instead, your growth will look a lot more like a compounding graph. That's because the first sales will generate social proof, which will increase your conversion rate, and the cycle will fuel itself.

Maintain brand loyalty

It's always exciting when a new customer buys from your business for the first time. But if you are running ads or using a commission-based sales service, you have to give up a big chunk of your profits. So the only way to increase your margins is to keep your customers coming back for more.

Return business was always important, but building brand loyalty in 2022 is more crucial than ever. Let's look at why that is.

Fiercer competition: Even though 2020 saw a sharp increase in internet sales, there have never been more online businesses. From e-com stores to coaching programs and remote services, almost every company is fighting to grow online.

Higher ad costs: In the past years, ads have increased in price. Each platform has a different reason for raising its pricing, so to be profitable in the long run, you need to balance paid ads with a solid organic presence. Paid ads are crucial for scouting new leads and customers at scale, but it's certainly not the end of the customer cycle.

More demanding customers: Consumers are more knowledgeable than they've ever been. Maybe a few years ago, you could have gotten away with suddenly raising your prices or letting buyers pay extra for shipping. But now everyone knows how to compare your offer to the rest of the market. So if yours is not up to par with the rest, you'll lose your hard-earned customer base in no time.

The best way to bypass or mitigate the issues above is to wow your customers once and for all. There are several ways you can build brand loyalty, so let me list a few that work exceptionally well.

• Offer a return customer coupon to your first-time buyers

• Offer a bonus right after the customer has bought something

• Follow up with your buyers with valuable newsletters

• Follow up by showcasing products that complement the original purchase

• Create a tiered system to offer unique benefits to return customers

• Launch a loyalty program or an "inner circle" option

Rinse and repeat from point 3

You made it! You now own (or work for) a brand that people love, trust, and, best of all, keeps on growing without relying on expensive ad campaigns.

The goal at this stage is to make minor adjustments to your brand strategy. For example, let's pretend that you sell legal services and you noticed that a big chunk of your clients came from a podcast interview you did a few months ago. If your original strategy didn't include interviews as the primary lead generation tool, you might want to have those and capitalize on your findings. 

But aside from making those tweaks, you should focus on the last three steps of the framework: increasing your brand awareness, getting leads, and building brand loyalty.

If you are a professional or a solopreneur and want to land high-ticket clients so you can automate your business and work less than 15 hours a week, click here to watch the free video training. We've helped hundreds of people build freedom businesses, and you can be our next success story. Have a look at our video testimonials, and let's get on a strategy call!

Latest posts