Introduction: 0:05

Welcome to the Small Business Marketing Huddle. Our show is all about taking action. We equip you with the marketing knowledge and confidence you need to make real progress. So let's huddle up and listen in to the latest episode with your host, Lily Richmond.

Lily Richmond: 0:31

Hey, this is Lily. Thank you for being here today. If you're already subscribed to the show, thank you so much. I do really appreciate you being here and you know I am really stoked that you are taking some proactive steps to take control of your marketing. Now, if this is your first time here, don't forget to hit the follow or subscribe button in your favorite podcast player, because today, like in every episode, I'm going to cover a marketing topic that I really think you have to master if you want to improve your marketing. That I really think you have to master if you want to improve your marketing. And make sure you listen in right until the end, because, as always, I'm going to share with you a really simple exercise and a link to a workbook that is going to help you improve your branding and, specifically, how to narrow down what your small brand stands for. Okay, so let's get right into the episode.

Lily Richmond: 1:25

Today is part five of seven in my series on where to start with your marketing when you are just starting up in business, and let's do a really super quick recap on what we have covered so far. In part one, we talked all about how to make your product or service irresistible, and in part two, we uncovered your target market and your ideal customer. Then, in part three, we crafted a single-minded statement on how you make your customer's life better. And in part four, we demystified how to set pricing and win business so that you can make a profit. And today I'm going to boil down branding to a really, really simple concept and that is brand essence and I'm going to teach you how to come up with yours and I'm going to share some ideas on how you can use that to create, I guess, a really engaging and a consistent brand experience for your target market.

Lily Richmond: 2:25

So, before we go anywhere, what is a brand? I know this seems like I don't know a really simple question, but we need to start with what a brand is, and I want you to take a really broad view of what a brand is. It is more than a logo. It is much more than a color scheme or a fancy looking website, and I really love the definition that one of the most famous marketing speakers in the world, seth Godin, uses to define a brand, and I'll drop a link to a really good blog article of his where he talks about the definition of brand. I'll pop that in the show notes. But he says that a brand is the set of expectations, the memories, the stories and the relationships that, when you put all of those together, that accounts for the consumer's decision to choose one product or service over another. Now, what I love about this definition is that it not only explains what a brand is, but it also puts it in the context of the consumer and their decision to buy.

Lily Richmond: 3:29

Because ultimately, we create brands because we want a consumer to resonate with us. We want them to buy something, or we might want them to join up to a community group, or we might want them to support our charity. You know, we need a brand to be able to do that and we need to create a set of expectations and a relationship with that consumer so that they can choose which brand they're going to choose over another. Ultimately, how you feel about a brand in that case that's going to dictate whether it resonates with you or not and whether you support that brand and how you feel about that brand is going to be made out of the expectations you have, those memories that are stored of your experiences with it and the relationship that you build with that brand, and that's why I'm choosing in this episode for us to focus on what your brand essence is, and your brand essence really is kind of the spirit of your brand and how it makes people feel, and we're going to do a really simple exercise to help you come up with that brand essence.

Lily Richmond: 4:33

Now, at this point I want to make a disclaimer. This short podcast episode is not going to cover the nitty gritty and all elements of brand strategy. You know that could be a whole series in itself. In fact, that could be a whole other podcast, and I'm sure there are plenty of podcasts out there that talk just about branding if you really want to go deep into this topic. What I'm really conscious of in teaching this episode today is that there is a huge amount of jargon, there are a lot of concepts around branding and there are many theories about branding and I don't want you to get overwhelmed because you just have to do a Google search and start trawling the internet for information on how to do branding and there is so much out there, and so when you are just starting out in business and you've maybe never had a business before, the whole concept of this could be just too much and you give up and you don't even focus on it, but branding is a core pillar of your business when you first start out. So I did think about this episode long and hard. And how do I explain branding in a really simple way that is accessible for you and is easy for you to implement? And that's why we're going to focus on the essence of your brand. You know this is not the only way to do it, but I find that when I've worked with clients, it helps them narrow in and focus on what is most important.

Lily Richmond: 5:50

So what are some of the important watchouts when thinking about branding? Firstly, to create a brand that people understand and resonate with, I think you've really got to be consistent. And why is that? Well, being consistent with your branding builds trust, and as consumers, we do start to expect a certain experience when we interact with brands, and we don't really like it when that familiarity is challenged. So think of some of the world's most recognizable brands. You know they don't change. Think Coca-Cola or Nike or Amazon. They are reassuringly consistent, and that builds trust and therefore a stronger bond.

Lily Richmond: 6:34

And one of the things that I see with small businesses and their brands quite often is that they are inconsistent. Often is that they are inconsistent. So you're always changing things up, always changing the colors or fiddling around with the logo or changing the website all the time. You know your email campaigns look totally different to what's on your website. The look and feel there is totally different. Or you say that you know you've got great customer service, but you never pick up the phone. All of these things are about building consistency in your branding. So what I want you to think about more than anything is how do I just be consistent? How do I always deliver the same brand experience each time? That's what the first thing that I think you have to watch out with branding.

Lily Richmond: 7:19

The second thing that I wanted to raise is that branding is much more than your logo, it's much more than your website and it is so much more than brand colors. You've got to think of branding, I think, as every experience that your consumer has with you and I've already touched on it in point one, but every phone call, every email, every social media post, every purchase and even when someone might see your sign written business vehicle out on the road these are all brand experiences. These are all opportunities for your target market to have an interaction with you, whether you're proactively doing that or not, and what does that mean? That means it's an opportunity for that consumer to ultimately form a perception of what your brand and your business is about. So it's really important. Think of every single touch point that a consumer might have with you. That's a brand experience, and we'll cover that off when we go through the exercise in the next section of the episode.

Lily Richmond: 8:15

Thirdly and lastly, I wanted to raise a question that you might be having right now listening to this episode, which is as a small business owner, do I even need to bother focusing on branding? Isn't this a big business thing where you have big budgets and deep pockets? And I would argue that having a clear and consistent brand that resonates or creates an emotional response with your target market is very important. When you're a small business and you don't need to be spending a lot of money on developing branding and expensive branding to be able to do a good job of it, you've really just got to be able to distill down and narrow down what it is you want to be known for, and a really cost-effective way for you to build relationships with your customers is to develop a brand identity or an essence of your brand and it's a way for you to set yourself apart from your competition. You know, if you remember, in the last episode if you've listened to it where we covered pricing with Alana Swain, there was a really great example about a white shirt, and lots of brands sell white shirts and each one of those brands creates a very different brand experience. So it is also a way for consumers to identify with something, that a brand that resonates with them, and be able to choose between different alternatives that are out there.

Lily Richmond: 9:31

So if you're a small business owner, don't you want people to choose your brand? So it's about identifying what your brand essence is and being able to deliver that consistently across all touch points. So I think that about covers everything that I wanted to really cover off with you before we move on to the next section and the exercise. So stay tuned because after the break, we are going to delve into how you define your brand essence and then how you can implement that across your marketing. Okay, so are you ready to define your brand essence? Now?

Lily Richmond: 10:10

To recap, your brand essence is like the spirit of your brand. It's essentially how your brand makes people feel when they experience it and, for another quote. There is a very famous one from Jeff Bezos, the founder of the retail giant Amazon, who I'm sure many of you know and love Now. He said that your brand is what people say about you when you aren't in the room, and I just think that is really true. As a business, you know you can create the branding that you want to project right. You can create that experience as best you can, but ultimately the consumer is going to decide how they think and feel about it, and that is why I think it is so important for you to be clear, concise and consistent with what you want your brand to stand for, because if you can do that, you have a much greater chance of your consumer actually having that same experience and having them feel that way about your brand. Now, to do this exercise, I've created another easy to follow workbook, which I will drop a link to in the show notes, or you can grab it on my website, and the url to go to is marketingondemandco and then slash startup5.

Lily Richmond: 11:31

Okay, to uncover your brand essence, here is what I want you to do. I want you to put yourself in the seat of your ideal customer, which you would have defined. As a side note in part two of the series. Now, if you're the sort of person that has a hard time visualizing or imagining what life might be like for your ideal customer, I want you to go and observe them, if you can, of course, okay. So if your ideal customer, for example, is a busy parent who has to juggle a lot of priorities, well, a good way to see them might be to head down to your local sports field after school and observe parents with their kids heading to sports practice. Now, this could help you put yourself in their shoes, by observing them, because you've got to remember that we aren't always in the target market for the products and services that we sell, right, so we need to be able to put ourselves in their shoes. Okay, so let's visualize, right, you are your ideal customer.

Lily Richmond: 12:27

Now I want you to ask yourself this question how do I want my ideal customer to think and feel about my brand? And here I want you to do a brainstorm. Use the workbook or grab a piece of paper and get as many words out onto paper as possible. Just free flow. Write, for I don't know, say five minutes all the ways that you want your consumer to think and feel about your brand. So that's part one of the exercise.

Lily Richmond: 12:58

Now part two. I want you to look at those words. Are there any patterns? Could you group some of those words together into kind of categories that might go together so you can kind of summarize some of that data? That's part two. Now part three. I want you to take that brainstorm and I want you to come up with just three words that you would want the consumer to use to describe your brand. So if you overheard them in a cafe talking about your brand, what three words would you want them to be using to describe you? So, for example, my brand Marketing On Demand. My three words are supported, relaxed and helpful. So those are the three things that I try to embody in any of the branding that I do. Okay, great stuff. You've now nailed down how you want your ideal customer to think and feel about your brand. Now the final piece is putting it into practice. Now, if you're just starting out and you haven't developed any branding yet, I want you to use these three words to inform your decisions about how you want your brand to visually appear and how all aspects of your business will work towards making the consumer feel that way. Now, if you're going to engage someone to help you do your branding, these three words are really helpful. Hey, even share with them the brainstorming that you did, because that might help them spur their thinking as well.

Lily Richmond: 14:23

Now, in this exercise, I want you to list out all of the ways a potential customer could interact with or see your brand. You know, so I'll give you some ideas. These are obviously all your marketing activities that you might do. It would be your social media content, it could be the way you answer the phones, it could be any of your customer servicing, how you deliver your products and services, your office space, what that looks like, your email signature. You know the signage on the outside of your building. You know even people who aren't in your target market are going to see that signage. So there could be ways that your consumer is interacting with your brand, which is not them directly interacting with you you but observing and seeing it in the marketplace. So I do want you to list out all of the ways a potential customer could interact with or see your brand, and I want you to use your three words to guide how you are going to create and manage those experiences. So write those down and then that's going to give you a really good action list of the things that you need to do to create those brand experiences that you want. So that is it. That's a wrap. You have now come up with your brand essence and how you can turn that into a reality across all of the ways the consumer could interact with your brand.

Lily Richmond: 15:39

Thank you so much for being part of the huddle today. I hope you enjoyed the episode and I hope you're feeling a little bit fired up and inspired really to get creative and develop your branding. Now don't forget to hit subscribe, because next time, in part six of the series on where to start with your marketing when you're just starting out in business, we're going to talk about distribution and that is how you are going to get your product or service to market. This is a really exciting episode because this is where our attention in this series now starts to turn from the why behind why you are doing your marketing all of the why, the strategic pieces into the how are you going to execute it. So you don't want to miss this episode. It is vital.

Lily Richmond: 16:22

As you get ready to launch and as a quick reminder, don't forget to visit the episode show notes to get access to today's workbook to help you define your brand essence and a plan for implementing it in your business. Or you can head to my website and you can grab the download there. You would find it at marketingondemandco, slash startup5. Thank you so much for listening and I will catch you at the next episode of the Small Business Marketing Huddle. Now for the legal jargon. This podcast is for information and education purposes only. We make no business performance claims or guarantees in the information shared. The podcast content is general in nature and does not constitute advice for your unique business situation.