Creating a brand capable of building outstanding connections with your customers is vital, but too many businesses fail at this by making their brand all about them. Here’s some tips from Michael Neaylon for keeping your brand balanced.
If there’s one major mistake brands lose business over, it’s making it all about themselves and forgetting their customer’s experience. Often they don’t even know they’re doing it until they lose website visitors, key team members or customers walk away in droves.
Great brands create outstanding connections with their teams and customers. They do it at every opportunity, every touch point, every piece of copy on their website that’s followed by the exceptional service they receive face to face or the surprisingly personal delivery of their internet order.
Keep your brand in balance
If you make your brand all about you it’s narcissistic. People will eventually switch off. That’s if they even switch on in the first place. Pretend it’s all about them, but it’s really about you and they’ll soon wise up.
Make your brand all about the client and you could go broke because you’re not maintaining a healthy brand balance; either underpricing or over servicing at the expense of your bottom line. This is business after all and money is more often than not made in leveraging a brand, money and time.
Three ways to keep your brand in check:
1. Look at the copy on your marketing material, including your website. Is all the language about you? Is there lots of ‘me, I we, us, our business, our story,’ language? If so, balance your passion, story and background with ‘what’s in this for you?’ Replace every ‘me’, ‘we’ and ‘us’ you can with ‘you,’ and ‘your.’ Structure the sentence to make sense of course. And if in doubt get a good copywriter to help you.
2. Don’t just do this in your copy. Encourage your sales team to do the same in their appointments or do so yourself if you’re the key salesperson in your business.
3. Do the same at networking events, lunches and public speaking engagements.
Be the exception and watch your brand stand out
It never ceases to amaze me how many businesses big and small say they’re invested in their customers, but their actions belie their words. ‘We value you your time so we keep you on hold for forty minutes?’
As business owners we can create better experiences than that. Take the time to truly listen to your customers and devise ways to increase their experience and deliver on your brand promises.
Take centre stage but make them the stars
By all means put yourself centre stage as Richard Branson, Oprah Winfrey or others do, but once you’re there, be the person, brand and business who listens and truly cares about their client, staff and colleague experiences.
That’s how brands stand out. They have a unique offering delivered in an outstanding way which gives their well targeted market a fulfilling experience: whether it’s the innovation of Apple, the steadfast security of your trusted bank or the personal, reliable and timely service from your local electrician.
