After reading our blog post, 6 Branding Tips for the Self-Employed, you want to leverage all of your great work to build buzz for your business. This is where it becomes most important to ensure that your branding strategy is highly congruent to who you are and what you believe in.
The secret to building effective buzz is all about effective engagement, and effective engagement is all about emotions.
Contrary to what most business owners think, most people buy for emotional reasons versus rational ones. There is a great Ted Talk by Simon Sinek that differentiates the effectiveness between Apple’s branding strategy and that of its competitors. Apple speaks first about how it believes in thinking differently followed by benefits of its designs and lastly about the products it makes. It’s competitors speak first about what they make followed by features and may or may not ever convey why they do what they do.
The U.S.’s recent political elections are another example if this. During their campaigns, Trump spoke about making America great again, while Clinton spoke about having a plan. Regardless of our political leanings, one of these messages provokes emotion and the other appeals more to rational thought. The election outcome conveys which strategy was more effective.
In this context, think about what you believe in and how you can share this effectively with others as you implement your branding strategy to build effective buzz. To aid this process, consider the following:
- What do you believe in?
- How does it relate to why you launched your business?
- Why would your target audience care?
- How can you speak to what they care about as you promote your brand?
- How can you track the resulting level of engagement?
- How can you build upon and reinforce what’s working?
Answering these questions honestly and thoroughly will result in a well thought out branding implementation strategy. The resulting buzz will validate it.
Be you, be true, and reap the rewards!