Brand Marketing 101
So you have something to sell?
Well the good news is that the basic rules of brand marketing are the same whether you are selling your services or selling a product.
What is a service? It's when you are selling someone your time and experience. Examples of this would include a hair dresser, personal trainer, personal chef, dog walker, plumber, photographer, dentist, or doctor. A service provider is also someone who sells content such as copywriting, advice, books, or any trade specific consulting.
By contrast, when you are selling a product, you can touch & feel the final output. This is often called a widget. It's something you can put in a box and hand over to a customer or ship on Amazon.
The basics of what I am about to share with you apply whether you are selling a service or a product. And there is no ultimate order to follow. All of these items need to be defined, however, you pick the order that makes sense. It's no different than when you are decorating a room. You might have a rug that you fell in love with. Then you pick out the colors from that rug and that defines your palate. Then that color scheme influences the era or decorating style, and then you find the perfect velour couch on Pinterest, and slowly you piece together the "strategy" of the room. You don't always have to start with picking paint swatches.
Before we get into the three core pillars of brand marketing strategy, it's important to define your ambition and philosophy. This will be your north star as you develop your brand, to make sure you stay true to your goals.
Your ambition is your WHAT. What is your agenda? When you look back in a year, two years, three years... WHAT do you want to have been achieved? Is it money? Is it helping a certain number of people in the community?
Your philosophy is your HOW. How will you lead? Will you hire a certain profile of your team? Will you surround yourself in a certain community? Will you respect certain sustainability measures?
Once you have written your ambition and philosophy (each can be a 3-5 sentence paragraph), you will continue on to define the three basic elements of your brand marketing strategy:
Brand Identity: Who are you? = What is your unique and differentiated angle?
Target Audience: Who are you serving? = Who is your customer / consumer / client?
Location: Where do you want be doing all of this? = Are you in a zip code? Selling via a 3rd party like Amazon? Straight from your website? Or is a doctor's office recommending you?
Brand Identity
This is where you define the essence of your brand. What is the persona you want to portray. If you are a service provider, like a dentist, it might be easier. You may simply want your persona to be YOU. Then the next steps are easy as you will catalogue the attributes through the lens of who YOU are. However, if you are selling a product, like jewelry, then you will want to personify the brand with attributes such as: tone, voice, and delivery. For example, if you humanize your brand and it walks into a room, what does it look like? What does it sound like? How does it speak to others?
You will also want to distinguish the boundaries of what you ARE vs. ARE NOT. These are the guardrails that will help in your copywriting and imagery. For example, if you ARE "kind" but ARE NOT "a push over", you will use language in your copywriting that cues that. For example
Target Audience
Who are you trying to reach? Why? Unfortunately, in some basic high school marketing classes, you were probably taught that your Target Audience was a demographic. What's a demographic? For example: Men vs. Women, or High School Diploma vs. College Educated. In essence, it's slicing your Target Audience by something the Census might collect. While this is a simple way to start, it is not powerful and it can cost you unnecessary money later as you begin to advertise and reach out to your Target Audience (let's call it TA from now on).
A more sophisticated way to define your TA is based on an emotional and psychological profile. This focuses on behaviors, as in, how does your TA feel, and what does your TA say & do? This is called a psychographic TA.
For example, if you are an Acupuncturist, you could define a
Demographic: women, aged 25-35, with 3 children, with college degrees, who make $75K per year. OR
Psychographic: people who are suffering from migraine headaches, who have tried traditional medicine, and are now open to alternative medicine
Which of these two options do you think will get you a more effective reach?
As you are defining your TA, you don't need to eliminate demographic information completely. For example, if you are selling tampons, it would appropriate to define your target as Women. However, there is no need to limit your definition to the demographic.
In other writings, I'll share the next step of this exercise, which is to create a full-blow persona, and create image/vision boards so that you can see the embodiment of your TA. It will help with writing content, creating marketing materials, and keeping you relevant in your communications.
Location
Using the example above of the Acupuncturist, if you are a local provider and you know that people are typically not willing to drive more 10-miles for a medical service, you would want to define a zip code area. This will save you money later, when you go to advertise in your market. What's the point of someone in Flower Mound, TX knowing about your services if you only serve the Jupiter, FL area?
By contrast, if you are a national brand, you will approach this a little differently. Let's say you have a jewelry line, which you sell direct from your website. Your location considerations might be whether to
Expand sales internationally
Open a pop-up boutique in the mall
Hit up your local retail boutiques and ask them to sell your products on your behalf
Sell via a third-party, like Amazon
Extend your digital storefront to Etsy
There are many assumption to consider when defining your WHERE? How does where you sell impact your brand? In the example of the jewelry line above, displaying your products in a local boutique could potentially hurt your brand if your style doesn't match the boutique style (this could be the price, look or even "vibe").
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Obviously all of the above is hugely simplified to show you that it CAN be that simple if you want to... and like anything in the entrepreneurial word, the most important thing to do is GET STARTED. The next part is to develop a brand communication and channel strategy and create an innovation funnel and a brand vision plan. But the above three pillars are the most foundational building blocks.
My daughter is in the 2nd grade and she's learning to write effectively with a tool her teachers taught her called POWER: Planning, Organizing, Writing, Editing and Revising. Each of these elements is done sequentially. When you are writing with POWER, you are not editing while writing. And you are not planning while writing.
It is no different in brand marketing. At some point (topic to be covered at a later date) you will want to COMMUNICATE out your brand message in the form of media. Whether this be paid advertising (ads), earned media (influencer), shared platforms (Instagram), or owned (website) entities. You will learn so much once you start interacting with your customer / consumer / client and you will need to continue "building your airplane while its in flight", or to continue the POWER analogy, to Edit and Revise.
However, if you can start with the plane grounded, and spend a few minutes Planning, Organizing and then Writing, you will save yourself stress, and frankly money. Because your basic brand marketing tenets will be defined. You will have your:
Ambition
Philosophy
Identity
Audience
Location
Wishing you the best of luck in your entrepreneurial endeavors. There is abundance. There is enough for you and everyone else. You will succeed!