better than the alternatives. Otherwise, people have no reason to do business with you instead of one of your competitors.
To differentiate your brand, find or create a unique selling proposition and a value proposition. A unique selling proposition (USP) is a statement about what makes your brand different from and better than competing brands. A value proposition is a clear statement of the tangible benefits of your products and services.
Here are a few ways to differentiate your brand with USPs and added value:
Narrow your target demographic. New brands may not be able to win a war against bigger, well-entrenched brands, but they can win some battles to gain a foothold and start building momentum. Narrowing your target demographic enables you to differentiate your brand in a smaller market.
Create a different price point for a popular product. Notice that I said different, not lower. Your price may be lower to appeal to the budget-conscious or higher to appeal to the quality-conscious. Don’t start a price war with well-established brands. Why not? Well, for one thing, you’ll lose, and in the process, everyone in your industry will lose because you’re all trying to undercut one another.
Focus on customer service. Promising and delivering superior customer service is a great way to differentiate your brand when your brand is nearly identical to competing brands.
Differentiation is all about creating a market niche, as explained in Chapter 2.
Building credibility and trust
People buy only the brands they believe and trust, so one of your branding goals should be to build credibility and trust and not do anything that undermines these attributes. Here are a few ways you can build credibility and trust in your brand:
Demonstrate your knowledge and expertise. Use content marketing (valuable, relevant content that doesn’t explicitly promote your brand) to show that you know your stuff. You can distribute content in the form of web pages, blog posts, email messages, newsletters, press releases, podcasts, videos, and more.
Keep your promises. Salespeople have a motto: “Underpromise and overdeliver.” Don’t make your customers expect more than you can reasonably deliver. Do what you say you’re going to do. If you launch a preorder, be sure that the date you promise to ship the product is realistic; then meet or beat that date. If an unforeseen delay arises, keep your preorder customers informed so that they know what to expect.
Use customer and client testimonials. Include testimonials and positive quotations about your brand on your website or blog and in your marketing materials. Testimonials are especially effective for business-to-business brands because they show that you have a track record of delivering quality products or services.Business-to-consumer businesses can also benefit from testimonials. After launching our brand Color Me Book, we reached out to satisfied customers to request testimonials, which we then posted on our site.
Embrace transparency. Be open and honest. If you say or do something wrong, own up to it, apologize, and try to undo any damage. Denial and shifting the blame may work in politics, but they’ll destroy a business.
Driving sales
Often, the goal of branding activities is to drive sales. Some activities drive sales directly, and others do so indirectly. Here are a few direct approaches for motivating customers and clients to buy what you’re selling:
Advertise your brand. Traditional and online advertising are great for building brand recognition and awareness while driving sales. See Chapter 15 for details about using advertising to promote your brand.
Offer freebies and promotional deals. The best way to persuade prospects to buy your product is to get them to experience your brand’s value. To do that, you need to get your foot in the door. Offering a sample product, a free consultation, or a 100 percent money-back guarantee are all ways to reduce customers’ exposure to risk, so they’re more likely to give you a chance.
Create a loyalty program. A loyalty program rewards customers for repeat business, and every encounter you have with a customer or client is an opportunity to prove your brand’s value.
Creating Your One-Year Branding Plan
With branding goals in place, you’re ready to build a plan for achieving those goals. Start by outlining your plan. Create a document that includes the following sections:
Goal: What you hope to accomplish by the end of the year, such as 25 new clients or $100,000 in sales revenue. Make sure that your goal is SMART, as explained in “Identifying Your Branding Goals/Objectives” earlier in this chapter.
Objectives: Mini goals that you must achieve to meet your overall goal, such as increasing brand recognition and awareness among millennials.
Strategy: A strategy is nothing more than a big plan. Suppose that your goal is to increase your brand’s market share by 10 percent over last year. You could use different strategies to achieve that goal, such as positioning your brand as being the highest-quality or marketing your brand as the most socially conscious.
Tactics: Tactics are specific activities for executing the strategy, such as launching a website, creating five branded social media properties, or buying $5,000 in online advertising.
Timeline: Break down your one-year plan into more manageable milestones. What do you need to accomplish in three months, six months, nine months, and 12 months to reach your goal? Or what do you need to accomplish each month to reach your goal?
Budget: How much money do you plan to invest in your brand over the coming year? If you’re just getting started, this amount will be a fixed dollar amount; later, it could be a percentage of sales revenue.
Monitoring and Evaluating the Success of Your Branding Efforts
Whether you set personal, professional, or business goals, having a way to measure your success in meeting those goals is essential. Otherwise, you’re flying blind; you have no idea whether what you’re doing to achieve your goals is working and no insight into what you could be doing differently or better.
To measure success, you need two things: metrics and analytics. Metrics are quantitative measures used to track performance, such as sales revenue, customer retention, and online sales conversions. Analytics involves examining the metrics in various ways to gain insight into what you can do to improve performance.
In the following sections, I explain how to use metrics and analytics to monitor and evaluate the success of your branding efforts.
Choosing metrics and key performance indicators
The first step in measuring and monitoring performance is figuring out what you’re going to measure. Here are some important branding metrics:
Brand recognition: The extent to which people in your market recognize your brand when they see your product or logo
Brand awareness: The extent to which people in your market understand what your brand represents or stands for
Brand consideration: The percentage of customers who would be open to