November 22, 2018 was my first podcast interview. I wanted it to be great. There’s only one real measurement of this – the value that the listener receives. It went incredibly well. I discussed how Building Your Better Brand will dramatically impact your lead conversion and save you money on all the rest of your marketing efforts for years to come.
I had the good fortune of being sought and found by Neil Howe – a veteran of podcasting and authority-building. He provided me with helpful key questions that any interviewee should have hashed out prior to a show. Below are the highlights that I discuss in detail in the podcast, which you can listen to here.
Building your best target audience
Finding your best niche – this is your path to more effective marketing and business building. I discuss how niching down actually expands your opportunities.
Defining your best company avatar (target persona) as a means to guide your marketing efforts and content development is an essential part of connecting with your niche audience. Define your ideal client. You probably have already worked with her/him in the past. Speak to that person in your content.
How to define your best brand
I talked about my many years of creating logos for companies and how that, by necessity this led to developing Mission Statements and Value Propositions BEFORE I could develop a truly refined and meaningful logo.
Neil and I also discussed how to create more trust and credibility within your website – without doing this optimally, your company will have to invest much more into paid advertising each month in order to convert visitors into prospects, and prospects into clients.
Finding your inner passion
Your best Mission Statement and Value Proposition intersect at the point where you find the deeper passion behind your product or service of choice. I discuss how I help my clients find their deeper, inner motivation. It’s often something so foundational that they’ve overlooked it for years, thinking that their best motivational and differentiating characteristic is still just outside their grasp when it’s truly been there all along.
I share a couple real world examples and I also talk about my own career path as an example – how I lost focus and found my way back to the basics of Better Branding to define my services. Sometimes it takes getting very quiet with yourself and creating a list of what you LOVE about your business and what you HATE. When you get in the right space mentally, this painful process will help you find clarity.
The bottom lines is, if you’re not enjoying what you’re doing than you’ve most likely lost track of your original desires, or you’ve simply not connected with the most appropriate (helping people) ones.
For those who truly cannot identify with a passion in their field, you’ll have to examine your limited beliefs. Many of us, including myself, need to get honest with ourselves. I discuss some techniques to combat our limited belief system, and why “The Secret” didn’t work for us in this post.
Constructing a homepage for lead generation
In the podcast I layout my basic tried and true process for laying out your home page in the way that your prospect is seeking the information.
Make sure the reader is able to qualify that they’re in the right place within the first two seconds. Immediately provide credentials such as accreditations, certifications or testimonials. Intersperse call to action forms or buttons along the way.
Case studies, videos and quality blog posts go a long way in building trust.
Addressing entrepreneurs’ biggest fears in regards to creating their marketing properly
There’s a lot of misinformation on the internet leading us to believe that simply having a website built will generate leads for you. Not going to happen. You need a better message and presence than your competition.
By the time someone is ready to work with me, they’ve typically gone through one or two of these processes first:
- Many companies will hold you hostage. They got you in on the cheap and then look for expensive up sells. Getting out of their grasp typically means leaving behind your efforts in content development. This is a painful process.
- Outsourcing to cheap off shore sources usually creates more problems than it solves. NEVER do this with your SEO.
- Some people/companies will try to sell you their “easy DIY process” that actually requires the time and resources of a small agency.
The #1 thing you should focus on is getting the best Return On Investment (ROI) possible. If a website only cost you $250, but produces no leads for you nor has a system in place for you to implement your content marketing, than you’ve not only wasted the $250, but you also wasted a ton of valuable time that could have been spent building your proper audience. In this post, I discuss in detail the pluses and minuses of DIYing your brand versus offshore outsourcing vs using an agency.
Final thoughts
Your brand is the foundation and framework for your entire marketing campaign for the life of that brand. If you’re looking to generate leads, you must have a presence that exudes trust and credibility to convert them – otherwise you’ll have to spend exponentially more on paid advertising that achieves a much smaller percentage of conversions. Overcoming a bad first impression isn’t easy.
Get your brand done right. Make sure your Mission Statement makes your heart beat a little faster and is a guiding light for you and your employees when times get tough. Make sure your clients clearly identify your Value Proposition. Make sure your logo and slogan connect with your target audience upon a glance.
Mostly – make sure your brand provides a substantial Return On Investment!
