Some people are lucky enough to have a really specific idea of what they’ll offer when they start a business. Some of us start off offering a wide variety of services and slowly narrowing down as we find our “zone of genius.” It’s important for all of us to evaluate whether we’re truly delivering what we say we will. Confused customers aren’t necessarily happy customers. But, if your offer has shifted since you started your business, it’s even more important to make sure your message still matches what you do. Which is why hiring a branding professional is so important.  

Hiring the Right Branding Professional

The Importance of Hiring a Branding Professional

 

While it sounds simple enough, many successful business owners get stumped by branding and messaging questions like these. When you’re in the thick of running your business, it can be hard to have any brainpower left over for big picture issues like this one. We’ve all been there!

If it makes sense for you, hiring a branding professional is a good way to get this messaging issue figured out. More brainpower left over for the stuff that comes easy to you!

 

Maybe you’re not ready to hire a branding professional to help you evaluate your messaging? That’s ok. We all DIY certain aspects of our business at some point. If your business has evolved, and you’re not sure your messaging is accurate anymore, here are some things to ask yourself:

 

• How do most of your customers hear about your business?
• What specific problem does your business solve?
• How different is your business from your competitors?
• What promises do you make to your customers?
• How do your customers talk about your business to other people?
• How loyal are your customers?

 

Consider the Customer Journey

After reading the questions above, you might notice that they start with how customers hear about you and end with how likely they are to be repeat customers. This is the journey they take with you when they choose you over other options. When we evaluate how we’re reaching and serving customers, we can see where we’re losing people and where we’re making them really happy. Helpful stuff to know, right?

 

Once we identify these areas, we can improve and fine-tune our processes with the goal of retaining more customers. In other words, you’re creating a brand experience. When you intentionally put processes in place to create a consistent experience for your customers, you’re more likely to receive consistently positive feedback. Can you think of any restaurants or other businesses where you have a certain expectation of service? You can create that for your brand, too. 

Your Brand Experience

Once a customer or client finds you, are they likely to have similar experiences? If you’re an online business owner who has a variety of offers, you might be wondering how you can achieve this. For example, we offer a variety of services in our business. But one area that is consistent for all of our clients is our onboarding process. Once we’re hired for a job, we send a specific set of emails letting people know what we need from them and what they can expect from us. You can read about our whole design process here.

 

We use project management software to help us keep track of communications with clients and potential clients. Newer business owners might not be ready to invest the time or money in project management software. But you can take the time to create some email templates to use for each step of the intake/onboarding process. That way you’re not writing new emails from scratch every time you get an inquiry AND the people who interact with you are getting a consistent experience. Win-win!

Next Steps

We hope your brain is swirling with ideas now. But we want you to be able to organize those ideas and put them into action. Remember those questions we encouraged you to ask yourself earlier? We encourage you to dig a little deeper. 

 

In fact, we included these questions and some follow-up questions in a free DIY Brand Audit Workbook we created. The follow-up questions help you get really specific. You might be surprised by your answers! By the way, we’ve left space for you to take notes. This way, you can keep referring back to the document as you implement any changes. 

 

If you’re working on strengthening our updating your brand, this is a really helpful tool we developed based on our intake/onboarding process for clients.  Other branding topics are covered as well, like identifying your ideal customers and your brand values. Whether you use this to DIY your branding or realize you want more help with your branding, we’d love to hear from you and know what you found most helpful. You can sign up for the free workbook here. 

Have you hired a branding professional yet?  Let us know in a comment below!