In Part I of Building A Strong Brand, guest blogger Annemarie Cross touched on the importance of knowing your brand’s secret sauce – YOU! Here’s Part II that reveals 4 keys to helping you identify your brand.
If you find it difficult to identify and define your core brand, here are four key areas you should consider when identifying your brand’s secret sauce.
1. Your Brand Attributes:
Your brand attributes are your characteristics; your unique qualities; your quirkiness.
• List 5-6 features/qualities that you would say are unique about you.
• What do people often admire about you?
• Do you have a quirkiness about you that is often mentioned as being something unique and essentially ‘you’?
2. Your Brand Strengths:
Your brand strengths are your gifts and talents – things that you are naturally good at.
• List 5 to 6 of your greatest strengths.
• What do people most admire about you?
• Think about some of your achievements. What strengths and talents did you use to secure these successes?
3. Your Brand Promise:
Your brand promise is what you guarantee people will receive when working with you.
• What are you committed to delivering time and time again to each and every client you work with?
• When dealing with people – what can they expect in terms of how you interact with them and make them feel throughout your relationship?
• If you were to ask several of your clients about their experience working with you – what would they say?
4. Your Brand Essence:
Your brand essence is really the heart and soul of your brand. [I use the Branding With ArchetypesTM system to uncover these elements].
Here are a few things to consider when defining your essence – the heart and soul of your brand:
• List 3-6 brand values?
• How does your brand make people feel?
• If your brand were a character, describe what that would look, sound and be like?
After identifying and combining each of these areas – your brand’s secret sauce, you too can define and build your own authentic signature brand.
Having a strong authentic brand will help you distinguish yourself from your competitors and will be impossible for anyone to copy. You’ll also begin to attract your ideal clients as they’ll instantly resonate with your brand message because you’ve made it very easy for them to understand exactly who you are, what you do, and how you can help them. Pretty cool, yes?
Here’s to identifying your brand’s secret sauce so that you too can stand out powerfully from the crowd to get more clients, get noticed, hired and paid what you’re worth. Have questions or comments about your brand? Please post them here. I’d love to hear from you.
Annemarie Cross is a Branding Strategist & Business Coach helping entrepreneurs create rich powerful and authentic signature brands that identifies who they are and magnetically attracts attention, opportunities and a steady flow of ideal clients. She may be contacted at: www.AnnemarieCross.com
