Recently I’ve been reading a lot of stuff about branding. What exactly does “branding” mean? Sounds like something that only relates to huge companies with big-time advertising agencies and humungous ad budgets.
But how the heck does that relate to you, the direct-selling professional? Is there a lesson in there for you and your business? It might just relate to you in a much bigger way than you might imagine. Let’s do a little investigation…
What is branding? For a company, it starts with a cool logo, graphic look and advertising campaign. But it’s much more than that. A brand is actually the differentiator of what they offer over their competition.
So, is branding linked to the products you sell? Is it that you offer the lowest price? Or the tremendous business opportunity you can provide? Sure, you need to sell products. You need to offer value. And to grow your business, you need to recruit others. Those are the ultimate goals.
But it’s HOW you go about it that makes the difference. And that’s where personal branding comes into play. Personal branding is best described as your promise to deliver quality, performance and consistency to your customers. You provide something that they can count on. As a business person, that’s worth all the tea in China.
Corporate Branding vs. Personal Branding
We can all learn from the marketplace. Successfully companies work very hard to establish themselves in their spheres of influence. Bizillions of dollars are expended every year to promote products and services. At the end of the day, they want you to walk away with a good feeling about them and what they have to offer. Simply put, they desperately crave your brand loyalty.
Certain organizations stand out as true branding winners. Apple, BMW and Nike come to mind. So what is it that they’ve done that differentiates them from their competition? Sure, they make terrific products that answer a market need. But they also do something else that’s relatively unique in the world of commerce: They establish relationships with their customers.
That can be your greatest asset. Think of yourself as a brand. What do people think of you and what you offer them. It’s not just the products you represent, it’s what YOU bring to the table. If folks believe in you and trust in what you signify, you’ve established a powerful personal brand.
So every business effort you pursue should enforce and embrace that goal. There are some basic fundamentals that you should consider when going about your business:
Personality
YOU are your brand. Make your personality something that your customers want to migrate to. If they’re comfortable with you, they’re more likely to stay with you and trust your input. Nurture and build relationships. Sales will follow.
Culture
Immerse yourself in the lifestyle and culture of your target audience. For example, if you’re representing wellness products, establish yourself as an expert. That doesn’t mean you become a know-it-all—that annoying guy at the cocktail party. Expert status is akin to respect. It comes slowly and develops through consistent action.
Be part of the conversation. Offer helpful tips and advice that leave people with the idea that you might have solutions for them. Don’t force products down their throats. Once they have confidence in your contribution to the discussion, they’ll be more open to what you have to offer them.
Stay in touch
There’s a huge difference between staying in touch and being a nuisance. Only you can determine that fine balance. You want to let prospects know that you’re there, but you don’t want to bug the heck out of them. Use subtle ways of staying in touch. Remember their birthday or anniversary. Or just say hello. Done appropriately, those little things can really make an impression.
Keep prospects and customers informed… casually!
When you do have a special offer or event, let them know. Just don’t overdo it. They’re very sensitive to a sales pitch. There’s a big difference between providing information and being that annoying mosquito that people just want to bat away. If you’ve established yourself as an expert in a particular field, they will want to hear from you.
If you make an effort to position yourself properly with your prospects and customers, you’ll find that they’ll be much more receptive. And that means more business for you in the long run.
It’s sort of like the old party game, “Telephone.” You whisper something to the person next you, who in turn whispers it to their neighbor, who whispers it to theirs, and so on. By the time it gets to the end of the line, the message sounds nothing like what you originally whispered.
It’s no game
Direct-selling. Network marketing. MLM. However you say it, these companies can suffer from the same problem when it comes to their branding.
Network marketing companies invest heavily in their brand and messaging. They spend many thousands of dollars creating marketing materials such as video, audio, presentations and print pieces for their representatives to use. Ideally, the company’s efforts will remain intact all the way to the customer.
It’s important to realize, however, that distributors are actually expending their efforts building THEIR businesses. And not everybody is a network marketing expert. The company may not have much control over what happens to THEIR brand and messaging after it leaves the front door.
Consider the following scenarios:
Video
A marketing team just spent tens of thousands of dollars on a new product video. Now what do they do with it? They could post it somewhere on the website and hope distributors either stream or download it. But who’s to say what happens with the video from there? Maybe a consultant will place it in a PowerPoint presentation. If so, how sure can a company be that the presentation fully honors its branding and messaging?
Presentations
How about that 12-slide PowerPoint business opportunity presentation the marketing department just finished? You can post it on the company back office site where representatives can download it. Remember, the consultant is promoting his or her own business. So it’s highly likely that they might dig in and edit the PowerPoint to personalize and customize it for them. How much brand/messaging control might the company lose in that process?
eCards/Invitations
Consultants could also be subscribing to third-party eCard or online invitation providers to get their message out. While there are many quality online solutions, they are somewhat generic and don’t provide any kind of consistent corporate branding.
So what to do?
The $64,000 question:
How can a company provide quality materials that THEIR consultants can use to promote themselves and still maintain the integrity of THE CORPORATE BRAND and messaging?
This was the driving force behind the development of the ROQlogic Media Center. We realized that there was a real desire in the industry for a solution that not only made it extremely easy to distribute content—from video and audio, to print materials and online presentations—but also to provide corporate control over what a specific brand looks like all the way from the consultant to the prospect or customer.
Simply put, there’s nothing else like the Media Center in the industry. It provides a centralized, controlled environment for a company’s multimedia content where distributors can:
Send an online, multi-slide presentation—complete with audio and video
Post a video or presentation to their social media sites
Download a video or email it to a prospect or customer
Download a presentation for offline viewing on their computer
Downloaded a high-resolution, print-ready PDF file
Creating Brand Partners
The beauty of the Media Center is that it not only automatically personalizes everything for the consultant, it gives the corporation complete flexibility as to what can and can’t be changed, and therefore what is and isn’t communicated. That puts the company back in the driver’s seat and in control of their brand! Furthermore, it empowers consultants to become BRAND PARTNERS with the company.
I urge you to visit the rest of our website and find out more about what the ROQlogic Media Center can do for you. And I invite you to comment below. I look forward to your thoughts and ideas.
Just read a terrific post by Marcus Sheridan, an online marketing blogger and proprietor of The Sales Lion, an online marketing consulting company.
We’re so deeply concerned about how many Facebook “Likes” and Twitter “Followers” we may or may not have accumulated through our social marketing efforts. But Marcus makes a powerful point that we might just be missing the real issue: What does that really mean in terms of actual readership? And more importantly, how does it translate to bottom-line sales?
“…all the content and blog posts in the world don’t mean squat unless they are leading to more trust, leads, and ultimately paying customers.”
He further states that first impressions in social media don’t mean much. He compares the “Likes” and “Follows” with one of his clients to actual readership and sales performance. The difference between the Facebook/Twitter/Google+ activity and actual tracked sales was remarkable. There were only 22 total social media “hits” related to his 8 posted articles. One would think that his online marketing effort was a bust.
Bankable results
But check out the actual “rubber-meets-the-road” results:
210,762 page views
2,471 inbound links
$2 million in sales directly attributed to those 8 articles
That’s just insane!
Makes you step back and reassess just how you go about your online marketing, doesn’t it?
Recently I’ve been reading a lot of stuff about branding. What exactly does “branding” mean? Sounds like something that only relates to huge companies with big-time advertising agencies and humungous ad budgets.
