Good Branding Helps Attract Ideal Clients

Last week, I introduced attracting more ideal clients as the first of three suggestions for generating more new business in 2023

Personal branding, the second suggestion, is a key factor in successfully attracting more ideal clients.

Your personal branding helps distinguish you from the competition, which is one of the many challenges of marketing services.

After reading this articles, park any intriguing ideas away at the back of your brain, allowing your fertile imagination to come up with scenarios in which better personal branding will help with your marketing.

Brand-Approved Actions

By way of example, at this point my personal brand is playing a key role in my work.

As part of shifting to delivering services to sharing experience, I am consolidating and reorganizing my web content and blogs.

During this process, enhancing my personal branding is the ultimate test.

If a proposed change makes a positive contribution to my personal branding, it’s go. On the other hand, if there is no direct connection with my branding, the proposed change is archived for possible use in the future.

Among its other benefits, a personal brand can serve as a powerful yet simple decision-making tool.

When faced with a decision, do whatever makes the greatest contribution to your brand. If on the other hand, there is no direct connection with your personal brand — don’t do it.

Differentiators ?In Personal?Branding

Sometime ago, I took a webinar offered by Hinge Marketing, a leader in the field of marketing professional services.

The webinar introduced the term ‘differentiator’ into my marketing lexicon. As explained in the webinar,

“A differentiator is something that makes your firm different from other firms in some meaningful way…Brand differentiation is simply making your firm’s brand different.”

On reflection, I realized that there are two categories of differentiators.

One category would be inside differentiators, such as people, processes and how we serve clients. These are the factors that are under our control. We can shape, refine and otherwise improve to help distinguish ourselves from the competition.

The other category…outside differentiators…is totally outside of our control. Try though we may, we cannot control factors such as the market, the industry or industries that we serve as well as our ideal clients.

Even though we cannot control these outside differentiators, it does not mean that we can ignore them.

On the contrary: it is important to know as much about these outside differentiators as we do about our inside differentiators.

This thorough knowledge of outside differentiators helps match our service to what the market needs, wants and is prepared to purchase. It’s also what helps us shape and refine our personal brand so that it resonates and helps us connect with our ideal clients.

The Essential Elements of Personal Branding

Personal branding distinguishes one individual service-provider from all others. It’s the magic ingredient that allows us attract potentially ideal clients.

Service-providers often give up their distinctiveness by trying present themselves in a manner that they think is expected of them. Invariably, this leads to copying the business and marketing practices of others. As a result, they lose their distinctiveness.

(Truth be told, as a lawyer, I failed miserably at meeting the expected image of a lawyer. Many clients told me with a sense of relief that I didn’t act like a lawyer.)

Without distinctiveness, all providers of the same service seem pretty much the same to potential clients and referral sources. All consultants ?seem much the same, all coaches seem much the same and so forth.

Given that everyone in the same business seems much the same, it would follow that their services would also be much the same, right?

As a provider of services, you know that’s not correct. You know that no one serves and satisfies clients the way you do. You also know how you help clients and how they benefit from your help.

But do potential clients and referral sources know these things?

Personal branding will help tell the market who you are and how you help clients.

Strategically, a personal brand is also a key component of the marketing framework, which provides the structure for all marketing communications.

Your Combination of Attributes

What makes us unique as individuals the combination of physical, emotional, and intellectual attributes that contributes to how we think and act.

Personal Characteristics

In a service business, many factors contribute to your distinctiveness.

Your website, blog/social media posts activities and content also influence how others see you.

In the best personal branding, each and every aspect of your marketing reflects your distinctiveness.

In effect, your personality represents your values in action. It’s how you behave and interact with other people. Because actions speak louder than words, your behavior sends a powerful message about who you are as a person and also as a professional.

Your Competencies

These are personal and professional skills that enable you to interact with other people and serve clients.

This distinguishes you from everyone else…including others who provide services similar to yours.

It’s the contribution of your personal attributes that contribute to how you interact with clients, contacts and your colleagues. Defining your uniqueness involves addressing questions such as:

???What can you do for clients that is better than anyone else?

???What is distinct about your business and your brand?

???What value do you deliver to clients?

???How is it better than what the competition offers?

???What benefits will your clients receive from buying and using your brand?

What Does Your Brand Promise?

A brand promise is the cornerstone of personal branding as a strategy to generate more new business.

Properly developed and managed, the promise can generate new business and referrals from past clients.

However, poor brand development and weak business management will lead to broken promises, which drive potential clients to the competition.

By consistently providing quality service (key component of the marketing framework) in effect you promise that clients will continue to receive the same quality.

This promise of quality is reassuring to your clients and contacts. It increases their comfort in continuing to deal with you and also recommend potentially ideal clients to you.

What difference would it make to your business if you were to distinguish yourself from the competition and stand out in your marketplace?

Feel free to share your thoughts by way of a comment … or if you like, let’s chat.