First of all, what is a brand? It's common to get branding and marketing confused. Marketing is getting out there and telling people all about your business, social media advertising, newsletters, all that kind of stuff.
The simplest way to think of your brand is the overall experience that your clients have from the second that they discover who you are to the last time that they interact with either your website, your product or you.
It's an overall experience, kind of like the feeling. It's a little bit more subjective than I think people think it is. It's not just your colors or your logo, it's an entire experience, the way you treat people, when you send an email, the way you respond in an email, the kind of products you deliver your vibe, all of that stuff.
Keep in mind as you're building your brand that your brand is sort of like a living, breathing thing that is constantly evolving and influencing your clients.
They don't just experience your brand by like an advertisement or something that they see on Facebook, they experience your brand on a in a fluid timeline kind of way.
Number one, and this was a really, really difficult one for me, in the beginning. It still is a little bit, but I've definitely gotten a handle on it. And I understand now why it's so important.
Number one thing to keep in mind when developing your brand: don't try to please everyone, it's okay to turn people off.
And that's because you don't want to work with those people, you will attract the people that you want to work with, you'll attract the right group of folks, if you are just true to yourself.
When something that you put out there doesn't feel like you, if you're, for example, editing photos, just because you think the client will like them better edited this way but that's not how you normally would work; or if you're if you're editing the language on your about page or on posts that you make to sort of be a blanket kind of benign post that's not going to offend anyone. But really normally you're the sort of person that F-bombs everything and doesn't really care. It's not going to really be true to who you are and you're going to constantly this entire time you're doing business be behaving in a way that not an alignment with who you really are.
Don't try to please everyone. The best stuff is stuff that turns away as many people as it attracts.
You will find yourself surrounded by awesome clients. Number two, keep in mind a service mindset. Not just how many likes do I have? How much traffic am I getting to my website? How many people are on my email list? That stuff is fine, but that stuff will grow naturally if you follow step number one, which is be yourself and don't try to please everyone.
And number two, if you are all about helping people out or serving people in some way, by serving, I don't just mean doing, like what I'm doing like coaching or something like that.
Are you adding value to the stuff that you're showing your clients?
Are you delivering something that might be really interesting and valuable to them? On Facebook, follow me here. Sign up for many sessions. Tons of calls to action and not giving people anything that might be valuable to them, like, “Here are five ways to prepare for a mini session,” isn't helpful. Keep yourself in a service mindset when you're building your brand, that will just help guide things as well.
And number three, really get familiar with your why. you should internalize it, it should be behind every single thing that you do.
It is incredibly important to understand why you're doing this. And there's no right or wrong answer here. But it's very important to just understand what that is for you because it's going to guide everything that you do and it's going to help you keep on track.
Don't try to please everyone. Keep a service mindset and remember why you're doing this. Before you do anything. That intentionality I talked about a couple episodes ago, when I went over my favorite things that I learned from Oprah, when I went and saw her a few weeks ago. That's exactly what I'm talking about the intention behind what you're doing should align with why you're doing it.
