Brand Strategy
Lesson 3 from: Design a Remarkable Client Experience for More Recurring RevenueTara McMullin
Brand Strategy
Lesson 3 from: Design a Remarkable Client Experience for More Recurring RevenueTara McMullin
Lesson Info
3. Brand Strategy
Lessons
Lesson Info
Brand Strategy
So a business's brand is really the creative building blocks of designing the client experience. Now we're gonna talk about brand strategy and you might be thinking Tara, what the heck does brand strategy have to do with client experience? Brand strategy is your creative foundation for building out a truly unique and engaging client experience. So I'm going to walk you through what a brand strategy actually is and how it relates to your client experience. Bottom line. The goal of this lesson is to help you answer the question how does your mission values and brand shape your client experience? So first off what is a brand strategy? Your brand strategy is how prospects and clients relate to your business offer or message. So when they think of your business or when they think of their relationship with your business, the what they think of that's part of your Grand Strategy. 2nd it's what's memorable about your business. It's what really comes to mind for someone who's worked with you o...
r someone who's even just senior marketing. It's that sort of little extra bit that makes your business memorable, that makes people remember it. Third, a big part of your brand strategy is positioning where your business falls in the market. So if the first point was how your clients relate to your business, this is sort of how your business relates to other similar businesses. So for example at my company Yellow House Media we we are a full service podcast, production agency. The way we relate to other businesses is that most other production agencies are editing services, we do editing but we do lots of other things as well. And so that full service piece is an important part of our brand strategy. And then finally what does your business stand for? Whatever its values, you know, for us values are all about equity, they're all about inclusion and we also have values for having fun and being just super efficient and knowing sort of where we're at in the process at all times. Those are pieces of what is super important to us and what we really stand for and that helps to tell our brand strategy story. Now brand strategy and client experience go hand to hand because each touch point of your client experience is an opportunity to operationalize an aspect of your brand. Now operationalize is a word that I love to use but I recognize it may be new to you. So when I say operationalize, what I really mean is it takes an idea and it turns it into something that you actually do in your business. So I can say we have a value for fun and operational izing that value for fun and kind of not taking ourselves too seriously is that we put a gift in every client email. So every client email has something super silly and fun in it. That's that is a very simple way, a very straightforward way to operationalize that value for fun and it enhances the client experience for a lot of our clients, they come to look forward to seeing what gift goes in what email that week. So that's how brand strategy and client experience go hand in hand. Now I want you to refer back to the map that you just made of your client experience as it is not only the sort of high level parts, but each touch point. So looking at each touch point, how is your brand currently represented in those touch points? Now as you go, you may notice that your brand is not represented in those touch points or it's not represented well or creatively. Again, that's fine, That's totally normal. Where are your biggest opportunities to kind of play with your brand? Now the goal here is not to make each touch point a representative of your whole brand strategy. Instead we want to look at sort of like the little bits and pieces of your brand and how one of those bits or pieces might fit in with a particular touch point. Right, so I mentioned putting gifts in emails. That is a super simple, tiny little bit of our brand that goes in one super tiny little bit of our client experience. So I don't want you to try and figure out like again, how you represent your whole brand in each touch point of your client experience Instead, it's really about how can I take a piece of the brand strategy and use that as inspiration for enhancing this particular touch point. Okay, let's take a look at a couple more examples from Yellow House media? The first touch point that I want to talk about is the initial consultation. Now our brand strategy positions our agency as concerned with both a standout podcast and marketing strategy. We don't want to just help clients make a great podcast that of course is part of it, but we want to make sure that they see their podcast as part of an overall marketing. So strategy, it's a big piece of our positioning as a brand. So in every initial consultation we don't just talk about podcasting, we talk about the whole business. What are the goals for the business? What else are they doing in marketing? How do they see their podcast fitting into their marketing strategy? And we talk through some ideas that we have about how that podcast can fit into their marketing strategy and and doing that creates a lot of confidence for our prospects and it reinforces that aspect of our brand positioning. Okay, The second one, I totally jumped the gun on. But just again, because sean would like me to let you know there's a gif in every email. So again, it could be something big like making sure that our positioning is represented in each initial consultation. But it can also be small, simple things like making someone smile every week when they get our weekly update. Now it's time for you to consider your brand strategy. What aspects of your brand do you really want to highlight or amplify through your client's experience? Are there a particular set of values or a particular value that you really want to lean into when it comes to your relationship with your clients? Is there an aspect of your mission or positioning that would allow you to have some fun with the way your clients move through your process? Is there something in there where you can help them feel even more taken care of because they can see just how aligned your brand is with their goals? It's all fair game. Second, what kind of relationship do your clients want to have with your business? This is sort of the reverse of brand strategy instead of thinking about how you want your brand to come across, you think about how someone who's coming to you wants to interact with you based on that brand and so when you kind of take the customer's perspective and think about what they want from the relationship, you can build that into the client expiry Reince as well. And then finally, and this one might seem a little strange to stick with me here for a minute. What misconceptions do prospects have about your business misconceptions happen for all sorts of reasons it can be because they've worked with someone else who does something differently, It can be that they've heard something from a friend about what they're trying to work on with you that doesn't really play out in reality. But your client experience is a great place to bust some of those misconceptions and assumptions and especially through the lens of your brand strategy, making sure that the way that your clients interact with you, the way that you are designing that experience helps them see what's really true and possible about the process that they're embarking on with you. Finally, I like to think about the kind of experience that my clients want to have. So there's the kind of experience that I want to give them and then as a client, there are certain things we want from working with the people that we work with. So this is a good time to think about the last time you were a client, What was really special about that experience or maybe what was not so special about that experience and how might you adapt what you've learned from that into the client experience that you designed your own business and how might you learn from the clients you've already worked with maybe where you might have dropped the ball where things weren't quite clear or just where you have opportunities to improve on that relationship. Your job now is to think through in the workbook all the questions around brand strategy and start to consider where your answers to those brand strategy questions really start to line up with the way you're mapping out your client experience
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