The Story Behind My Brand Messaging

Hello and happy midweek to everybody there!!

Today I want to talk about brand messaging and the story behind MY brand messaging, and the story behind some other brand messaging, that we often come in contact with, when we're trying to figure out who we are, what we're trying to accomplish in our business. And I

think that that's really important, right?

So when you're talking about your brand, the one thing that I see people struggle with alot is "what's my brand? What's my one thing? How can I be unique? What can I do to stand out and have people choose, me over for instance another realtor?" Branding is

important, however until you have ANY business, it's really not important.

You need to get some business under your belt as well, otherwise you're just doing branding for something that's completely imaginary. So how do you figure out branding? How do you figure out if it's something that works in terms of marketing, in terms of your image, in terms of what exactly you're selling, what you're trying to accomplish here?

A couple of things that I see sometimes when people are trying to figure this out...

#1: they come up with some crazy amazing unique idea for branding. Something

that they love and and that's what they they really cling to. And then

they really believe that this is so cool and unique. Yet, it's not

really serving their business in any way that

is moving them forward, towards their their goals and their values and their

their value proposition.

So I would think about, A) what is important to you a

and B) what is your superpower? What's your one thing that you know how

to do and and you really think that you can create.... ? And things that you

are passionate about?

Then we do need to have those end

goals in mind, right? So what are we trying to accomplish here, and how does

this kind of branding tie in to what I'm trying to do?

I'll give you an example: so the story behind MY brand messaging... so we're

called the Spotlight Realtor Network, we've got hundreds of Realtors every

year in this program, that's a free coaching program, to those Realtors who

hang their license in our office (which is fantastic, right?)

When I sat down to think about what we're going to call this program, I thought about

"what's my background? Where am i coming from, what do I love and

what is my cool one trait?" So I'm not a gymnast, I'm not you know a

pilot I'm not a race car driver, or whatever.... these could all be things

that you could tie into any kind of a business name, right? But I did get my

degree in film production! So when I started thinking about film

production, one of the things that was interesting to me was that we have

certain programs, other productivity coaching programs, all around the country

and the East Coast has some specific things, and actually when I was thinking

about my branding, I was still up in Portland Oregon, yet I was still on the

west coast. And I thought to myself "okay, what does the West Coast have, that the

rest of the country doesn't?" Right?

And I thought "of course! We have Hollywood!!!"

Hello, we have "lights, camera, action! " This is my thing! I love video, I love video

production, and the more I started thinking about that, I started thinking

okay... there's red carpet like "KW red", we give out awards, there's agents in the in

the film business, right different types of agents. There's production in the film

business - we have production in the world of real estate. These just

kind of started matching up for me, and I thought this is totally it! This

is what it is, and this is also something that speaks to people who live

on the west coast, because that's what we grew up around. So that's kind of

my story. I would say, figure out your natural skill and superpower,

and also make sure that it fits within what you're trying to accomplish.

The #2 thing is, that you always want to make sure that you have your mission

and your value proposition in place, before you do any of this stuff, because

those things are going to help you get to a place where you actually have the goal

in mind - mission, vision, values. I mean you can do all kinds of other things along

with that, but if you have the mission... ...ie. what are we trying to accomplish

here? Why is this program created? Why is your brand created? Well it's created

so that we can cure cancer, or it's created because we noticed a need in you

know in for instance the the school programs in the area, that had a lack in some

certain way and now we created this program, to go teach there... whatever your

business is. In the world of real estate - why did you, why are you creating this

brand?

Maybe it's because you're giving that exceptional customer service, maybe your niche is multi-family homes, or maybe you had service that wasn't good and you want to definitely make that service better, and make the industry better. So why are you created? Why is your

brand created? And then for the value proposition. You know, a lot of

times people think value proposition is goes something like this: that you know we give great customer service or blah blah blah...

Your value proposition should actually look

almost like a resume, which sounds a little nuts, but this is how it would go..

something like this : with my his history in XYZ field I am able to bring my

customers this and this and this kind of an experience. So the value

proposition is actually telling them why you are the person to bring them this,

what gives you the right to help them, what gives you the right to sell them

this product, what do you know about it, and therefore why can you bring value to

them. And so if you get those two things, the mission and the values straight, I

think that you're gonna have a lot easier time trying to brand yourself to

to anything - to your business, to putting it on actual paper, creating any

kind of operations manuals, whatever it is that you need to do, creating the

systems in your business.You'll have that common goal and common mission and

now you're able to create the branding around that, versus moving it the other

way, where you're just like "oh this would be a cool brand." It's not really a good

business plan, right? So are we holding on to some sort of an idea for branding

just because we like the idea, or do we actually think that it would work? And I

think that that's kind of the separating factor, that I see a lot of times

especially in real estate agents, when they start their branding. So

think about if it works for you. You know, energy attracts energy - who are you

attracting?

If you want to read a really good book, this one is one of my

favorites.

It's called "Find your why" by Simon Sinek. His first one was "Start

with why" which is basically discovering what your "why" is and this one

is more about branding and it's talking about why do people stay

loyal to certain brands, for instance Apple. Why do they stay loyal to them?

And one of the things that they've found is that

by them aligning themselves with that brand, it says something about THEM. So

when you're thinking about your mission and you're thinking about your value

proposition, what is that actually saying about your client to be aligned with you?

What is it - what does it make them feel? And if your views align

with the type of client that you need, you're gonna have business. That's

just as simple as that. So what is your branding doing to

the potential client, and why do they want to align with you? It has

to be something that says something about that client, right?

So those are my

two tidbits for the day - nothing too crazy! I hope you all have a very

powerful week and I will be posting some links if you're interested to

learn more about this. I do have a great format also for the mission vision

values beliefs system that can really help you develop that further, if you'd

like, with some amazing questions. See below.

I'll post that below, all right? So you

all have a powerful day and I will see you guys soon.

*I do not own the images in this blog*