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*