Blog

April 21, 2021

What are your Brand Pillars?
When building your business, you want to focus on making sure that you are doing the things that will allow your brand to stand out from everyone else. Defining your pillars and being clear about the things that make your brand unique, is going to be extremely powerful for this to happen.

Brand pillars are the points that set your company apart from competitors. You want to sum up your outlook on the things that matter most to your customers, and where it naturally fits, reinforce those ideas in content you produce.

Branding comes to be from all of the different encounters people have with you. You see, everything that your business does is adding (or subtracting to your brand). You are either building your brand consistently through values, images and feelings, or you’re not. Simple.

Let’s begin to understand the components that make your Brand Pillars.

01: PURPOSE
Why does your brand exist with respect to the positive difference it makes in your audience’s lives?

What promises do you make to your audience?

Where did your purpose stem from? (E.g. Does your company history have anything to do with it?)

What motivates your purpose? (E.g. why do you wake up every morning and continue down this path?)

BRAND PILLAR #1: THE BRAND FOUNDATION

The first brand pillar you need to focus on is THE most important element that will genuinely allow you to transform the way in which others look at you. The brand foundation is all about getting crystal clear around WHY YOU. Why should others hire you – especially when the market is so saturated and full of people selling a variation of the service that you are offering?

Answering this question at its core, will enable you to leverage the things that make you different and use them to your advantage. At the end of the day, we live in what’s being called an “Identity Economy” where people are making purchasing decisions based off identity above anything else.

This means that your job and priority as an entrepreneur is to figure out what the identity of your brand truly is all about.

So when we talk about this first pillar, we want to make sure that we truly are able to understand the things that make us different from our competition. I do this through a process I call “The 6 S’s of Singularity” where we focus on uncovering 6 different
areas that make you who you are as a brand:

• Stories: What stories and experiences from your life have shaped who you are as a coach or consultant?
• Skills: Which skills make you great at what you do? What are those learned and innate things you bring to the table?
• Successes: What important success stories do you have in your experience? Maybe this is from clients or even from your own life.
• Superpower: Here, we focus on understanding what your brand archetype is and how it plays into the way in which you are perceived as a business.
• Style: What is your communication style? Are you seen as someone serious or someone that is more relaxed in the way in which you come across?
• Steps: What unique processes, systems, frameworks or methods do you bring to the table?

   

  When you are able to understand these 6 areas, it’s easier for you to communicate the value that you can bring.

  Within the brand foundation pillar, you also have to get a clear understanding of who your audience is. One of the most common mistakes that entrepreneurs make is thinking that they need to be broad with their audience in order to attract more people in. Actually, the opposite is true.

  You want to get extremely specific with your audience so that all the communication pieces you emit, can speak directly to the problems that they have. Otherwise, you end up getting lost in the crowd. 

  The final part of this pillar is getting extremely clear on the ultimate outcome that you provide for your clients. What this means is knowing the benefits that you deliver and learning how to communicate them and position yourself in a way that makes your ideal audience turn around and pay attention.

  For your messaging to connect and convert, you have to make sure that you are crystal clear on what you are saying and your words get straight to the point while connecting to the RIGHT PEOPLE – your actual audience

  Positioning is what allows you to answer the question “SO WHAT? What’s in it for me?” for your audience. The better you are at understanding this, the more effective your marketing and customer journey will be.

  BRAND PILLAR #2: YOUR SIGNATURE OFFER

  Once you have defined your point of differentiation, audience and positioning core message, the next step is to get clear on your signature offer.

  For people who are starting out, this means creating clear milestones between where their audience is and where they want to be and turning this into a program that will allow them to get the results that they desire.

  For those who have a signature offer they have created, their next step then lies in making sure that the message surrounding their offer is extremely powerful and clearly communicating the value that they provide.

  At the core, you have to understand three things: features, benefits and results.

  When we talk about features, we mean the different characteristics or things that are included in your program. For example, saying they get 10 groups coaching calls, access to 5 training modules, workbooks, swipe files and more. These are all considered features and it’s essentially the tangible things your clients are getting when working with you. For example, for my 1:1 program, a Brand that Attracts, 

  The next part of this brand pillar is defining the benefits and these pertain to why it matters or what can people do with the features or details of your program.

  Finally, when we talk about results, we’re referring to the outcome that they will get or what they will achieve because of working with you.

  For example, this could be a breakdown of this for my 1:1 program: 

   

  Features: 12 months of coaching. Creating your Brand Book, building your website.
  Benefits: Having absolute clarity on your brand while feeling supported knowing exactly what the next steps to your business will be.
  Results: Creating a message and marketing strategy that will allow you to attract 1-4 high-end leads into your business every single day, resulting in you making over 6 figures per year.
  Let’s look at this for a weight loss program:

  Features: 3 months of coaching, a personalized diet plan and a simple exercise routine
  Benefits: Having a plan that’s 100% adapted and customized to your specific needs so that you don’t have to figure out if it will work, you will just have to follow the system.
  Results: Losing 15lbs in 3 months, and knowing exactly what to do to keep the weight off. 
  Getting clarity on these three things will allow you to improve your communication and to be able to show your audience that you have the solution that they need. 

   BRAND PILLAR #3: YOUR MARKETING STRATEGY + VISIBILITY PLAN

  
  The next brand pillar that you need to define is your marketing strategy and visibility plan. Essentially, what you want to do is create a Magnetic Customer Journey that will allow your ideal clients to go from a cold and unknown audience, to a hot lead that then turns into a client.

  You want to be able to create a clear path that will allow you to close deals consistently – and therefore, make more money.

  This means that you begin by building Awareness around who you are through free, organic content or paid advertising.

  This leads you to take these people into the Consideration phase, where they enter your sales funnel and become a lead that begins to consider you as an option.

  The next step of this customer journey lies within the Decision where you present them with your offer (see brand pillar #2) and they are then led to make a Purchase for your service.

  The key to making this customer journey truly magnetic is in doing these 3 things:

  Building trust, authority and connection (which comes from Brand Pillar #1)
  Revealing your unique framework and offer (which relates back to Brand Pillar #2)
  Overcome objections by positioning what you do as a necessity and the solution your clients need.
  When you are able to do this within your funnel, your content becomes magnetic and it becomes an easier decision for your ideal clients to make. 

  BRAND PILLAR #4: YOUR VISUAL BRAND

  The final brand pillar is related to your visual brand and it’s here where you want to focus on building a brand that visually represents the value that you deliver. 

  
  If you are constantly attracting clients who are asking you for discounts or who don’t see or understand the value that you are offering – it might be time to audit and look more closely at your brand.

  Listen, I don’t have to convince you that a visually powerful brand will make a massive difference in the perceptions others have of our businesses. I’ve worked with so many clients with very amateur brands and websites that needed a major rebrand if they wanted to attract high-end clients. 

   If you want to attract the right people, make sure that you are worthy of the people that you want to bring into your business. This helps you determine your brand. 

  Your visual brand includes your logo, identity, color, fonts and the general look and feel of your brand. You want to make sure that you’re keeping it simple, fresh and that it really connects back to the message you are trying to convey and that your personality is really shown. Below, you can see four examples of brands that I’ve worked with that look powerful, and when bringing the message, offer and marketing strategy together, make a big impact in the types of leads they are bringing in. 

  As you see, the power of defining your brand pillars is infinite and will allow you to make the necessary connections you desire with your ideal audience which, bottom line means, making more money while having a bigger impact in your business.