In 2015, my company made less than $30,000 in gross revenue. The next year, we received over $179,000. While my company has continued to grow, this was by far our biggest revenue jump in a single year thus far (roughly 600% growth in just 12 months).
What caused this shift? When I reflect on what changed between those two years of business, it was nearly all in our branding and marketing.
Here are the three branding shifts I made that led to a major influx in customers.
1. I learned to see my products as the premier option.
My product is my coaching and courses. This means people are paying to hear me talk, to have me answer their burning questions and to have my hands on their business strategies.
I had a list of reasons in my head for why I wasn’t good enough. We are our biggest critics, and this doesn’t end in front of the mirror or in our personal lives; it easily creeps into our business lives.
I was comparing myself to others who had been in business longer, who had bolder personalities or who had different kinds of success in my industry. All this did was to hold me back and add to the fear in my head of not being good enough.
My advice to you if you are your biggest critic is to create a visual list of all your experience, your accomplishments and your (and your clients’) results. You can keep this on your computer or printed out and displayed in your office, but you need to be looking at this daily.
What happens when you put all your focus on your greatness is that you start to show up more confidently in your marketing and in your sales conversations. When you are more confident in your offer, your potential customers are more confident about buying your offers, which naturally leads to more customers for you.
2. I created a personal brand to build a connection with my customers.
One of the biggest mistakes I see my clients making when it comes to marketing and branding is writing content only about their product or service. They aren’t sharing their lives, showing off their personalities or really letting their audiences get to know them.
The problem with this is there is no trust building. There are lots of other people they could buy this service or product from, and what really sets you apart in the marketplace is your personal connection to your product and your story.
Once you start sharing your story, your life and your personality, your potential customers start to connect with you and trust you because they see themselves in you -- and that allows them to see that the end result your product offers is possible for them, too.
What I realized is that no one is going to buy my product when they are not even sure if the end result is possible for them. So, once I started sharing my story and the journey getting to where I am -- and also showed them that I am just a real person -- I started seeing more people buying (and, since they had more confidence in the product, they got better results, too).
3. I marketed to people who already wanted what I was offering.
For way too long, I was using all my content as a way to convince people to want my product. I was trying to show them why I was qualified, why I was the best option and why they should make the changes my product offers instead of just marketing to people who already wanted what my product offers.
This is the age of influencer marketing, which means people buy products and services -- really, anything -- because they trust the people recommending the products. If you focus your marketing more on building trust and connection with your audience and less about just your product, you will actually make more sales.
If this feels like a major shift in your marketing, challenge yourself by creating three to four pieces of content per week that let your audience into who you are as a person and your personal connection to your product (why you created it, what your life was like before and after using it, etc.). You will likely start to see more engagement on your content and more people buying.
Creating a personal brand takes practice. Don’t get discouraged if you feel uncomfortable with it right now. Remind yourself why you buy the products you buy, and let that inspire you to switch things up with your marketing and have more fun with your personal brand.
