Your Helping Business

What actually is your brand?
Your brand is made up of several things:

• Your Business Name
• Your ‘logo’ or any specific graphic associated with your business
• Your domain name
• Your e-mail address
• Your phone number
• You– and your photo – which could form a major part of your brand because people are going to do business with you!

These are the mistakes that people and businesses make with branding:

• Saying too much in the brand about what the business offers unless the offering is very, very specific and you are targeting a very specific niche market.

It’s very easy to turn people off with a brand that’s too specific, or too generic. The reaction will be “I don’t want that” as assumptions are made about what you business do and don’t do.

Unless of course, ‘turning people off’, disqualifying them, is what you want to do.

• Using a domain name that is too long and too descriptive. As a rule of thumb, the main part of the name (before the .com etc.) should not be more than 20 characters. Sometimes people will need or want to type it in, so don’t put them off.
The name should not include underscores as often they are not seen, but it can include hyphens.

• Using an email address that is not in the form yourname@yourdomainname.[ext].

Email
Common email mistakes

Using gmail, hotmail, btconnect, me, aol, outlook, or any other generic or ‘free’ email can impact your credibility and may in any case often go straight to a junk mail folder!

Using an email address that starts with ‘sales@’ (Really! how crazy can you get?)

Using any of the other ‘generic’ addresses like info@, enquiries@, hello@ and so on.

Always use a personal name, preferably your own, or, if you don’t want to do that (and I can’t think of a reason why you’d want to ‘hide’ in that way) you can use any first name.

This is easy to set up. When you register a domain name you simply set up email addresses @ that domain name and redirect them to whatever email account such as a gmail or outlook address that you already have and then set the outbound mails to look as if they come from your business email address.

Of course, you can also take the little extra trouble needed to do it ‘properly’?

How to set this all up is dealt with step by step in the Personal Business Creation System.

Image & Name
The actual design of your brand and logo is extremely important, including the colours that are used, and the ‘shape’ of the design. A good designer will understand the psychology of colour and not just use colours that happen to be ‘fashionable’ at the time.

Along with this goes the business name and for a personal business I would very strongly recommend that you incorporate your own name or use something ‘meaningless’ (like Apple, Blackberry, Wildshark, Google, Virgin, Pink Spaghetti, Clever Jellyfish, Yellow Jigsaw, etc). These are all real brand names, some of which you will recognise.

The thing is that they all started out as personal businesses with one or two ‘founders’, and you cannot dismiss them until you know what they offer.

Examples of ‘owner name’ brands include Ford, Ferrari, Amstrad (A M Sugar Trading), Dyson, Hoover, Sainsbury’s, Morrison’s, Eddie Stobart, Rolls Royce, Marks & Spencer, and so on – you’ll be surprised.
It’s so important to put your own name to the business, it shows belief and commitment.

Having decided on the name the next thing to consider is how it appears and the image it creates – and that rather depends on the target market.

You’ll need a different image if you’re an accountant than you would if you were a therapist, a different image as a life coach than as a plasterer – and so on.

Your image needs to be one that both attracts your target market and that they relate to and are comfortable with.

If for example you are female but want clients of any gender don’t use a pink and flowery logo – it will cause a large proportion of people to reject you, and of course it’s the same the other way around. Unless you want it to be because those are who you want to attract, don’t use a gender specific logo.

Depending on what it is that you offer (and your target market), you may wish to reflect this in what you wear – branded clothing or a uniform of some sort, sportswear if that’s your niche.

Male or female, just because you own a ‘business’ doesn’t mean you have to wear a ‘suit’, and in our market, definitely not!

Cards
Your ‘presence and credibility’ starts with your business card.

Rule No. 1 – Always carry a few business cards with you wherever and whatever, you never know when you might need one and have to admit that you don’t have a card – which means that your business isn’t that important to you – credibility score falls by about 5 points!

Rule No. 2 – your business card is NOT an advertising flyer. Keep it simple. All they want is your contact details, not a sales pitch on the card, and if you give them too much ‘information;’ they may decide that you’re not a ‘fit’ for them anyway.

You may want to put a good businesslike ‘headshot’ on your card as well, really useful for the people who remember faces and not names.

I’m not convinced that ‘shaped’ cards or small, or square cards are any better that a regular A7 card. They tend to be perceived as a bit ‘cute’ and maybe not ‘serious’. Again – keep it simple.

Your Business Identity
“Who am I – to them?” – is the question you must ask, and once you have the answer, the task is to decide how you are going to present yourself to the larger market.

‘Who you are to them’ needs to be your decision, not theirs.

How you present yourself is critical because people out there cannot resist, within the first 7 seconds, attaching a ‘label’ to you. It’s how we’ve all been trained – to recognise and categorise stuff quickly – usually into one of three ‘boxes’.

1. Not interested, bin, ignore
2. Interested, will look at it ‘later’ – when I get one of those ‘round tuit’ things
3. Very interested, just what I’m looking for. Act now on put on priority ‘do list’

It’s not as simple as that obviously, but that’s how you, as a new business owner, need to be thinking –
“What will cause ‘them’ to put ‘you’, in the bin, in the file, or on the ‘do list’?”

Media
Where and how do you do all your promotional activity?

There are many platforms where you can promote yourself. The one people now usually think of first is ‘social media’, more on that elsewhere but there are other media and the one most people forget is doing stuff ‘live’.

Business networking, organizing and participating in live events and attending business shows, are all examples of the ‘live’ stage.

This is discounted by many either through lack of results if they have ‘tried’ it, or lack of confidence to do it.

The thing is that if you do it properly (and you may have to learn how) this is very effective. I know of many coaching and therapy businesses that have been built in entirety through business networking and different forms of live events. It gets you in front of real people a lot quicker than any other method.

The second, and some people would say old-fashioned, media for promotion is paper.

Don’t underestimate it. Advertising on paper does work but only if you do it right. It must be targeted and well placed in the ‘right’ publications or locations.

The way that works best on paper, if again it is done properly, is good old fashioned direct mail. Relatively expensive but very effective depending of course on the benefit you are offering and to whom.

There are two forms of online media. One is through promoting your own website and the other is through the hated by some and loved by others, ‘social media’.

The most effective of these are LinkedIn and Facebook but the thing to remember about these is that businesses comprise of people and people work for or own businesses – so you can promote to individuals on LinkedIn (although they’ll probably have their ‘business hat’ on) and you can promote to businesses on Facebook (where the reverse may be true).

The thing is though, do not EVER post anything on either of those platforms that could be construed as or interpreted as an advertisement.

Yes, advertising is available on both at a cost, but it is doubtful whether anyone looks at them unless they are really closely targeted. It’s not what people are there for.

What they are there for is information and recommendation, so that is the content you should be posting.
It should be done regularly but not too often and should vary in content although you can repeat content on an appropriate timescale. There is a lot to this and more detail is available in the Personal Business Creation System.

Finally, we come to e-mail marketing which is a descendent of the ‘old’ direct mail. It is of course much cheaper which usually results in it being ‘overdone’. The emails you send out follow the pattern of the marketing funnel and can be informative, promotional or advertorial.

You need a system to manage them, and what is called an auto responder, to send follow up mailings. It can all be written in advance and plugged into a system such as Mailchimp, Constant Contact, Aweber or Campaign Monitor. All have their pros and cons, but I’d recommend as a start up, unless you have a very large list, that you start with Campaign Monitor.

One of the things you need to be aware of with email marketing is the data protection regulations – GDPR in the UK and EU. It’s different in the US and other countries and there seems to be a mutual non-recognition of the rules. So what you do in the US may be either illegal or ‘over the top’ in Europe and vice versa.

The key thing with data protection is that when you ask someone to opt in to a mailing list or anything else for that matter, you must be specific about what they are agreeing to -you can’t just have a general opt-in to receive any old emails! You must also specify the length of time for which they will receive mails, and this this can of course be ‘indefinitely’ or ‘until further notice’.

A further note on e-mails. Email providers are increasingly introducing stronger and stringer ‘spam filters’ ostensibly four your ‘protection’ or ‘convenience’ but it’s also a form of censorship. They will filter out emails for any of the following reasons, seemingly sometimes at random:

• Links to web pages in the email
• What they consider to be spurious subject lines
• Videos in the email. Graphics in the email
• Emails coming from a ‘mailing list’ (such as Mailchimp etc.)
• Emails with names in the ‘blind copy’ section

It doesn’t seem to make any difference if your emails are replies to something someone has sent you or to list of names who have ‘opted in’. I’ve found the best way around this is to let people know you’ve sent them a mail via a messaging system like text, WhatsApp, Telegram or Signal.

Messages sent from within LinkedIn and Facebook do in most cases get through but it’s all extra work.

Video
Video is something that you must include in the presentation of your business online. It is not an ‘option’. You cannot compete with a similar business that has a video presentation on their website or uses video on social media.

There are ‘rules’ about the length and composition of video but these change frequently, and you need to get up to date advice on these at the very least every six months.

Your video should show you, what you do, how you deliver your service, and what the benefits are. Video testimonials from clients are good for this.

And look, don’t be coy about not liking how you look on screen – it’s how others see you in real life – not how you see yourself in the mirror – that’s why we always look ‘odd’ when we see ourselves on video.

Video is often hosted separately from your website rather than being embedded in it which means you can share the video on its own or as part of something else. After all, you’ve gone to the effort of making it – you wouldn’t want to use it only once!

There are various platforms for hosting video such as Wistia, Kajabi and Amazon S3 – and there’s also YouTube – the ‘upside’ of which is that it’s easy, is owned by Google and may give better search results, but the downside is that alongside your video on YouTube you’ll find a bunch of ‘similar’ videos – often from your competitors. Not really what you want is it?

You will be tempted to make videos with your smartphone. Yes, this can be done but it’s much better if a professional videographer does it using professional video making equipment, especially lighting.

The Personal Business Creation System takes you through the process of getting a video produced and up and running and also shows you how to set up your own studio, get the right equipment and make your own (almost professional) videos.