Promise that you’ll craft a brand promise
A lot of people I meet talk very passionately about the need for a company to have a clear and compelling brand promise. About 10% of them know what a brand promise actually is. The other 90% confuse it with a mission or vision statement.
If you want to picture a brand promise, think about the first words a new visitor would see when arriving on your company’s website. Messages like “Get Paid Faster,” “Supercharge Your Sales,” or even “Make a Better World by Supporting Healthcare in Developing Countries” are all potential brand promises. But while these statements might appear very broad and simple, the true challenge lies in making them both unique and relevant to your target audience. This is the first five-to-ten seconds you get when you begin talking about your business to anyone, and it’s impossible to spend too much time working on it.
Your sales strategy might involve chasing a few tire-kickers, but your brand should always be built around the client who sees the true, unique value you have to offer, and the promise you make to them.
I first encountered some of the principles for developing a brand promise in the work of Jon Jantsch at Duct Tape Marketing. For more tips in this vein, I also highly recommend this blog post on Marketing a Professional Service, and Duct Tape’s content in general.
Here are a few steps you can take to help get you there:
1. Imagine your ideal customer
This is the person who truly gets it, who sees all of the incredible value you have to offer, is great to work with, and is willing to pay what your product or service is truly worth.
2. Determine what this customer sees in you
When you put yourself in the headspace of your ideal customer, try to understand precisely what it is about you and your product that they value so highly. Try to be as specific as possible, and try to think of things that make you truly unique. How do you offer them these things better than anyone else?
3. Take these qualities, then promise them to your customers
Whatever it is your ideal customer sees in you, use that as the basis for your promise. Or ask yourself: what is it that you want for your clients? What joy and success do you wish upon them?
Have a few ideas? Now promise them.
Why brand promises work
Brand promises work for several reasons:
- First, they force you to be confident in your position. Your sales strategy might involve chasing a few tire-kickers, but your brand should always be built around the client who sees the true, unique value you have to offer, and the promise you make to them.
- Second, a brand promise makes you responsible for delivering on your unique value.
- Third, a brand promise is especially helpful for a company trying to sell something intangible. Just think about how much a strong brand promise could help a law firm or engineering firm, in contrast with a line-by-line description of the cases and projects they work on.
- Fourth, a brand promise helps you connect personally with more ideal clients, meaning that you are more likely to attract good clients and to be paid what you’re worth.
Yes, a company won’t always have the luxury of only taking on ideal clients. But your branding should always speak from the strongest possible position, and that means visualizing your ideal client, identifying what they see in you, bottling that, and broadcasting it through a clearly defined brand promise.
Anytime you start from your ideal audience and then make a promise to that audience, your path forward will become much clearer, more confident, and a lot more purposeful.
Feeling stuck?
If the above process isn’t yielding any strong results, think about approaching it in a more problem-oriented way. In this version, you would:
- Identify your ideal client
- Identify that client’s problem
- Identify how you solve that problem better than anyone else
- Turn that solution into a promise
I believe that these same principles for creating a brand promise can be used to help forge your own career path over time. For that reason, I’d also recommend doing this same exercise using you, the professional, as the one crafting a promise. Anytime you start from your ideal audience and then make a promise to that audience, your path forward will become much clearer, more confident, and a lot more purposeful.
