How Brand Clarity Helps You Connect With Your Audience

Most small business owners I speak with want to generate leads. They believe increasing lead activity will drive revenue growth. In their view, marketing is a numbers game—more leads mean more sales, more sales mean more profit.

But many small business owners overlook a critical piece of selling:

It’s what happens before the sale that makes the sale.

Instead of spending money to get more leads, what if you could close more of the leads you get now?

Better yet, what if marketing and advertising yielded quality leads, making it easier to convert them into customers?

Wouldn’t that also mean a greater ROI on marketing resources?

Brand clarity could be the catalyst for more leads and higher close rates—without increasing the marketing budget.

Brand clarity is more than having a logo, mission statement, and customer profile. It’s a process that enables you to communicate value in a concise, compelling way while differentiating from competitors.

Most of all, brand clarity keeps an organization laser-focused on operating efficiently and effectively.

Here’s what you will learn in this post:

• how brand clarity improves the connection with your target audience

• how to make your marketing and advertising more effective

• a framework for developing brand clarity

It’s How You Look at Things

Consumers use several factors when deciding to buy a product or service. The process begins with how they perceive brands. As buyers evaluate options, they will consider brands that make a positive impression and eliminate those that don’t.

To make that positive impression and encourage more prospects to buy, you must develop a relationship with them while building affinity and authority. This relationship with prospects evolves through the customer journey experience andoccurs through a series of touchpoints.

Any interaction consumers have with your company is a touchpoint. A website visit, social media post, or an advertisement in a trade journal are all examples of touchpoints. The collective impact of all touchpoints creates a perception of the business in the customer’s mind.

It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.

Henry David Thoreau

Brands with a developed customer journey forge stronger connections with the target audience, which results in more sales.

The Relationship Between Brand Clarity and Marketing Efficiency

The business that does the best job of communicating its value clearly—and the fastest—wins. Brand clarity ensures your messages will be on-point and easy to understand.

Most small business owners dive into lead generation without knowing how to connect with the target audience. So, they experiment with advertising messages, hoping to find something that works. Instead, they end up overselling or sending mixed signals that confuse prospective customers—and a confused mind says no.

Successful marketers establish brand clarity before they sell anything. Clarity makes all brand communication—such as ads, promotions, and websites—more effective.

The purpose of brand communication is to influence the customer’s opinion of a company and its products.

Brand communication comes in many forms—written, spoken, or through imagery (i.e., your logo). All are designed to build value for your brand and its offer.

Many business owners become impatient when immediate results from marketing and advertising aren’t evident. But most prospects in your audience have never heard of your business or are only becoming familiar with it, so they may not respond to marketing or advertising right away.

For brand messaging to work, it must be consistent. So, give it time to take effect before you tell the marketing department to go back to the drawing board.

READ MORE: How to Create a Brand Message That Connects

How to Get Brand Clarity

The simple framework outlined in this section will help you develop brand clarity.

1. Purpose

Why did you start a business?

The reasons you began are the foundation for your brand’s purpose.

Consumers want to buy from brands that stand for something other than making a profit. Companies that lead with purpose surpass the primary functional benefits of a product or service, making them more attractive to buyers.

Many business owners underestimate the value of shared purpose with the target audience and instead focus solely on driving revenue. However, leading with a mission profoundly impacts consumer sentiment.

People love to buy but hate to be sold.

To construct a brand purpose statement, determine why the audience needs your offer. The why becomes the foundation for your mission and allows the brand to take on more meaning in the customer’s eyes. Brands with a strong connection to purpose separate themselves from businesses that rely on price to compete.

2. Benefit Claims

Your customers have obstacles that prevent them from achieving a desired result. At their core, obstacles come in the form of emotional pain or desire but are also physical. To develop strong benefit claims, you must determine how your product or service enables people to overcome obstacles.

A bit of psychology comes into play when creating benefit claims.

For example, people say they want new cars, but if they only wanted “a car”, there wouldn’t be over 250 different models to choose from each year.

People feel fiscally responsible when they buy a car that gets good gas mileage. When they purchase a vehicle with higher safety ratings, they believe they have taken a step to protect their children. Others desire a luxury car because they associate it with success.

So, there’s more to the buying decision than meets the eye.

No matter how it looks on the surface, people buy the transformation. This transformation almost always has emotional ties.

Consider the problems your prospects have that your product or service solves. How do those problems make them feel? What do these problems prevent your customers from achieving?

Most of all, how does your offer help people achieve a positive emotional state?

Once you know the answer, you can create powerful benefit claims that prompt people to act.

3. Ideal Customer

Many businesses cast a broad net, selling to anyone willing to buy. But lead quality is directly tied to higher conversion rates. So, instead of marketing to a general audience, focus on your best customers.

Your “best customers” are those who are an ideal match for your product or service. As a result, they are likely to benefit from your offer most and place greater value on it, which provides more profit potential.

It’s difficult to identify ideal customers using demographics alone, which is why it helps to explore your audience’s psychographics.

To develop an ideal customer profile, you must understand your customers on a deeper level. First, you must know what makes them tick—their values, priorities, and emotional buying triggers. Then, you can link their pain points to your benefit claims.

Read this post to find out how to develop an ideal customer profile.

4. Unique Value

Being unique makes all the difference in marketing. And creating differentiation for your product or service that sets it apart is key to selling more of it.

Creating and communicating unique value isn’t easy, yet differentiation is the golden key for businesses that want a selling advantage. Without exceptional value, customers will not see why they should choose your product or service over a competitor.

To create unique value for your brand and offers, study your top ten competitors and compare their benefit claims, target audience segments, and offers to yours.

Do you notice any trends or competitive gaps? For example, could you improve on their benefit claims, pricing structure, or market segmentation?

Remember, you don’t have to be the best in your niche to win the sale—you just have to be better than competitors at communicating unique value.

5. Brand Messaging

In this step, we assemble everything you have developed in the previous steps to create brand messaging. Brand messaging communicates the organization’s overarching value.

Brand messages are unlike marketing messages used in advertising or other promotional content. Instead, the purpose of brand messaging is to reinforce the organization’s identity throughout marketing, advertising, sales, and even customer service processes.

Many brands—large and small—find it difficult to create brand messaging that penetrates the saturated market. Consumers are overwhelmed with messaging day and night. So how do we get them to listen to us with literally thousands of competitors vying for their attention?

Piercing through the noise is like hammering away at a brick wall. One or two swings won’t bring it down, but a hundred or two might. Likewise, consistency is the way to push through the noise—and it’s the secret to successful brand messaging.

All messaging is delivered with a tone of voice. Your brand voice should align with the business’s identity, target audience and should possess an emotional quality. Sophisticated, casual, and authoritative are examples of emotional brand voice characteristics.

6. Brand Clarity Bonus Step

Jeff Bezos, the former CEO of Amazon, once said, “Your brand is what people say about you when you aren’t in the room.”

What someone says about you behind your back reveals what they think of you. The branding process allows you to mold the impression you make.

So, what do you want people to say about your business when you aren’t around?

Most companies try to build a reputation by doing an excellent job for their customers. But shouldn’t you always do your best work? Besides, your target audience can’t know you do skilled work until they become customers and witness it firsthand.

Before people buy from you, they must decide if they know, like, and trust you. While it’s impossible to completely control how they feel or think, a brand can influence their opinion.

Brand communication is the combination of activities that influence customers’ opinions of a company and its products.

What opinion do you want your audience to have of your business?

Write it down and put it in front of everyone associated with your organization. Every message you put out into the world must express and reinforce this theme. This principle applies to your website, social media, ads, presentations, events, or any other point-of-contact.

Conclusion

Brand clarity is the building block of a thriving organization. Without it, you risk confusing your audience with mixed or misguided messages—and a confused mind says no.

With brand clarity, you can reach qualified prospects in your target audience and help you convert more customers with less effort.

If you have a question or need help, email me personally at chris@goldenvineyardbranding.com.

Until next time,

Chris