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Your brand is the promise—implied and explicit—you make to your ideal clients and buyers.
It’s the essential truth of your firm, your services and products and, well, you.
It’s the emotional tug to your sweet-spot audience that creates evangelists to your big idea.
Marketing is digging for your clients and buyers and letting them know you exist.
Branding is strategic. Marketing is tactical.
Your core brand seldom changes. Sure, over time you might tweak or even overhaul HOW you express that brand: logos, fonts, images, colors, copy. But your essential truth is often eternal.
Your marketing is not.
It’s designed to be fluid. To evolve with your clients, your firm, your work and technology.
The minute—no the second—your marketing becomes stuck in time, you’ve started the downslide of your business.
Does that mean you have to try every marketing shiny new bauble, every platform-du-jour that comes along?
Of course not—you’re a professional.
My best advice is this: discover the top three tactics that work best for you AND stay savvy on what’s happening in your industry, within your client base and the world in general.
Where are your clients and buyers getting their information? What platforms do they visit and for what? Where is your message most likely to resonate? How is the technology landscape changing vis-à-vis your business?
Because what works today won’t necessarily work tomorrow.
“Malcolm” did a fair amount of experimenting before deciding that Facebook would be his key social platform. He spent two years building 45,000 likes for his Facebook page—steadily building a content distribution channel. But he was so busy generating likes that he was caught by surprise when Facebook changed their algorithms. To get anywhere close to his old visibility, he must now buy ads to (maybe) reach the tribe he used to reach for free.
If only he’d converted some of those likes to his email list, he’d be sitting pretty today, thrilled with his investment instead of gnashing his teeth at Facebook.
Even being an anti-Malcolm has plenty of downside—advisors laser-focused on local contacts while their competition wised up to creating digital marketing funnels and/or using social media to drive engagement.