Branding Your Unique Expertise For Knowledge Commerce: Guide

 

Your Branding Must Resonate Perfectly And Be Symbiotic With Your Target Audiences

What is a “brand”? Simply put, a “brand” reflects the superiority of your product and business. It defines your quality and the values you stand for. It promises the solution to certain problems or routes to achieve certain dreams.

What is the “target audience”? It is the segment of people who are most likely to buy your products and services. These people have both ... the need for your products and the purchasing-power and inclination to spend on them.

Most entrepreneurs see their branding and their target audience choices as separate issues. But think about this. What value does branding offer if it cannot help impact your target audiences?

At Solohacks Academy, we believe branding helps simplify buying for a customer. Branding is a kind of shorthand for your product quality and differentiation. Your target audiences must resonate with your branding. The net result should be greater bonding between target audiences and your brand. That will generate greater sales. It will also increase customer-loyalty retention.

 

 

1. HOW TO GET STARTED WITH BRANDING STRATEGY FOR KNOWLEDGE COMMERCE:

It’s Pointless Beginning With Brand Design Without Understanding The Basics Of Why You Need Branding

Branding is sexy. It's an exciting area of your Knowledge Commerce business. The minute you have a brand name and a logo, it's as if your business comes to life, right?

That is the whole reason why solopreneur knowledge marketers get carried away, and don't think hard enough about why they are branding, and what branding really means to a business. More importantly, they don't ponder over why branding is so crucial to their customers.

At Solohacks Academy, we'd like to encourage you to feel good about your branding, but we'd also like to caution you that branding should be done to a clear strategy. Branding doesn't just have to look and sound good, it has very hard work to do for your business.

In this article, we want to introduce you to the macro-level concepts that you must begin with, in understanding how to get started with your branding. Particularly for Knowledge Commerce, branding is everything. Don't take it lightly.

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2. HOW TO USE THE 9-T BRAND BUILDING METHOD FOR KNOWLEDGE COMMERCE:

It’s Pointless Beginning With Brand Design Without Understanding The Basics Of Why You Need Branding

Brand building, especially if you follow the standard advice, can be unwieldy and cumbersome for solopreneurs or small businesses.

At Solohacks Academy, we have developed a system we follow, that shows you some simple steps you need to get your brand building right. We've outlined it for you below.

Having a strategy helps you do things in a structured way for best cost-efficiency, easy manageability and reliable results. Without a good brand building strategy, most solopreneurs would flounder, not knowing what to do before what, and what should be the priority at each stage of activity. With a good structure, though, your workload will get streamlined and productive.

Why did we name it the 9-T Method of Brand Building? Many of our clients have asked us that. The answer: it's easy and fun to remember the key brand building blocks by the nomenclatures of each stage - all beginning with T. Any program becomes do-able for a solopreneur if it’s easy and fun to learn – and once learned, can become semi-automatic too. That’s what this 9-T’s model is all about.

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3. HOW TO BUILD A KNOCKOUT BRAND IDENTITY FOR KNOWLEDGE COMMERCE:

A Brand’s Identity Is The Visual Expression Of A Brand That Is Communicated To The Outside World

A brand's identity includes its name, logo, communications, and visual appearance. A brand identity creates an emotional connection and reflects the brand positioning and desired image conveyed to stakeholders and the world at large.

At Solohacks Academy, we like the definition that Paul Rand has for brand identity: "Design is the silent ambassador of your brand."

If you want your brand to succeed and thrive in the future, you need to build a brand identity that accurately conveys your essence. Your brand identity should be steady but also flexible enough to evolve with you.

All this doesn’t happen overnight. It requires imaginative thought and preparation, and a collaboration with a specialist brand identity designer with strong communication and design skills, and a deep understanding of your brand. But it can be done well, with excellent results - as long as your brief is good and the designer understands your spoken instructions and unspoken feelings.

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4. HOW TO LEVERAGE BRAND STORYTELLING ARTFULLY FOR KNOWLEDGE COMMERCE:

Telling Your Brand’s Story To Avid Audiences Is Like Making Connections Between Kindred Spirits

It's a tested axion in the online world, that the more people like you, the more they are likely to do business with you. In Knowledge Commerce you are the brand - because it's your knowledge you're selling as ebooks or courses or memberships or consulting services. The more likable you make your brand, the more business you reap.

One of the marketing tools online brands must use artfully is "brand storytelling". What's this? People love stories. Stories hook them emotionally and they get engrossed in its details. Using storytelling techniques, you tell people the back story of your brand. What got you changed from where you were into forming your business and brand, what challenges you encountered and overcame along the way, and how you are now succeeding. You encourage customers to tell their stories too - instead of cloaking these as boring case studies.

Why is it more powerful when you tell people stories, instead of just being businesslike? As Clifford Chi writes, "Just like your favorite books and movies’ characters, if you can craft a compelling brand story, your audience will remember who you are, develop empathy for you, and, ultimately, care about you."

At Solohacks Academy, we have discovered several nuances about brand storytelling as a masterful marketing tool. We can show you how to finesse your stories, how to build stories with all the emotional ingredients, how to make the customers the heroes, and a lot more. Read on.

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5. HOW TO BUILD A REMARKABLE BRAND EXPERIENCE FOR KNOWLEDGE COMMERCE:

Brand Experiences Don’t Live In A World Of Their Own. They Have To Be Evaluated Against Customer Expectations

Unknown to you, every potential and existing customer of yours, when he hits a contact point with your brand, comes with an expectation set in his mind. This dictates how he perceives and devours your brand. He measures the experience he gets from your brand with the expectations he had in mind. Your brand may come off favorably or unfavorably in this evaluation.

So what then is brand experience? The dictionary defines "experience" as "an event or occurrence which leaves an impression on someone." So brand experience is that elusive "impression" your brand leaves on someone who comes across it, as against the expectations he had of the encounter.

At Solohacks Academy, we've found that there are four things that matter here:

• Where and when did the potential customer come across your brand touchpoint (point of contact)?
• What shaped his expectations of the encounter in his mind at that moment?
• What experiences did he get from the contact with your brand at that touchpoint?
• What resulted from that contact? Was the potential customer impacted enough by his experience to explore your brand further?

We hope this article will help you learn what the expectations of customers are - so that you can choreograph brand experiences that match up to or exceed expectations.

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6. HOW GREATER BRAND TRUST ACTS AS AN INSURANCE IN KNOWLEDGE COMMERCE:

Strongly Trusted Brands Are A Hugely Protective Insurance For Businesses And The Marketers That Own Them

To your customers, when the economy goes slow or uncertain, the familiar becomes even more important. The sense of instability pushes many consumers towards what they’ve known. They gravitate towards the things that feel "proven" to them.

Best-buddy brands are part of the things consumers cling to, at a period of life when other things are shaking around them.

A survey by JWT, for instance, suggests that people going through rough life patches want to feel good about the things they care about. Brands they are closely connected to - and more importantly, learn to trust - become part of these things they want to feel good about.

But consumers holding their favorite brands close to themselves is just one side of the picture. Did you realize that strong brands that have built consumer trust are also a huge protection for businesses in challenging times? They are a bulwark for the businesspeople who own these brands. Strongly-trusted brands can literally save businesses and marketers in downturns.

At Solohacks Academy, we want to show you how boost brand trust so that it can be your ever-dependable protective security. In good times, it helps to shore up enough brand goodwill, so that your brand acts as your fall-back resource in difficult times.

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7. HOW TO USE EMOTIONAL BRANDING FOR BEST RESULTS IN KNOWLEDGE COMMERCE:

Emotional Branding Happens When Customers Think Your Brand Makes Them Feel Great About Themselves

Most people don't get the full idea of "emotional branding. They think a brand has to pull the emotional strings of customers to make them act a certain way that get the brand to sell more and make more money.

That could work as a superficial way. But there is a more strategic perspective. A brand should trigger actions that build a positive emotions about themselves in customers. The customers then feel like bonding with the brand because it acts as their no-fail self-validator. The bonding created then acts to engender loyalty and sales.

It is true that emotions drive actions. But to drive emotions in the first place, you need some small empowering actions by the consumer. It's a chicken-and egg-story. Small starter actions change emotions. A brand has to make people take those small actions that change their emotional states. This then jumpstarts more energetic actions by the consumer driven by the emotions that have been lit.

At Solohacks Academy, we are often dismayed by the commonly seen casual marketing attitude towards emotional branding. It cannot be treated superficially as mere psychology of images, or color usage, or the tone of your text. Emotional branding can pay huge dividends if its use is far more strategic than the way it's commonly delpoyed today. Read on to see how ...

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8. HOW TO BUILD AND MANAGE BRAND REPUTATION IN KNOWLEDGE COMMERCE:

How Positively Your Brand Is Perceived By The General Public is Brand Reputation

According to the dictionary "reputation" means "... the general belief or opinion that other people have about you. Reputation comes from the Latin word "reputation", which means "consideration." It's how people consider, or label, you — good or bad."

Needless to say, brand reputation to you, refers to how your particular brand is viewed by others. A positive brand reputation means consumers believe and trust your brand, and feel good about doing business with you. A negative brand reputation works against you on these counts.

There's one other factor about brand reputation, though. It usually precedes your brand. For example, it's not the kind of trust that develops after knowing you. It's often a label associated with you before people even approach you. Your reputation could attract or repel people who never give you a chance to prove your credentials.

That's why, at Solohacks Academy, we believe your brand reputation should not be something you care about only with respect to your customers. We think you should care about how you are perceived by the general public, because that will matter to your customers.

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9. HOW TO PROTECT YOUR BRAND AND ITS ASSETS IN KNOWLEDGE COMMERCE:

Pro-Active Marketers Spend Far Less On Legal Protection Of Brands Than Those Forced To React After Theft

This article is not intended to be a legal piece of work on the protection of your brand and its assets. There is no substitute for appointing a specialist Trademarks, or Intellectual Property protection lawyer if you want to be extremely comprehensive about the way you protect your brand.

In fact, professional legal help is not just a "nice-to-have" for any online business, it's a "must-have".

If you are pro-active in protecting your brand it won't cost you very much at all. But if you are not careful about brand protection, and wait to react after thieves have looted your brand assets, it will cost you a fair bit of money. Better be safe than sorry.

At Solohacks Academy, fortunately, we had good advice right from the beginning, because we went to a specialist in copyrights, trademarks and IP, who focused on the particular problems of small businesses. Hope you too find the right, cost-efficient, empathetic legal help right at the start.

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10. HOW TO REBRAND YOUR BUSINESS WITH SMARTNESS FOR KNOWLEDGE COMMERCE:

What Went Wrong Last Time That Is Forcing You To Rebrand Your Business? Never Repeat That Error …

A lot of marketers who are forced to rebrand their businesses, after building up their brands to a good recognition level, usually name the rapid changes of our online environment for the rebranding need.

They name technology changes, consumer behavior changes, fiercer competition, growth in their own portfolio ... they name everything, but seldom examine why the brand identity built the first time wasn't flexible enough to go the distance. If they have erred the first time around, it's time to never repeat those mistakes.

Another thing ... a lot rides on the back of rebranding. It's not just about a change in your identity, it's about making the whole world around your brand re-familiarize themselves with your new identity, your credibility and the trust you hope to renew and retain. If someone around you suddenly changed their name, how would you react? Would it feel like the same person, the same personality, the same buddy you knew? Or would you feel the person has become somebody you have to befriend from scratch?

At Solohacks Academy, we urge all marketers, itching to rebrand their businesses, to exert due caution and a lot of thought. You are asking the whole world to change with you, and not just making a small internal change. Go ahead if you must, but do so with calm, controlled, deliberate steps.

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There seems an awful lot to Knowledge Commerce, but fear not, because we'll tell you everything you want to know in easy steps. It will all be a breeze, and you'll hugely enjoy the process too.

 

We'll take you there, step by step ...

Read our full collection of articles below that explore more on Branding Your Unique Expertise For Knowledge Commerce.