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?

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 LEVERAGE BRAND STORYTELLING ARTFULLY 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. VALUING AND LEVERAGING YOUR BRAND:

How do you evaluate what your brand is really worth - and why should you always know this? How do you leverage your brand value and authority to gain even more success in your business? A brand is an asset, and if your build it, it has to start paying off more than you ever spent on it. Learn how to increase your brand equity.

 

7. PROTECTING YOUR BRAND ONLINE:

It takes a long while to build a brand, and just seconds to shatter it with a lack of security and protection online. How can you prevent brand-predators from harming your brand? What solutions does technology offer you? What legal protections do you have to safeguard your brand? Learn these. Forewarned is forearmed.

 

8. GROWING YOUR BRAND ONLINE:

You really have to think carefully when you want to grow your brand. What strategic directions will give your brand more power? Which wrong directions can erode your existing brand power? Wisdom in growth choices is crucial. So is the hierarchy that you give your brand's products as it grows.

 

9. KEEPING YOUR BRAND EVERGREEN AND RELEVANT:

Re-relevancing your brand over time, as you gain more and newer target audiences, is a fine art. Your brand has to stay evergreen in its values, while also adapting to the times and trends as they change around you. Can your brand withstand time and evolution without losing its essence? Can you build your brand to be able to do that? Yes, you can.

 

10. BRANDING MISTAKES AND HOW TO OVERCOME THEM:

Sometimes the market forces can do your brand in. But more often, its the mistakes of the brand-owner that do the most damage. There are mistakes in brand management you can easily avoid, if you only you knew what these are and plan to avoid the, Learn how not to make serious brand care mistakes, and also how to overcome setbacks if you are ever caught off-guard.

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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 of The Basics & Power of Knowledge Commerce.