Be Your Brand

by Regan Hillyer

  Take note, customers don’t care what department you’re working in. When should a customer’s comment on Facebook be answered by customer service versus sales, versus public relations, versus marketing, versus your agency? That’s all up to you. The truth is, the key challenge isn’t making sure you know exactly who should answer what kind of comment and when. Instead, the issue is making sure that as many people as possible are fluent in social media, are part of the team, and are treating every customer well!

  Customers don’t care about your job title or what department you’re working in. If they have problems, then they want solutions. When you’re looking for something specific in a supermarket and you find a staff person and ask for help, a good supermarket will have that staff person trained to walk you to the correct aisle. The employee will help you, with a smile, whether he or she happens to be the butcher, the baker, a cashier, or a janitor. The situation applies to the use of social media, too. Try thinking of every post on Facebook, Twitter, or your blog as one that could have been written by the most important celebrity customer you’ve ever had, and you’ll be more likely to treat every customer and every post with great care, no matter your official department or role.

  Ensure that the website is as integrated with social media as possible. If you have only a tiny link at the bottom of your website, “Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter,” you’re not leveraging the opportunity to connect to people. Facebook’s social plug-ins, including the Like button and other assorted interactive elements such as “Share” and “Recommend,” are imperative to smoothly and deeply integrating Facebook into your Web presence. Imagine if, for instance, instead of trying to sell people your product or service, whatever it may be, on your website, all you did was try to convince people to like your website’s content. As discussed previously, you’d get fewer sales at first, of course, but over time, more and more visitors to your website would see how many people liked you. More importantly, you’d increase the likelihood that one of the site’s next visitors sees that her friend has already given your site, services, products, or content personal approval. Are there any sales or promotional content anywhere on the Web more valuable than the honest words, “Your friend likes this?”

  WE LIVE IN A WORLD OF INSTANT GRATIFICATION

  New technologies have made it easier than ever for consumers to access what they want. People don’t need to go to bookstores to get books, flower stores to get flowers, or shoe stores to get shoes. People also don’t need to buy newspapers or magazines to read articles. Thanks to the growth of mobile food trucks, you don’t even need to go to restaurants to buy meals anymore in many cities. Now is the best time ever to be a consumer. Just remember, as a marketer, it is necessary that you make it as easy and efficient as possible for people to access your products, services, or content. How can you bring it to them, wherever they are on the Web? Where in the marketing and communications process can you remind people to engage with you on the social Web?

  Action Items

  1. Determine who else besides you at your organization can have a role in using social media to interact with customers. Form a cross-departmental task force to better integrate social media into all of your business practices and operations.

  2. Closely examine all your available inventory, assets, time, and space you have to promote your Facebook presence. As you grow your Facebook presence, where can you remind people to join the conversation? Where can you share your value proposition for “liking” your company and following you? Have you integrated social media links into your traditional advertising packaging, and website yet?

  3. Integrate Facebook’s Like button into as many products and objects on your website as make sense. The easier you make it to be “likeable,” the more likeable you’ll become.

  SPEAKING TO LEVERAGE YOUR RESULTS

  One of the most efficient way to grow your brand and to accelerate the results you are getting in your business, is to speak. This includes both online and offline speaking, but right now, lets focus purely on the offline method.

  You have a few options when it comes to speaking but the first thing you must do is actively make a decision that you want to speak. You must then decide whether you want to promote and run your own events to speak at, or find other people’s events to speak at, or both! There are benefits and challenges with both.

  When you are running and speaking at your own event, obviously there is a lot more work involved. You and your team will need to market and promote the event, fill the event, cover all the expenses but ultimately, if you are selling at the event, you keep one hundred percent of any income that is created after covering your expenses.

  If you are more interested in speaking at other people’s events, you often simply need to turn up and speak. The organiser of the event will cover all of the expenses and promotion responsibilities. If it is someone else’s event however, you have to play by their rules. Including time frame, potential speaker fee, you may not be allowed to self promote or sell your product, etc. Even if you are not allowed to sell your product from someone else’s stage, it is still great exposure, and if your brand is positioned well online, people will be able to search your name, find your website and landing pages and eventually filter through your systems to convert into clients.

  At the end of the day, the more you can speak and get yourself out in front of people, the more that this is going to increase your visibility. The best thing is, is that it is a leveraged model. If you can speak for an hour to 200 people for example, that is much more efficient than speaking to 200 people individually for an hour each…

  If you are just starting out and you have never spoken before, there are a few things you should focus on:

  1. Find speaking engagements. Network. Grow your audience. Connect with people and offer to speak for free and add value.

  2. Don’t trick yourself into thinking that you need professional speaker training in order to be brilliant. Of course, any training that you do undertake is going to accelerate your results and your impact, however, some of the best, most influential speakers have had zero, or very little physical speaker training and they simply show up authentically as them and are focused on sharing their message.

  3. Focus on giving first. Give, give, give. The more you can give to the audience the more likely you are to generate leads and grow your following. Where possible, always give something away for free in exchange for their email address, so that you can continue to market to them and add value in the future.

  ONLINE LEVERAGED SPEAKING

  We touched on the traditional offline speaking strategies, but in this day and age, you absolutely have to be speaking online in order to accelerate your results in a leveraged way. A great way to do just this is by running online webinars, free teleconferences, Zoom Meetings, Google Hangouts, Periscopes, Facebook Mentions Live as well as many other platforms.

  The process when it comes to online leveraged speaking is simple. The purpose of speaking online is the same as speaking offline: increasing visibility, building a following, reaching many people at one time and ultimately offering your audience your product or service. Many people are drawn to the online leveraged speaking models due to the amount of ease associated with it. Proving you and your audience have an internet connection, you can run the online event from wherever you please in the world, and people can tune in from everywhere in the world, unlike having to turn up at a specific place for an offline event.

  Here are the key points to follow and consider when running online leveraged speaking events:

  Promote the online event to your audience

  Provide roughly 45 minutes of content and then 15 minutes of presenting your product or your service

  Ensure you record your live event so you can turn it into a product or use it as a sales tool over and over again in the future.

  Ultimately, to accelerate the results of your brand, you want to combine both online and offline leveraged speak
ing strategies to ensure that you are reaching as many people as possible, in as many powerful ways as possible.

  PRICE POINT INCREASES

  Once your brand is getting great results through your product and service launches, you will want to consider increasing your price points as one way to accelerate your results. The amount that you are charging for your products and services are directly proportional to what you believe they are worth, and, in a personal brand like this, they are directly proportional to what YOU believe YOU are worth. As you start seeing people join your tribe and get great results, often your own self belief and self worth increases so, naturally, you should look at increasing your prices when you understand the amount of value that you are giving to people.

  Often people battle with the thought of increasing their prices, as their scarcity mindset sets in: “What if it’s overpriced and no one buys it any more?”. When and if that mindset starts to happen, you need to catch it and recognise it as scarcity and choose to think differently.

  At the end of the day, if someone is investing $47 a month for your product, chances are, they would be willing to invest $57 a month. If someone is investing $3997 for your product, chances are, they would be willing to invest $4997 for the same amount of value.

  When increasing your price points, you always want to ensure you look after your current tribe members as these are your loyal clients who stepped up and invested first. It’s not recommended to increase the price points for your current tribe members, but instead, increase the price points for new clients.

  A great way to do this, is to let your audience know that your prices will be increasing. You can run a special offer of accessing the current price for a certain amount of days, before it goes up to the new price. This encourages people to take action and moves all the people forward who have been sitting on the fence and watching you. It also makes your current clients feel great when they can see the prices increase and they know they have been looked after as it hasn’t increased for them.

  YOU CAN’T DO THIS ALL ON YOUR OWN

  If your head is feeling overloaded at this point, then that is perfect! As most likely you’ve realised, that you really can’t do all of this on your own! And please, don’t try and do all of this on your own. Last time I checked, you were looking to build an incredible, global brand that is going to make a massive impact in the world and that can’t be done with just one person.

  Take Richard Branson, Oprah Winfrey and Tony Robbins to name a few. These are people who are extremely well-known, have incredible brands and are making a massive impact in this world, yet, they have one thing in common that is the most important thing to take note of right now: They don’t try and do it all themselves. They understand that they are only as powerful as the team that they have around them.

  People often ask, how do I know when I should be hiring and expanding my team? What tasks should I start getting them to do? And the answers are simple: You should start as soon as possible. Remember, the goal is to have you completely replaced from the day-to-day running of your business by the 12-month mark. If you can do this earlier then, bravo! And when it comes to what you should start getting your new team members to do, again it is simple: Anything you either aren’t good at or don’t enjoy doing, you should be outsourcing and getting your team to do for you.

  KEYS TO HIRING A SUCCESSFUL TEAM

  Everyone has a different belief system, different values, different dreams, desires, fears, weaknesses, strengths—the list goes on. When you dive deep into understanding human behavior, you really get a grasp of just how unique and complex humans really are. And connecting with someone becomes an art form, and a confusing one at that, once you really start to delve into the complexities. And connecting with MORE than one person? With all of those different factors that make people tick? NOW we’re in a super challenging place!

  I get asked all the time: “How do you empower a big team? How do you keep everyone motivated and on track?” And before we get into that, it’s important to realize you really are only as powerful as your team. If you don’t know how to lead, inspire and communicate with your team, it will be a challenge to get big results rapidly.

  I see so many people trying to get results managing or leading a team of people, and when they find their team is no longer engaged or following them, they feel bewildered as they’re not sure what steps to take. If you have been in that place, you’ll know what I mean. And if you haven’t, and you’re growing a business, it’s coming, so listen closely. It’s a BIG topic when it comes to leading a powerful team, in fact, I could create an entire online product about it, but if I were to give you the ONE THING to focus on, it would be vision. Leaders have the ability to speak belief into a vision for people that they are not yet able to see in their mind.

  And if you’re asking ‘how?’ We can break vision down further into three key sections:

  Your vision

  The team vision

  Individual vision

  Firstly, as a leader, you must be super clear on your own vision, what you want and where you are headed. If you’re not, this whole game falls apart!

  Once your own vision is rock solid and charged with intensely positive emotion, turn your focus to the team vision. What is the vision for the team, where is the team headed and what are they looking to achieve? Once that is solidified, it is your job to enroll each and every team member into the vision of the team. At the end of the day, people want to be loved, appreciated and most importantly, here, they want to belong.

  So many people don’t have a team or tribe that has a clear vision and they are looking and waiting for a leader to step up and enroll them into a strong team vision that they can be a part of. Think about this for a second — have you actively worked or trained your leaders to work individually to enroll every single person in your team to be a part of your team’s culture and vision? Then last but certainly not least, people need an individual vision. This is the most important thing when it comes to leading a powerful team, as if people don’t understand what’s in it for them, in the long term, they will leave your team, even if the team vision is strong. People need to know that they are moving forward to their own personal dreams and desires by being aligned with the vision. At the end of the day, if they do not have a leader helping them build a strong and distinct vision, you will find that people won’t stand beside you forever.

  When you focus on these key elements of vision you’ll find that people will do their best work, will stay fully engaged and will LOVE being a part of your team.

  DEVELOPING JOINT VENTURES TO ACCELERATE RESULTS

  A mentor of mine once said to me, “There is no competition in business, there is only collaboration. And collaboration equals growth and profit.” The minute that you have developed and launched your brand, you need to start looking for people who you can partner with and market with. Being partnered with other credible and influential people makes you, your business and your credibility even stronger.

  When considering who to partner with and market with you should be considering:

  The person’s values. Are they in alignment with yours? Do you like what they stand for? Do you like the way they do business? Association with another brand can either dramatically accelerate or dramatically kill your business, so be careful here!

  The person’s outcomes. What are they looking to achieve? Why do they want this? What is driving them? Is it the same things that drive you to your success?

  Their overall big goals with this partnership. Where do they see the relationship heading? What do they want from it long term? Why? What will it give them vs what will it give you?

  Once you have found people who are on your wave length and that have the same values as you, you always want to make sure that any partnerships or launches that you do together are a win-win for both parties. It’s recommended that you take the partnership one launch at a time and, if it feels right, you’ll promote it, and vice versa. So it�
�s done on ‘‘feeling’’ rather than promoting by obligation. When you promote by obligation, it can throw you completely out of alignment and your audience will feel this, too and, chances are, it will not be a successful launch.

  Ultimately, if you can create a group of 8-12 people who are totally in alignment with your vision and your mission of your brand, you’ll want to team up and work together to really accelerate each others launches and successes. No one in business makes it alone, and if you have goals to go to 8 figures and beyond in your brand, then this group launch strategy will be one of the most powerful things you can do to accelerate your brand and your results.

  SUMMARY

  Everyone has a powerful personal brand locked away inside them. Everyone has a message that they are called to share with the world. And when you align what’s on the inside with action that you take on the outside, magical things can happen, fast.

  The strategies are simple in their execution, as long as you are super clear on your message to the world and the kind of people you want to attract.