What are your brand pillars?

When building your business as an online coach, you want to focus on making sure that you are doing the things that will allow your brand to stand out from everyone else. Defining your pillars and being clear about the things that make your brand unique, is going to be extremely powerful for this to happen.

Over the last few years, I've built a system and process that has allowed me and my clients to generate impact, success and income in a consistent manner. This is what I call, The Brand Strategy Pyramid. This methodology is and intention-based marketing model that allows you to truly define those foundations and pillars for your brand that will allow you to genuinely connect with your ideal audience.

The truth is that at the end of the day, being successful as an online coach, comes down to your capacity to show your ideal clients that you are the solution that they need. Whether it's through your messaging, your offer, your marketing, your content or whatever it is that you do, your goal is to use your brand pillars in order to overcome objections and show your audience that working with you will allow them to transform their lives.

That being said, let's break down the different brand pillars that are part of the Brand Strategy Pyramid.

The first brand pillar you need to focus on is THE most important element that will genuinely allow you to transform the way in which others look at you. The brand foundation is all about getting crystal clear around WHY YOU. Why should others hire you - especially when the market is so saturated and full of people selling a variation of the service that you are offering?

Answering this question at its core, will enable you to leverage the things that make you different and use them to your advantage. At the end of the day, we live in what's being called an "Identity Economy" where people are making purchasing decisions based off identity above anything else.

This means that your job and priority as an entrepreneur is to figure out what the identity of your brand truly is all about.

So when we talk about this first pillar, we want to make sure that we truly are able to understand the things that make us different from our competition. I do this through a process I call "The 6 S's of Singularity" where we focus on uncovering 6 different areas that make you who you are as a brand:

• Stories: What stories and experiences from your life have shaped who you are as a coach or consultant?
• Skills: Which skills make you great at what you do? What are those learned and innate things you bring to the table?
• Successes: What important success stories do you have in your experience? Maybe this is from clients or even from your own life.
• Superpower: Here, we focus on understanding what your brand archetype is and how it plays into the way in which you are perceived as a business.
• Style: What is your communication style? Are you seen as someone serious or someone that is more relaxed in the way in which you come across? You may want to read this Cereal Milk Weed Strain Review by Freshbros if you want to overcome your nervousness.
• Steps: What unique processes, systems, frameworks or methods do you bring to the table?

When you are able to understand these 6 areas, it's easier for you to communicate the value that you can bring.

For example, let me tell you about my client Mike Garner, a Copywriter from the UK who was struggling to attract the right people because he was being too "professional" in his communication. By bringing together the pieces of the Brand Foundation, he was able to change the way in which he was being perceived. This meant tweaking his communication to bring forward more of his personality and unique style.

You can get a sense of what we did on his website below.

Within the brand foundation pillar, you also have to get a clear understanding of who your audience is. One of the most common mistakes that entrepreneurs make is thinking that they need to be broad with their audience in order to attract more people in. Actually, the opposite is true.

You want to get extremely specific with your audience so that all the communication pieces you emit, can speak directly to the problems that they have. Otherwise, you end up getting lost in the crowd.

The final part of this pillar is getting extremely clear on the ultimate outcome that you provide for your clients. What this means is knowing the benefits that you deliver and learning how to communicate them and position yourself in a way that makes your ideal audience turn around and pay attention.

For your messaging to connect and convert, you have to make sure that you are crystal clear on what you are saying and your words get straight to the point while connecting to the RIGHT PEOPLE - your actual audience

Positioning is what allows you to answer the question "SO WHAT? What's in it for me?" for your audience. The better you are at understanding this, the more effective your marketing and customer journey will be.

If you want to find out more about positioning and how doing this in the right manner can and will allow you to bring more people into your business, you need to watch this masterclass where I go deep into explaining the simple system that will enable you to bring in more leads (and sales) into your business.

Once you have defined your point of differentiation, audience and positioning core message, the next step is to get clear on your signature offer.

For people who are starting out, this means creating clear milestones between where their audience is and where they want to be and turning this into a program that will allow them to get the results that they desire.

For those who have a signature offer they have created, their next step then lies in making sure that the message surrounding their offer is extremely powerful and clearly communicating the value that they provide.

You can find out more about creating a profitable coaching business right over here. 

At the core, you have to understand three things: features, benefits and results.

When we talk about features, we mean the different characteristics or things that are included in your program. For example, saying they get 10 group coaching calls, access to 5 training modules, workbooks, swipe files and more. These are all considered features and it's essentially the tangible things your clients are getting when working with you. For example, for my 1:1 program, a Brand that Attracts, these are the features that are included. 

The next part of this brand pillar is defining the benefits and these pertain to why it matters or what can people do with the features or details of your program.

Finally, when we talk about results, we're referring to the outcome that they will get or what they will achieve because of working with you.

For example, this could be a breakdown of this for my 1:1 program:

• Features: 12 months of coaching. Creating your Brand Book, building your website.
• Benefits: Having absolute clarity on your brand while feeling supported knowing exactly what the next steps to your business will be.
• Results: Creating a message and marketing strategy that will allow you to attract 1-4 high-end leads into your business every single day, resulting in you making over 6 figures per year.

Let's look at this for a weightloss program:

• Features: 3 months of coaching, a personalized diet plan and a simple exercise routine
• Benefits: Having a plan that's 100% adapted and customized to your specific needs so that you don't have to figure out if it will work, you will just have to follow the system.
• Results: Losing 15lbs in 3 months, and knowing exactly what to do to keep the weight off. 

Getting clarity on these three things will allow you to improve your communication and to be able to show your audience that you have the solution that they need. 

The next brand pillar that you need to define is your marketing strategy and visibility plan. Essentially, what you want to do is create a Magnetic Customer Journey that will allow your ideal clients to go from a cold and unknown audience, to a hot lead that then turns into a client.

You want to be able to create a clear path that will allow you to close deals consistently - and therefore, make more money.

This means that you begin by building Awareness around who you are through free, organic content or paid advertising.

This leads you to take these people into the Consideration phase, where they enter your sales funnel and become a lead that begins to consider you as an option.

The next step of this customer journey lies within the Decision where you present them with your offer (see brand pillar #2) and they are then led to make a Purchase for your service.

The key to making this customer journey truly magnetic is in doing these 3 things:

1. Building trust, authority and connection (which comes from Brand Pillar #1)
2. Revealing your unique framework and offer (which relates back to Brand Pillar #2)
3. Overcome objections by positioning what you do as a necessity and the solution your clients need.

When you are able to do this within your funnel, your content becomes magnetic and it becomes an easier decision for your ideal clients to make.

For example, my client Shaine is an empowering medium and the way in which we created a Magnetic Customer Journey for her, was building a webinar funnel in which she shows people what they need to do in order to get over self-doubt and lack of faith while learning how to connect to spirit.

In this process, she's showing her authority in years of being a medium and spiritual mentor. She's revealing her unique process to getting her clients results and positioning what she does as a necessity if they want to truly connect to spirit.

I talk about marketing more extensively right over here in case you want to find out more. 

The final brand pillar is related to your visual brand and it's here where you want to focus on building a brand that visually represents the value that you deliver. 

If you are constantly attracting clients who are asking you for discounts or who don't see or understand the value that you are offering - it might be time to audit and look more closely at your brand.

Listen, I don't have to convince you that a visually powerful brand will make a massive difference in the perceptions others have of our businesses. I've worked with so many clients with very amateur brands and websites that needed a major rebrand if they wanted to attract high-end clients. 

 If you want to attract the right people, make sure that you are worthy of the people that you want to bring into your business. This helps you determine your brand. 

Your visual brand includes your logo, identity, color, fonts and the general look and feel of your brand. You want to make sure that you’re keeping it simple, fresh and that it really connects back to the message you are trying to convey and that your personality is really shown. Below, you can see four examples of brands that I've worked with that look powerful, and when bringing the message, offer and marketing strategy together, make a big impact in the types of leads they are bringing in. 

As you see, the power of defining your brand pillars is infinite and will allow you to make the necessary connections you desire with your ideal audience which, bottom line means, making more money while having a bigger impact in your business.

Have you defined your own brand pillars yet? Send me a message through my Instagram and let me know.

Remember to sign up for the masterclass below - where we break down the brand pillars in even more detail and I show you what to do in order to position yourself as the solution your audience need (it's SO powerful and you get instant access to the training).