“A 15-minute call could save you 15% or more…”
When you do a Google search for “gecko”, GEICO used to appear first—even before the the definition of the word or description of the animal.
The gecko has become a major part of the company’s branding.
In any financial or insurance practice, branding is a primary way to attract your ideal client. It is an expression of your unique identity to arouse interest in the kind of people you most want to work with…and then some.
But branding isn’t just about showing how you’re different from your competitors. It’s about getting your ideal clients or prospects to see that what you offer is exactly the solution they’ve been searching for.
If you meet someone and tell him during your conversation that you’re a financial advisor who works with medical professionals to help them to be able to pay minimal taxes in retirement, you’re simply engaging in direct marketing.
If his friend comes across the room and says, “I hear that you are the advisor to see if I’m a medical professional and I want to avoid taxes in retirement,” you’ve successfully branded your business.
But to brand yourself and your work seamlessly, you need to take three preliminary steps:
1. Identify an ideal client, target market, or niche. Who do you most want to work with? You will have more success if you become an expert in the needs of one particular narrow target market: federal workers, “Boomers”, young families, entrepreneurs, landscaping contractors, teachers, retirees, etc. Aim at one target with a high-powered rifle, rather than shooting up hundreds of pounds of buckshot in the hope of hitting something.
2. Identify one “core need” that your ideal clients often have that you can help them with. What are their biggest problems or dreams? They may have many, but lead with one.
3. Design your unique solutions. Why will these people with that need choose you to work with? Why not your competitors? What’s unique about you? Having a specialty and being an expert in it will make you more appealing than being another white crayon in a box of white crayons. You’ll be the only red crayon in the box.
But your WHY—the reason you’re doing this particular work with these particular clients, could be compelling.
And how you package your services can also make you unique.
In The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, Al Ries and Jack Trout wrote: “If you can, be first. If you can’t be first, create a new category in which you can be first.”
My 3-month one-on-one coaching program can take you from grossing in the low six figures annually to the mid-six figures and to over a million dollars a year next year, depending on where we start from.
As part of our work, we’ll get clear on your ideal clients, their core need, and the reason they will use you over your competitors.
Then we’ll work on branding everything you do to get the message out to your ideal clients.
If you’d like to learn more, contact me and we’ll get together for a short conversation to see if it makes sense to work together.
Fedex used to say that it was the service to use “when it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight”. When are you the advisor to use? And by whom?
Decide who you are, and then, keep REACHING…
P.S. Can you see the arrow built into the logo?
