Branding Exercise for Coaches & Solopreneurs
How to sharpen your message and build a unique reputation in a world full of noise.
Before creating content to build your reputation in whatever space your want to be in you first need to understand what you want this reputation to be.
In this article, I will share with you how a marketing team would work with you. How do I know? Because I am currently working with one and this is how they are helping me out.
Go through this branding exercise yourself.
Branding Exercise
This is what my marketing team asked me:
To help us create the best brand for your business, we need to understand your company’s vision, mission, values, brand promise, target audience and what makes you better than your competitors.
Some companies have a vision and mission statement, but lately, companies are merging these two statements. The choice is yours.
At this point, these do not need to be perfect; just get some ideas on the page. It can even be bullet points.
As you can imagine this will be a lot of unfiltered writing. And this is how it should be. Tell your inner critic to shut up and get to work :)
1. Vision
A Vision statement is aspirational and expresses your brand’s plan or vision for the future and the potential impact on the world. It is meant to serve as a guide. It should be bold and ambitious.
A Vision for a company is an abstract idea of how the organization intends to impact society. For you, this is no different. You are a one-person business. Your Vision is your Destination.
- How do you want to impact society?
- What is the vision of the brave new world that you want to see?
- What is the change in the world that you want to be a conduit of?
2. Mission
A mission statement is an action-oriented statement declaring the purpose of an organization serves to its clients. It often includes a general description of the organization, its function and its objectives.
If your Vision is your Destination, then your Mission statement is a guide on HOW you are going to get to that destination. Your Mission statement should concisely explain how that destination will be reached (or the goal will be achieved). Your Vision is your future. Your Mission reflects the past and the present.
- What are you doing right now to get to where you want to be?
- What do you do? How do you do it? And why?
3. Vision/Mission Statement
Blending the vision and mission statement into one statement.
See if there is an opportunity for you to synthesize a more concise definition of your business. Connect your yesterday, today, and tomorrow in one formula.
4. Brand Promise
A brand promise is a value or experience a company’s customers can expect to receive every single time they interact with that company.
The more you can deliver on that promise the stronger will be your brand.
Check out this article by Gary Fox on Brand Promise. He also has this cool visual:
5. Values
Complete this exercise to gain clarity on your Personal Values.
Since you are a 1-person business you can use your Personal Core Values as the Company values. Or you can work on it a little bit more to polish and come up with a separate set of Values.
Just like with the Values exercise where you will develop your own set of Guiding Principles, you can derive the Principles for your 1-person business. What is the belief system that you want to instill in your Company?
6. Target Audience
- Who do you want to help?
- Who is most likely to buy your product or service?
- What personas can you create?
Leverage ChatGPT and ask it to create personas for your business. It will give you some ideas.
7. Competitors
- Who is your competition?
- Why are you better than your competitors?
- Why would I come to {your name} over anyone else for help with {insert your service}?
Bonus: Some self-coaching questions from me:
- What is your desired reputation? 3 years from now when you are where you want to be, what do you want people to say about you when you are not in the room? What do you readers say?
- What is the TRUE purpose of you creating your content? What is the fire in you that will never die away and keep fuelling your content?
- What is your unique knowledge? If you feel like you don’t have any, what is the unique knowledge that you want to acquire and be known for?
- How specifically do you intend to help your clients achieve what they want? What would you want to see as the outcomes of the transformations you facilitate?
- If I were to ask you to put together a program, what would it look like? Who would sign up for this program? How would their life change at the end of it?
- What are the patterns that you see among the people you have helped before? How do they describe their experience with you? How would they describe you/your personal brand?
Let’s wrap this up
The most important thing you need to remember about the personal brand.
Your Brand is not what you build. It is what you do.
A Brand is a Marketing term that might be hard to relate to. The term that is more applicable for Humans is Reputation.
And Reputation is not something that stems from the content game. It stems from the quality of work that you produce. Real impact. Real results. Real transformations.
Through 95% of your energy into becoming the best at what you do. 5% into your content maybe. If your clients are raving about you, your reputation will precede you.
When you create content experiment more with the long form. Yes, in the short-term you might not get as much engagement as you can get with short-form but on a long enough time scale only true deep expertise will remain relevant. Good dopamine over cheap dopamine. Prioritize right.
Check out this article on personal branding and thought leadership. Maybe you will find some more food for thought there.
If you have gained some interesting insights on your personal branding journey, please share (publicly or in a DM). Always love a good story :)
Good luck!
