A major challenge for many companies and brands is trying to be too much or do too much.
In many cases, brands fall into that deadly trap that makes people think “if I just tell you this one last thing, you are going to be totally bought in.”
Which never happens.
So the challenge when managing a brand is to not let your brand grow out of control, to keep your brand in check and focused.
Here’s a couple of ideas about how you can do just that.
1. Be really clear about who you want to talk to:
Pretty regularly I talk about the 3 essential strategic questions you should be answering.
And, the middle question deals specifically with who can use your product and service and who will buy it.
When you are trying to make sure that your brand is focused, you have to begin by understand who it is you are speaking to.
2. Focus on, at most, 3 important things that your product or service does:
Don’t fall into that trap of trying to add “just one more fact” to your marketing and sales material.
If you are doing your job correctly, you don’t need to share everything, the impact of your service will do the selling for you.
If you are in a situation where you have to keep adding information to persuade someone, you are likely already lost.
So make sure you keep the impact of your product or service tight. So that you don’t lose your prospects because of overload.
3. Focus your brand on outcomes:
One trap that you can easily fall into in marketing and branding is that you focus on all kinds of extraneous things like features and attributes, which are great…but they don’t do a tremendous value of selling your brand to your audience.
You can overcome this by focusing on the outcomes that your product or service produces.
That means, measurable impact like making money, saving money, increasing profit margin, increasing productivity.
If you look there, you are going to hit the nail a lot more often than if you focus on all the cool tasks you do.