Episode 278: How to Leverage and Build Your Branding
Building a powerful personal brand like Adam’s does not happen overnight. In fact, it took him many years of blood, sweat, and tears to develop and grow it. It involves not only using social media as a tool, but other avenues as well such as industry awards, influencer endorsements, and more. So, what can you do as a business owner to start being chased by clients for your services and not the other way around?
In this episode, Adam Stott shares the different types of branding that you need to leverage in order to develop your personal brand. Adam also talks about meaningful ways to pursue your brand such as endorsements, awards, testimonials, and many more!
Show Highlights:
- How Adam built his own branding
- Importance of starting a relationship branding
- Why you should not miss Awards and Recognitions
- Getting some media mileage and get them to talk about you
- Testimonials and endorsements
- Understanding how media works to benefit you
Links Mentioned:
Join the Ultimate Three Day Business Event and learn more Business Growth Secrets
Be part of our Facebook Group Big Business Events Members Network
Connect with me on Instagram @adamstottcoach
Transcript:
Please note this is a verbatim transcription from the original audio and therefore may include some minor grammatical errors.
Adam Stott:
Hey everybody. Welcome back to Business Growth Secrets podcast. You are with your host, Adam Stott. I wanna say a sincere thank you to listening to the podcast. So many people, so many in the live events that I see, people were just saying to me, “Adam, the podcast is helping me, it’s giving me more clarity. I love the guests,” and you know, we’re getting loads of great feedback. So I wanna say a big thank you to you all for, you know, listening, staying committed and being a great advocate of this podcast. Now, of course, we don’t sell anything on the podcast. We don’t do any sponsorships on the podcast. And the way that this podcast grows is by it being shared with the audience. It’s a very organic growth, and I would love to help more business owners. So if you know a business owner that could benefit from what we are talking about, please go over to your favorite channel that you use this podcast on and share the episode. That way somebody else can get the knowledge, they can start to grow so you are putting some good karma into the world for another entrepreneur.
Having said all of that, I’m now about to take you into an epic breakdown of branding. I hope you really enjoy it. It’s gonna be massive value for you and hope you enjoy today’s podcast on Business Growth Secrets. So this is not my first rodeo. My name’s Adam Stott, and if you don’t know me, I’ve built very powerful personal brand that’s took me many, many years to develop and grow. And when I first started out, I found it really, really difficult to know what to focus on. So if you are a business owner or you’re a cultural consultant and you’re a little bit confusing, you’re not sure what to do, a hundred percent know where you’re at, and that’s why I wanted to make this video to really show you the three areas that are really fast and easy to put in place that can help you to grow. And those three areas are actually really, really simple. There is relationship branding which is the building of relationships and leveraging relationships to get you more out to market so other people are saying how good you are. And really that’s what branding is all about. Branding is about you not having to constantly say how good you are and beg clients of business and instead change the tone where clients start begging you to do business with you. So imagine that for a moment, all of a sudden, clients are coming to you asking to wanting to do business with you. And you’ve got a waiting list rather than chasing clients. And if you want that kind of result, then you’re gonna love this video so pay close attention. Now, first of all, it’s relationship branding. And I’m gonna give you some segments that you can focus on to do this fast, easy, and in most cases free, which is pretty cool. Now the second part is what we call award and nomination branding. And this is something that so many people miss. And I think fundamentally, it’s actually a really, really big mistake to miss this aspect. Because when you’re actually building a business and a brand, you want other people saying how good you are and I’m gonna give you lots of segments that you can focus on in this area too. And then finally, the final one is media.
How do we get the media talking about you and really saying what an awesome person you are to do business with. And now we’re gonna deep dive into these different areas. So from a relationship practice and you actually building relationships, this is what you’ve gotta acid test in your business. You’ve gotta look at your business and ask yourself if you are currently doing these things. And if you are not, what opportunities you’re missing? So the first one, would be case studies. This is not just standard testimonials. Look, what we see from unbranded businesses and businesses that don’t get massive results is their testimonials are very, very weak. And what they do is they’ve got, “Hey, Mr. P says that I had a great experience working with this business.” Like no one knows who Mr. P is. No one understands what result you got for Mr. P. And frankly, no one believes that Mr. P exists, right? So we need to be much more specific and we wanna show an actual journey of how somebody developed and grew under your product or service. Now, building an actual case study takes time, but the good news is about case studies you don’t need 3000 case studies. You’ll be able to use four or five case studies on clients you really helped and got great results to very much build your brand alongside you which is really important. We’re gonna go for ’em all and then I’m gonna give you a quick tip on how you can put this in place for each of them. Now, the next one is testimonials. Standard testimonials. And some of you like, “Yeah, I got that!” But I’m gonna give you a couple of tips on how you can power that up. The next one is actually having higher profile testimonials and having influencer endorsements. So more high profile people talking about you, talking about your business, and talking about your brand. So we’ve got influencer endorsements. And when I say influencer, in your mind you might go to, hey, like Kim Kardashian. I’m not talking about that. What I’m talking about as an influencer is somebody that’s well known in your industry, somebody that’s well known in your marketplace, actually saying how good you are. Because more than likely, your clients are gonna be familiar with that type of person. And that endorsement is gonna give you a massive, massive amount of credibility.
The next one would be that higher profile celebrity endorsements which is really, really cool and powerful to get. Another one would be group and body endorsements to actually get in groups, to saying how awesome you are. And every single industry… remember, I’ve done this with thousands of clients to help them build their brand. Every industry has industry bodies. Industry awards. They have different groups of people that are very involved in the industry and you getting endorsed by these people is very, very powerful when it comes to building your personal brand. Because straight away it lends more credibility and this is what we’re talking about. You building your credibility in a powerful way. Next one is, of course, media endorsements. Actually getting the media channels to endorse you and say how awesome you are. And the next one is what we call charitable leverage. So charitable leverage is showing that you are doing good work in the community, you are doing good work in the industry. It’s not just all about the profit for you, but actually that you are giving back. This, of course, will start to get people really tuned in to what you do and wanna do business with you. So if we just look at these seven in isolation for just one moment, imagine for a moment that you had proper case studies where you were able to demonstrate people working with you in a step-by-step basis showing the power of change from your products and services. That is an absolute must for businesses that want a better brand. Because what will happen, these clients will see themselves in that story. They will see themselves in that case study. Before someone does business with you, what they wanna see and what they’re asking themselves is, “Hey, what’s gonna happen next? What’s gonna happen after that? What are the steps gonna be?” And you having a case study demonstrating the steps gives a massive amount of confidence.
So if you want more people to say yes, and you wanna earn more money, getting case studies in place is a really important thing to do. It’s really easy to do as well. You just have to demonstrate and show, hey, when someone takes action and buys your products of service, what’s the first thing that happens? When they get their first result, what happens next? When they get their next result and they start to see change and transformation, how can you demonstrate that? And what is the end result? Like what is the big picture across the course of you working with that client? Next one, client testimonials. I’ll just give you a couple of tips. One, make sure that when you’re getting client testimonials, you’re using proper names. You’re not just making things up or you’re not abbreviating people’s names because it absolutely destroys the credibility of the testimonial straight away. So you don’t wanna do that. Instead, understand the hierarchy of testimonials. Written word is okay, but something like a video testimonial is gonna be much more powerful because that’s somebody speaking the message. And after video testimonial, remember, even live testimonials is even more powerful than that. Getting influencers and celebrities and group endorsements is something you can go to work on and you can connect with people even if you had to do a little bit of work for free. For someone mega high profile, you would see that that might have a powerful impact. And hey, say you went out and did a day’s work for free for somebody that was super high profile and you got ’em a great result. If you use that testimonial or that endorsement for the next two or three years and that goes and influences your next 100 clients, can you imagine that? What’s that return on investment that you’re getting, you know? That day that you might charge a thousand pounds for 500 pounds or whatever you actually charge might go on to win you hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of business so it’s something that you can get in place and is a really easy, quick win. So of course, there’s masses of ways that you can do this.
The next one is awards. People overlook this, right? Some of our clients are getting insane results. We’ve got so many clients that have become award winners that work with us. We’ve taken people to the top of their industries very, very quickly using awards. And let me tell you, the buying process of a customer psychology of awards. You got two businesses, both of them look good. You’re putting them next to each other, and you’re considering which one you should do business with. All things being equal, you’re like, “Oh, I don’t really know what one to do business with,” but you got this business here, which is an award winner, and this one isn’t, guess what happens? Who do you prefer to do business with? You prefer to do business with the award winner. Why? Because somebody else is saying they’re good rather than just you. So you should make it an absolute priority to get your business to award-winning status. Now, we have had people in the travel industry, for example, that we’ve made the very number one travel agent in the entire country. That people in the mortgage industry, we made the number one mortgage person in the industry. That people in a state agency that we’ve made the number one. Now, when they got voted number one, they weren’t necessarily number one. But because market perception changed, all of a sudden, everybody wants to do business with that person and they ascend very quickly. So sometimes you can get a little bit of imposter syndrome like, hey, I don’t know if I want to put myself forward for an award, because what if I don’t win? Well, worst-case scenario, you get nominated, you don’t win, and you get that branding. Best case scenario, you do win, you grow, you increase your price, you get better results. So look, you’ve got nothing to lose. You’ve got everything to gain. So getting focused on awards is actually really important. So here’s some of the things you can do with awards One, first of all, you can focus on local awards. You might not feel that you can go out and win best business in the UK or in America or wherever you are right now. But I’m willing a bet that in your county, you probably could quickly get an award, an endorsement from, let’s say you are in Essex, or you are in Manchester or wherever you are, you could certainly get an award locally, maybe even in your town or your village to get you some extra branding and it will cost you very little, if anything, to go and get that done. Just a little bit of time and a little bit of effort but that’s gonna push you on. The next thing you can look at is starting to look at your industry. So you’ve got local awards, then you’ve got industry awards. So industry awards are rather than you just looking at best business in Essex, for example, it might be best construction business in Essex. So it’s even more filtered down. And guess what? So is the competition. So all of a sudden you’re getting recognized as being really good at what you do. Now, after you go to industry awards, you can start to look at national awards. Now, once you start winning national awards, you can really power up your brand. People start to know you and they’re like, oh, this person’s absolutely awesome. They’re the best in the country. You wanna say you are number one? Well, you can if you start winning the national awards and look, it’s more simple. How do I know? Because the next one that you can do is you can be a judge on these. So you can actually judge awards. And I’ve been a judge for the Nationals Industry Awards and local awards, and you know what I know from behind the scenes being a judge on these awards, hardly anybody enters. People don’t take this seriously. So this is a way you can power up your brand, power up your brand fast.
Next thing you can do, which is really easy for you to do, is you can give your clients that you’ve already got awards for how they used your products or services brilliantly. And guess what, this ties directly back into your case studies. Ties directly back into your testimonials. And all of a sudden you are starting to build this culture of success and that’s what you wanna do. You wanna build a culture of success around what you do and your business, that your products, your services, gets results. Especially if you’re a service-based business. Because if you’re a service-based business or you’re a coach or you’re a consultant, somebody like that, and you’re in that kind of industry, you wanna show people, you get great results. That’s really, really important. Next thing, you can start hosting awards. You can start sponsoring awards. There’s so many different things that you can do that power up your brand, get you known, and get you out there. So you wanna really consider how you can do this in your business and do it fast. And if you haven’t got anything in this area on brand for this year as targets and goals, you know, really you should be looking at how can I get some of those targets put in place to make you award-winning. Hey, how would it feel to be award-winning in 2023? Would that be pretty cool? I’m sure you’d agree. That’d be pretty awesome. And that would start to put you in a place where you become more well-known, you get a better brand, you raise your prices. And hey, all your friends, your family start celebrating you. Your social media blows up because people are talking about how awesome you’re doing. You’re creating a culture of success. And the more you create a culture of success, the more you will draw successful people towards you, my friend. Okay. Next, we’ve got media. So media actually is really, really, really easy to start to get into. And you might have no media right now, but let me explain media to you very quickly and get you to understand. The way that media creates products, which essentially every business has products, their product is your story. They want your story. They want stories every day. They are looking for people to give them their story because it’s free product for them. So you going to the media, getting a relationship with the media, and putting your news in the media is helping them and it’s helping you. So it’s a win-win and we wanna create these win-wins. Now you starting to feature in the media regularly means that you are a more well-known person, you start to ascend and your business becomes more well-known. And when you become more well-known, you can charge more money, you can get better results, and everything starts to change for you.
So I think it’s really important that you focus on media and how you can build in a media strategy for your business. So I’m gonna give you some simple ones that you can do and you can do fast. So the first one, from a media perspective that you can do is again, you can look at local media. Having a relationship with your local media is free, it’s easy, and you don’t need a PR company to do it for you. You can just do it yourself. You can go out, have a conversation with them, get to know them, visit them, sit down with ’em, have a phone call with ’em, whatever you prefer, a Zoom call and just have the conversation, “Hey, what kind of stories are you interested in?” You know, three or four calls with local media before you know it, you get ’em published. Hey, how would it feel with your children and the people you know, your family were reading about your business in the media? That’d be pretty awesome, wouldn’t it? You know, everyone starts talking about you and that’s what building a brand is. I really love, I think it was Bill Gates that said, oh, it might have even been Jeff Bezos that said, ” Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.” And the reality is if everybody’s talking about you and everybody’s talking about the success of your business, your brand is going up, your prices is going up. Guess what’s also going up? Your bank account. So these types of things are important and you can’t miss it in business. If you’re a business person that’s unbranded and you’re not considering these things, you’re missing opportunities, right? So it’s really, really important. Other things that you can do is you can look at speaking. So speaking is a great way to start to get yourself more well-known. Getting out there, speaking on radio stations, speaking at different events that are happening. You know, people are always looking for speakers. If you’re willing to put yourself forward and actually get yourself out there in that way, you are gonna get picked up, and that is get another way of getting media exposure because then you can do press releases on your speaking and where you’re speaking, et cetera.
Other things that you can do is radio. All the radio stations are looking for commentary. They’re looking for guests, they’re looking for people to add value, especially your local ones. So really consider how you can build a relationship with local radio stations. Another one would be TV. Right now, this is what most people don’t get about TV. There is like a gazillion channels on Sky. But forget Sky, you’ve also got all these streaming sites, which there are hundreds of them. Now, all of these need constant media and they need to be fed. They want stories. In fact, I had a friend of mine, a coach, very recently, he just had a Netflix series commissioned because he just had the absolute guts and the know-how to again have a conversation and say, “Hey, I’ve got this idea.” It ends up getting picked up by Netflix. His life changes immediately because he had the ability and the nos to go out and have that conversation. And look, anybody can do it. Right now, what’s the largest grown segment in TV? The largest grand segment in TV is reality TV. That’s what’s being watched the most because it’s free content for the media. They don’t need a million-pound budget to go and do a story. They can do a story to you at next to no cost. And I featured on Rich House Poor House twice on national TV. I did another documentary about Super Cars on national TV. It built my brand in a big way. It got me featured in all the national newspapers, which is obviously, we’ve got online news and we’ve got offline news. But you know what? The really cool thing is all of these things work together. You get the TV, you get the online news, you get the offline news, you get the radio appearances. You start speaking, you get noticed, you get the TV. So all of these things start to link together and before you know it, you’ve built a brand that stands out. So don’t sleep on this and don’t miss the opportunity to get yourself branded. Don’t fall into the camp of unbranded businesses because if it’s meant to be, it’s up to me. It’s something that you need to work on, and if you do work on it, you can get out there, you can dominate and you can make things happen without having to spend thousands of pound.