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If you want people to be passionate about your business, you need to make genuine emotional connections. Making people feel connected to your business, your brand, or your products is the single most effective way to create the kind of raving fans every business wants.

These kinds of bonds are created using emotional branding. This is a form of marketing that is less focused on the hard facts about your business or products and more interested in the emotions that they evoke in your ta rgeted customer.

Emotional Branding and You

Think about the brands that you are most passionate about:

Do you always choose Ford trucks or Buick sedans because that’s what your father drove?

Does your family have a go-to restaurant that always hosts your most important celebrations?

Do you have a favorite movie or book that you always recommend to people who ask you about your preferences?

These are all strong feelings that were created by emotional branding.

You feel strongly about these products because you have a genuine emotional connection with them, bonds that are created by time, experience, and actual feelings you have experienced and want to experience again.

When you use emotional branding to create these feelings in your target customer, they establish a bond that can last a lifetime – or even be passed onto future generations of consumers.

Using Emotional Branding

Every business, brand, or product can benefit from emotional branding. Using real-life feelings like joy, trust, appreciation, surprise, and delight can create lifelong bonds that stand the test of time and that can be shared.

But it’s not just positive emotions that can make genuine connections. Things like fear, disgust, sadness, and anger are also widely used to promote products and brands. For example, the entire home security industry is built upon instilling fear in the hearts of homeowners about the safety of their family or the security of their possessions.

Emotional branding is time-tested, highly effective way to build real, durable connections between your business and your customers. Identifying the right emotion for your brand then promoting it effectively to your targeted customers is what Lytron   does best.

Call us today to learn more.

There are all kinds of ways to promote your brand’s products or services: Online ads, social media campaigns, discounts and couponing, even traditional advertising.

But one of the best ways to get people to trust your brand is to get other people to go to bat for your business. Things like testimonials, awards or recognition from reputable organizations, and being the focus of articles or features in media related to your market are powerful tools for advancing brand trust.

Truth in Testimonials

The owner of a local small business spent hours talking about his services at an area trade show. He gushed about his reliability, competitive pricing, and expertise to thousands of booth visitors without getting anybody to fill out a lead card.

Then somebody who once used his service happened to tell another trade show visitor about the quality of his brand and the next thing you know he ran out of cards and had to start writing down phone numbers and emails on his smartphone.

The moral of this story is that even if people don’t believe you, they will believe other people when they talk about your brand. Testimonials are one of the fastest and most effective ways to build trust in prospective customers, even more than direct marketing or personal appeals from the business owner.

Brag about Yourself

You may have three advanced degrees, awards from national organizations, and the highest rating from your industry’s most

prestigious organization, but nobody is going to know about it until you tell them.

Promoting your personal or brand’s achievements isn’t bragging, it’s marketing. And it’s one of the best ways to build brand trust. When other people say your brand is worth recognizing, it can open doors to people who otherwise may have ignored your brand entirely.

Traditional marketing is important. But equally or even more important is getting other people to share their faith in your brand. Most people are more likely to believe others when they say your brand is trustworthy than believe you when you say the same thing. Get over it and get going promoting brand trust.

When it really comes down to it, earning trust in your brand is pretty simple: Back up your promises with actions.

If you pledge to provide the best quality good in the marketplace, do it.

If you tell people your customer service is second to none, make sure it is.

If you advertise that you have the smoothest return policies and the best guarantee, have it.

In other words, don’t lie. Don’t overpromise. And don’t underdeliver.

Your Reputation on the Line

The harsh reality of fast-paced, web-based business today is that most customers aren’t going to give your brand a second chance.

There are simply too many competitors, too large of a marketplace, and too many barriers to entry being removed for you to expect customer loyalty if you fail to back up your promises with action.

People can literally move on to the next company that provides the same products or services as your brand with the push of a button on their smartphone. So it’s imperative that you treat every interaction as if it is the one and only opportunity to win over that customer for life … because it is!

Know Your Limits

So before you promise anything to your customer, make 100 percent sure you can deliver. There will be pressure to overpromise in order to undercut competitors, or cut corners in order to broaden your appeal … but it rarely pays off in the long run.

Instead, the brands with the best reputations today earn them one customer at a time. Deliver what you promise and that customer will come back … and hopefully will recommend your brand to their family, friends, and social network.

Remember, in today’s online economy, word of mouth is the strongest sales tool. Deliver what you promise and you can earn brand trust and build your customer base exponentially.

There’s been a lot of talk in business circles lately about vision. Much of it started way back in 2006 when TV host Oprah Winfrey lauded the book, “The Secret” by Rhonda Byrne.

This has led to such concepts as vision boards, writing letters to your future self, and setting “powerful anchors” followed in popularity among some entrepreneurs.

Whether or not you subscribe to “The Secret” book’s premise on the laws of attraction – which claim focusing on a specific outcome with your thoughts can cause it to occur – there is obvious benefit to envisioning success.

Or at least understanding how you define it for your business.

Envision Your Future Success – Setting Business Goals

Creating goals for your business is critical to your success. Without them, your enterprise is simply adrift.

But goals give you something to work toward. They also provide key measurements. For example, let’s say you set a goal for doubling your sales and increasing your profits by 25% within two years. These are tangible, specific targets.

Once you have these goals, you can essentially reverse engineer your Business to achieve them: How can you double sales? What specific steps do you need to attract new customers? How can you reduce costs to increase profits by your targeted amount?

Thinking about Your Future

Goals help keep you on track toward a specific outcome. Focusing on goals is important because it gives you something tangible to do daily,weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annually for the success of your business.

Do you have specific goals? Are they measurable? If not, that something you can make your very first goal: Creating targeted outcomes that are tied to specific dates, specific numbers, and specific success.

Once you can answer the question “How do you measure success?” you already are on the road to achieving it.

Do your customers genuinely trust your business? If your answer isn’t an immediate “Yes”, then there’s something you need to know.

Trust is critical to your business’s success. If it doesn’t exist in the hearts of your clients or customers, they aren’t going to keep coming back for your products and services.

Fortunately, building trust isn’t easy but it isn’t impossible either. Here are three effective ways to do it.

Play to Your Strengths

The first thing you need to do is figure out what your business does best and then lean into it.

For example, let’s say your customer service puts your competitors to shame. You can build on that by making your outstanding customer service the centerpiece of your next marketing campaign.

Key Ways to Build Customer Trust – Do What You Say

Most people probably aren’t going to inherently trust your company right away. That’s just real life. You need to prove to them you are worthy of their trust and their business.

The best way to do that is to follow through on your promises: Both direct and implied. Make sure you offer the best products possible. Ensure your services are top rate. Then back up that promise with unconditional guarantees.

Build Your Reputation

Having great products or services, backing them up with great customer service, and supporting it all by bending over backwards to ensure satisfaction isn’t enough. People need to know that you exist.

Once you have confidence in your company, other people can as well. Play to your strengths by emphasizing your integrity in your marketing. If you tell people you are worthy of their business then prove it every day and with every transaction, they are going to believe what you say because it’s the truth.

Trust isn’t something that comes naturally. Like anything else worthwhile in Business , it needs to be earned day in and day out.

The biggest mistake unsuccessful companies make is failing to clearly define their brand before doing anything else.

Everything flows from your brand. Everything.

That’s why it’s so important to understand what your brand represents before making any other decision about your company – including selecting products to sell, services to offer, or which platforms to use to promote your offerings.

Brand Mistakes

The decisions you make when forming your business shouldn’t define your brand. Instead, your brand should determine your choices.

But most business owners don’t understand this. It’s not something taught in most business schools. Instead, most enterprises are product-driven, or service-driven.

In other words, you may decide you want to open a bakery. So the first thing you might do would be to draw up a menu of offerings: Cakes, donuts, cookies, etc.

Wrong! Stop right there.

Instead, before you do anything else, the number one thing a new bakery owner should do … or any new business owner, for that matter … is to take some time defining their brand, not their products or services.

Branding Drives Business

Why? Because your future potential customers aren’t going to choose your business because it provides specific products or services. There are probably dozens of others in your area that provide exactly the same things.

Instead, these future people are going to choose your brand. And that’s why your branding should be the primary driver of your business.

Everything Follows

When you have a clearly defined brand that is appealing and unique, everything else follows from that: Your products or services, your space design, which marketing platforms you choose to promote your business, even the types of people you hire.

So before you do anything else when starting a new business, stop. Think about your brand. Come up with something new that people will like. Then build on that. It practically guarantees your success.

Has anybody ever told you they don’t understand your business? Have you heard that people don’t know what your business is about? That they can’t tell what you actually offer?

Some business owners get so wrapped up in making their business unique, cool, and interesting that they lose sight of the main reason for being in business to begin with: Making money.

Customers today have far too many choices to spend their time and effort on a brand they don’t immediately “get”. But the good news is that if your brand is confusing, unclear, or even unsuccessful there’s still time to make it better.

 The 10-Second Rule

It’s always worthwhile to approach your brand from a prospective customer’s perspective. Log off as an administrator and try to find your website as if you were simply a customer looking for a business similar to yours in your geographic region:

Is your business easy to find? For example, is it the first one that pops up on a Google search? If not, that needs to be fixed.

When your business does appear, would you instantly understand what it is you sell or offer? If your brand is confusing to you, imagine how it is perceived by somebody who never encountered it before.

From psychological perspective, people generally are willing to allocate 10 seconds or less to your website. So if the purpose of your business isn’t instantly perceivable, you need to fix it. And fast.

It’s Not Too Late to Correct Branding Mistakes – Streamline Branding

Clarifying your brand needs to be the top priority of your business. The only path to long-term success is continually feeding new customers into your pipeline. And if you are turning people away before they ever get a chance to click through to buy, that’s never going to happen.

Lytron  specializes in streamlining brands just like yours so that they are instantly recognizable and inviting to new and old customers alike.

Don’t let branding mistakes sabotage everything else you do to make your business successful. Let Lytron  help you open the door to more business.