5 Key Branding Tips to Help You Attract Better Clients

by Tom Ewer 5 Minutes

Two people working on a table.

For some small service businesses, branding can feel like an ‘optional’ strategy reserved for the big names. Instead of creating a recognizable image that attracts the attention of their target audience, they market themselves as the solution to everyone’s problems. Unfortunately, when a company doesn’t have a clearly defined brand, it often creates a dime-a-dozen image that only attracts low-quality customers.

If you want to start reaching high-quality prospects in your target audience, you need to create a brand that represents who you are, what you value, and what solutions you can offer. When your target audience can connect with your image, they’ll have a better understanding of whether you’re the right service business for them. Developing a strong brand reputation is an excellent way to ensure that high-quality customers will trust you and seek out your services.

Strengthening your brand takes some planning, so in this article we’ll take a look at five key tips you can use to improve your company’s image. Let’s get started!

1. Know Your Target Audience

When developing your brand, you’ll need to consider the people you’re trying to attract. Your brand should be an accurate representation of who you are as a company, but it also needs to appeal to the members of your target audience. This means that your ideal customer should be a consideration in everything from your logo and company colors to your brand values.

When you better understand your target audience, you can create a more targeted brand strategy. By studying the things your ideal customer is looking for in a business, you’ll know what branding elements to include to get their attention. If you create your brand with that audience in mind, you’ll attract more customers and clients you actually want to work with.

The best way to get to know your target audience is to create a buyer persona. If you haven’t done so already, identify the exact kinds of individuals you want to attract. Be as specific as possible, laying out everything from their age and gender to their fears, hopes, challenges, and interests. A strong, detailed buyer persona will help you with the rest of the strategies we’ll discuss.

2. Examine Your Brand Reputation

It can be difficult to gain as much control as you’d like over your brand reputation. While you can try to influence your audience members to believe in the brand you’ve created, how they ultimately perceive your company will depend partly on their own opinions and points of view. In order to change their impression of you and your services, you need to know what they currently think.

Once you’ve identified your target audience, take a look at how they’re engaging with your brand. Read online reviews, check blog comments, or even have your website critiqued. Get feedback directly from members of your target audience if you can, to see if they’re connecting with the brand you’ve created or if you’re missing the mark.

The information you gather can become a starting point for strengthening your brand. When you’re constantly evaluating the way you’re perceived by your audience, you’re able to make strategic shifts to better connect with your ideal customers. As your brand becomes stronger and more targeted, you’ll start to see more high-quality customers coming to your business.

3. Make Your Business Stand Out

Many service business owners run into trouble when they try to be everything to everyone. Instead of focusing on the things they do better than their competition, they try to collect as many customers and clients as they can, even if the business that results isn’t in their wheelhouse. In order to provide superior service and attract better clients, however, you need to identify what makes you different from your competitors.

The truth of the matter is that you can’t do everything. When you try to, you’ll end up stretched thin, unfocused, and unable to make the strong connections you need with the clients you’d actually like to have. However, when you focus on your unique traits or the areas you excel in, you can become an expert. As the go-to source for excellent service, you’ll be able to work with only high-quality clients.

To determine what makes you stand out, consider what unique value you bring to your customers. Conduct analysis on your competitors’ web presence, offerings, and messaging to see what areas they’re leaving open. Read reviews about your competition, and see where they’re underperforming. Then, see if you can adjust your services to fill in those gaps and offer something truly unique.

4. Cut Out Unnecessary Extras

When you try to attract as many clients and customers as possible, you usually end up offering services you don’t really feel invested in. You’re willing to provide them if someone hires you to, but it’s not your preferred area. Offering too many unnecessary extras can actually ‘cloud’ your brand, making it difficult for your target audience to understand what your business represents.

Getting rid of these extras allows you to create a clean, strong brand image. When you only focus on a few things that you do extremely well, your company is more likely to become the leader in those specific areas. Not only will cutting out extra services bring more high-quality customers to your business, you’ll also waste less time explaining your offerings.

To make progress with this strategy, remove any services that don’t relate to the unique niche you’ve carved out for your company. In addition, get rid of website pages that might be bogging your site down or causing confusion to visitors. Focus all your attention on the services that will help you develop the brand image you’ve created and best serve the ideal customers you’re trying to attract.

5. Create Consistency in Your Branding

In order to ensure that people start to recognize your brand, it needs to be consistently applied throughout your website, social media, print materials, and any other components of your business. When every piece of marketing shares the same logo, colors, images and messaging, your customers will start to associate those elements with your company.

Consistency enables you to build trust with your target audience. When prospective clients can easily recognize who you are, what you offer, and what value you provide, they’ll start to understand what to expect. This helps them to connect with your brand, remember your company name, and come back to you when they’re ready to make a purchase.

Establishing branding expectations can ensure that you stay consistent. Laying out the colors, fonts, words, and tone you should use when creating new content can help boost your brand to make it more recognizable. To get started, you can create a branding guide featuring all these details to refer back to when needed.

Conclusion

If you want to attract high-quality clients, you need to make it easy for prospects to connect with your business. When members of your target audience view you as a company they can relate to and that provides them with the services they need, they’ll come to you with their needs. If you want to be a go-to resource for quality customers, you need to create and maintain a strong brand image.

Let’s recap the five ways you can improve your branding to attract better clients:

  1. Create a more specific brand image by understanding your target audience.
  2. Analyze the current reputation of your brand.
  3. Identify which unique traits help you stand out from your competition.
  4. Eliminate practices or services that don’t align with your goals.
  5. Develop a branding guide to help you stay consistent.

Which of these branding techniques do you think will bring the most benefit to your company? Let us know in the comments section below!

Image Source: Pexels.

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by Tom Ewer
Tom Ewer and the WordCandy team have clocked some serious mileage as freelancers, agency employees and even agency owners over the years, and they love sharing their combined expertise here on the Bidsketch blog.