Henna Business Tips Part 4



This week's Henna Business tips is going to feature on your business brand.  


What is a brand?
All about the way your business makes people feel.  How people feel has a huge impact on whether people book or not.  Every single impression you have on a potential client leaves a mark, that’s why it’s called “branding”  You are the only one who has the control of what your potential client’s lasting impression will be.  You want to make sure that the impression is the best one you can give to your client. The following are 5 major tips and exercises to make sure you have a business brand and are following the brand that you have set for yourself. 

Know your target market—this is very important—know and understand who your ideal customer is.  Understand your customer, feel what they feel, know what is it that they want from your business?  This is super important and often overlooked by small business owners.  Who are you catering to?  Are you mostly catering to brides?  To moms with teenage kids?  To young adults?  To an older clientele? To traditional families?  Who are you selling your work to?  Who is it that you want to deal with on a regular basis to sell your services?  Once you know your target market, you will know what types of services to offer and price it accordingly.  

Know what feelings you want your business to be associated with. This is a small exercise that you can do to figure out what you want your business to be associated with.  Write a list of at least 20 words that describe your business.  Go through this list and clean it up to about 10 words. Your clean up should eliminate duplicate words with similar meanings, and words that you think don’t shout about your business.  Do another clean up to choose 5 really distinct and true words for your business.  (for example, don’t use organic if you don’t intend to use organic ingredients in your henna paste, but opt for natural/pure/chemical free/green instead).  These five words should be words that people would use to describe your business.  ask your friends or previous clients to give you a list of words that they feel when they think of your business.  This should help you come up with 4 or 5 solid words that will be associated with your business. 
 
Do everything possible to evoke those feelings from the 5 words.  Whatever your words are, make sure you are living those words in your business.  These words should be alive in your website, your content, your photos, your emails, your phone conversations, your public posts.  Literally everything that your business does.  Those 5 words should seep out of your business.  This will reiterate the feelings you are trying to evoke in your customers.  This will also create a repertoire with your customers and will let them trust you and your business.  If they trust you, they will be more willing to invest their money into your business.  Their investment may be just $10 or $200, but you will establish the reputation with that client for a lifetime.  To help you implement these feelings, walk through the entire process that your customer will have with your company (website, phone, social media, business cards, posters, etc).  Ask yourself… how can I inject those 5 words into everything that my business does?  How can I make this experience better for my customer?  How can I make my customer really feel my brand through their experience?  Small things like pricing emails, business cards, thank you notes, blog posts, etc.  All your communication should be filled with your brand words.

Be consistent!  A brand is all about trust, building up long term consistency and repertoire.  People like feeling safe and like things that are predictable.  They want to know what they can expect.  For example, you know you will always walk into a Starbucks and get the same experience.  You will never get a cheap experience at Starbucks, just like you will never get the fancy experience from going to 7-11 for a coffee.  What kind of experience can they expect?  Build around your five words.  People will trust you if you are consistent. If you are not consistent in something, or your actions do not represent your brand words, rethink your actions, rethink your workflow, rethink your product, rethink your service, etc.  Just make sure you are consistently giving each and every single customer the same experience.  If it's their first time experience with you, make it the best.  If it's their repeated experience with you, make it the best!  Be the best at what you are doing and replicate it over and over again.  This makes things easy for you, and it gives the customer the satisfaction of being safe, in good hands and with a reputable source.  


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