Let’s cut to the chase. Whether your brand is a company, a product or a service… Why do customers choose you?

If your answers look like these, you’d better keep reading.

“We give great service.”
“We treat our clients like family.”
“We deliver solutions (you can also add the word “results”).”
“We have (insert hundreds of years) of collective experience.”
“We offer a high-quality product (or service).”

Bla bla bla…

You may get by with these expressions in a booming economy, but not in today’s competitive landscape, where every customer matters and every dollar counts. If you’re not providing outstanding service, treating customers like gold, offering quality solutions delivered by the best and the brightest, stop reading now. You have bigger problems than I can solve today. Doing these things gives you the right to sit at the table, but not at the head.

The promise of excellence is simply not enough motivation for customers to join your brand or switch from a current provider. Because? Because for a potential customer, adopting your brand represents change, and change is hard. Change represents pain, the unknown, a potential abyss for many decision makers. To motivate a prospect to face the pain of change, you must decisively demonstrate the even greater pain of not changing.

“A little better than the other guy“It’s just not enough. You have to be that much better and deliver one of these two ingredients in a big way:

1. Make me more money

How does your product or service create wealth for your customers? How will you raise the top line? You need to make a clear and unambiguous connection between your brand and increased profit for a customer. How will your product or service represent a competitive advantage in the market? How will you create better awareness, exposure, and adoption by new customers? How will what you offer help a customer access a new market sector, a new customer base, or a new region? How will you create the opportunity for even greater success?

2. Save me more money

The answer to this question is especially relevant when economic times are tough. When CEOs aren’t focused on growing the top line, they’re honing in on ways to eliminate expenses from their operation. How will your product or service demonstrate short-term cost savings? How will you create new efficiencies, reduce waste, increase speed, throughput, or eliminate redundancies?

team exercise

Take out a paper sheet. At the top left she writes “Earn money” and at the top right “Save money”. Draw a line down the center. Now, working with your team, write down all the ways your product or service helps customers “do” more or “save” more. Choose the top three in each category and identify a specific example for each. When you’re done, you should have six great examples, or case studies, that clearly show how your solution decisively helped a customer make more money or save more money. To download a premade form of this exercise, go here [http://www.thebrandmatters.com/download/team_exercise_0409.php].

Now implement

Now, rev up the online marketing machine to full throttle and deploy your newly created case studies via email, on your site, as press releases, online business review portals, and other social media destinations. You’ve just taken a big step forward, positioning your brand in a way that will force the decision maker to take action.