This week we’re talking about making offers to help people. This is part two in a four-part series about the phases of personal branding.
We’re diving into how to build a personal brand from zero to one hundred, from start to finish. What are the things you need to focus on?
The first phase covered in episode 176 was about How To Build Your Brand Identity. The second phase covered in episode 177 was about How To Introduce Your Brand To The World.
WHY YOU SHOULD MAKE OFFERS AS A PERSONAL BRAND
Making offers is a very important phase. This is when you go from being the friend or acquaintance of the client or the person you just met to the thought leader, the person who can help them. You’re transitioning your positioning.
We are talking about making offers to your customer as a personal brand. This is a tricky subject for a lot of people. Selling anything is a tricky subject. That’s why we don’t call it selling.
MAKING OFFERS IS A DIFFERENT TWIST ON ‘SELLING’
We call it “making offers” because sometimes you may not be offering your actual service. Sometimes you will offer a couple of resources and say, “Good luck, and let’s talk sometime in the future. Let me know how it goes.”
Sometimes you might be offering someone else’s services because you’re not a fit. You might be offering to say, “Hey, maybe we’ll just meet again some time and see if this would work out.”
Making offers isn’t always about selling, but there are opportunities for the right people to say, “You know what? I am looking for exactly what you are talking about. How can we work together?”
In the last episode, we talked about how to frame that and explain to people (when you’re introducing yourself) how you work with them and what the steps are to accomplish those goals. Now we’re past that. We’re at the point where we want to figure out what our value is that we are offering.
MAKE SURE YOU ARE SPECIFIC
One of the first things you need to figure out is what that service is. What is the most common thing you can help people with? What is the result of that? You want to be able to explain that simply. However, you don’t want it to be vague. You don’t want it to be just “Photo services.” You want it to be specific.
For example, say, “We get together for a day. We shoot a hundred pictures and you get twenty of them that you like that are the best. They’re well-edited. At the end of this, you have professional photography that you can use in your social media.” Be that specific. You want to understand all the things that your offer entails.
What I want to impart to you is that this is obviously beyond that first phase. Once you understand what your most basic offer is and how you really want to help people, you can get into the design part of this.
There are a few phases here. Number one is understanding what the suite of products is that you want to develop. In other words, what do you want to offer that’s the most complicated thing you do? Also, what do you want to offer that is the easiest, smallest way to work with you? Then what do you want to offer that’s in the middle?
This is called a value ladder. In other words, there may be things that you want to offer that just bring people into your world. A lot of people, just to get started, need help with something very simple. That will help build trust.
If you help them succeed and you give them some quick wins, they might be willing to move on to the next phase and hire you for the thing that you do, the service you really want to help people with.
However, you may have to start with something smaller. Building this suite of offers is part of that phase right now.
MAKING OFFERS ISN’T JUST SELLING STUFF
What I also want to add to this is it’s not just about selling things. The idea of offering your help is huge. What I want you to be able to do is before you get to the point where you are selling something, I want to make sure that you build out resources.
Even while you’re teaching, what are the things that you would give people, like templates, checklists, resources that they can use, books they can read, approaches to follow, et cetera….
Whatever it is, build them out, write them out. Do you have any kind of list of tools that you might use that you would recommend? Start to catalog them. Save those things, because number one, it will help you serve your clients when they do decide to be clients and pay you for your service.
Number two, they will help you figure out what the resources are that you could be offering people when you meet them in person or online when they are just trying to get a question answered. You can say, “Oh, actually I have a resource for that. Why don’t you go get it? It should solve your problem for you.”
OFFER RESOURCES TO BUILD YOUR EMAIL LIST
It brings them into your world in a non-salesy way. You are offering them help, not a service. As you make that offer, you are bringing them into your world because generally when you offer that free thing, they have to give you an email of some sort to receive it.
Not just like a website downloadable freebie thing, but also when you meet someone say, “I can email that to you. I have that thing where I’ve solved this a hundred times for people. Let me send you that. Where would you like me to send it?”
You could do that in a text with someone. Direct message them on Instagram or somewhere else. Also, you can put it on your website as a downloadable resource.
There are lots of ways to get that, but along that way, you have to give it to them somehow. Make that an email, because then what happens is you can start to email them and introduce yourself to them and your world.
Say, “You know, if you guys would like to keep hearing some of my best resources for this thing that you need help with, I’ll continue to send you those every week or every month in my newsletter with helpful tips.”
SHIFT YOUR MINDSET FROM SELLING TO HELPING
That’s how you start to build an offering. Think of it as how do you continue to help people? What can you build for them? Those can become what people call lead magnets, but I don’t like to talk like that because that’s changing your mindset from being helpful to something else.
Instead, think of them as your helpful offers and resources that you can provide to people. Then as you go through that, you’ll continue to develop those things. What do people need that I don’t have yet? What do people need that would help them get to where they would need my help, and beyond?
That’s what I want you to think of in terms of your offers, is how to build those different suites of products and resources that you can help people with. Make them all map to the thing that you are a specialist at, not a variety of offers that are disconnected.
Find the one thing, then find the things before and after that, in terms of their journey, that would help them.
RELATED: Build your personal brand with the Content Marketing Starter Guide.
HOW TO GET ATTENTION FOR YOUR BRAND’S OFFERS
Now we’re going to talk about the attention side of this. This is the second piece of all of these conversations. How do you build attention when you have an offering when you’ve figured that out?
Now, we’ve already talked about what I call One-to-Zero and One-to-One attention. One-to-Zero means you are building websites and email lists, but no one is there yet. One-to-One means you are creating direct relationships and communication with people via networking and social profiles.
This week we’re going to talk about One-to-Few. This is you connecting to a few people at a time. This is how you start to scale the attention.
The key here is that you have to find a way to be around groups. In some cases, those groups will give you opportunities to do One-to-One networking and in some cases One-to-Many, but we’re going to call it One-to-Few because initially you take on smaller groups.
FIND PEOPLE IN NETWORKING GROUPS
This could be a local networking group. Ten to thirty people get together in a networking group in your community with people from different backgrounds that you can get to know and exchange information. Those people have connections. By connecting to them, you are connecting to other people.
Get into small groups of people like that. Networking groups are one example. Another is online communities. There are tons of Facebook groups out there for every industry, topic, or audience. Join those Facebook groups and be involved in those committees.
DON’T JUST ATTEND: BE ACTIVE
Better yet, if you can get to know the leaders of those communities, be involved with them. Then they might support you and refer you to people in their community or just recommend you. That would be helpful as well.
Not only that, if you can find something that’s actually industry-specific, that’s a huge one. Look for associations in your industry. Look for events in your industry and attend them. Actually show up and be there.
Get to know the speakers and the other thought leaders in those industries. As you build those relationships with people that are the influencers of those communities, you are now opening a door to having people promote you that already have audiences.
CREATE OPPORTUNITIES TO MAKE OFFERS
That is how you start to unlock more attention for your offers because as you’re meeting more people, they’re getting introduced to you as the guy who’s good at this thing that we just talked about. Then you can start to introduce them to your resources and the way you help people, which brings them into your offers.
That’s one thing that’s one place to start. Another is instead of just being an attendee or something helpful, position yourself as a thought leader in this space by starting to get onto stages of some sort.
That could be you in a room talking about what you do in front of people for 30 minutes. You could run a workshop or do a virtual summit where you are a presenter. Curate a conversation. Be a guest on a podcast, whatever it might be.
How do you get involved so that people look to you as a speaker or someone who’s a leader in this space, providing information and useful tools? Reposition yourself as someone who’s not just an audience member, but is now a leader in the committee.
That is phase three of building your personal brand, and expanding not only how you help people, but also how do you bring attention to that? Again, if you’ve been noticing episode by episode, we are starting small and starting to expand out.
If you try to take all this on at once, it’s overwhelming. You’ll start to lose focus and priority. You do have to do these things in order for them to make sense.
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MORE ADVICE AND INTERVIEWS
If you’d like more content about how to build your personal brand, check out my free Content Marketing Starter Guide.
And here are some more of my most popular thought leader interviews!
- What Business to Start with John Lee Dumas
- Personal Branding Masterclass with Chris Ducker
- Built to Serve with Evan Carmichael
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Talk soon!