For your brand to make an impact, it must have a purpose. You can’t know change lives if you don’t understand what’s driving you to serve.
We’ve talked about finding your message, and we’ve talked about building a community. Today, we’re taking the last step of your personal branding framework, which is making an impact. To do that, you’ve got to know your community.
What are their pain points? What challenges do they face? How will you be able to provide assistance?
When you figure that out, you can create a business that solves problems. Instead of simply making a difference, you get to make a lasting impact.
But how exactly can you achieve that? Where do you begin? What are the key things you need to know?
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What Does It Mean to Make an Impact
One of the best things about being a consultant or coach is having the ability to help others.
But most of the time, coaches and consultants fail to sell anything because they aren’t solving problems. They share a lot of content, but they don’t actually get out there and help people. So they fail to engage with their audience or solve problems, and they leave no impact.
The problem is that those people aren’t taking advantage of their community. What is key about a community is that it’s transactional. There is give and take, back and forth. It isn’t just a subscriber or a follower. It is an engaged community, and that means interaction.
Through that interaction, you can build trust, and you can identify your listeners’ problems. Solving those problems — through a resource, tool, program, coaching, whatever — is impact.
Creating an impact consists of three components:
- Your framework for solving problems
- The tools and skills needed to solve the problem
- The value exchange.
Framework for solving problems
In our last episode, we talked about discovery. You call someone, you ask what their problems are, you figure out where they are lacking or deficient, and you find things they might need to work on.
If you don’t have a framework for solving a problem, you’ll be creating the wheel from scratch every time. You’re missing a huge opportunity to help and to reinforce what you are known for.
When you build a framework that is special and only yours, you are supporting your positioning and differentiating yourself from the competition. You are making yourself unique. You’re making yourself a commodity that only you have.
A lot of people can do things their way, but only you do it this way. It’s your framework, and figuring that out takes a little bit of work. You have to get out there and actually start working with people, solving their problems, or thinking about how you would if you could.
HAVE A PLAN
So, say you’re a health coach, and your three tenets for getting people to lose 20 pounds are changing your diet, getting more exercise, and educating yourself on why you need to make the change so that you stick to it.
Those three things are your framework. Now, when someone tells you their problem, you know right where to go: “Well, the first thing we need to work on is your diet. The second thing we need to do is work on your activity levels, your exercise. The third thing we need to work on is your mindset.”
Then you go through those three things with your client, and you have a plan for how to do each one. Your client will see that this is something you’ve done before that you can replicate. People start to see that the one person you helped wasn’t a fluke because they followed your system and your plan — a plan that you are continuing to optimize and make better.
BE CONSISTENT
The best thing about a framework is that you can continue to make it better, which has two advantages:
- You have a jump-start on someone starting later than you who hasn’t had as long to optimize.
- You are creating consistency.
Consistency is the backbone of a brand. You must consistently get results and have customers saying, “This person changed my life. This person helped me. This person solved my problem.” That consistency of solving problems creates momentum.
That momentum is what is going to drive your brand growth, and you have to have a framework in place to achieve it. Without it, you’re grabbing at straws at best. Plus, you might miss a step because you didn’t follow the same program you had before.
Your framework could be a set of steps in a certain order, or a certain key ingredient or action people have to take. Whatever it is, it must be repeatable over and over again.
WHAT TOOLS DO YOU USE TO MAKE AN IMPACT
The best thing about helping people is that you don’t just have to do it with your words. There are plenty of resources out there. A lot of the time, the people you’re helping just don’t know where those resources are and don’t have the time to figure it out.
What’s great about working with hundreds of people is that you get to start to curate all the best resources out there. You’ll curate them by asking questions like:
- What tools are best?
- Which ones do I like that work within my framework?
- Which tools have I really seen results with?
For me, I’m in marketing and branding. There are a million email marketing tools, CRM tools, graphic design tools. The list goes on.
The point is that I’ve tried them and figured out what works. So I can start to say, “This is the tool I use for managing my CRM. This is the tool I use for managing my social media posts. This is a tool used for editing my podcast.” As I go down that list and find things that work for me, I save my client from having to go by trial and error. Here’s why that’s great:
- You’ve just saved them a ton of time, and that’s impactful.
- You’ve established something that you can do over and over again.
- You can develop affiliate relationships with those tools.
Affiliate relationships are obviously only for the tools you’ve vetted and work, not just ones that pay you the most. But the right partnership is a win-win situation: You have one more stream of income for your business, and your clients are getting the best of the things that you use.
WHAT SKILLS CAN YOU DEVELOP AND SHARE
Skills are the other half of the equation. These are the kind of things you can coach on. It is like a framework, but it’s much more focused. It’s basically something within a very specific set of skills that you need to solve for.
For example, my framework for marketing could be something broad, like “You need to do social media, build an email list, and do some outreach with PR.” That would be my framework for getting my message out there.
I can, of course, offer some tools for doing that: Here’s my email marketing system. Here is my favorite social media posting program.
Skills are about know-how. So in that case, I could say, “Do you not know how to do Facebook ads? Let me coach you through how to do that. Do you not know how to set up an email CRM and a sequence of emails? Do you not know how to set up project management tools? Let me show you how.”
You can teach them once, and they could be set for life knowing how to use that skill. And of course, you could charge for that, but that skill is something they are happy to pay you for once.
They can now use this skill in their business moving forward, instead of having to pay someone to do something over and over again. That’s hugely impactful.
Value Exchange
Value is something that you offer that’s going to make a difference. If you’re not actually helping your audience, making their lives easier or faster or more affordable, then you’re not offering value, and value is the whole reason they have started to work with you.
Impact is defined by the value you create. But this is a value exchange. You’re not just adding value. The exchange part is that you’re also receiving something of value to you. And that value can present itself in different ways:
- Money
- Bartering services
- New ideas and connections
Learning something new is not necessarily hugely valuable. A client could read books all day and not take action on it. He could take all the free courses in the world and look at all the free programming and content, and he would gain something.
But the things you are giving away — the tools, the coaching, the lessons, the skills, the framework — all of this is worth something. It is your job to come up with equitable value. What makes what you are offering worth it for this person? What pushes them to exchange their value for your value?
The Impact of Value
This is going to create impact as well. A value exchange is going to hold the client accountable and show them what these skills are worth. And it’s going to establish a precedent and a benchmark for the impact you’re making.
You can’t have a return on investment if you had no investment. Maybe you took advantage of free stuff, but there’s no ROI if you didn’t give some kind of exchange of value.
If you want to build a personal brand business, part of that business is value. Your job is to build a hugely valuable program that you can say was 10 times the value of what they paid for.
Then your job is to create higher and higher value programs that help people more and more and give them greater impact. It reaches a point that the money they invest is nothing compared to the value they got out of that.
The Personal Branding Framework
Remember, this all happened because you listened to your audience when they were in their community to solve their problems. And that community formed around your content, that you had a voice around because you positioned yourself as the right thing for them all connected in this beautiful cycle of the personal branding framework.
That’s what I want you to think about. How do you continue to deliver impact in people’s lives? Because what’s the point of having a personal brand if you don’t get to change someone’s life or create a transformation?
Maybe you’ve been helping two, three people at a time, but you’ve never really found your voice and put it out there. Maybe you’ve had impact and people know that you’re like the guy for this thing, but you never created a community to bring them together.
Or maybe you are just someone out there putting out content and building Facebook groups, but you never actually helped anyone solve a problem.
If you’re missing one of these three legs of the branding framework, you are missing an opportunity to really have an impact and help people.
And without one of these three legs, you aren’t building your personal brand. You aren’t helping or having the impact you want in people’s lives. It takes all three.
MORE ADVICE AND INTERVIEWS
If you’d like my full plan for how to build your content marketing strategy, check out my free Content Marketing Starter Guide.
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- What Business to Start with John Lee Dumas
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