Hook new customers with an effective brand strategy: Kingsley, Top Broker Summit

Can you define your brand in a few words on a sticky note? Can you define your brand at all?

When professionals reach the point in which they find it difficult to express what they are known for, it is time to explore and define their hook, said Justin Kingsley, a creative strategist and writer, at Canadian Insurance Top Broker’s annual summit in Toronto on Monday.

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Brokers and their employees can begin this process by squeezing their definition of their brand on a sticky note, he suggested.

The sticky note exercise involves gathering company employees in one room and asking them to write down 12 or fewer words that describe your company’s brand. Employees are discouraged from talking to each other.

“You’re going to get the gut truth out of your people. Not the one that is written in your mission and value statements but the one that comes from people that spend every day in your company,” explained Kinglsey, whose client list has included Montreal’s pro hockey team, the Canadiens and mixed martial artist, Georges St-Pierre.

Those who are visual thinkers might find it helpful to have the team go through newspapers and magazines and cut out images that they feel represent the company brand.

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Another exercise involves asking your team key questions to help everyone understand how they are supposed to promoting the business. These can include:

> What is our company about?
> What is the benefit of our company?
> What is our real challenge?
> Who is our biggest enemy?
> What makes us different?

“If you don’t get to the right answers and you’re the leader, that means that you have got work to do to identify these things,” Kingsley said.

The one way a professional should never identify him or herself is by the amount that they charge their customers. Competing professionals can just continue to go lower on the price scale until doing so actually becomes a problem for the sustainability of the business, he said.

Once the branding story is determined, brokers have to understand they literally have seconds to share that story and convince potential customers to try the broker’s service.

You have three seconds to tell someone you would like to share your story, 33 seconds to actually tell your story and 333 seconds to get their business, Kingsley said: “All of your [employees] have to understand this is how it works.”

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This story was originally published by Canadian Insurance Top Broker.