Blast Off with the Solopreneur Brand Rocket: Seven Questions to Help You Rebrand with Wisdom
This post will help you:
Develop the visual elements to impress your audience and unify experience across brand touchpoints. Get prepared to powerfully market your business.
- Want a quick summary? Watch the video
When describing my visual design work, I like to say I build Ferraris.
Up until now, this approach has served my bigger clients well. But what if you don’t need a Ferrari, or can’t afford one?
The more I thought about what I love about my successful solopreneurship, and how it’s given me the life I want, the more I want to help others achieve this dream, too.
My friends, the Solopreneur Brand Rocket is designed to do just that: launch a successful solopreneurship.
In ten weeks, I walk you through building your own Mercedes: giving you hands-on guidance to build your brand wisely and market it efficiently. Because the one thing I keep coming back to after years in this field is that the better you brand and market your product or service, the more money you can charge for it. Which makes your business more successful.
“And why would I want that?” said nobody, ever.
A design partnership that takes the overwhelm out of branding
The Brand Rocket is tailored to clients who are packaging their expertise into a professional service – examples include indie consultants, therapists, marketing strategists, and many types of coaches.
Solo owners with a unique offering have a genuine need for help in branding and marketing their offer, especially when it’s not a tangible product or direct service.
In the Brand Rocket, I coach you through:
- developing core messaging
- creating a logo
- building a website
- polishing your social media presence
This means you’ll have a coherent, professional brand identity across your entire business and digital presence.
You’ll discover pearls of wisdom about how to better serve your clients and gain a mini graphic design education that will give you confidence in future marketing endeavors. And “branding” won’t feel so plain scary or overwhelming. We’ll work past your preconceived notions and you’ll gain a much bigger picture of how a brand should work.
Yes, this takes time and investment on your part. But the end result is that you’ll have a solid foundation to make dynamite design decisions – and implement them – on your own, now and into the future.
Preparing to blast off: Seven questions to ask yourself
If this sounds exciting to you, you may be wondering, “Am I actually ready to do this work?” That’s a great place to start!
Here are seven questions you should ask – and answer – to make sure you have everything you need to pick up your wrench, get a little greasy, and drive off into the sunset.
- What do you want your business or organization to accomplish?
This is your big-picture question.
Consider this the first stop on your journey through the brand funnel: how do I want to change people’s lives for the better? What’s the problem or set of problems I care most about solving for people? What better answer can I give to a specific challenge that someone is facing?
- What will I name my business or service?
Whether you’re forming your business, or cementing a specific service (like the “Solopreneur Brand Rocket”), changing its name after you launch is like trying to change horses mid-race: at best you’ll lose momentum, and at worst you’ll get trampled and left in the dust.
So before you begin, you want to have a clear sense of the name you’ll use. Just like naming children or pets, try as many as you need until you find the one that feels right before you introduce them to the world.
- Who will benefit from what I offer?
Repeat after me: I cannot be everything to everyone. Check!
Now that we’ve dispensed with that notion, you can get down to the business of homing in on who you’ll serve really well. It’s helpful to build on your experience serving various clients, or working in an industry sector – and to be honest with yourself about your strengths, talents, and preferences.
- How will I market myself?
Again here, you don’t need to have a full marketing strategy mapped out: that will grow out of our work together, and you may wish to partner with a marketing professional when your brand is solid.
But you need to have a general idea of how you’ll reach your audience. Are they on social media? Industry networks? Where do they spend their time online or in person?
- What is my competition doing?
It’s much harder to beat your competition if you don’t know what they’re doing.
And part of that work might be to capitalize on work they’ve done, taking it to the next level. This perpetual innovation, of starting with someone else’s idea and building in a new direction, forges progress that is good and useful – helping your customers solve their problems in even better ways.
After you’ve articulated your vision, dreamt up your business goals, researched your competition, and determined there is a need big enough to support a viable business, it’s time to get more details about what your product or service looks like.
It’s time to ask:
- What IS my offer?
Your “offer” is a specific way of bringing your skills together that solves your customers’ most common problems and is easy for them to understand and purchase.
McDonald’s doesn’t just sell hamburgers, they sell Big Macs. I don’t sell “visual design,” I offer durable Design Partnerships, targeted Power Hour advice, and the 10-week Brand Rocket. These defined “offers” let my target audience know what they’ll invest and what they’ll get.
Answering this question is taking your big idea and traveling a little further down the road to identify What do I actually want to sell to people? What does this product or service look like when I’m selling it? Is it one-on-one or with a group? Live or pre-recorded video? Do we meet once a week or once a month? For how long?
Essentially, what are the boundaries of my ‘product’, and how does it make me indispensable?
- What is the value of my offer?
Once you know your offer, you need to ask how it will specifically make a difference to your clients.
As you pull your brand together and “go live,” your marketing will be centered around conveying your value and the benefits your offer brings. So what key issue does it resolve for people? How will it take the stress off their plates and leave them wondering how they survived without you for so long?
You don’t need to have all this neatly under your belt, but you should be able to explain your value.
Keep at it until you’re ready to go
When you can answer these seven questions, you’re well-positioned to begin your branding journey.
Your answers don’t need to be perfect, but having this basic sense of your business is critical to beginning the process. You don’t need to be an expert mechanic before I help you build your Mercedes, but you do need a basic understanding of how a car works and you need all the parts. Then you’re ready to build your brand with a design expert as your guide.
It’s such a privilege to do this work with my clients.
As I shaped my Brand Rocket offer, I asked myself these same difficult questions – I know the pain of getting stuck and the joys of finding the right path. A successful solopreneurship that meets a true need AND gives you the life you want is a beautiful thing.
When you’re ready, let’s blast off together!
Key Takeaways:
- The Solopreneur Brand Rocket is a unique design partnership that guides you through your own branding process, gives you the visual elements to impress your audience and unify experience across brand touchpoints, and prepares you to powerfully market your business.
- To take advantage of an investment in this design education, it helps to have a solid foundation: knowing what your goals are, your target audience, what your competition is doing, and dialing in on what your unique offer is, the need it fills, and the value it will bring.
- You don’t have to have perfect answers to all of those questions – as your guide I’ll help get you beautifully “over the finish line.” But spending time with these seven foundational questions, and honing in on your answers, will prime you to partner with me and reach your goals in our time together.
Video summary
Here are three key areas to prime you to be an empowered marketer (and prepare you for the Brand Rocket).
It's hard to market an unfocused brand.
Your business should tell a powerful story to attract loyal customers. Get a brilliant visual framework tailor-made to help you build trust.
