50 - Brand Awareness V Buyer Awareness

The Accepted Authority

There is a lot said about branding for your consultancy practice, so that buyers can be made aware that you exist when they need you. You want top-of-mind awareness so that when they have a need, they will come to you. And that’s a good thing.
Brand awareness is great when our clients have a need for what we do. We hope all the brand awareness activities we have engaged in will bring those clients to us.
But, one of the biggest mistakes I see owners of consultancy firms making is to focus all their marketing on brand awareness. What they should be doing instead is focusing on buyer awareness.
Brand awareness activities – focusing on what we do, the services we provide and the name recognition we try to achieve, mostly fall on deaf ears, because they have no relevance to our buyers, even though we know that most of them really need what we do.
Buyer awareness is about being the authority. As the authority, you influence the buyer’s journey to:
o Create buyer awareness
- Show you understand their situation
- Educate them about their problem and what happens if not attended to
- Show them your unique solution, based on your knowledge of what is best for them
- Highlight the outcome they will enjoy as a result.
o Build connection, trust, value and belief.

Slow down the sale – it’s about a relationship, not a transaction.
o Selling creates pressure which is responded to with resistance
o Relationship building creates trust and openness
Build a sales and marketing system that positions your firm as the authority for them, eliminates their resistance and has them trying to sell you on taking them on as a client.