If you ask business owners what they’re doing to strengthen their brand, you might get a variety of answers. Some might think that only the big guns think about branding. Some might have no idea how to even get a brand at all. But the truth is, every company, no matter how big, has a brand.
Now, more than ever, building a good brand is easy. Surprisingly easy. You don’t need to pay expensive graphic designers for logos- you can use an app. You don’t need to put your employees through a daylong session with a photographer – great photos can be taken with phones too.
Template website builders can create websites in hours. Their quality can match what professional web designers do for most users. Unfortunately, this comes with a downside. Now that everyone can be a brand, it’s harder to be number one.
But do you need to be number one to be on top? Do you even need to be the first? The answer you’ll get in this article might surprise you. But here is a quick peek: Perception is reality. You only need to be perceived as superior and consumers will treat you so.
Now, as you will learn, this is not as easy as it sounds. But by the end of this article, you’ll know how to shift perceptions and gain this superiority status. You’ll understand what you need to strengthen your brand and become a disruptor at the same time.
How To Strengthen Your Brand By Becoming A Disruptor
You’ve probably heard the term disruptor before. But what does it actually mean? Can only startups become disruptors? How do you go about it? Do you need to be innovative?
In this article, we’ll discuss what you need to disrupt an industry. You’ll discover what steps you can take to do so. But let’s begin by defining disruption first. According to its official definition by Clayton M. Christensen, disruption has five criteria:
1. It’s a process, not a product or service, that occurs from the fringe to mainstream
Are you hoping that your product will be the new Netflix? You’ll be disappointed. Powerful disruptors didn’t change the game the day they came out. Blockbuster refused to buy Netflix many times before. Few people took Wikipedia seriously as a source of information at first.
Go in with the mindset that you have to work hard and that it won’t be easy. But with the right framework, you have a chance to succeed.
2. Originate in low-end (less demanding customers) or new market (where none existed) footholds
This means that disruptive technologies originally don’t appeal to mainstream demand. They satisfy a need that first occurs in emerging markets or is unimportant to the current market. What does this mean?
A new product or technology doesn’t always have to be the very best. It can be a cheaper solution with fewer features than the current incumbents offer. Not every customer needs a space station’s worth of technology in their pockets. Especially if it costs a monthly salary to buy.
Some people are happy with a $200-$300 smartphone. They don’t need the latest features.
Your solution could also meet demand current incumbents don’t address. Going back to our Netflix and Wikipedia example: You remember, before them, consumers needed to go to public libraries and video rental stores. It seems ages ago, doesn’t it?
3. New firms don’t catch on with mainstream customers until quality catches up with their standards
This is important. Most disruptive offers are seen as inferior. Consumers won’t buy only because your product is cheaper. Looking back at Netflix and Wikipedia:
Libraries cost a rental fee for books, the same as video rental stores. Wikipedia was free and Netflix charged significantly lower fees. This didn’t give their customers a reason to use them yet, did it?
Netflix needed to step up their game. In the beginning, they offered to send DVD’s to you via mail. They offered a longer return time, so you can conveniently watch them. But only after Netflix became a video streaming service, the market cherished their offer.
In the case of Wikipedia, people didn’t trust the information at first, as everyone could edit it. Wikipedia became a credible source of information after they started monitoring their sources.
4. Success is not a requirement and some business can be disruptive but fail
You might ask: Isn’t the whole point of disruptors to be more successful than their contemporaries?
But remember, it’s a process, not a product or service. Yes, you might have a solution that would be highly disruptive but the market won’t go crazy over you at first.
To master this phase, excellent marketing and presence in the marketplace are crucial. We’ll tell you about this later on.
5. The new firm’s business model differs significantly from the current industry leaders
This is usually what disruption is known for. The big players were not able or willing to go with the times. As a consequence, they were disrupted by a company that thought outside the box.
We’ll give you an easy process to find a spot to disrupt the market later on as well. But for now, let us remind you that you don’t have to tick off all the boxes to become disruptive or succeed as a new company. Yet it helps to know those aforementioned influencing factors ahead of time.
Let’s take a deeper look into those criteria of successful disruption and how you can use them to become successful disruptors.
Once you have a clearer understanding of it, you’ll see why the disruption strategy further down might work well for you.
Before You Strengthen Your Brand, Focus on People
Focus on the people in your company specifically. Disruption needs innovators, out-of-the-box thinkers, and leaders.
How can you build a disruptive company without the people to support the process? Not getting traction in the market can be tedious, mentally taxing, and frustrating. It’s easy to lose faith and give up. But with the right team on your side, executing a disruptive idea is easier.
Dan Lok says: An average idea with an excellent team is worth way more than an excellent idea with an average team. But how do you get such an excellent team?
Train for innovators
Innovation is a learnable skill. So make sure to give your staff the relevant knowledge, skills, and abilities. Look for a strong desire to be the first and prepare them for heavy competition trying to keep you down. This will happen sooner or later and if you’re prepared, that’s one more step towards success.
Change the culture
Allow employees to explore, experiment, and bring in new ideas. Let them be on the offensive and take initiative on their ideas. Most companies try to play it safe when they start but disruption needs another approach.
Hire for disruptors
Being unconventional requires unconventional methods to hire people. Put a hiring process in place to see their creativity, thinking skills, and problem-solving skills.
With the right team by your side, you can now focus on earning your place in the mainstream. To be truly disruptive, make sure to start from scratch. Don’t just try to work within the boundaries as everyone else. Step completely outside the box and approach from an angle no one else comes form. As Albert Einstein put it: We cannot solve problems with the same mental state in which we created them.
Strengthen Your Brand By Superior Presence
This a powerful strategy that Dan Lok used to build his global empire. Remember, a successful disruptor makes customers feel that the quality of the product meets their standards. Yet, value is very subjective, right? But if you control how people perceive you, there is a good chance you also control how they perceive your offer.
People don’t buy because they understand that you’re better. They buy because they feel understood by you. So get in their daily lives, and be in front of them as much as possible.
Ask yourself – how can I be constantly in front of my target audience?
You see, it usually takes 5-20 touchpoints until a client considers to buy from you. Why is that? Today’s market is very crowded and consumers get bombarded by different ads constantly.
So what then if you don’t have a huge advertising budget? Well, this could be a challenge. It’s hard to overcome loud competition and cut through the noise.
This is tough for disruptors especially. At first, customers don’t know, like, or trust you. Yet, with increasing touchpoints, you gain increasing attention and trust.
What can you use to get exposure? Technology and tools that is accessible to the masses, relatively cheap and free: Content. Use blogs, YouTube videos, webinars, social media posts, podcasts, emails…to just name a few.
You might wonder – Which of those platforms and tools should I use? The short answer is – all of them. If this is not possible yet, focus on the medium that your ideal prospect is most comfortable with.
Strengthen Your Brand With Content Variety
It pays great dividends to use funnels as well to educate and warmup your clients. A rule of thumb is, for every $1000 you want to charge give them one hour of valuable and relevant content.
What kind of content can you create? Anything you like, but there are two types of it: Paid and Organic.
Paid content entails anything that you pay for like Facebook and Google Ads. Organic content is anything you put out for free, like blogs, emails or social media posts.
You can mix and match them together, to create automated value ladders for your clients. This way, you’ll be able to engage them when they are ready, on their time and on their terms.
This way you will be different and more valuable. Remember, any company can just put out one ad hoping to get their business. But putting out content is beneficial to you in more than one way:
- It enhances brand awareness
- It allows you to prepare your clients. You can pre-handle objections, filter out unqualified prospects, and more
- It gives you an authority status. By creating content on every platform, you’ll gain a stronger status in your industry.
Imagine you’re looking for a product and there are multiple providers.
One of them has thousands of posts, hundreds of articles, and you see their ads everywhere. The others only have a great website and a newsletter. hat would you think if you were the customer?
How To Strengthen Your Brand And Penetrate The Market
How else can you make your audience appreciate you? Make it easier for them to explore your product or service. Show them you truly understand them.
Become your own client. Walk a few miles in their shoes, look for their most pressing problems. A problem is a product, as Dan Lok says. See what they are using to solve those problems.
What current solutions can they access? Are they sufficient? If not, what’s missing? That’s where you can come in and give them what they are looking for.
You can use this checklist to do your research:
- Scan the market for strong demands. Are there certain hot products available currently? Do any of those get criticism for certain missing or unwelcome features?
- Find that one pressing demand you want to satisfy and map out your ideal audience
- Become your ideal audience and recreate their lifestyle. What is their life like, why are they using the product or service you want to disrupt? What are possible alternatives and what does your future customer like and doesn’t like about it?
- If you found the missing piece of the puzzle, now strategize how you can solve it easier. How can you do it cheaper, and more conveniently for your customer? Ask yourself: Why didn’t the competition address this pain point yet?
- Once you have your solution, it’s time to become visible. Find a proven formula and strategy to market within your niche. Execute the blueprint with your team
Once you have traction and people are picking up on your offer, it’s time to scale. Use a combination of social media, paid and organic traffic and remote teams. Remote teams increase your agility and allow you to use employees more efficiently. They don#t spend long times in commute and could even work in different time zone. This way, you can quickly react to what happens in the market. Especially if your competition tries to make a move against you.
Don’t underestimate the power of social media. When you want to strengthen your brand take a look at which social media platforms can help you. If you’re more in the B2B space, LinkedIn might be a good choice to start.
Facebook can give you great insights into your metrics and has a lot of data on your audience. TikTok and Instagram are also very powerful, especially with teenage audiences. Now, some of those platforms still count as low value or low status. This is why the established businesses rarely use them, if at all.
This might be one of the pathways into the mainstream. Appear where your competition doesn’t go. From there, you can build up a powerful following under the radar of the incumbents. As with many disruptors, they might only notice you when they can’t ignore you anymore.
It’s Not Easy To Strengthen Your Brand As A Disruptor – Unless You Know This
If you want to shortcut this path, you might find value in Dan Lok’s program created it for his high-level clients. You see, many companies want to hire Dan for consulting to grow faster, manage their teams better and become crisis-proof.
Yet, he has to reject most of those requests as he has only a very limited amount of time available. This is why he created the High Ticket Influencer Program. It’s a blueprint on how to dominate your industry by becoming the most influential company in the niche.
You’ll learn how to build an elaborate content system to attract clients. What’s so special about it? It warms them up and sells for you while being fully automated and consistent.
In this program, Dan explains how to leverage webinars and social media to become nearly omnipresent. This enables you to sell with powerful messages 24/7. Furthermore, you’ll learn how to make your disruptive offers into high ticket offers and l increase your margins.
As a bonus, you’ll also gain access to Dan’s directors of Copy, Revenue, and Advertising. This way, you get insights on possible weak spots before they become a serious problem.
But all of this is just the tip of the iceberg.
If you ever wished to have Dan’s influence, reach, and status, then this is the program for you. It contains the exact, step-by-step blueprint to replicate what Dan did in record time.
If you want to become a disruptor and strengthen your brand, check the High Ticket Influencer Program here.
