Branding: Your Company Brand 101

  What is Your Company Brand?

Your company brand is more than just a logo, website, and getting some signs created. In the home services space, these are all important elements to have, but they aren’t things you should just get quickly created so that you can check boxes and move on. Your brand represents who you are, why you are different, how you go about your business, and your reputation.

How is Your Company Brand Used in Home Services Marketing?

Your company brand should help you stand out from your competitors, win you more referral jobs, and help you close more jobs. It’s used to convey a message to the marketplace, and ultimately to your customers, that you stand behind something outside of the service you provide and that by going with your company they are guaranteed that experience.

What are the Key Elements that Should be Done to Your Company Brand is Designed to Work for Your Company?

When developing your company brand, you should focus on a few things. Your value proposition, defining the benefits of buying from your company, a clear Unique Selling Proposition, developing your brand standards, and having a process for your customer experience all go into your company brand.

Value Proposition

Every home services business has a lot of competitors who offer the same basic things – the same products, price points, ability to execute within a certain time period, etc. The importance of having a defined value proposition is that explains to your customers why they should choose you over your competition in a very succinct manner. One way to figure out your value proposition is to go and look at your existing customer reviews. When someone talks about your business, what are the things they say they got by choosing you over the other options?

Creating a Unique Selling Proposition

A unique selling proposition is a quick way to communicate your company’s value proposition to your customers in your marketing materials. You want your USP to be as specific and simple as possible. A lot of times, you may jot down all of the ways you solve the problems your customer has, the benefits your company provides, how they specifically solve the problems and your company promise. Once you have all of that written out, boil it down to one or two sentences that clearly show what value you provide to your target customers that can become your company’s slogan.

Developing Your Brand Standards and Brand Style Guide

As you start to expand your marketing, you may look to hire outside resources to help you accomplish your marketing goals. When you do, you want to have a clear branding guideline that you can send to different resources so that everything you have produced is consistent and “on-brand” – this is called your Brand Style Guide.

Within your brand style guide, you should include the following elements:

• Your logo
• Your color palette
• Your fonts
• Your photography style
• Your brand voice

Your Customer Experience

As a home services professional, you could have the best USP and brand standards in the world, but if you have a poor customer experience, that’s absolutely what will show up in your customer reviews online. It’s important you establish what your customer experience is going to be like for every customer – regardless of whether or not they are a referral, a highly profitable customer or someone who is a pain to work with – and you should train all of your employees on being consistent and ensuring that they get the same experience speaking with you or with them at all times.

You may have a certain level of professionalism you want your brand to convey or you may want to come across as more down to earth and casual. It may be important to your brand that you show up on time or always clean up after you are on the jobsite. Whatever those components are that make your customer experience different than your competitors, needs to be consistent and followed-through on each job.