You are your brand

Below is an excerpt from Chapter 10 of Mortgage Broking: Lead Generation and Sales Mastery by David Ham. You can get the whole book for free here

So how exactly should you be presenting yourself in your marketing?

I have a lot of discussions with Brokers about branding, which they often think of in terms of logos, business names and slogans. Those things may be a part of your brand, but fundamentally your brand is a promise to your customer. A brand tells your customer what they can expect from your business and it differentiates your offering from that of your competitors.

Your brand is derived from who you are, who you want to be and who people perceive you to be.

What you are trying to achieve with your brand is that when people see it they are familiar with it and associated with some predictable benefit to them.

You want your brand to be recognisable and trusted.

For small to medium sized Mortgage Brokers, building your business name and logo into a recognisable brand is something you need to be very careful about as it is probably the fastest way to waste your money for zero new clients. In particular, Brokers should not try and copy the advertising methods utilised by big companies to build familiarity and trust with their brand.

In one study, among tag lines for 22 of the nation’s biggest marketers, only six were recognised by more than 10% of those surveyed — and this was for companies spending more than $100 million a year on ads. So what chance does your small business have of being remembered?

The answer is that when it comes to a small business, people are lot more likely to remember you, and much less so your business name.

When I first starting in the mortgage industry as an individual Broker working from my home in Perth, I received a call from someone who was moving here from Adelaide. They told me they had gotten their last home loan with my company and so wanted to use us again. That was great for me, but I had never done a loan for anyone in Adelaide up to that time. This client had just seen ‘Mortgage Australia’ and had confused it with the myriad of other ‘Mortgage Something’ business names. They had completely forgotten the business name of the broker who they got their previous loan with.

Given these limitations of logos and business names, what unique image and business name can you display that has the best chance of being remembered and can represent your business?

I firmly believe that YOUR FACE and YOUR NAME is the answer.

Your photo and name should be front and centre of all the marketing you do and every client facing document or presentation you have. Your name should be your business name, or at least the key component of it.

There are a number of reasons to do this:

1. People remember and distinguish between faces
2. You are your unique selling proposition
3. Familiarity is the first step to trust
4. Make yourself recognisable
5. It makes people feel like they already know you
6. It’s a personal touch in an impersonal world
7. It shows you are standing by your business

People choose the ‘Who’, not the ‘What’. They are looking for the person they can trust who has their best interests at heart and has the expertise and resources to help them. You need to present yourself  as that person and not some faceless company.