E287 - To beat your competition, pay attention to your branding. It’s the strategy that matters most! | with Tonya Eberhart

Tonya Eberhart is the CoFounder of BrandFace, a company that focuses on Branding to grow your business. Tonya is a best-selling author, branding coach, public speaker, and host of the Be Bold Branding Podcast. Tonya has inspired authors, podcasters, coaches, and entrepreneurs to become authorities in their field through the use of Branding so they can outsell their competition. Tonya works extensively with real estate professionals, helping them stand out from the competition through unique branding strategies. If you’re interested in learning actionable tips to set your brand apart from the competition, read on and learn top branding strategies from the coFounder of BrandFace. For Tonya, the road to BrandFace wasn’t direct. Her first introduction to marketing was when Tonya sold vacuum cleaners door to door to put herself through college. She quickly realized that she needed to learn how to market her product because it wasn’t enough to say - open your wallet - to make a sale. Then as fate would have it, one of her customers convinced her to go into media advertising, where she was exposed to marketing of a different kind. Tonya realized how important branding that genuinely resonated with an audience was. The best way to achieve that was when the face and voice of the advertiser were the same as the business owner. In other words, the rockstars of radio marketing were the voice and face of their own company. And that is when the lightbulb went off, and BrandFace was born. At the heart of every successful marketing campaign is the understanding that people don’t do business with a logo. They do business with a person. To be successful these days, you need to know how to make yourself stand out in social media marketing. Otherwise, you fall into a sea of sameness. The question comes down to strategy. How do you make your brand stand apart from the competition? Tonya helps her clients do this by asking five very important questions. You need to be very specific with your answers:Who do you serve?How do you serve them?What qualifies you to serve them?How does your product or service make your customer's life better?How are you different from everyone trying to serve the same customer?<br/>You can’t get your brand off the ground until you can honestly answer these five questions. Going through these questions, you need to know how to set your brand apart from the competition. You need to understand what makes your brand unique and how you can leverage that to capture your share of the market. Another essential part of the puzzle is understanding that you can’t market a brand that can’t stand on its own. The best way to understand this is to define marketing. You can market a brand through YouTube, Facebook, and Linkedin ads. However, your brand is the message or image you place in those ads. To create a successful marketing campaign, you need to start with the answers to those five questions and position yourself to capture your audience. That's where a brand identifier steps in. A brand identifier is your tagline, slogan, or mascot, it’s the quick one-liner, or visual that leaves people with an emotional connection or impression of your brand. This is the only way to build a brand from the ground up. Your brand identity connects to your audience, which is why they choose you over your competitor. To win at personal branding, you need to market the person behind the brand.People are interested in who you are and what makes you unique. They need a reason to choose you. You should infuse your uniqueness into your brand. Don’t look at what everyone else is doing when creating your brand's voice. Find your one thing. It doesn’t need to move the earth either. It can be that your target market is super niche. For example, selling homes only to people in probate. You need to find a simple way to develop your brand, so it’s unique. W