Building Your Brand Authority: A Guide for Professional Service Providers

These days, authority matters. For professional service providers, your perceived authority is what allows you to up your game.

Not only will building your brand’s authority help attract new business, and create more opportunities, but it’ll also drastically shorten sales cycles.

But here’s the thing you must understand — building brand authority is a marathon, not a sprint. It can influence customer behavior over time as you effectively communicate with your audience. This will not only help you sell services and products, it will help you better forecast the growth of your business.

Step 1: Define the characteristics, problem/challenges and behaviors of your ideal customer 

Step 2: Discover or create your value proposition/difference

Step 3: Document your vision, mission and objectives

Any small business that’s been successful in building brand authority has showcased their ability to lead. One of best ways to demonstrate leadership is to discover and develop your own core point of view.

Let’s face it — Professional service providers large and small have a problem standing out in our modern landscape. Products and services are largely undifferentiated to buyers, and trust is at rock bottom, especially for unfamiliar brands.

This sets the expectation for every professional service provider to develop a set of foundational principles that their company is built upon. Then turn each of those steps into the building blocks for creating a message for how their approach, process or method to solving their prospects and customers problem is unique.

This point of view must run through every element of content you create for generating awareness, educating, building trust, converting prospects and retaining customers. It’s the basis of your organizations presentations, newsletters, trade show material, special reports, white papers, webinars and speaking.

When you create and nurture a meaningful package of principles you also start to build a methodology that your prospects, can begin to understand, share and extend.

You now have 8 blog posts, 7 social media posts, an white paper, an hour presentation and a 1/2 day workshop — from your content foundation.

Focusing on the foundation of your brand authority will mean your marketing will be easier to create ideal customers, will reach more potential prospects and, most importantly, help your company achieve your business goals.