Strong brand identity and positioning for freelancers

Everyone has an identity. Most people just don’t consciously realise it. As an agency or freelancer, you are often concerned with where and how you can win and convince clients. But the basis of your success starts earlier: with your brand identity and positioning.

Become who you are

The brand identity is the defining characteristics of your company. It is your self-image that you want to convey at various points of contact with customers and important people. These can also be other freelancers, co-operation partners and the media. Your goal, which you should achieve for successful marketing, is a consistent image in all directions. A coherent brand that resonates with your customers.

To do this, we look at our identity and positioning and derive everything else from this. So it doesn’t just affect what your brand and website should look like, for example. This is also where you determine how you want to communicate, what your products look like or how you send out material products, for example.

Shape your identity

Your own identity is not something that is set in stone at birth. Rather, finding your identity is a process that is strongly characterised by your social environment and which you can only influence to a limited extent. By contrast, you are in the driving seat when it comes to establishing your brand’s identity. You can define your identity at the time of founding, but you can also adapt the identity of your brand in the further course and in interaction with your environment. For companies, identity is a self-reflective process that you can consciously control.

The brand world

You can look at your brand identity from three angles:

1. Hard facts
   Verifiable brand characteristics and assessable brand benefits (see left side of the brand wheel)
2. Emotional side
   Sensual side of the appearance with the brand tonality and the brand image (see right side of the brand wheel)
3. The brand essence
   With the origin, history and soul of your company.

You then expand this self-image to include the customer perspective. In this way, you can develop your existence as an agency or freelancer into a brand experience that keeps and inspires your customers in the long term.

The brand essence – provides starting points

Who am I? You can answer this question for yourself in four sub-questions.

1. Where do I come from?
2. Where do I want to go?
3. What qualities and competences do I have?
4. What values or culture do I have?

This can be used as an example:

• I was a web designer and project manager at a medium-sized marketing agency for 11 years.
• I want to help small and medium-sized companies in my region to attract professional customers on the Internet.
• I know the needs of a wide range of companies – from hairdressing salons to office supplies wholesalers and online shops.
• I am not “just” a web designer. Thanks to my experience, I can advise clients holistically on all marketing issues and embed the website in a larger whole.

Hard facts

What is there for me here? From the customer’s point of view, answer these questions about the brand benefits (What do I offer?) and the brand characteristics (What do I have?). Characteristics can refer to products or the entire company.

In the case of a shop, for example, speed, a short communication channel and many years of experience are a tangible benefit argument for customers.

→ A functional benefit would then be the rapid implementation of requests.
→ An emotional benefit would be security.

It is important that these things are verifiable or provable. Fast implementation is possible, for example, because you are easily accessible as a freelancer and have a cushion for urgent requests. Thanks to your practical experience, you know the typical pitfalls, take them into account and already have possible solutions ready. This gives your customers peace of mind.

The emotional side of your brand identity

How does the brand feel? The right-hand side of the brand wheel represents the emotions and experiences conveyed by your customers. The Big Fivemodel of human personality is a good aid for defining the brand tonality (What am I like?) and the associated personality traits. There is a modified version for brand personalities by Jennifer Aaker.

For example, a web designer may have the following personality traits: Unconventional, creative and reliable. These characteristics work in the direction of customer benefit. Of course, every person and every company has more than a few of these characteristics. However, marketing is about extracting the ones that are relevant to the customer and drawing attention to the characteristics that are of benefit to customers.

If the web designer also considers themselves to be honest and independent, this is fine, but does not bring any particular benefit to their customers, which should be emphasised. If the person were an IT or financial consultant, communicating these two values would be essential.

The other side of brand tonality, on the other hand, works in the direction of the brand image. These are the relationship characteristics with the customer. These should be the characteristics that can be directly experienced in communication. This is not primarily about the benefits, but about the interpersonal “chemistry”. For example, contact with the web designer should always create the feeling: He is helpful, competent and gets straight down to business.

The brand image – How do I present myself?

But how do these characteristics become visible and tangible? There are countless examples of the levels on which you can “experience” a brand. A Coke bottle can be felt. The song “Sail away” acoustically conveys freedom and masculinity for Becks. Miele washing machines are heavier than others.

Services are usually limited to the dimensions of hearing and sight. For example, there are designers who emphasise a special external appearance. Such features are rather detached from the content and abstract. This can be realised even more practically with our web designer. In pictures, he is wearing the ever-popular hoodie and sitting at his PC. You don’t expect to see a web designer standing in front of a smart glass front wearing a tie and suit.

If you want to appear competent as a blogger and service provider, links, sources and professional graphics work well in digital communication. However, if you want to appear more creative, communicate a lot via images. Have a photo taken of yourself scribbling in a café. If you’re a creative, a desk picture with lots of drafts can sometimes look a bit messy. Something that doesn’t inspire much confidence in a developer.

And it goes without saying that this area of the brand image also includes the corporate design. So, which colours convey which characteristics? Which font on the website shows which emotion? Do we work with images, with people or with factual graphics? This field is huge. If you don’t have a specialist for this, then make it your routine to always ask the following question:

Do the form, colour, presentation, content, message, structure, etc. match what I want to convey?

The big picture – more than the sum of its parts

The last question in particular is extremely important and must be seen in the overall context. A brand identity is a puzzle in which the individual pieces complement each other to create a perfect picture in the end. And that’s not all. The puzzle as a whole creates an even stronger picture than the sum of the individual pieces.

Tips on identity

• Identity comes from within. Don’t look at the competition, that’s how you make yourself comparable.
• Focus on your strengths rather than your weaknesses.
• Get external feedback and check: Does my self-image match the external image that my customers have of me?
• Keep developing your brand identity. It is alive and never finished.

Positioning – Why should customers choose me?

Good positioning means gaining a unique and relevant place in the customer’s mind. A well-positioned brand focusses on a few relevant features for customers. As a result, it is not only better perceived than competitors, but also wins the battle for orders in the end.

However, many service providers, bloggers and creatives find it difficult to focus on just a few things. Everyone wants to be a Da Vinci – painter, anatomist, ornithologist, engineer and much more. Due to his lack of focus, even this genius almost remained an unknown. So the key to success is a clear focus. You and any partners or employees should be able to tell every customer in one short sentence why they should choose you or your company.

Your specialities – the USP

The “Unique Selling Point” (USP) is a functional benefit or feature that sets you apart from your potential competitors. If you have developed a unique or innovative product, the USP is easy to find. For example, this could be an analysis tool developed for a specific industry or target group. If there is no such thing, you can switch to something else.

An externally recognisable USP is the hoodie mentioned above. This (often constructed) unique selling point is therefore often referred to as a UCP (Unique Communication Proposition). Products such as Toblerone show that this works in the end customer sector. The shape of the chocolate is a UCP. For service providers in the B2B sector, however, the external appearance is a very weak unique selling proposition and is too person-centred. It has little to do with a benefit for the customer and therefore communicates little added value.

Other exemplary USPs are

• Industries/market niches
• Offers such as mastermind groups
• Special training designs
• Unique services around the actual service

There are countless options. You just need to identify the most suitable one for your target group.

Attractive and forward-looking

The speciality of the positioned brand must be attractive to customers. This sounds mundane, but it has a simple background: product features are not sexy. Your customers are rarely interested in your layout or the individual contents of your services. What they are really interested in is the benefits they bring. As one major cosmetics brand put it: “We make cosmetics, but in the shops we sell hope”.

So you’re not selling a website, design or other services, but the benefits they bring to your customers.

In the search for such points, shop operators and service providers often come to the point where they carry out “market analyses”. In the worst case, competitors are analysed and bad copies are created. At best, they ask customers about their ideas. This is not ideal either, because positioning should always be focussed on the future. If you ask your customers, you will usually only be told common clichés or even the characteristics of the competition.

But it is precisely the courage to try something new, combined with relevance for the customer, that leads to a strong position with customers. If implemented correctly, you will find yourself in the position of “market leader”.

If you have any feedback or further questions on the subject of brand identity and positioning, please leave me a comment.