We live in a world where we are being bombarded by 1000s of messages from brands every single day.
It’s gotten to the point where we are so good at tuning them out, it’s a miracle that any companies still exist.
And yet they persist.
Why?
Because we live in an attention economy (kind of). The brands that get attention, get money (kind of).
That’s it.
Your brand is competing for attention along with every other brand out there.
Even the billion-dollar companies.
You can’t think that you’re simply trying to create a side business and believe that in no way is it competing with much larger businesses. It doesn’t work that way, unfortunately.
People don’t wake up, look at their schedule, and make sure to set aside 15 minutes of their day for the person that has a small brand that isn’t trying to compete with the bigger brands.
This is why building a strong brand is important.
For your business to succeed you need attention and nobody pays attention to weak brands.
Think about it. How many mailing lists do you subscribe to in the hopes that you’re going to get something awesome only to find out that you ignore most of the emails?
Looking at my inbox now I can tell you that there is only ONE person whose emails I read religiously when they hit my inbox (please don’t ask who). I’ll read others, but when this person sends an email I make time to read what they’ve sent.
Why?
Because they grabbed my attention and then they kept it by providing me with an insane amount of value.
They have my attention which usually means they have my money as well.
You can read all of the strategies that you want about Pinterest, SEO, and creating amazing opt-ins, but none of that matters if your brand doesn’t capture the attention of the people that come to your site.
Before you can think about money, you need to think about attention.
This is why a brand is not a logo. You can have the coolest logo and the coolest site design, but that isn’t why people pay attention to your emails or continue to come back to you.
If you don’t get attention and keep that attention in today’s world, your business will die.
But that’s not all.
Some businesses are able to get by on attention alone but if you want guaranteed success then you have to take it a step further.
How?
Trust
While we are still in the attention economy era we are starting to move quickly into the trust economy era.
While most brands are just trying to get noticed and gain attention, it will be the brands that focus on building the trust of their audience that win out in the end.
Why?
Because brands continue to do more and more shady shit to people and unsurprisingly people don’t like that.
Brand Hiccups
No brand is flawless.
You won’t grow your business and sustain for a long period of time without having some type of hiccup.
We’ve had plenty ourselves, but at the end of the day, our members know that we are there for them and understand that everything that we do is in their best interests.
You don’t build this level of trust overnight, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to build it at all.
When you see a brand do something that goes against your worldviews then it’s not as if they’ve lost your attention. However, they probably have lost your trust and when that is gone then all bets are off.
The better your brand gets at getting people to trust it, the more people will share your brand with people they know. The more people will open your emails and watch your videos.
The more trust you get, the more others will notice you, the more attention you get, and the more money you’ll make.
This all sounds great, right?
So how does a brand build trust?
It has something to do with what we call Transformations.