Your brand is created by every interaction someone has with your business.

Every call, email, post, demo, website visit, form completed, onboarding, fulfillment, deliverable sent, offboarding, customer service inquiry, invoice sent...

It all creates the perception people have about your business, the perception that we call a brand.

Yet, most B2B service businesses never map out their brand experience.

They'll drop money on campaigns, logos, and a website, but wing it when it comes to onboarding, delivery, and customer support.

Profitable brands design their experience.

Ensuring every touchpoint aligns with their brand strategy and helps their ideal customers feel their differentiation.

Craft Your Brand Experience

So, how can you craft an experience that aligns every touchpoint with your brand strategy?

Here's how I design those experiences for my clients:

Step 1: Create an Experience Strategy

Define the 3-5 adjectives you want prospects to feel every time they interact with your business.

These will lay the foundation for the individual tactics you use across marketing, sales, operations, and retention.

Follow these tips:

• Limit to 3-5. That constraint will force you to prioritize adjectives that truly matter.
• Link to your strategy. Review your brand strategy and messaging for keywords to help you decide.
• Link to your personality. Look at your brand personality for insights into feelings you should evoke.
• Ask your ideal customers. Ask them what type of experience they want.
• Workshop your choices. Iterate your initial choices to find more specific and relevant adjectives.

Here's what Shft's brand experience strategy looks like:

Notice that this is not a plan. It's a list of adjectives, each with an example of how we want our prospects to feel when they interact with us.

That's a strategy.

Step 2: Attract Experience

Once you have your overall brand experience strategy in place, it's time to apply it to attracting your ideal customers.

Here, you'll define the unique experience you'll provide across your marketing efforts:

• Paid ads. How will your paid advertising resonate with your ideal customers?
• Content. How will your social media and SEO content be unique?
• Lead Magnet. How will your lead magnet and nurturing process educate ideal customers and move them closer to buying from you?
• Email. How will you make your newsletter something people want to open?
• Website. How will you turn your website into a place your ideal customers want to visit?
• Events. How will your virtual or live events be unique?
• Demos. How will your demos or video sales letters be unique?

Notice the emphasis on being unique.

The goal here isn't to map out what you'll do, but how you'll make those experiences unique and relevant to your ideal customers.

Here's what Shft's Attract Experience looks like:

Step 3: Convert Experience

Next, define the experience you want to provide across your sales efforts.

The emphasis here is on building trust and removing friction from your sales process — so they move from prospect to paying client faster.

Map out the following conversion steps:

• Discovery Calls. How will your discovery calls provide value beyond creating a proposal?
• Paid Discovery Offer. How will your paid discovery offer be unique?
• Pitch Decks. How will your pitch decks stand out from your competitors?
• Proposals. How will your proposals delight your prospects?
• Closing. How will the closing process be easy and pleasurable?

Here is Shft's Convert Experience:

You're not trying to create a sales strategy, but the overall experience people should have in your sales process.

Step 4: Delight Experience

Next, define the experience you want to provide during onboarding, client fulfillment, and offboarding.

The goal here is to delight your customers — finding ways to WOW them so they talk about their experience with you to others.

Consider ways to delight customers across:

• Onboarding. How will you streamline onboarding to make it easy for clients to provide the information you need?
• Communication: How will you level up your communication with clients?
• Deliverables: How will you make your deliverables unique?
• Offboarding: How will you make leaving you a pleasurable experience?
• Doesn't Scale: How will you WOW clients with experiences that don't scale?

At this stage, you aren't trying to list out specifics, but more the overall feeling customers will have in each of these areas.

Here's what Shft's delight experience looks like:

Step 5: Keep Experience

Finally, define the experience you want to provide to upsell and keep your ideal customers.

The goal here is to find ways to keep your clients — either by upselling them on more services or by bringing them back in the future.

This is where long-term relationship-building happens.

Consider ways to provide an excellent experience across:

• Upselling. How will you make it natural for clients to buy more from you?
• Proof. How will you make it beneficial for them to give you a testimonial or case study?
• Referrals. How will you make it easy and natural for clients to refer others to you?
• Relationship Building. How will you continue the relationship even after they aren't giving you money?

Here's what Shft's Keep Experience looks like:

Remember, your Keep Experience is all about removing friction so existing customers can give you more money.

Ask yourself how to streamline that process and make it enjoyable.

Provide an Exceptional Experience

Businesses that provide an exceptional customer experience keep clients longer and make more money.

Take the time to think through the experience you want to provide and map out the five experience strategies I outlined above.

​Use my Brand Experience Template to create your strategy.​

Then, implement your ideas.

Strategies are important, but without execution, nothing changes.

Until next week,

#SassyJason out.

✌🏼