What is the true value of your Expert Practice – both to your customers and to you?
How do you define the primary assets in a knowledge-based commercial entity?
How do you measure something as intangible as Expertise?
There are certain key performance indicators that every business owner must measure and seek to constantly improve: leads, conversions, profit margins, customer satisfaction surveys are some examples.
As an Expert, there are also three essential cornerstones of your Practice that must be strategically planned, nurtured and given your maximum energy for your practice to flourish and your profits to continue to grow.
At Expert Agency, our services are built around our commitment to ensuring all three cornerstones are rock solid in your Practice:
Brand Equity
The features and qualities of your brand that distinguish it within the marketplace, and which generate engagement and commitment with your customers, and demand for your products and services.
Brand equity is that intangible additional characteristic of your Practice that both helps to create and to communicate your message to the world. Your community, or tribe, contributes and grows your brand equity alongside you in a Web 2.0 world, through the window of social media. Much of your equity is created and flows through the commentary taking place across social media platforms. It is also intricately linked to your Intellectual Property and Relationship Capital.
Far more than simply a logo, your brand equity is a powerful energy that can be both positive and negative.
Intellectual Property
The foundations of your Expert Practice: your ideas, thoughts, skills and experience delivered in commercial form via your content creation. Intellectual property references the ownership of these ideas, thoughts and content.
Your content strategy and your product and service development strategy are key to the continued growth in quantity and quality of your IP. An Expert constantly seeks to improve, grow and refine the width and breadth of their expertise, and their ability to deliver this expertise to their audience.
Relationship Capital
The strength and quality of the relationships you create across your entire network of people and organisations: customers, partners, suppliers, advisors, team members, mentors, Twitter followers, Facebook likers, Google + circles…
As the influence of social media continues to grow, the lines between relationship capital and social capital blur and overlap. As Gary Vaynerchuk observes in The Thank You Economy:
“While the ability to form relationships has always been considered a subset of intellectual capital, social media has catapulted that skill into a wealth-building category. In the future, the companies with tremendous “relationship capital” will be the ones that succeed.”
(Buy or download that book immediately if not sooner)
So, what does this mean for you and your practice?
It means be authentic and awesome in all that you do. Engage and communicate at every opportunity with your community. Cherish and protect your brand, but be open to input from that community. Constantly strive to grow and improve your content, and your ability to deliver it.
Above all, love what you do, stay true to yourself and fight to be out there giving massive value.