As an entrepreneur and leader, your brand represents what I like to refer to as your Who and your Do—the best of your innate brilliance coupled with your expertise in your field of work or the area you focus on. When those two aspects of yourself are fully integrated into your brand, the result is transformative because it will represent the best of who you are and what you bring to the table. This secret sauce is what will draw your customers, stakeholders, or clients to you like bees to honey.

But you may be wondering how best to communicate about your brand so it resonates with your target audience. Here are four strategies that can help you connect with confidence.

Be authentic.

This may be obvious, but many entrepreneurs feel they need to communicate "a certain way" to get noticed. This is far from the truth. Your communication connection is only as strong as your ability to be vulnerable, real, and relevant. Communicating authentically allows your ideal client to get a sense of your heart even when you’re not talking about yourself.

As business owners, our clients want to know we are there for them, that we care, that we understand their particular challenges. The most natural way to demonstrate this is by leaning into authenticity.  Your clients don’t need you to present a perfect front. They just need you to be true to who you are and bring your amazing skills in your engagements with them. When you communicate with them, on your website, in your newsletters, in your blog posts, podcasts, on social media, etc., speak the way you normally do and communicate from your heart. Strong emotional connection, which is the key to resonance, is fostered in authentic connection. Don’t try to be or communicate like another famous influencer you admire. Just be you.

Don't be the hero in your brand narrative, be the guide.

It is so tempting for business owners to focus on their credentials, experience, and expertise, thinking that this is what gets a prospect to convert to a client. While these are important, it is more important, especially on your website, to communicate why potential clients should trust you and choose you. You accomplish that by letting them know how much you understand their situation and challenges and by presenting your services as a solution and a pathway to getting them to the life they truly desire.

There is a time to toot your own horn but when it comes to your website’s content, less is more—meaning talk less about you and more about your ideal client. 

When you make it all about your client and not yourself, you can connect organically with them. In your content, your client needs to be the star, the “hero,” and you make this apparent by focusing on their needs, challenges, frustrations, hopes, and aspirations. You need to position yourself as the guide, demonstrating how your services, programs, workshops, or solutions resolve their challenges and provide them with the ideal vision they have for their life.

Communicate why your niche needs you, specifically.

This principle gets to the heart of the importance of niching your audience and your services. Niching allows you to communicate directly to your target because you can speak directly to their pain points and desires. Niching is a powerful communication and differentiation strategy.

Niching your audience is about identifying the specific group of people you are meant to serve. We all have different strengths, passions, life experiences, expertise, we bring to our business and those factors attract different clients. Are you serving technology leaders? High-school teachers? Homeschooling mothers? Service-oriented entrepreneurs? The narrower you can get with your niche, the more targeted your communications can be.

Niching your services is about the type of services you offer. Are you a leadership coach? If so, what type of leadership coaching do you offer? It’s not enough just to say you’re a coach. You have to drill down further to differentiate yourself in the marketplace.

To be successful in attracting your ideal client, it’s all about how narrow you can niche. When you can be as specific with your target audience such as, “I coach highly creative and intuitive women” then you’re well on your way to crafting content that specifically gets the attention of that specific group of individuals. And that’s powerful!

Remember the KISS principle. 

This final point is pretty straightforward. Your communication only connects when your niche understands what you are saying. KISS stands for Keep It Short & Simple.  Overly contrived language, complicated sentence structures, jargony language, all deprive your audience of clarity, which is key to successful communications. Plus, it can make you come across as aloof and disconnected, which no entrepreneur wants to do. If you can keep your language simple, avoid jargon, and speak clearly, you can powerfully connect with your ideal audience.

Note: A version of this article first appeared in ICF’s “Coaching World” publication in May 2021.