female entrepreneurs

Discover The Top 8 Branding Strategy Factors Used by Successful Female Entrepreneurs to Achieve Higher Revenue and Make a Bigger Positive Impact in The World

International Women’s Day on Monday, 8th March provides a great moment to stop and reflect on what it is those female entrepreneurs do so well. International Women’s Day reminds us to take a closer look and learn from how female entrepreneurs enrich the lives of those around them, whether it’s global or local communities, their people, and families. Regardless of how you identify or what pronouns you use, there is a lot to learn from the inspiring stories of leading female entrepreneurs in both large and small businesses around the world. 

Here we’re sharing some valuable lessons from everyday female entrepreneurs. Many of them are unsung heroines who’ve quietly achieved remarkable things in the face of huge adversity. 

One thing which unites them is that they have, in all cases, used branding strategy to achieve higher revenue, build their brand asset value, expand their market share and make a bigger impact on the world positively.

Related: Brand Strategy: 6 Tips for Building Your Profit Growth Plan

branding strategy

© Persona Design

1. Female Entrepreneurs Emphasise Fulfilment Not Just Profit 

A common media trope about entrepreneurs is that they are obsessed with profits. From Silicon Valley’s ‘overnight billionaires’ to rags-to-riches stories of company founders, the media narrative often emphasises profit. For many entrepreneurs, financial reward is only one part of what drives them and often not even the core part. A lot of entrepreneurs are driven by factors such as a social purpose, fulfilling a big vision, helping a community, benefiting from more flexible working patterns or embracing the need to be their own boss simply because conventional ‘work’ or ‘employment’ doesn’t meet their needs.

Female entrepreneurs are more likely to emphasise fulfilment than their, traditionally described or identified, male counterparts, according to research [1]. A drive for fulfilment is a powerful motivator to ensure that a business develops its brand strategy to enable personal and social fulfilment. For example, brand purpose, brand vision, brand mission and brand values are guiding principles which help embed a pathway to fulfilment in the brand strategy.


Female Entrepreneurs

Image via Notonthehighstreet.com © From Babies with Love


A case in point is From Babies With Love, founded by female entrepreneur Cecilia Crossley. It sells organic baby clothes, with all profits going to orphanages in developing countries. 

Cecilia’s philosophy around personal fulfilment alongside profit is transparently evidenced across all her other commitments too as Board member of Duchenne UK, Ambassador for the Meaningful Business 100, and Board Member of the Gaia Foundation, a global, small and feisty organisation that revives bio-cultural diversity, to regenerate healthy ecosystems and to strengthen community self-governance.

Related: Top 5 Reasons Why Brand Purpose is The Essential Growth Driver in a Fast Changing World

“If you’re interested in the brand strategy that will take you to the next level, that will put you on the market in a premium position, Lorraine Carter is the person to assist you in getting there with specific elements and with specific tools that simply work. All you have to do is focus and know what you want — she provides the tool kit you need to accomplish your goals.”

Adina Iacob

Founder, PR, Communications & Media Relations Consultant

Adina Iacob

We know that sometimes it’s a struggle to build a brand strategy that really engages your ideal customers effectively, particularly in adversity, so we’ve developed three different ways of working with us to help you build your brand, depending on your preferences, so if you’d like us to:

  1. Build your brand for you – find out more here or get in touch [email protected] or ring +353 1 8322724
  2. Empower you to build your brand – check out the Persona Leadership Branding Strategy Mastermind here. This is a live, interactive programme online where you work on your brand with us codifying and mapping out your brand strategy for business growth. Alternatively, join our online half-day Branding Accelerator Masterclass for a fast-injection of brand-building essentials. Ask about our Personal and Corporate Leadership Brand Alignment Masterclass
  3. Want a DIY solution? Check out our how to build a brand eprogramme here and our how to audit your brand yourself eprogramme here

2. The Power of Community Matters to Female Entrepreneurs

Community comes more naturally to female entrepreneurs than those who identify as male entrepreneurs. Engaging positively with people regardless of their status or possible utility, and treating people as human beings rather than just as possible business customers or associates, is something that effective entrepreneurs do regardless of their orientation or gender identity. However, it is a skill set which research suggests further helps many female entrepreneurs to succeed.

Related: 21 Brand Trends for 2021 You Can Leverage to Achieve Higher Revenue

Entrepreneurship can be a lonely, demanding journey. Supportive female entrepreneur groups are a helpful means of encouragement, advice and practical help. But in an age when digital behaviour has come to dominate so much brand activity, an understanding and appreciation of community is helpful in other ways. Understanding how a community works and what it needs enables female entrepreneurs to match their brand communications to changing trends and customer sentiment in the world in which their brand lives. 

Related: 7 Key Elements for a Successful Brand Refresh When Your Market is Changing Dynamically


female entrepreneurs

Image via © Wovoyage


A B2C service case study is provided by Rashmi Chadha, an entrepreneur based in Delhi. She runs a female-friendly travel company called Wovoyage. Responding to the demand slump caused by the pandemic, she has used her community of travellers and influencers to create new content relevant to pandemic-era travel, emphasising staycations [3].

A B2B service case study is Going for Growth. This organisation, founded by Paula Fitzsimons, centres around supporting female entrepreneurship. It’s designed to support women who are serious about growing their businesses with the philosophy that entrepreneurs learn best from each other. 


female entrepreneurs

© Going for Growth

Accordingly, the initiative is based on interactive roundtable sessions that are facilitated, not by consultants, academics or professional trainers, but by successful female lead entrepreneurs, so they can pass on their wisdom and expertise to help other women succeed. 

One of its recent initiatives, alongside its monthly working sessions led by successful female entrepreneurs, is ‘Voices from the Community’. Female entrepreneurs who are members of the community meet each month, with the focus around a topical issue, to share their ideas, experiences and collaborate. This helps them to grow more successfully and faster together even with lean resources. 

Related: Female Power And The Growing Influence of Branding for Women

“An exceptionally talented individual. Lorraine Carter, Persona Branding and Design has a wonderful ability to ‘horizon scan’ for any business and then bring them on a journey that delivers value to their Balance Sheet.”

Dave Feenan

Founder

Technology Ireland & ICT Skillnet

Dave Feenan

3. Female Entrepreneurs use Adaptability to their Advantage

It is a cliché that women are better than men at juggling multiple skills to adapt well to different situations. Clichéd though it may be, research supports that interpretation. As an entrepreneur, often there is a wide range of tasks which are pressing at the same time, but the business lacks resources for support from a team. That is why using different capabilities to adapt to a wide range of situations is such a helpful skill for entrepreneurs.

Multiskilling is important to entrepreneurs, and it is often a useful attribute when devising and implementing a brand strategy. Especially for a young brand when there are multiple demands typically in parallel: brand positioning, brand building, brand communication and defining brand culture, for example. These are not isolated, but feed into each other to some extent. So the ability to multi skill enables female entrepreneurs to develop a rounded, holistic brand strategy which can support premium pricing, for higher profits.


female entrepreneurs

Image via © yasminvorajee.com


A B2B service case study is Yasmin Vorajee, of Tiny Time Big Results. This very family centric business model is based on the concept of working 20 hours a week. Yasmin left the corporate world to build a flexible business model around her young family and now teaches others how to excel in 20 hours a week.

This is an invaluable skill for any business leader, especially if you want to simply reduce the time you give to one particular area of ‘work’ in a given week as a mother, carer, empty nester or somebody who contributes as a non-executive director or wants to build another business.

Related: Building a Resilient Brand and Business, 10 Lessons From Brands That Have Thrived Through Market Stress

brand strategy“We participated in the Persona Branding Strategy Leadership Mastermind Programme online. The 12-week program suited us as the weekly accountability spurred us on to get work done between sessions.

We found the flow of the course appropriate for the development of the brand through the various areas of the business. Already, we have developed our Customers Personas and our Brand Persona adding value to the business.

The course has helped us make more astute decisions in the business such as restructuring our product offerings, so we grow more profitable lines and remove those with lower margins.

Lorraine is very helpful and accessible as a tutor with follow-up after each live working session and the half-day masterclass. Most of all the clarity achieved has been most invaluable.

In the first two weeks of March 2020, before Covid-19 required us to close, we were 300% up in our online sales compared to the whole of March 2019. By the end of May 2020 [after being completely closed for 6 weeks with our 150 staff furloughed] we were back to 69% and by end of June 2020 back at 108%, January 2021 we’re up four-fold on January 2019 — results achieved from applying our brand strategy.”

Sinead Heffernan

Managing Director

Thunders Bakery

Sinead Heffernan

brand strategy leadership programme

Are you a business leader, manager, or entrepreneur who wants to re-evaluate or build your brand strategy, so you can apply some of the principles common to successful female entrepreneurship to increase your sales? Are you curious about how to build or scale a highly successful standout brand? Join one of our branding masterclasses because they empower you to build your brand, enhance customer experience, expand your market impact and create higher perceived value, so you can command a premium. 

In fact, the Persona Branding Strategy Leadership Mastermind is all about fast-tracking you, your brand and your business through the brand building, agile branding strategy process using professional big-brand know-how with proven systems that get results, so you can grow your business faster and more effectively. 

The programme enables you to make your brand highly visible, different, credible, trustworthy, memorable and much loved amongst your ideal customers so you can become more profitable and leave your competitors way behind. Be The One — your ideal customers’ favourite brand of preferred choice commanding a premium.

If you want a tailor-made solution specifically for your brand then we also provide inhouse bespoke Persona Brand Building Blueprint™ Intensives working with you and your team, so you can grow your business faster and more profitably. Contact us to discover more [email protected] or +353 1 8322724

 

4. Female Entrepreneurs Reap the Rewards of Creativity

Entrepreneurs are typically highly creative regardless of their gender identity. However, the research shows that female entrepreneurs tend to be especially skilled at taking a creative approach to business. This is a skill that has become increasingly valued in the commercial world. Entrepreneurial businesses often seek to tackle new challenges, or old challenges in new ways. Creativity underpins innovation, the lifeblood of all organisations, large and small. With resource constraints, they are often forced to come up with creative solutions to significant challenges.

Creativity is an essential skill when it comes to successful brand strategy. Brand strategy is a structured approach to generating and using a set of brand assets to help a business succeed. But for a brand strategy to work well, it often relies on a high level of creativity, in everything from evaluating go to market strategies and brand activism, to more obvious outlets for creativity, such as the brand style guide and tone of voice.

A B2B service case study is Get the Shifts, a temp staffing agency set up in 2016 by female entrepreneur Hannah Wrixon. From its pun of a brand name to its funky tone of voice online, the company is a creative breath of fresh air in the often staid world of recruitment agency branding.


female entrepreneurs

© Get The Shifts


Related: Branding, Creativity without Strategic Rigour is a Waste of Budget

5. Focussing on Customers Helps Female Entrepreneurs Succeed 

Client relationships are something which the research suggests are better managed overall by female entrepreneurs than by their male identified counterparts. Understanding what customers want and need, and building a relationship with them over time, is essential to make almost any business more successful. Even businesses which aren’t obviously customer-facing benefit from relationship building skills amongst their people, stakeholders, suppliers and customers.

This focus on customers is a key part of successful brand strategy. That is why a lot of brands use purchaser personas and user personas. These enable brands to bring the voice of the customer into the heart of their brand decision-making process, resulting in a brand strategy which will resonate better in the real market. This helps turn a service or product into a relevant and differentiated brand, which can help sustain profitable pricing.

A B2B service case study is award-winning, Drogheda-based Paycheck Plus, founded by Anne Reilly. The outsourced payroll management company provides a solution to a common pain point for customers, managing their payrolls. A key insight which helps the brand succeed is that by taking care of this pain point for customers, those customers can focus on their own business, not administering their payroll.

Related: 4 Ways You Can Be More Customer-Centric to Grow Your Business

“Excellent programme delivered by somebody who is obviously very experienced and knowledgeable in this area. 

Love how Lorraine gave a clear but broad range of areas to cover and the process in which it should be done. 

There is so much we need to implement, but it’s exciting to think what it will be like when we do.”

Ciarán Flynn

Director

Child Paths

Ciarán Flynn

If you’d like to discover more about building and maintaining a thriving, high-performing, highly profitable standout brand, so you can differentiate more strongly and achieve higher revenue then get in touch because we’d love to help you make your brand into a profit powerhouse.

  1. Schedule a chat — we can meet in person online
  2. Let’s consider a customised plan for you
  3. And perhaps implement the plan together  
  4. Contact us [email protected] or ring +353 1 8322724 (GMT Dublin/London time 9:00 – 17:30 weekdays)

Lorraine Carter is a branding expert and international speaker delivering talks that inspire and motivate along with masterclasses and workshops that inform and support transformational outcomes fast, and consultancy expertise that solves problems — using agile branding strategy underpinned by professional big-brand know-how — so you can outshine, outperform and leave your competitors way behind. 

She enables you to differentiate, achieve higher revenue, expand your market share, build IP brand asset value — make the complex easy as ABC, so you can Transform Your Brand & Increase Your Sales — Be The One, the brand that’s most credible, trusted and commanding a premium, so you’re highly profitable and leaving your competitors way behind.

Ask about the Persona Branding Strategy Leadership Mastermind — live, interactively, face-to-face online.

6. Empathy is Key to Successful Brand Strategy – and Female Entrepreneurs Excel at It

Empathy is another character attribute which is more visible amongst female entrepreneurs. Understanding how other people think and feel – not just users, but also staff, neighbours, suppliers and other stakeholders – is important to any brand’s success.

That is why branding strategy emphasises internal branding, as well as customer-facing branding. As empathetic entrepreneurs understand, how staff feel and think about the brand influences their own engagement with it, as well as their ability to represent it to the wider world. This has come even more to the fore in the current more challenging work environment, particularly with teams of all sizes working remotely. 

Entrepreneurs are in the perfect place to reflect on and maximise the benefits of strong internal branding: while a company is small, nimble and open to change, it’s much easier to define or change its brand culture. It’s more difficult later as the company gets larger and typically also more set in its ways. 

Dr. Tanya Pergola is a great example of a female entrepreneur who puts empathy at the heart of her brand strategy as clearly evidenced in her businesses and foundation. She’s a successful award-winning author, speaker, anthropologist, sociologist and well-being therapist who combines cutting-edge science with the ancient wisdom traditions into bespoke, practical regimes. 


female entrepreneurs

© Dr. Tanya Pergola

Her experience living amongst the Maasi healers in East Africa for over ten years and her very successful foundation Terrawatu, one of the most respected NGOs in Tanzania set up over twenty years ago, is a great example in how empathy, commonality and value in cultural diversity enriches lives. She believes through empathy, understanding and mutual respect indigenous and modern society can learn from each other for a more peaceful and equitable world.

You can discover more about how empathy underpins Dr. Pergola’s female entrepreneurship evidenced in how she has married the strengths of these very different perspectives through the Terrawatu Foundation, The Healing Safari and The Pergola Method here.

brand psychology

Get your worksheet here to discover more about how to positively use the influence of psychology in your brand strategy here

brand strategy“For anyone who has a well-established business I would totally recommend working with Persona Design because it will provide them with a new perspective on how to think of their brand. You see in different markets and industries that are overly competitive what makes the difference is knowing what exactly your business is all about and why people would choose you instead of any other competitor.

What makes you different from all the other service or product providers in the market because that’s what’s going to make your business be the No.1 choice in the range of those specific products or services that you’re providing. Also, that’s what’s going to make your brand stand out and have a long-lasting life and thrive in the context of where you’re operating and delivering value. So totally go for it!

This framework provides you with a lot of insight and more than that, with a systematic process that’s easy for you to understand, easy for you to grasp, easy for you to work with, so you finally nail what makes you different in your business, and what you are about and what those key points are that resonate with your audience.”

Camelia Păduraru

Founder

Crafting Minds

Camelia Păduraru

7. Family Links Help Female Entrepreneurs Build their Brands

Male entrepreneurs are more likely to keep family members at a distance from their business, whereas female entrepreneurs are more likely to involve them. Clearly there are pros and cons to involving family members in building a brand.


female entrepreneurs

Image via © Double Dutch


One advantage is that a family is an extended network of people who already know you and how much they can trust you. That can be helpful in building a grassroots business. That is why many multilevel marketing companies like Mary Kay and Avon emphasise the importance of female entrepreneurs not only in their brand story, but in the practical delivery of their brand amongst their own family and social circles.


female entrepreneurs

Image © Double Dutch


A B2C product case study is Double Dutch, a startup based in the U.K. and founded by two Dutch sisters, Raissa de Haas and Joyce de Haas. Starting in the increasingly crowded market space of premium mixers for drinks, the family link and brand story (gin was invented in the Netherlands), has enabled the brand to develop a successful brand strategy.

Related: 6 Ways To Use Family Business Branding To Drive Growth and Maintain Relevance Through The Generations and Adversity

8. Strong Storytelling Builds a Brand and Female Entrepreneurs Lead the Way When Sharing Their Stories

Great brands have great stories. Storytelling is an art and female entrepreneurs are better at it than male entrepreneurs, the research shows. 

Stories have a key role in brand strategy. Getting a brand’s tone of voice right helps it sound attractive to its target users. The brand stories a brand has, enable it to communicate what it wants target users to understand, across a variety of touchpoints. A great B2B service example is MGI Learning


female entrepreneurs

Image via © MGI Learning


MGI Learning’s brand story starts back in the late 1990s when Shona Cooper, managing director and co-founder, was frustrated by the lack of clear tangible evidence that investment in the development of so-called soft skills could really drive improvements in business results. Investment in training relied on taking a leap of faith that it was the right thing to do and proving cause and effect was not common practice.

The truth is though, if you’re running a business or any professional organisation it’s not enough just to have to take a leap of faith. We all need to be able to measure and validate improvements whether its people development or brand strategy application to support the commercial imperative.

This lack of ability to make a clear connection between training and outcomes was a source of increasing vexation to MGI Learning because they wanted to be able to give their customers certainty — an essential factor that’s even more valuable in the current hostile market conditions. 

Their visionary drive to underpin everything in the business with a clear evidenced based cause and effect is what became the catalyst for the creation of their unique IP developed through working with leading authorities in their field. 

That driving purpose ‘to help people develop strong, influential and positive relationships, to give them the ability to thrive no matter what comes their way, so they can live a better, more fulfilling lives both professionally and personally’ is still central to the business’s core brand strategy — and the secret to their lasting success working against all the odds with customers worldwide. 

Related: Rebranding Strategy, Why Your Rebrand Must Embrace Storytelling

Final Thoughts

What insights could you learn from these inspiring female entrepreneurs about how to use brand strategy to achieve higher revenue whilst also enriching society at large?

The focus isn’t just on profit, as evidenced by all these female leaders who have looked for a wider sense of fulfillment alongside their commercial imperative. The truth is though, this isn’t only unique to women because you can see patterns of the same philosophy amongst male-identifying entrepreneurs too — it’s just more strongly apparent amongst female entrepreneurs globally. Leveraging and valuing your natural skills such as empathy, multiskilling and creativity help underpin the commercial rationale, so you can build a more powerful brand strategy

Similarly, developing your abilities and emotional intelligence to understand and collaborate with other people of greater diversity aren’t just essential human skills. It also enables successful entrepreneurs to understand their customers more deeply, so they can provide better solutions to solve their problems.

So the question is if you reevaluate your business today, what could you adapt or change to catalyse innovation, identify new opportunities, enhance society at large and achieve higher revenue?

Questions to Consider

  1. How clear are your brand purpose and brand mission?
  2. How well do you understand the wants and needs of your customers?
  3. What are the top five skills your brand strategy will need to succeed? Who in your team excels at them? 
  4. Is your internal branding strategy as well-considered and structured as your external branding endeavours?
  5. What is your brand story and how do you tell it to engage your ideal customers?
  6. Could you use a brand audit to enable you to better identify your strengths, vulnerabilities and opportunities for innovation and growth, so you can achieve higher revenue?

Brand Identity“Lorraine Carter has been the catalyst and an inspiration for MGI Learning to clearly define our brand.

Working with Lorraine has been both enlightening and enjoyable. Her blueprint for defining a brand is extremely comprehensive and challenged us to think very deeply about what we offer to our customers and really understand what underpins our success.

Lorraine is extremely knowledgeable, very focused and supportive and leads you through the process and ensured we got maximum benefits from the investment we made.”

Shona Cooper

CEO

MGI Learning

Shona Cooper

Your Persona Client Satisfaction Guarantee

  1. When you work with us, we’ll create a customised brand-building plan and strategy with clear investment for you tailored to your specific requirements and preferences
  2. You’ll know each step of your brand building journey before we start because we’ll discuss it, document it, and agree on it with you before work commences
  3. You’ll have timelines, key milestones, and deliverables to evaluate and approve for each stage and part of your brand building process
  4. Because we know the unexpected sometimes happens we can make adjustments along the way if you need it and if something extra is requested we’ll ensure you’re fully appraised about what that entails before committing
  5. As we achieve pre-agreed objectives you’ll be able to evaluate your brand building work and strategy in progress, coupled with the outcomes to ensure return on investment

Get in touch today because we’d love to enable you to re-evaluate and build your standout, powerhouse brand, so you can Be The One — increase your profits and leave your competitors way behind. 

Email us [email protected] or ring us +35318322724 (GMT 9:00-17:30) and ask about our VIP Brand Strategy Re-Evaluation.