Creating Digital Assets: A brand name

👉 This is part of the Creating Digital Assets series.

The idea behind this is simple, but the work can be tough.

Short version: If you give your digital asset a brand name, it’s much easier to sell (or be acquired) as a standalone business.

Just to recap, your digital asset is now:

• A service you already know how to deliver;
• With a known buyer;
• A very clear benefit, difference, or both;
• A clear scope;
• A tight process;
• A fixed price;
• Referability;
• A landing page;
• and you know your target sale numbers, at least to begin with.

All of those things are useful in 2 ways:

1. It makes your service efficient to deliver, and
2. Efficient services packaged as digital assets are sellable, if you so choose, to the right buyer

The piece that completes the digital asset is a brand name.

Consider a service you provide to your clients at the moment.

Maybe you have a process for it, or perhaps you know it well enough that you can go through the steps intuitively, and deliver a great outcome for them.

You might refer to the service casually as a part of a sentence, rather than by a specific name, eg:

Yes I can help with your corporate identity design;
Yes, I can help you write your homepage copy;
Yes, we do professional headshots;
Yes, we do tax returns.

If your digital asset has all of the bullet points above, but you still talk about it in sentence form, it’s going to be a tough sell to an interested buyer. Not impossible, just harder.

However, if you name it, suddenly it can be listed for sale as a standalone thing.

It’s the difference between:

“My professional headshot service is for sale… no no, not my whole photography business, just that one service”,

vs

“Headshot in a Day is for sale”.

And with the process, landing page, known buyers, fixed price and predictable sale numbers behind it, it’s an attractive package.

To be clear:

Selling your digital asset won’t happen right away. You’ll need to prove that you’ve sold it regularly over time, delivered it efficiently, and can completely hand it over to someone else without them needing your ongoing involvement.

Those are things that are tricky to prove without taking the steps above. It’s foundational stuff that makes the job of delivering the service much easier, but has the added benefit of giving you the option to sell it, should you choose to.

Or keep it for yourself 🙂

Tomorrow, the final step: A climate-first mindset.