If you want a quick sale, a simple, hard-hitting direct response ad is the way to go. Do you want to sell to the same customer over and over? Building your brand as the go-to authority in that field will be your long-term strategy. For a long time, I thought direct response advertising was king, and this branding thing was something made up by large advertising agencies to suck a ton of money out of big-dollar clients. Clients who would pay to build something where the ROI can’t ever be measured.
Then I got thinking about it. My view has shifted, slightly. In today’s job culture, where people are essentially their own business, the need to stand out is more important than ever before. Branding yourself as an authority will help you step away from the crowd and can potentially put you ahead of countless others who are much less qualified. We blend in some direct response techniques with the branding mentality. And from there, you begin building an image where customers will recognize you as an industry leader in your field.
It sounds like a good idea, but where do you start? Here is a step-by-step plan to begin building your brand.
Building Your Brand Step #1; What do you have to offer?
You need to determine what your skills are and what you want to offer to your audience. This will take some real self-discovery. What role will you play to others? Not everyone building a brand is an expert. You can portray yourself as a ‘searcher’ instead of a teacher. The ‘searcher’ leads their audience on their own story of self-discovery. As they learn, the audience learns as well. This is a way to build a brand without actually doing years of work to gain knowledge without actually constructing your platform.
The tricky part is staying one step ahead of your reader, so you are providing useful information. This may even mean analyzing specific events and giving your perspective. Think of a food blogger or restaurant critic. These people may not be chefs, but they have built trust with their readers to give them an authentic appraisal of restaurants or chefs. They are searching for excellent food, and they will give you their opinion along the way. These individuals also reach out to their audience via events or fan meetings. With this, they invest in equipment such as a corporate AV hire so that everyone can hear what they’re saying even in a large venue.
They may burn every meal they’ve ever cooked. That is not why people follow them. They follow them to read about their experiences with other people’s food. I’m providing a similar role on one of my blogs. In the other blog, I’ve done the research, and I offered my knowledge through years of previous experience. This blog, I’ve pulled myself out of debt and built myself a nest egg, but have yet to escape the nine-to-five. I’m experienced in the first two areas to help other people do the same, but in the last one, I’m building the knowledge and passing on what I learn as I go along.
Building Your Brand Step#2 Who will want what you have to offer? (avatar)
Next, you will need to define who is your audience. When I began my training in direct response copy, the instructors drilled this into my head. It is essential to know who you are writing to every time you sit down to write. You need to find an audience to buy what you are selling. You will need to know if that audience wants what you want to offer. You will need to know if that audience is large enough to make your effort worthwhile. This may come from past work experience, or you might have to do some research to see if that audience is there.
You can test with some simple pay-per-click advertising if you have a couple of dollars to spend. Visit sites like https://retail-focus.co.uk/best-pay-per-click-advertising-company-uk/ to learn more. My favorite test is to put some ads on Craigslist. If you believe at least a small portion of your audience strolls through Craigslist, it’s free, and an easy way to experiment. If you put up a simple ad for your services and you get some hits, you may have a winner. If not, tweak your ad and rerun it until something clicks. Keep digging until you have defined who you are talking to.
Building Your Brand Step #3; Where does your audience hang out?
This one will start to materialize when you do the second step as well. As you begin testing what your audience responds to, try different platforms to try to find out where your ideal customer will hang out. This is where you will want to concentrate your effort on building your brand. It will be a waste of time to put a ton of work into one particular platform when your audience isn’t there. If you are trying to offer business services, LinkedIn not Facebook may be your best option.
If you want to build a brand around traveling, beautiful travel pictures on a platform like Instagram might be more appropriate. Other platforms like Reddit, Digg, or YouTube may be a little more universal but will require different work on your part to join your readership there. If you want a tip, I’d suggest looking at your competition. Find out where your competition is connecting with their audience and do the same.
If it’s working for them and your message is unique, you may be able to attract a significant amount of followers. Make sure you offer something unique enough to nudge your way into a space.
Building Your Brand Step #4; What is your strategy to reach your audience?
Now, the last leg before you get busy building your audience and brand is to come up with an overall strategy. A strategy usually consists of creating a content posting schedule, then deciding:
- What kind of content do you need to produce?
- Will there be paid advertising involved in building your brand?
- What hashtags does your audience follow?
Paid advertising will give you the fastest result, but this can get pretty expensive. You need to keep track of your ROI, so you don’t slip too far into the negative number hole. If you fail to see immediate traction with paid advertising, start changing things up. Paid advertising is something you need to be on top of until you get it humming along. If it ever gets humming along. The ads I’ve done have usually done well for a while, then fizzle out, and I had to change them up.
Hashtags are something that gets overlooked the most. People stuff them into post descriptions. Sometimes, without doing much research at all; as many as possible to get in front of as many people as possible. Or, people neglect to research what their ideal target avatar is searching for.
Hashtags can be extremely useful if you target the right ones and post at the right frequency. If you post to a busy hashtag too infrequently, your content could get buried before it even gets noticed. It’s almost as bad as a hashtag that never gets new viewers. Facebook, on the other hand, keeps making it harder to get noticed organically.
It has gotten to be like email, where you need to build a page with a dedicated following to gain any traction. I like email better. Don’t worry about nailing down the perfect strategy because you will probably change it up as you go along. Following this will put you well on your way to building your audience and ultimately building a brand.
But, remember, there is more to brand building than just an image. Branding is as much about personality and the customer’s perception of quality as it is about the picture or image you portray. It is not as much the logo as it is the impression of quality that the logo portrays. What you will do from here on out will determine your brand.
Be Safe,
Kevin