5 Tips to Build Your Brand Foundation
What kind of brand are you? Let me know in the comments!
Branding is not easy! Finding exactly what aligns your passions and creative momentum with an audience that cares can be complex and frustrating, as well as greatly rewarding. Branding yourself can take time, years potentially, and is highly dependent upon your consistency especially when you first start out.
Here are the 5 tips you should use as a foundation to build your brand that hopefully will help you quickly find your perfect online presence. No matter which platform you intend to use, these 5 tips will support your overarching goals and connection with your audience.
Tip 1: Leverage Your Values
What an audience sees beyond someone’s niche online is the values that drives the creator in the first place. You may be great in your niche, but people are innately connected through their common intentions, this can be a range of ideas and morals.
A value could be anything that is important to you. For example, you love family and being with your family drives your motivation and passion to continue with your niche. This is important to realize and align yourself with early in your branding journey because it’s a consistent aspect of your life that your viewers are going to understand and connect with (because they probably have a similar value as you). Since this is a value of yours, it’s unlikely you will wake up one day and have changed your mind. Values are the key to consistency as well as content creation. The more you understand and self-assess the values that drive your passion to create and share an online brand, the more focused your branding will be. It is also so much more fun to do something online that you VALUE, here is why: include your family and friends, show off your pets, share your hobbies or art, and whatever it is that lightens your day. The brighter the light under your values, the easier and quicker it will be that viewers and audience members understand and connect to your brand.
Tip 2: Relate to Your Audience
Your audience wants to follow/read/view content that entertains them, interests them, or drives them – there needs to be a reason for them to want to continue to see what you create online. This is why it is so important to be relatable, so that your audience sees your content and presence as a role model for the common life happenings we all experience. Your content could be beautiful and aesthetically perfect, but maybe you share on your Instagram story the makeup-less days, your silly antics, or blog posts about mental health struggles. Like life, there are both ups and downs of your content, which should make content creation even EASIER. People are not perfect, and the more you harness that idea and work it into your content, the more people will relate to your brand.
Relating to your brand is what will begin what we will call the “word of mouth”. Word of mouth is the most powerful form of marketing because once audience members trust you, your brand, and your content, the more likely it is that they will talk to their friends, family, and acquaintances about how brilliant your brand is. What we want is for people to relate and connect to our brands so deeply that they are willing to share how incredible it is with their people simply because they like it so much.
Tip 3: Understand Your Challenges
What do you struggle with? Challenges, like values, similarly drive your brand and the content you create. Finding the specific challenges that you struggle with in life (typically are related to your niche) and being creative in how you find solutions to them is what we will call “hot content”. Hot content is the information you share with your audience that not only explains how you solve your daily challenges, but demonstrates how your audience will now solve theirs. A relatable brand will have followers that have similar challenges and when we solve their challenges, they love and trust our brand more.
A brand that shares their struggles, solves them, and positively impacts their followers will become a reliable source that they turn to when they want to solve a new problem they incur.
Tip 4: Be Innovative
This is where your creativity can really sparkle! Your brand is unique whether you realize or not, and it’s simply because you are YOU and no one else can think, create, or invent exactly like you. Remember that your ideas are worthy and be innovative, no one ever got anywhere new by being just like everyone else. Be aware of the functional tools, tricks, and experiences of other creators like yourself and allow them to inspire and guide you, but also be mindful to create your own work regardless of how confident you may or may not seem in it.
Being innovative may feel complicated – how do I stand out? The real key here is to continue driving and analyzing your success, finding out what your audience really adores about your brand and the uniqueness it has. Be patient and don’t be afraid to fail, like a lot.
Tip 5: Be Yourself
Out of all the tips, this may be the MOST important – be yourself!!!
It sounds so cliche, but it truly is relevant to remain loyal to yourself. Your brand is your brand, and no matter how much you want to please an audience, you must remain strong in your values, your passions, and your goals otherwise you won’t own your brand anymore, it will own you.
Depend on the other tips in this blog post to really remain true to yourself and focus on obtaining followers and viewers that really do care about the work that you care about. At the end of the day, having 5 viewers enjoy your work is incredibly satisfying compared to having 10,000 viewers that only come to view the content you hated to begin with. Create what empowers you and aim to empower those that that see what you create.
Finally
I have been a wannabe content creator and digital art guru for over 2 years now, and though that might see like a short amount of time, I also work in corporate marketing on top of my personal social media and various media endeavors. The most relevant and impactful tips I have learned, seen, and harnessed throughout my journeys online and in my professional life all begin with these 5 tips. There may be other ways out there that can give you “an audience” but finding one that cares is worth the extra wait.
Trying to figure out what content to create? Now what? Try out the Attractive Content Strategy, prioritizing value over growth.
By, Delaney Lawrence
