With a strong branding framework and a basic understanding of marketing tools, you can change your brand forever. Even if you outsource your branding and marketing, it’s important to be educated on best practices. Here’s why:
- There is a lot of bad information out there in the world.
- It’s getting harder and harder for businesses to compete.
Each of these leads to the other. Bad information makes your business ineffective. And the pressure to compete leads to bad information. It’s time to change your approach and break the cycle.
Right now, there is just too much content out there with not much originality and value. Even with all the tools available at our disposal, a lot of brands end up just copying what other people are doing.
But if you follow what everyone else is doing, you will end up lost in the crowd. Change the way you view competition. At the end of the day, you’ll realize you are not differentiating yourself, and that won’t help you find the customers you need to drive your business.
The biggest place I’m seeing this is on social media. Social media is a huge opportunity. It’s the number one topic in marketing, especially among growing businesses and personal brands.
Right now, the prevalent thought on social media is to create, create, create. Everyone is trying to keep up with the trend of churning out a massive amount of content, but in the end, they fall into the trap of creating content that doesn’t get traction.
But does that get you anywhere near your goal? Probably not.
MAKING A CHANGE
Instead, break away from the routine. Change the plan. Take the time to build a strategy and determine where to put your efforts or dollars.
I see people spending thousands of dollars to pay someone to create massive content for them. Unfortunately, they have no followings. They’re not growing or reaching anybody despite putting out great content. No one’s finding their business and worst of all, they’re not driving any leads.
Social media is this amazing cash cow for marketing businesses, but it’s actually leaving businesses scratching their heads, trying to figure out why it’s not working.
I’ll tell you why. You are probably doing one of two things:
- Focusing on the wrong things.
- Investing in places that you’re not ready for.
Change how you set priorities. The best advice I can give you is to try to understand where your customers’ eyeballs are. Find a way to drive discovery and capture those people and bring them into your world.
CHANGE YOUR FRAMEWORK FOR PERSONAL BRANDING
You can change your framework for personal branding with some simple focused actions. Building a personal brand uses a three-pronged approach:
- Finding your message.
- Building a community.
- Making an impact.
You cannot work without all three of these things.
If you have a message and you’re making an impact but you don’t gather these people into a community, they won’t stick around. If you are leaving an impact and helping people but you don’t have a defined message, it’s hard to make any ground.
And if you have a message and you start to build a community but you’re not helping anybody, you’re not changing any lives. That community will get bored and fizzle out because they’ll realize they won’t get anything out of your brand.
Content with these three targets in mind will take you much further.
Finding your message
As a personal brand that wants to build a business around coaching other people, you must figure out how to find your voice and how to share that message.
You can start by defining the following:
- How do you describe your product?
- What are you selling?
- Who are you and what are you all about?
- How do you position yourself in the market?
- What is your message?
Once you’ve answered these basic questions, you can find your voice and start using it.
Start generating posts, not for the sake of getting discovered, but for the sake of you understanding what your voice is.
What is your message? What do customers identify you with? That exercise of creating content and using your voice will allow you to position yourself. It will help you figure out what things define you as a brand.
That message is what will drive people to understand if you’re for them or not.
Building your community and making an impact
Once you find that message, you need to start bringing people toward you and your platforms. That can be a blog, a YouTube channel, or a podcast that all then drills out to a website. The message that lives on these platforms should help you gather a community of people — because once you have a message, you need people to share it with.
When you bring them together, they can engage and start building a relationship with you. And in that process of building your community, you can figure out the problems you can help them solve.
What are they’re struggling with? What is challenging them? Understanding their issues helps you understand how to have an impact on their lives.
When you know how to make an impact in their lives, you can design the tools, frameworks and skills to help them move forward.
In that, there is a value exchange, and when you create that value in someone’s life, you have the foundations of a brand.
So, it’s hard to go without any of these three prongs. Once you have all three, you have a brand. It is something that you can hang your hat on. You can grow as people come to you time and time again for the solutions and value that you provide them.
This a simple version of the three-pronged approach. If you’d like to tune in to a more in-depth discussion, you can check out Episode 74, where I tackle the personal branding framework.
CHOOSING THE RIGHT TOOLS
Once you’ve got your mindset and message figured out, the rest comes down mostly to logistics. If you know what you’re doing and you’re leveraging the marketing tools out there that actually will help your business, you’re going to be set.
The next questions you’ll need to answer fall along these lines:
- What platforms will drive my reach?
- What platforms will help me grow?
- Where should I spend my money?
- Do I understand the back end of my business?
We’ll help you figure all that out each season. For starters, you don’t need to be on every social media platform, just the ones that will help you grow and best help your followers.
You need to find the platforms that are going to work for you and the tools you have to invest in. Take advantage of where the eyeballs are that are cheap, that are inexpensive, that you can invest in and actually drive quicker growth of your business.
Paired with your framework of having a message, building community and making an impact when you can, you’ve reset yourself on a much more stable and successful path to success.
You don’t have to be an expert in every aspect of your business, but you do have to understand those two basics: your branding framework and your marketing tools. And you have to understand them enough to hire the right people to go out and execute.
If you can tackle those two things, I guarantee you your life will change. Your business will change.
You will grow.
MORE ADVICE AND INTERVIEWS
If you’d like my full plan for how to build your content marketing strategy, check out my free Content Marketing Starter Guide.
And here are some more of my most popular thought leader interviews!
- What Business to Start with John Lee Dumas
- Personal Branding Masterclass with Chris Ducker
- Built to Serve with Evan Carmichael
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