Five Essential Marketing and Branding Tips
BY MELANIE BARR
Whether you’ve taken an idea and created a business, product, or service or you work in corporate and are passionate about what you do it’s important to think through how our business and brands - personal and professional - are presented. How do you make products, services, and yourself known to followers, clients, and customers?
1. Define Your Audience
Knowing your audience and who your brand is speaking to makes all the difference. Speaking to your ideal consumer brings clients and customers to you instead of you having to try to find them. Even if you’ve done a deep dive into thinking through defining your ideal customers, clients, and audience it’s always good to check in and reevaluate. When I reevaluate I like to go back to the basics. I take a Sharpe and a piece of printer paper. I am a huge fan of technology and live on google docs, scheduling apps, podcast apps, social apps, all of it - but when I need to get creative I like to use a pen and paper. It’s freeing, it doesn’t feel so rigid, structured, and creative ideas flow easier. Draw a stick figure and around the figure write all of the words that describe who your product is speaking to. I have an avatar that I drew on the back of my door in my office. When I’m working and my office door is closed I see my ideal client, it is a constant reminder of who I’m serving and why She Built It™ exists. To empower women and everyone to “experience the life and business that they crave” by sharing knowledge, business and life inspiration, resources, and sharing in a community. We all crave a certain kind of life and business - the beautiful thing is the life and business that we crave is different for all of us. Once your ideal customer and client is identified, become super clear on who you serve and why you serve them.
2. Reach Your Audience
Let’s take your avatar a step further. Where does your avatar spend most of their time, and how can you reach them? Are they on Instagram, Tik Tok, Youtube, Facebook, LinkedIn, email lists, TV ad’s? Maybe you spend your time on Instagram and Tik Tok but your clients are mostly on Facebook and LinkedIn. Once this is determined it is so much easier to develop campaigns around reaching your customers and clients and conveying how you are going to make their businesses and lives better or bring joy to their lives.
3. Infuse Your Personal Brand
When building a brand this can be a tricky. Today, we want to purchase a product or service that we are going to use and like - we also want to know the story of who is behind the product. It can be challenging to figure out how much of yourself to put into your marketing and branding. You might choose to introduce yourself and your team to clients and customers so they know who is behind the product and who they are speaking to. You might want to focus mostly on your product and brand and only tell a bit of your story. At the rate business changes today this is something to take some time to think through and figure out. It’s different for everyone but it is more satisfying as a leader to figure out what is best for you and your brand. It’s easier to confidently move forward when putting your product and your story out to the world and bringing it to life.
4. Be Yourself
Your community, friends, audience, clients, and customers want to know who you are and for you to be your authentic self. Try not to get caught up in what others are doing and focus on doing the things that are true to you - as a person, as a leader, and as a brand. Your true self will shine through and it will be easy for your audience to see. There’s also the question of - how much of personal life do we want to share. This comfort level is also different for everyone and for every product. Someone who is working with clients - either selling fitness equipment and products or helping clients to get fit for example might want to be very real about their struggles and triumphs. While companies who are selling other consumer goods might want to focus mostly on the brand while infusing the stories of clients and why the founders created, developed, and scaled their products.
5. Growing Your Brand
Hiring a photographer or video media team for personal and business branding is a beautiful thing and highly recommended. You can also bring a brand to life by sprinkling in photos and videos of who you are by taking them yourself. Everyone’s business, product, and service is different and how everyone wants to appeal to their audience is very different too. Here are a few things I learned during Covid when we were in our house and not able to do branding photo and video shoots like we usually do. You might know these tips and tricks but if not here’s what I do.
Lighting is everything. Go outside or find the place in your house that has the best lighting. I am also a big fan of the Diva Light. There are so many different kinds on Amazon. It takes some trial and error but you’ll find the best light for you.
Filters - depending on your brand or your personal brand - you might like a bright and happy filter, a darker filter, or one that goes with your certain aesthetic and brand colors. Find the right filter for you and stick with it for a more cohesive and beautiful look when posting pictures. Facetune is also a favorite app for photo editing.
Use Planoly or another scheduling app. Planoly helps you to see what your media will look like weeks ahead as you build out your grid. Another one of my favorite apps (there are many!) is Bazaart. With this app you can create fun backgrounds and designs with a few clicks on your phone.
If you are putting out reels, Tik Toks, and video out by the minute - awesome. If you are just starting - it takes practice but once you are in a flow it becomes easy and fun. There are so many video editing apps out there - imovie is one I use often to clip and add music.