I started launching my personal brand out of my passion to write. I’d consider myself a creative person, I have been writing ever since 2006. I started posting different kinds of blogs about life, business, and whatnot. So by 2018, I got the idea of using a personal brand to reach out to customers specifically for our business.
I never thought about monetizing it and recently because of the pandemic, I started my Accounting Starter Digital Course. Now gradually as we build traction with this course which benefits our company in particular those small businesses who really need help particularly when business process automation is concerned.
In relation to our main topic, let’s first dive into what branding is.
Branding is something that identifies a certain organization or company and there are a lot of businesses who tend to not see the long term value of branding or sometimes they don’t prioritize it but it holds huge importance especially if you want to grow because that’s what’s gonna set you apart. In addition to that, there are a lot of people who think that branding is all about logos and design, but a brand is a result of your customer’s emotions and feelings about you. For example, hearing the name or brand Nike establishes a brand of trust in high quality. The company Apple correlates to a prestige brand. It can be different to some people, but that’s my impression of those brands. Basically, when you talk about a certain market niche, you’ll have a first person or company in mind, at the same time, your emotional feelings towards a brand. In my case, if I ask people what they think about me, I have the impression that I’m the go-to person when it comes to technology and business process automation and solutions. That’s how important branding is because it will make you stand out from a sea of competition.
The next question now is how do you build your brand? There are specific questions that you can ask yourself if you’re an owner, or you wanna build your own brand. Some of the questions that you can start to ask yourself is what is the message you’re trying to send? It’s really important that you’re fighting for something because that shows that you are not just selling something, but you’re trying to help and serve. So that will translate to the feel of your business. What follows is how does your product serve the consumers? This addresses the problem that you’re trying to solve because it will result in how you will visually look and the tone that you will set for your business. Another is what do you want your consumers to feel? That will translate as well to your branding. The last one you can sit on as well is what are the words that you associate with your products and services? Mind mapping is a great way to start with building your brand. It’s just the words or everything that you associate with your products. From there, you can filter it out as well.
As you build your brand, it’s also important that you touch on marketing. A lot of people get confused between the two so I’ll lay out its definition and differences. For me, marketing is about first positioning yourself or your product and promoting it through advertising. The activities you do in marketing result from the branding you made or the impression that your audience feels about you. It’s the follow-through or action steps after creating your brand. For example, you position yourself as an online course creator. Once you position yourself, that can be synonymous with asking who your target market is. Then comes your message as well.
Moving forward, this is now where copywriting comes in which is an important aspect of branding in general. Copywriting will set the tone and the language of your business so everything you’ll be showcasing, all come back again to your branding. Some free tips to give when it comes to copywriting are as goes :
- Freewriting. With the message that you wanna send, you can just lay it down and dump it, what it means for you and that’s when you can finalize what it would be. Also, don’t force anything you won’t say in real life. Freewriting is good to express your thoughts on your products and services.
- Make things short and straightforward.
- Always recognize the problem you wanna address. This is what the consumers will be drawn to!
- Focus on your consumers and target market.
- Don’t judge yourself. There is no such thing as writer’s block because you’re already stopping yourself from writing freely! This is when editing comes in as well to tweak whatever you wrote.
- Sympathise with your audience. Know them well, and what their specific pains and struggles are in their business.
- Research also is important. Get factual data to build credibility.
- Don’t sell hard. Tell stories so they can remember you and make them feel like they are the hero in the story that you will help and guide.
Once you have established the emotional response, the next is to follow through by using logic. Provide data on the positive outcomes for availing products and services, providing limited discounts. One more tip is to learn the art of writing hooks and deadlines to catch the reader’s attention. There are also headline generator sites where it can suggest a headline based on your subject. I even recommend a book by Russell Brunson called “Dot-com Secrets” and some more sequels in that book. So overall, messaging is a lifetime commitment and you won’t be able to spread your message with a single blog post or content. The examples we mentioned should be structured as a series of messages.
After copywriting is the distribution of your message. It can be through a blog post and social media channels. In my case, I have a presence on all major channels from Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok and I may have few followings because my niche is small and I invest more in paid ads but consistency in posting is the key to growing and reaching other people in business.
My final thought is that don’t worry too much about branding especially if you are being authentic with your purpose, then your brand will come out naturally. It takes hard work to spread your message so the more emotions you can touch the more people will be attracted to you.
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