How to Approach Do-It-Yourself Branding
A brand is a promise. It gives a sense of reassurance to your buyers. It keeps the wheels of your business greased and oiled. It pumps in the money. Branding is to business what healthy dietary habits are for the human body.
Your brand provides momentum for word of mouth marketing. For that marketing push that tips you into the world of big wins.
Branding is also an illusion. It’s what your customers perceive you to be. It’s a barometer for how much your customers vouch for you, like your business, gain value off your product or service, and what they are prepared to pay for the value they get.
Branding, however, isn’t just for companies like Coke Cola, Land Rover, and General Electric. Every Individual, celebrity, and even self-employed one-person businesses can be a brand.
Here’s the good news: You can do it all by yourself — only if you focus and keep at it for long enough, of course.
Here’s how you should do Do-It-Yourself branding:
Publish for branding
Never before in the history of mankind has there been an opportunity for you to self-publish. Thanks to the onslaught of publishing platforms, Content Management Systems, and a low-barrier to entry, publishing is as real as it gets.
Whether you are an individual or a company, blogging opens the doors out to public.
The world gets to know you. As they read what you write, you begin to affect their way of thinking, influence their thoughts, inspire them, and make them love you.
That’s branding for you. No matter how small and incremental it might seem to be.
Leverage Social Media
Along with self-publishing also came the rise of social media. A one-to-many social interaction base for you to make an impact: one Twitter handle, one Facebook business page, and one LinkedIn account at a time. While each social network is a different beast from the other, the common dominator is people.
Focus on interactions, real relationships, and how you know who you know. It’s hard to do this given your hawk’s eye on numbers, business, and ROI.
Before you get to ROI, think about who you know. Social gets you there.
Find ways to deliver value
It’s easier to write that single line of advice than it is to actually deliver value. First, determine your target audience and what their single burning itch is.
If you are a web designer, business owners need websites that work for their business.
If you are a copywriter, your target audience is entrepreneurs who want to make their copy get them cash.
If you are a real estate brokerage agent, you are looking for home owners who need a hassle-free, rich, experience of renting/leasing/selling their property.
Think about your audience, decide what you can give away, and actually give it all away.
It’s astonishing what “giving away” can do for you.
Build a Tribe
As Seth Godin writes in this book The Tribe, it’s easy to initiate and call people together for a cause. Or maybe you can help solve their problems, in person. Start a meetup.com, launch a seminar, or host a conference.
If you are the online kinds, start a forum or a community.
Build your tribe today.