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There’s so much advice on the internet, it’s hard to know which is worth following and which is worth forgetting. This is especially true when it comes to marketing.
You get conflicting messages all the time:
You should post to social media everyday; you should post to social media a few times a week; you need a blog for SEO; SEO doesn’t matter; you have to build a personal brand; you should keep yourself out of the spotlight.
How can you figure out the best ways to market your brand when you have so much conflicting information coming at you? I have some ideas for you:
Consider Your Audience
Good marketing always starts with understanding your audience. If you don’t know who your audience is, what they need, what they struggle with, and what motivates them to take action, how can you create content that connects with them? It’s simple: You can’t.
Without first spending the time and effort to deeply understand who your target audience is, not just in terms of demographics, but emotions, you won’t be able to create meaningful connections with your target market.
Each and every single person who comes across your business is unique and experiences different challenges from each other, so how do you relate your business to your audience needs?
Understand their pain points. When you can identify how your target audience is struggling in different or overlapping ways, you can better adjust your content strategy in order to serve them more personalized ads that they'll engage with.
Have empathy for their lives. Empathy is my secret to success. I am very adept at emotionally putting myself into other people's shoes, in part because I spent so much time doing theater growing up. When you understand what motivates people and/or what is holding them back, you can tweak the messaging to address this need within them in order to make a deeper connection.
Demonstrate how your business will help them. Once you know what your audience is struggling with, you can get to work on creating content that demonstrates your value in helping them with their problem. But you have to go above and beyond here, leveraging your value proposition against their struggles, connecting your mission statement to their internal value system, and speaking to them in a tone that feels relatable to them.
Understand Your Business Objectives
Having larger business goals and objectives will help inform your marketing choices and allow you to work more strategically. This is why there’s no one-size-fits-all marketing advice that can be applied to every business. Whether your goals are based on growth, revenue, consumer base, or whatever you have set as your primary goals and objectives, those goals should determine the marketing choices you need to make to work more strategically.
Setting concrete goals for your business helps you better understand where you are going. These goals and objectives also lead you in the direction you need to go to grow your business and shape your marketing strategy. Again, this will look different for every business.
To determine your business objectives, consider the following:
What do you want to achieve in your business?
What does success look like for your brand?
Are there different goals to consider for employees vs. customers?
Are you choosing goals that have measurable results?
Be Authentic
Focus on what makes your brand unique, and ignore what the competition is doing. The goal isn’t to build a brand that already exists, the goal is to build something brand new and improved. People connect with weird, funny, messy messages because that’s all authentic to the human experience. Perfection is a myth, and no one wants to be sold perfection anymore.
Be authentic by humanizing your brand, leading with emotion and showing consumers that you understand who they are and what they are struggling with. The human experience is connected at every stage by emotions, struggles, challenges, joy, desire, and motivation. By tapping into the intersection of these often complicated emotions that your audience might be feeling, you can inspire them to make a purchase with you.
Every business sets out to solve a problem for people, and by understanding the deeper experiences that cause that problem you can create content that makes your customer feel as though you are talking directly to them. Showing them that you understand their plight, and you are there to help them.
Consistency Matters
I’m not talking about how much you post, I’m talking about how you convey your message in terms of tone and delivery. Cut down on mixed messages by refining your brand messaging. Without consistency, you end up confusing consumers, sending mixed messages, and turning people off from your brand. If people are confused they certainly won’t buy from you, let alone engage with you.
It’s not easy to figure out the best ways to market your brand. Putting a strategy in place that’s tailored to your business can make all the difference. The four main things to consider when marketing your brand are: considering your audience, understanding your business objectives, being authentic, and being consistent. But there are so many different ways to apply those four concepts to your specific business. Ensuring your branding is spot on can be difficult to do yourself. But that’s where I come in. With over a decade of branding experience, I can help you figure out the best ways to market your brand without having to compromise the core components of what makes your business unique.