Building your business into a brand is an evolution. Work on finding ways to attract a new audience and deepen your connection with your existing audience. Over time, your brand will evolve into an experience that you provide for them. This experience is what they know, like, and trust, and helps people to remember you.
Your Brand’s Voice
It’s important to use a consistent voice and style when creating your content or communicating with your customers. Take advantage of social media as an outlet for your brand’s voice. It’s an easy way to connect directly with your potential clients and customers. Social media doesn’t have to be used to sell a product or service – it allows customers to provide feedback, ask questions, give advice, or even have a friendly conversation. You can use it to show your brand’s personality. Social media is meant to be social, so get out there and have conversations with your tribe.
Being transparent with your audience from the get-go will build an authentic relationship. The more you give, serve, and connect with your audience, the more they will engage with you. The more you authentically connect with them, the deeper the bonds you will make, and in turn those relationships will grow over time, organically.
When your followers are more in tune with you, they trust and understand your message and mission, and it gives you more opportunities to connect with them and build your tribe.
The number one mistake that I see in this category is that people are not using their own authentic voice and style in their copywriting and content. Don’t borrow swipe captions or content. That is the lazy way to do it, and it is plagiarizing. It only hurts you in the long run because it lacks your unique expression.
Your audience will come to know and love your style, and that is what will make you stand out. Think of some of your favorite brands, and how they all have their own unique personality and style when communicating with you. Take out a journal and brainstorm some of the ones you have liked best. Then write down why. Figure out what your specific voice is when discussing your products and services, as well as your overall mission in the world.
The only way to stand out is to be yourself, use your own authentic voice to capture the way you would normally talk to share about what it is that you do, how you do it, and who you work with. Your personality and your brand’s quality are what people are going to remember. If you do live videos, or any kind of videos, if your speaking style doesn’t match up to what they’re reading from you, they’ll know that it’s not your voice. It’s important to build trust by being yourself. When an email lands in their inbox, or they read a social media post, they want to feel like they are listening to you and having a conversation.
It’s important to be super clear on your offerings. Your confidence will grow with your clarity. The clearer you are about how you work with people, what it is that you offer, the types of results they can expect, and what their experience working with you will be like, the more confident you will be in delivering that information. Clarity creates confidence because you don’t feel like you’re scripting anything or trying to memorize something. You’re speaking from your heart, just like you would in a normal conversation. If you were sitting face to face with your client, it’s the same thing that you would tell that person across the desk. Execute your messages from this perspective.
It’s okay to collect ideas for social media topics from other accounts; just be sure to put your own spin on it. People sometimes struggle with imposter syndrome, and a great way to overcome it is to put yourself out there and succeed in your own way. You know what it is that you do, you know how you do it, you know the results that people can expect from you; just be honest and share those. That’s what they’re looking for.
Create an emotional connection. This is important because it’s one of the main reasons why somebody buys from you or decides to engage with you, follow you, or be a part of your community. It all comes back to how you and your brand have made them feel, and when they have made an emotional connection to you, you have secured a customer relationship.
Focus on Engagement
Once you have your channels in place, it’s time to focus on the rules of engagement. We all know there are two predominant types of people in any social setting, including ones that exist in cyberspace. There are introverts and there are extroverts. Then there’s a third unique group known as ambiverts, also known as an extroverted introvert. Extroverts gain their energy from crowds, excitement, and group settings. Introverts gain their energy by recharging alone. Ambiverts can appear to be very extroverted in social settings but need a lot of alone time to recharge afterwards rather than looking for the next party.
You can think of your online spaces as a part of sorts. It’s your brand’s job to entertain conversations. If someone walks up to greet you in your virtual room and starts asking questions, treat that interaction as you would an in-person meeting. “Hi, welcome. Thank you so much for being here. What’s your name? What do you do?” They start asking you questions. You would never just ignore their questions in person, you would engage in a conversation. It’s just a different platform. So, instead of being in the same room with each other, face to face, there is a computer screen and bits of data between you. It’s still possible to create a human connection. When somebody is commenting or trying to connect and engage with you through a post that you’ve created, the last thing you want to do is not respond to their comment.
You want to make sure that you’re engaging. The whole point of social media is that it’s social. So if we’re not being social, then how are we going to build our brand there, grow our business, and move forward with our goals? It provides an amazing platform and opportunity for not only reaching new people, but actually connecting and engaging with people. Another way to activate engagement is to proactively make an effort to reach out to connect with qualified new prospects you don’t know yet and who aren’t in your current network.
Maybe it’s a friend of a friend. Or maybe it’s a member of a specific interest group that may be interested in what you offer. If you’re in a Facebook group and somebody leaves a comment for which you’ve got some valuable insight you’d like to share, take a shot at connecting, engaging, and trying to help, just to be helpful. Your comment may be very engaging, and this is a perfect example of being proactive to make a new connection and position yourself as an expert. So many great things can happen from that one small choice. It’s up to you to go out there and be engaged and get involved.
Another great place to engage with new people is Instagram. On Instagram, you can search for people by hashtag and by followers. I try to schedule at least two hours a week to just connect and engage with people who aren’t in my network to position myself in a way to be helpful by providing information, knowledge, and my expertise. Just go out and help, be serving, connect, and engage. You never know who you might meet.
As a reminder, here’s a paraphrase of a well-known quote – people may not remember what you did for them, but they will always remember how you made them feel. So go help people feel sensational, and your brand will become a sensation! For more tips on branding, read Getting Started With Branding.
This post was written with the help of Kristiek, a branding and marketing professional available for projects on Fiverr. I occasionally hire Fiverr freelancers to write articles on topics they are proficient in, as this enables us all to learn more. Subscribe for more business, sales, and investing posts. Have a lovely day!
