Building Your Brand Before Breakfast

20 Apr Building Your Brand Before Breakfast

For those building personal brands, starting first businesses or finally redefining the current online presence of your existing company, the thought of managing your digital marketing can be overwhelming. Sometimes, we become so caught up in what our brand does that we neglect how it represents itself. But it doesn’t have to a full time job, devoting just 15 to 20 minutes of your morning to working on your digital presence will increase your brand awareness, expand your cliental and ultimately lead to higher revenue. With 81 per cent of shoppers conducting online research prior to purchase, your company’s online presence is essential for converting to successful new clients. 

So step one, grab a coffee (or a mimosa if you’re feeling it), your laptop and phone.

1. COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT

We all know social media is important but why? It’s called social for a reason. It is not enough to simply post good content. Interacting with your networks is vital in creating a successful digital presence. Automatic programs such as Social Envy that comment, like, follow and unfollow for your account can impact your online presence in a negative way. Usually, the bots are pretty easy to spot. The process usually starts with a follow, a couple post likes and a standard comment such as “Love this!” or “Great post!” Brands that are well received, tend to have one thing in common: authenticity. Using automatic programs to control your community engagement could jeopardize your brand’s success in connecting with consumers. When you carve out time to engage with your networks, pay attention to what you’re seeing. Simply scrolling through your feed and double tapping everything, will not help drive people to your brand’s feed. If you see a post you like, explore the feed with intention. Comment. Ask questions. Engage. Building a trusted brand through personal connection is key in developing long-lasting relationships both on and offline. You should be spending over a third of your designated #MorningMarketing time to this engagement.

2. RESEARCH 

Researching might sound too time consuming to happen over breakfast, but it can really be done in just a few minutes. If you stay on top of your digital space, it becomes even easier. Researching your competitors is integral for creating noise around your brand (or for sparking the conversation). Ask yourself: who is in the same digital space as you? What is working for them? What hashtags are they using? What are some of their top posts? During your community engagement, you’ve already completed some of the research. Your feed should not only be filled with potential clients, but also brands in your field that are doing incredible things. Educate yourself on their weakness and strengths and apply your findings to your content and strategy. There are many different tools you can use to look into how you are performing on each platform. For example, a tool you can use for basic insight  for your Facebook page is Likealyzer. By entering your page URL you can gain insight on your post timing, whether or not you’re asking enough questions, how the length of your posts are impacting engagement and so on. Not only can you gain insight for your brand but you can also see top competitors’ analytics. Researching your digital space is necessary incorrectly completing the next step of your #MorningMarketing.

3. PLANNING 

Now that you’ve seen what your competitors are doing in the space, it’s time to plan. A great starting point for this (especially if you are rebranding or just starting to build your online presence) is reminding yourself of your brand mantra. A brand mantra helps guide the personality reflected in all of your content. Choosing just three to five words that represent the personality of your brand can help unify your feeds and ensure your direction is focused. If you want to know more about how to develop your brand mantra, click here. Keeping your brand mantra in mind will help direct the look and feel, as well as type of posts you include in your feed. If a post doesn’t hit every word of your brand mantra, it probably isn’t the best possible content to post. It’s extremely helpful to give each day of the week a theme. The format of the content can always change from Boomerang, graphics, video, photo or blogs but the consistent daily themes will help your audience understand your brand better. Not to mention having a theme for your content each day will help the efficiency of your content calendar planning. It will also allow your followers to know what to expect, and as humans we love predictability. The more predictable your brand, the more like your audience is to trust it.

PLAN YOUR #MORNINGMARKETING

 There are a lot of platforms in today’s digital world. Between Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Youtube, LinkedIn, Pinterest (the list goes on), managing your brand’s online presence can become overwhelming.  You could spend hours, days, weeks doing the above (and at Spark Boutik, that’s exactly what we do day in and day out for our clients), but when you choose to focus on one or two platforms each morning, managing your online presence becomes manageable. If you dedicate a specific day of the week to community engagement, research and planning for each specific platform, by the weekend you’ll have covered all platforms effectively. We understand even 15 to 30 minutes of brand building can be tricky when running a company or trying to launch your career. That’s why Spark Boutik obsesses over the details of your brand’s marketing and focus on our expertise, so you can focus on yours.