Every brand, every entrepreneur has a story. How do you tell it? First let’s dive into what a brand story or brand narrative means. While these words might inspire thoughts of fiction, yours should be anything but. Your brand, your products and/or services exist in our world, they interact with your customers’ lives in one way or another. Your narrative or story is the way that you capture those interactions, and explain them to new and future customers. Let’s look at an example – the ever recognizable brand CocaCola. Their legacy product coke is a refreshing carbonated beverage best served cold. Coke is also full of sugar and acidic enough to take the rust off of metal so I’m told. Is that what they tell us through their branding? Absolutely not. Their current marketing initiatives, which all stem from their overarching brand…
And trying to do everything entrepreneurial by yourself. It takes a lot to run a business, from actually marketing and selling your products services, to the accounting, the marketing, etc. Often I see entrepreneurs trying to accomplish every aspect of their business on their own. This is a slippery slope that bottoms out in burn out. Why do we think we must do it all? There are people who have come before us, having done it all, and managed to somehow do it all successfully. This proof that one can possibly do it all by themselves, has led to a false expectation that in order to be an entrepreneur, we must do everything our business requires by ourselves. This isn’t true and for many, it isn’t healthy. For other business owners, this might stem from the notion that the journey of an entrepreneur is a solitary…
While You Might Be on the Journey to Work for Yourself, You Don’t Have to Go It Alone. About five years ago, I started out on this crazy journey to become an entrepreneur. I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I knew that I couldn’t keep working for terrible bosses and giving of myself in situations that were not replenishing me. I tried becoming an influencer and did pretty well, garnering over $5,000 in books and another $5,000 in yoga clothing and gear, in exchange for positive reviews. But I wasn’t able to monetize it and I didn’t see a sustainable career in it because it wasn’t me. I’m not saying that you can’t make a living through becoming a social media influencer, it just wasn’t the…
Getting to know your audience is a major component of your content marketing strategy If content marketing is creating relevant, and interesting or meaningful content, on a consistent basis, how do you find out what kind of content that is for your business? How do you find topics that your current and prospective clients or customers will want to read? This is where the rubber meets the road in content marketing. It’s not just enough to write a bunch of content that you think your audience will find meaningful, helpful and interesting. You need to get closer to them and actually test it out. Doing that is beneficial yet can be somewhat difficult if you’ve never done it before. That’s where working with a professional content marketer like myself comes in quite handy. But let’s talk through it more before I make…
Partner with a web content specialist to create meaningful content and deliver it to your target market. With the plethora of easy to use content management systems (CMS), like WordPress, Wix, Shopify and countless others, almost anyone can build and manage their own website. This democratization of the internet has helped make being a small business, startup, entrepreneur, blogger or influencer a bit more attainable – as now you don’t have to pay a web design and development agency big bucks to carve out a small place on the internet. But, the benefits of being able to setup and manage your own website, to create your own content, have made the internet a crowded and clamorous environment. While the Googles of the world try to instill order and create organization, it can be difficult to reach your target audience, as they now have so many websites available to…
If You Are Going to Bill Yourself as a Social Media Marketer, Take the Time to Build Your Own Channels If you are going to bill yourself as an expert in social media marketing, which you are doing if you are asking a company or individual to pay you for these services, take the time to build your own channels and you will be able to put your money where your mouth is. Understandably I only have just over 3,000 followers on Twitter and only about 600 followers on Instagram, so it might seem silly for me to make this point…but I’m investing the time and effort into my own channels so that when I need to proposition a new client, I can point to my own channels as proof of my ability. If you have a number of clients with statistics that you can…
How can you Cash in on trending hashtags? Hashtags are here to stay, learning to embrace them can have a positive impact on your social media strategy. You know that hashtags are here to stay when they are being written into almost every comedic show and movie being made – even kids shows have characters dropping hashtags in conversations. Whether you love them, or loath them, using them in your social media posts can be a great way to help you reach your target audience and increase your brand awareness. But how do you know which hasthags to use? How many of them should you use in a post? These, along with many others are great questions to ask when considering using hashtags as part of your social media strategy. While there might not be a wrong way to use hashtags, not using them well can make you look silly…
Why Is It Important to Take the Time to Empower: Your Employees? Your Customers? Your Ambassadors? People are smart, and can generally figure things out for themselves right? When you work for a company, or use it’s products you generally have a good idea of why you do these things and what it means for your life. No one is disputing or arguing that consumers are intelligent, or that your employees understand why their job is important. No one can argue that ambassadors have an affiliation for the brand that they are promoting. So why am I writing this post? Dilution Every person that engages with your brand, whether they are an employee, a customer or an ambassador, brings with them different experiences, different frames of references, even different vocabularies. So it is natural that they would all describe their understanding of your brand, the reasons they like…