How much money are you leaving on the table because you don't know how to promote your business on social media?


You're a business owner and you're eager to start using social media for marketing, but you're unsure of what to say, what content to share, which platforms to use, and how to turn your efforts into profits. You may be missing a very important element: Defining your Brand and Identity.


In this post, I'm here to help you nail down your brand. Why? Because branding is everything. When you define your brand, you're paving the way to use social media as a powerful marketing tool for growing your audience and generating leads.

Branding Workbook


To help you with this, we created FREE Branding Workbook for you to download and follow along, as well as a YouTube video to help frame the perspective of this exercise.


Included in this workbook:

1. Identifying your target audience

2. Brand DNA

3. Brand positioning

4. Brand personality

5. Creating a compelling brand voice

6. Brand messaging

7. Brand story

8. Choosing Your social media handle

9. Visual identity


By the end of this workbook, you'll have a crystal-clear message and a plan to share it, helping you stand out and thrive in the world of social media. So make sure to fill it out and use it as a tool to guide your messaging on social media. 

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Define Your Brand and Identity | Awake Abroad Media on YouTube

WHAT IS "BRANDING"?


A brand can be defined in various ways. It can be seen as the overall customer experience your business offers, starting from the moment a prospect learns about you and extending far beyond any immediate interactions. 


This definition encompasses several approaches, all of which aim to enhance your business's attractiveness to your target audience, setting it apart from competitors and, ultimately, influencing their decision-making process.You can think of branding as a two part ecosystem consisting of brand strategy, and a brand identity. 


Your brand strategy focuses on how you’re going to connect with your audience to influence their decision. 

Your brand identity is the visual representation of your brand such as your logo, colors, fonts, image style – in other words, how your brand is represented visually. 


Now, your brand identity can have an influence on your audience, especially if they like what they see. But it won't turn them into customers. There needs to be a message that speaks to who they are. So it's important to synchronize your brand strategy to your brand identity for a far more powerful impact on their decision making process. Having a brand strategy will help you communicate your unique value proposition by clarifying your messaging strategy, storytelling, and your brand personality on social media and beyond.

1) Defining Your Target Audience


As part of your brand strategy you need to define and analyze your target audience, and recognize their needs, preferences, and behaviours. Defining your target audience is without a doubt one of the most important aspects in the whole spectrum of branding and marketing. It's getting clear on exactly who you want to help so you can appeal to them more specifically and be more relevant to who they are.


In addition to that, it's also important to understand how your competitors are targeting your audience. If you take the time to learn how your competitors are addressing them, you can find gaps in the market to position your brand with a unique value proposition. 


So for this exercise I want you to create 1-3 client avatars. A client avatar is a detailed outline of your ideal customer. Think deep. If there was one person your product or service would be perfect for, who would they be. If your product or service solves more than one person’s problems, feel free to repeat this exercise two or three more times.

Awake Abroad Media Branding Workbook Page 4.

2) YOUR Brand DNA


Your brand DNA is, as the name suggests, the essence of what makes up your brand. So here are some things you need to get clear on to outline your DNA: What is

  • Mission: What problem you solve
  • Vision: How you hope to achieve it
  • Purpose: Why is solving this important
  • Values: What you stand for and against


Some of these things you may have outlined as part of your business plan but let's take a moment to work through them in the context of defining your brand. If you're following with the worksheet you can simply fill in the blanks. Being intentional with these answers will help guide your decisions and actions such as what direction your brand is going, your commitments to it, what values you will uphold or reject as you move forward marketing it on social media. 


Your DNA should serve as an internal guidepost to help you and your team make the right decisions so that your brand stays on track in terms of where you want your brand to go and what perception you want to create in the market. So, it's really important for you and anyone working alongside you to understand your brand DNA and know how to uphold it, so you can build a powerful and concise brand identity.

3) Positioning your brand


Having a product or service that the market wants is great. But if it's the exact same as your competitors, it's not great. Your competitors already have a head start. So you're not providing your audience any unique value. 


So, what you need to do is understand what your competitors are offering your audience and then look for gaps and opportunities as to what the audience wants and what they're not getting from the current options in the market. This is how you define your unique value proposition, differentiating yourself from your competitors and establishing your position in the market.


We do this by performing what we call a SWOT analysis. And it's really just learning about your competitors Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats so you can show up to the market with unique alternatives to what's already out there.


I included this section in the worksheet as well so you can use it to study your competitors. So take a few minutes to study your competitors and try to find specific gaps in the market.


Once you do, you can then propose your solution as something uniquely different than what's already out there. If you do a good job at marketing it, your audience will turn their attention towards you.

Awake Abroad Media Branding Workbook Page 8.

4) BRAND PERSONALITY


Let's say, you have a beautiful-looking feed, you have a nice logo, and then someone arrives at your page and your message is bland. We’ll it shouldn't be!  Now, believe it or not, brands do have personalities, and you almost have to see it as if the brand was representing a person who your customer is interacting with. By now you should clearly know who you're talking to and what their needs are, as well as how you'll position your brand to attract them to your business.


So it's time to outline your personality. Write down 3 traits that you'd like your personality to feel like. Use those to guide how you communicate across every channel. You are going to need to incorporate this personality into your writing, your colors, your images, and that unique brand personality will help draw in and retain your audience.

5) Verbal Identity


Naturally, the next pillar we’ll discuss is your verbal identity. Now, we just touched on your brand personality, so verbal identity is essentially an extension of your brand personality. 


Verbal identity refers to the way your brand speaks to your audience and the tone of voice it's going to use. I'm referring to your verbal identity in regards to everything multimedia from still images, to videos, podcasts, reels, stories, blogs, and so forth. 


So really try and humanize it and think how we as people connect with other people. In order to be well received you need to talk in a manner that your audience is receptive to. Believe it or not, the etiquette of our verbal language has implications on how well we are received by the people we address. 

6) Brand Messaging: Crafting messages that resonate with your target audience


Now let’s talk about your brand messaging. This is probably one of the most impactful tools at your disposal and one that a lot of business owners miss. They’ll put all this focus on how the logo and their appearance on Instagram and Facebook, but put very little emphasis on the messaging behind it. 


This may be why you encounter so much hardship when trying to figure out what to say. So I want you to take a moment and define exactly what you want to say to your audience. What is your message? And how can you break it down for your audience to understand? How will you present it?


Remember, this goes hand in hand with your brand personality. The message that you put out there is what you're going to say, and the personality and the verbal identity is how you're going to say them. So understanding what you want to say is super critical in influencing how your audience perceives your business.

Awake Abroad Media Branding Workbook Page 13.

7) THE POWER OF STORYTELLING: YOUR CUSTOMERS HERO JOURNEY


I'm sorry to break it to you, but your customers don’t care all that much about who you are. I know this may suck to hear, but hear me out. Building a brand is not about you. It's all about your customer. You are simply here to serve. So you need to tell your customers their story. This is going to show them that you understand their problems and qualify you as someone who may be able to solve them. So how do you write it out? Don’t worry, you can follow along in our worksheet.


To tell your story you need to stick to your role as a guide. As a guide you should have two main traits: Empathy for your customers, and Authority in guiding them through their challenges. So when you tell your story, it’s not about you, it’s about your customer. And your role is helping them get what they want.


In order to do this, you need to understand the 3 types of problems we all face:

External - most obvious but not the main driver 

Internal - the emotions drive the decision making 

Philosophical - what people believe about the problem they’re facing


People buy external solutions for internal problems. And people remember stories a lot more than they remember facts. So in other words you need to Identify their internal problem and explore what failures they will encounter if they don't take action. Just be sure not to exploit this. Instead leverage empathy to provide a genuine customer experience. It's easy to fear-monger people into taking action, but it's so much more powerful if the success you communicate overpowers the option of using fear.  Don’t lead with authority, lead with empathy and you will build authority.


Here are some ways you can share your customers story with them:

  • Share Testimonials 
  • Talk about case studies
  • Ofer mindshifting value and help them see what is possible through you
  • Focus on benefits, not features
  • Tell your story of the hardships you encountered and how you overcame them


If you're able to make that emotional connection by telling a story that aligns with who your audience is, and the journey that they're on, they're going to be drawn to you because you understand their journey. So sharing a little about you is great, but you really want to focus on your audience and their story by weaving it into the stories that you tell and the messages that you share. It's not the best product but the best story that gets the sale. This is why branding and storytelling are so important in the marketplace. 

8) BRAND NAME AND HANDLE


If you’ve been following along, you may start to see why choosing a name isn’t your top priority. So if you do this prematurely, then you're not taking advantage of everything we’ve discussed so far. 


When you think about all the aspects of your brand, coming up with a brand name and handle after you define your brand strategy really works better because it helps lock in that position. So choosing a social media handle that is aligned with your position in the market and the position that you're trying to own as well as the message that you're trying to get across to your audience, is really important.


So if you’ve already opened up your social media accounts, you may be making a mistake most entrepreneurs make. Thats for you to decide. Be honest. Does your handle serve your brand?

Awake Abroad Media Branding Workbook Page 15.

9) VISUAL IDENTITY


And last but not least, you have your visual identity. And I hope you can think about all the elements that we have considered up until this point and why this is last on our list. By now we’ve defined your audience, positioning, your unique value, your brand’s personality and traits, and the message you want to share. 


You now have all these tools at your disposal to hire someone to design your visual identity. Think of how much this is going to help your designer create an impactful visual identity for you, and how much of an impact a carefully crafted identity is going to have on your audience.


If this all seems too overwhelming to do for yourself, I do suggest you find a brand strategist and graphic designer who are experienced in building brand identities. I have personally tried to design my own brands, and I have to say it's not easy. In times like these sometimes it's just better to hire an expert so you can benefit the most from your brand.


FINAL THOUGHTS

In this post we've learned how to go from having no idea what to say to having a strong understanding of your brand strategy and the ingredients to building an effective visual identity. Now you are ready to leverage it across all your marketing and social media to grow your business. 


If you're an established business but you're struggling to cut through the noise and to scale, maybe it's a sign to revisit some old decisions and outline your brand strategy a little more. Maybe it's time to change a few things, or even hire expert help. Your business will thank you !


At Awake Abroad Media we help you leverage social media by creating a high-converting strategy, content, and managing your online presence. If you feel like your social media needs some expert help, book a free consultation here.


Thank you so much for joining us today! If you found this video helpful, share it with your fellow business owners and make sure connect with us on instagram for more tips on utilizing social media for your business. All the links are in the description box below.


Much love, Seb and Jaz