Ever feel like social media is wasting your business's time? Well, let's fix that!
The online marketing world is ever changing, so allow me to stay on top of these changes and how to respond to them for you. This show will give you your social media marketing news as well as your plan of action. We'll mostly focus on how to grow on Instagram, but also cover Facebook Ads, YouTube, TikTok, and any emerging social media platforms as well. To hear social media updates first, watch out for my Instagram stories @derekvidell then look to this podcast for a detailed explanation on what to do. For additional free and paid growth resources, go to https://www.socialbamboo.com. You can also check out my new podcast Instagram Marketing Pros to be the first to know of any changes to the Instagram app or algorithm.
What's up, guys? Welcome to the Social Media Entrepreneurs Podcast. You see how to become a full-time entrepreneur by leveraging modern social media strategies. I'm your host, Derek Fidel. Today we are talking about the importance of branding. What is branding? Said simply, it's what your customers think of when they hear your company name. It is just what they associate with you. And it's not what you want people to think about you, it's what they do think about you. And you can obviously influence that, but you also can't control it completely. And there's also a lot of this that you have to realize what's important and what's not. So let me ask you this: what is the most important thing that customers can think about you? What is the essence of a strong foundational branding? This would be that when they buy things from you, they're glad they did. It solved their problem, it was worth the money, it was a good deal, they're gonna buy again, they're gonna tell your friends about it. The transaction of a business to customer is worth it. That is 97% of it. I'm just making up a number. You get what I'm saying. It's almost all of it. If you don't have that, you don't have anything, right? Oh yeah, I hate their product, but man, their customer service was great. I really like the look of their store. I like their branding a lot. Their social media is pretty funny. They they use trending audios. I really appreciate that. I really like that their website has like the the shade of tan they use on their website, just a really great shade of tan. Don't like their product though. It won't even matter that you have a positive outlook from that person towards your brand. Like that they have um, you know, this positive perspective of you because they're not even your customer, right? It it wouldn't even be uh you wouldn't be making your decisions around that. Sure, it's better than them having a negative opinion about you, but i if they don't love what you sell, then nothing else matters. If you also can't get enough sales to survive as a company, nothing else matters. If you can't provide an exceptional product, regardless of your website being designed beautifully. You having a convenient website matters more than you having a beautiful website. You having a clear marketing message matters more than you having a witty marketing message. You having a custom a brand voice that speaks to many is better than having a brand voice that speaks to few and unnecessarily cuts out pieces of your audience that you can't sell to. So your goal as a business is to make a lot of profit and uh make your customers happy. And if your branding, quote unquote, decisions are getting in the way of that, then you're looking at branding in the wrong way. And this is a lot of you. I've worked with clients that have had such dumb rules with their branding as, oh, we always put text to the left of products on our ads, never to the right. That's one of our rules. If we're gonna have a product on the ad, then we have the product on the right and then the text on the left. We and we don't, yeah, that's part of our branding because you know, if we put text on the right, customers are gonna start hating us, right? That would be an example of you're just being OCD. You're making up rules for your business that don't need to be made up and should be challenged. And there's absolutely cases where ads should have text on the right in this case, right? If you're running a sale and you're showing the product and you want to show a sale, it's usually better that they see the product first and then the sale second. So product on the left, text on the right. If you are selling the product and people can't look at the product and instantly identify what it is, then it is better to have text on the left that explains what they're looking at before they look at the product on the right. Now, with the that in mind of what they are actually looking at. So there's times that it should be both. There's times that you should use different fonts outside of your brand fonts when conveying a different message. Maybe you're running a Halloween sale. Should you stick to your brand fonts no matter what, or should you use a scary Halloween type font during that time? Probably use the Halloween fitting font. It's gonna be an overall better ad experience than you trying to cram your specific font onto every piece of creative that you ever come out with. Maybe sometimes you'll sell to a married male audience, and sometimes you'll sell to a single woman audience, and those ads will look different, sound different, and be different, and rightfully so. You would want to try to sell to as many people as you can because that's what we're making our decisions based around, right? That would be part of your North Star of decision making. I need to get a ton of sales. My brand is going to be one that stays in business at all by getting a ton of sales by running profitable advertising. Need to have that in place. And that might be that sometimes I do a slightly different brand voice. I try different styles of content. You do something with your website that you've never done before. You you test, you try a different kind of creative, you have a UGC creator make you a post that you would have never thought to make, and you just try it anyways, and you see how it does. This willingness to adapt to whatever gets us sales and whatever gets us happy customers is what your branding should be based around. So, yes, you should have your brand colors, yes, you should have your fonts, but don't think that these are diehard rules that if you were to break it, you're gonna lose your trust with your customers and they're gonna think negatively of you forever. And if we don't have a lot of followers, people aren't gonna think that we're credible. So let's buy a ton of fake followers and then ruin our account, thus ruining our ability to reach clients and get sales, just so that we can fake having a large audience. There's a lot of decisions like this that are made. So simply with your branding, you can have your preferences, but do not let them violate you making happy customers and you getting a ton of them. That's your brand. That's your brand. When I buy stuff from that company, I'm glad I did. Their emails are pretty good too. It's nice to get a reminder. I don't really read them, but I get emails from them every now and then, so it's easy to keep in touch with them. Their website's pretty easy to use. It's not that it's flashy or anything like that that makes me so loyal to the brand, but I just appreciate that they make the checkout process easy for me, that they don't waste my time, that they're not trying to impress me or be witty or doing anything. They're just being clear and helping me get my problem solved and leaving the transaction at that, optimizing around max convenience for that. That is how you maintain a better brand. Now, there are a lot of fun things that you can do. You can have some fun subscription models, you can have awesome packaging, you can give some gifts with your orders, you can include a handwritten note, you can have emails that are genuinely helpful. A lot of that still goes into the same category as we're just helping people, right? We're just helping our customers enjoy their product to uh the fullest extent. Maybe you're selling a product that helps people with acne, and then you also give them tips on additional things that they can do to get rid of that acne. That still is on brand. That's more on brand than you just saying, like, no, we have to use this pink and we have to use this tan, and the text always has to be on the left, not the right. That that's not a brand. That's you just making unnecessary rules for yourself that are limiting your ability to sell. So, unless you have customers, there's not really anyone's opinion that that even matters about you besides your customer's opinion of you and your offer. Don't extend it past that. And I'm just gonna call some of you out right now, but ladies, y'all are way more likely to think that it has to be an exact branding and they look an exact way. So watch out for that because the it's not the aesthetics needs to just get knocked down a notch in your book of importance because it can limit you at a certain point. This is all situational, right? But food for thought. I'll see you in the next episode.
