June 12, 2019 - 10 Comments
Have you backed yourself into a corner with your choice of branding? Or are you looking to start a new brand and wonder how broad or narrow your focus should be?
It's a tricky situation. Branding is important from the moment you choose a domain name and making the wrong choice can lead to problems far down the road.
Luckily, there are a few simple principles you can follow, to avoid what I call the branding trap and make the right choice from the outset. And even if you already have an established brand, knowing about this will help you in your content marketing.
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I've summarized the guiding principles for branding in this diagram:
Watch the video for a walkthrough of all the aspects of the diagram and the 2 ways to escape the branding trap.
If there's one key takeaway from this entire topic it's this: specificity comes with marketing power.
This presents us with a dilemma. If you have a big audience of fans and followers, you have more freedom and leeway in your content creation and choice of topics to cover. Your fans will be interested in (almost) whatever you have to say. But if you start with a broad, "a bit of everything" kind of brand, it's extremely difficult to build an audience in the first place.
In other words, the narrower your niche or topic, the more effortlessly you can reach people (or rather: people can find you), but the more limited you are in terms of content and topics.
Because of this, it's a good idea to differentiate your strategy for getting traction from your long term strategy. To get from zero to something, it's a good idea to be highly specific and create content that is optimized to gain an audience. For example, content that is search engine optimized, content that is highly shareable, content that you can present to other people's audiences etc.
Once you have gained traction and your audience is growing, you can start branching out (not before).
What's your take on this topic? Have you experienced getting stuck in the branding trap as well? Does the model laid out here help you with your brand choice and content creation? Let me know by leaving a comment below!
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