Every creator needs to stand out if they want to reach their potential. To do that, you need to have a strong understanding of who you are and who your content is speaking to. Essentially, it would be best if you created a brand that’s unique and marketable. Marketing your brand and content will not only earn you more views on your uploads – it will also grow your audience and open more opportunities for your channel.
That being said, developing a solid marketing strategy requires a lot of work on your part. Here are a few tips to help you start marketing yourself to your audience and brands.
Develop your brand
Before you can begin marketing your brand, you need to create a strategy to ensure you’re effectively communicating with your audience and delivering consistent messaging. Your brand strategy likely will take a long time to develop, and that’s okay. As you build your brand, consider these three categories: your brand’s goals/mission, messaging (including voice and personality) and your identity (such as colors you use often and typography). These are crucial to developing a solid brand and will help you create an effective marketing strategy.
First and foremost, your brand needs to be authentic to you. If you’re not comfortable with the persona you want to communicate to your audience, it will show. It is easier to be consistent with your branding and messaging if you don’t need to perform in a way you don’t feel natural doing. Your identity should feel natural.
Your brand identity should also consider who your target audience is. The best way to figure out who your target audience is to determine what kind of content you want to make and research the demographics that like that kind of content.
Use social media
Social media is a powerful marketing tool; it’s your direct connection to your audience and a way to measure if what you’re doing (with content, branding and marketing) is working. As you create a marketing strategy, determine what your goals are for the campaign. For instance, you may decide you want to increase the traffic going to your content, or you may want to increase your brand awareness on the platform. Depending on what you want to achieve, your marketing strategy will vary in how you post and interact with your audience and the community.
For example, if your end goal is to drive more traffic to your videos, you will want to promote your videos on all platforms you’re active on. You’d also have to consider which platforms you’re posting on and how to engage with their different demographics. Facebook’s audience is typically older than TikTok’s, so you will have to tailor your content depending on the platform.
Track the data
As you start posting, monitor your data closely. Pay attention to things like the number of unique users and clicks that your posts are getting, along with their engagement level. The number of unique viewers tells you how far your content is traveling. Unique views differ from the total number of views. While both metrics are important, unique views tell you how many new people click on the links you share. The total number of viewers tells you the number of times viewers clicked on the link. So, if one person clicks on a link 10 times, the total number of views would be 10, and the total number of unique viewers would be one.
Also, tracking the number of clicks you get helps you determine what strategies pique people’s curiosity and get them to click. For instance, it can help you see what kind of titles, thumbnails or taglines are working. Additionally, your engagement level (calculated by taking the total number of social interactions and dividing by the number of impressions) tells you how many people are ready to interact with your brand. This metric is vital for landing brand deals and sponsorships because it shows that you can influence your audience and can get them to interact with your brand partners.
Invest in brand awareness
An effective marketing strategy gets your name out there. Networking with other creators in your content niche can help you expose your brand to a broader audience. Another way you can increase your awareness is by creating merchandise for your community to wear. Not only will merch help grow your audience’s loyalty to your brand — since they’ll have something physically from your community to hold onto — your audience can help advertise your brand to others when using your merch. A few good merch companies that will work with creators include Teespring, Design by Humans and Spreadshop.
Stay consistent
Consistency is critical for every marketing campaign. You want to stay consistent with your brand voice and messaging — which is why it’s essential to develop your brand early on. Additionally, you want to post to social media consistently. It will keep engagement high and ensure your audience is constantly interacting with your brand. According to Hubspot, an established marketing and sales service, you should ideally post around one to two posts per day — meaning you have to be consistent with publishing content and sharing on social media.
Get your name out there
Making quality content as a content creator is only half the job. Marketing your brand is essential for growing your audience, increasing your brand awareness and ultimately boosting your bottom line. Practically every successful creator today uses some sort of marketing strategy and they’re all unique to their brand, audience and goals. Once you find out those are for you, you’re well on your way to making an effective marketing strategy.