Your brand identity didn’t just materialize overnight. You had to hone your craft, find your voice, learn from the experts, create content, find a place to house it, and all the rest, right?
It’s a lot of work, so you don’t want to miss out on opportunities to be found and to convert the people who find you. But you just might lose those people because of things like poorly formatted profiles and content that doesn’t leverage the strengths of the media channel.
So today we’re going to talk about how to create a brand that shines because you’ve set up the identities in the right places and in the right ways to let people know what you’re all about.
So, how do you create a brand identity that shines? You build it in a way that follows the guidelines of the channels you’re using. That helps you stand out and position yourself, so when people look for you, they find something that really reflects who you are and what you’re all about.
We’re going to start by going through three sets of priority items you should be looking at if you’re building your brand identity through podcasting, video or blogging.
- Your profile: your bios, your biographies, your profiles, your cover — all the things that represent you as a profile.
- Episode headlines and thumbnails — things that set you apart and grab attention for your content.
- Content categories, keywords, and tags — the things that identify you in your area of expertise.
Is Your Brand Identity Showing Up in Your Profiles and Bios
First impressions matter. Your first impression for most of your social channels and content will be your biography, your profile, or your cover. That’s what’s going to define who you are.
This is your chance to start crafting what you want your audience to see. Let’s say someone logs in and tries to find you on Instagram, or they bring up your podcast and look at your cover.
What you want them to see is who you are, who you can help and how you help them. You want that to be apparent right off the bat. A lot of us figure that out in terms of how to introduce ourselves, maybe at a networking event, but we don’t follow through by defining that in our online profiles.
That’s a big miss because right after someone meets you, they’re going to go check you out in some online channel. And if you haven’t consistently put that same information and support across all those channels, you’re going to be missing out.
Think about that. In your podcast description, are you defining who you are, who you can help and how you help them? Same thing with YouTube. In your profile feature video and description, are you answering those questions? What about your social channel bios?
You’ve done a lot of work getting the content right and putting it in all these places consistently, but you also need to think about how that content is presented. How does it look and sound? How well does it read?
Does your copy match your brand identity?
The better you write your content, or the better you show it with images and graphics and high-end design and copywriting, the better your brand identity comes off.
Look at your intro content — the copy or the video or the snippet — and ask these questions:
- Does it sound like something you’d be proud of?
- Is your personality at the forefront?
- Do the words you use describe who you are, who you can help, and how you can help them?
- Can the audience tell what kind of person they’re going to be working with based on your brand voice and how you talk and how you spin the words to explain those things you want to share?
- Are you including some kind of social proof that shows why people should trust you?
- Is there clarity in how you present yourself?
That final question is important. If you aren’t being very clear and articulate in what you’re all about, what you stand for, who you can help, and how, then people don’t know if you are for them.
It sounds like a lot, but your intro can be very simple. A couple sentences is good. It doesn’t have to be a long-winded write-up. And honestly, that’s why most profiles give you such little space. It keeps you focused.
You’ve got to leverage your social platforms to define your brand identity. Presenting a clear, consistent message that conveys your personality is the place to start.
Reinforce Your Brand Identity in Headlines and Thumbnails
If you talk to any media guru out there who’s been doing this a reasonable amount of time, and you pick their brains on how to get a little more viewership of your videos or a few more listens of your podcast or more people to read your article, a lot of them will tell you right off the bat, let’s look at your headlines.
Think about your emails. What emails do you think get opened the most? The ones with the catchiest headlines that really speak to the audience and entice them to want to read more. That’s true of everything. Same thing with video search on YouTube. The headlines that are thought out, use the right keywords, are attention-grabbing, and use the right words to leverage the power of the search engine are the ones that get clicked.
Headlines determine whether you get shown to people and then whether they click you or not.
So, the most important thing you can do to be found is to use the right headlines and thumbnails. And the thumbnails are just the pictures you use to describe your content. If you’re skipping this and you’ve created this amazing content, but you’ve taken the easy way out and not put a lot of work into your episode headlines, you’re going to be missed. They’re not going to find you.
Of course, once people have found you, the content has to be good to keep them there. But if they don’t find you in the first place, then you’re doing all this work for nothing.
What makes a good headline?
Here’s what you do to make your headlines good. You need to provide relevant solutions for your audience, and it needs to show up right there in the title of the episodes. And you need to use the words they use.
I actually had to refine my approach to this because I didn’t know what keywords people were searching for. I just used something that I thought was attention-grabbing, which I think a lot of us do. We ask, “Well, what would stand out? What would entice people to say to use this?”
For example, when I started this episode, I was thinking, “Let’s talk about the social media guidelines for your profiles.” But that’s not what people type in. They type in words like “brand identity.” That’s a more heavily searched word.
So the content is the content, but you need to ask, what am I going to call it that brings people in? You’ve got to use those words they use, and you need to keep it simple.
Being clever does not work when people are trying to find you. You might need one clever word, but the rest of it needs to just be simple and make sense.
You do need to grab attention, and you need to be creative, but don’t go overboard. The way to be creative is to think about the emotions you want people to feel. You want to convey and be empathetic to what they are feeling and thinking when they’re typing these things in. What are they looking for that’s going to relate to them?
If you can do that with your episode headlines, you’re on your way.
Thumbnails
Think about your thumbnails the same way. On YouTube, this is huge. One of the most important things you can do on YouTube besides your headline is your thumbnail. You want to create a graphic that is simple, that catches their attention using maybe four to six words only.
The image is a huge attention grabber. If it’s a face, that’s awesome because faces are captivating. Take the emotional face someone’s making — whether it’s a smile, a laugh, cry, a funny face, whatever it is — and zoom in on that face. Those are the kinds of things that get people’s attention and get them to click.
People are going to be looking at your channels to see, “Does this work for me? Is this the kind of person I want to listen to?”
If you’re missing strong headlines and thumbnails, you’re missing your chance to convert and for your brand identity to shine. Having clear, consistent headlines and thumbnails that reflect your brand is what creates your brand identity.
Categories, keywords, and tags
Creating a brand identity that shines also comes down to details like your content categories, your keywords, and your tags.
Keywords are not a new thing. Tagging is not a new thing. Category is not a new thing. But, if you want to be findable on these media channels, you need to make sure you’re putting yourself into the category where people would expect to find you.
For example, my content is about marketing and personal branding. I need to make sure that I’m showing up within the marketing category. How do I do that? Well, I have to actually select that category for my content. Then I use keywords to categorize myself there and tags to call out those things that fit into the category.
A blog is a perfect example. You get to choose how you categorize your blog, and it needs to be pretty top end. So for me, personal branding is one category of content. A lot of my content is about personal branding. Content marketing might be another category, and entrepreneurship might be a category.
Get detailed with tags
You get to choose the things you want to be found for. But then when you tag individual articles, you need to make sure they fit.
For me, if it’s something within the realm of marketing and I’m interviewing a Facebook guest, or an Instagram guest or someone who’s an expert on blogging, I need to make sure I have tags that reflect it. Now, when someone looks into my content and they want to know specifically about Facebook ads, they can just look at that tag and say, “OK, here’s all the different articles and guests that have been interviewed regarding Facebook ads.”
It’s your job to organize your content in a way that helps people find it. Same thing for category selection. If you want to be found within a podcast search engine, like iTunes, you need to make sure you’ve chosen the relevant category that your show falls into.
Take me. I know marketing’s great. That’s what I’m all about. But if I chose career advice as the content category, I’m not going to fare as well. I might be bigger than a lot of the shows in the category, but I’m not going to be found or be relevant because the people who are looking for shows in that category are looking for shows that aren’t mine.
So you’ve got to think about not just how to hack a system, but how to make sure you’re finding the right people who are actually looking for you.
Curate your content
Beyond choosing your categories, you should also think a little bit about curation. You can talk about a lot of different topics — maybe getting into mindsets, emotions, advice, expertise and all these other things — but if you get a little too far off-topic or too broad, you’re not going to be curating an experience for your audience.
So you need to be thinking about that. Does everything you build help relate to one particular topic or not? I’m not saying you have to get super niche, but I am saying you need to create a bunch of content within a particular topic category so people understand what you’re all about.
You’re positioning yourself in a category, and to do that, you need to make sure you are curating your content into categories that make sense.
Beyond that, you need to take people on a journey. If you want them to stick with your content, you need to let them know, “You were curious about this one thing within this category, but by the way, here’s all the other things that you would want to know.” And tell them the highest level piece of content that you want to drive them toward.
For example, if you are teaching people how to do something in the category of blogging, like how to find a website provider or a host, you might show them how to create clever subtitles and titles. Or maybe you’re showing how to add graphics to their blogs.
Point back to your pillar content
You might teach them all of these things, but don’t just let them live independently. At the end of the year, say, “By the way, if you want to learn how to start a blog, go to my main article, my pillar content on how to start a blog top to bottom.”
You should be driving them to your most important content. That way, you show them, “This is everything you need to know in this category. This is the most important thing you can do, and you should save this and share with people.”
It helps you not only establish yourself as being an expert or being known for this particular topic or category, but also it keeps the users in your world to show them the next piece of content they can be consuming, because guess what. They don’t always know what the next thing is that they should be learning.
They might be thinking, “I was curious about this one thing, but I didn’t realize I also needed to know these five other things to get good at this category that I’m trying to get good at.”
You can show people the way by using content categories to classify all the things you’re teaching into one bucket so people can kind of go through the list and check them all off.
Brand identity by platform
So we’ve got three elements:
- Biographies, profiles and cover art.
- Episode headlines and thumbnails.
- Content categories, keywords and tags.
All of these are really important priority items to be thinking about when you’re creating a brand identity that shines. If you do these right, you’ll be findable. You’ll shine, and you’ll stand out because you’ve done these other things to keep people engaged.
Let’s dive into some of the specific platforms and areas to give you some ideas and tools.
Podcasting
For podcasting, one of the ways you can really represent yourself is to create an amazing graphic design for your cover. It’s probably the first thing you did before you even built it. I actually even do episode art, and I use Canva.com. And these are affiliate links that might earn me a few pennies, but they’re not going to cost you anything extra.
If you go to Canva, you can design cover art and design episode art that makes sense to get people’s attention for your show.
The next thing for your podcast is that you might want to promote it with an audiogram. That’s a graphic image and the waveform with a clip from your actual show to help promote it.
That’s how people are seeing your show for the first time in a lot of cases, because not a lot of people are searching for podcasts in a podcast player. They’re actually searching for it on social. So how do you build your brand identity for the podcast? You might have to do it off of the podcast platform and bring people in through social media.
One of the tools I love to use is Get Audiogram. This is one of my favorite audiogram tools. I’ve tried several of them, guys, and this is the best one for audiograms for me.
The last piece is Fusebox. Fusebox is a podcast player that you can embed on your website or into your blog posts. If you want your episode to show up with a better-branded player that shows and highlights your show and other episodes, then that might be something for you to consider.
Video
One of my favorite things about video today is that live video is probably easier for people who are just starting. It’s a little less intensive in terms of having the perfect lighting and background. When you can just stream from somewhere in your house, people are a little more forgiving about the content and the background because they realize this is a live stream.
You can also go to a tool like StreamYard and create a branded background and frame for your show. It doesn’t take much work, and you can use Canva again to create that image.
Now, every time you turn on your show, instead of just your living room background or whatever, you’re in your branded background. You can also create borders and titles and embed them on your graphics on top of your stream to show people that you are a little bit more professional. StreamYard is amazing for that.
And you don’t just have to live stream. You can also just record there in the platform and then save it and download it for later.
Another great tool for research to get some of the keywords we’ve been talking about for video is TubeBuddy. TubeBuddy suggests tags for you, lets you know how things are doing, and tells you extra steps you can take to make your videos more findable.
TubeBuddy is something I’m using right now. It’s just one more way to make sure you’re being categorized correctly, getting the right keywords and tags, editing your episode headlines and things like that, so that you are findable. They even help with thumbnails if you need that.
Blogs
Blogging is really important for anyone, even if you’re doing video or podcasts. Your blog should contain your videos or your podcasts, and it’s one of the hardest things to build correctly.
A lot of people try to shortcut it and just do show notes, but for me, a blog is hugely important. So much so that I even started to go back. I learned how to blog, went back and am refreshing all of my podcast posts to not just be show notes but to be actually full-on blogs.
One of the amazing tools I’ve discovered for that is Yoast.com. If you have a WordPress site, Yoast is a plugin that you just turn on and use.
It tells you things like are you using enough keywords in your copy? For example, if you say this blog is all about brand identity, but then you don’t use the word “brand identity” in the post multiple times, then the search engines won’t know that this is what this article is about. You need to help them figure out what the articles are about.
I’m not saying you go crazy and add the keyword a million times. Yoast will actually tell you the right number of times to use it for an article or blog of a certain length. Yoast is one of the industry standards for this. If you’re in the business, you should know that.
Starting your blog
If you’re just getting started and you haven’t even launched a website and don’t know where to go, that’s a whole other thing. You can Google how to launch a website, but one of the partners out there that’s highly recommended is BlueHost for you finding your website domain and paying to have that hosted.
Anyway, Yoast for me has been one of the most important things in getting that an SEO-friendly blog accomplished other than actually having, going through and learning blogging from the experts in the industry.
Grammarly is another tool I use to help me make sure I’m not spelling things wrong or using sentences incorrectly because my grammar is not the best all the time.
Sometimes, there are just words that just need to be fixed or sentences that need to be rewritten in a way that just is better English. Grammarly is great for that.
Brand identity bonuses
There are two other bonuses I’ll give you here to help you guys out.
After you do all of this work we’ve been talking about in this episode, one of the most important things you can do is to bring people into your world by signing them up for an email list.
That way, you can send people your work more regularly because on most of these platforms we’ve talked about, viewers don’t all end up being people who subscribe or even see your video a second time. However, if you can get them onto your email list, you now control the conversation, and your branding will show up.
When you send emails, it’s actually easier to sell, to talk to your customers about the things you actually do, and talk about how you can help them than it is in a video.
They don’t want to hear all that stuff in a video. They just want to get the answers they’re looking for. If you want to sell them something, get them on your email list and then talk about your services.
ConvertKit and Designrr
The email provider I use is ConvertKit.
One of the best decisions I’ve made was changing over email providers. HubSpot was not for me. It’s just way too expensive for the entrepreneurs out there that aren’t huge, massive businesses.
But ConvertKit is amazing. It’s used by some of the top experts out there, and it’s a great way to create landing pages, manage your email list, create little lead magnets, and just embed that in your content.
And then a new tool I use right now is called Designrr. This actually takes my content, like a blog, and converts it into a PDF that I can send you guys via email. So if you ever want a copy of my episodes, just ask and I can send you it via email.
If you want to just have something you can print out and have at your desk, Designrr is cool for that.
Embrace your brand identity
What I want you guys to take away is that your brand identity is more than coming up with a cool thing you say about yourself.
It really is what you do to go the extra step, to make sure that the right information is showing up in the right places, in the right formats.
Write it all down if you need to, so you have these guidelines that you follow every time you change something:
- Did you change it on your social profiles and thumbnails?
- Have you updated your headline to be something people are actually searching for?
- Did you alter your content categories, keywords and thumbnail to match?
- Does your biography highlight something that matters? Does it go through what’s important?
If you’d like to create that brand identity that is consistent across all of your media channels, be sure to take a close look and be more thoughtful about these priority items.
And remember, building your brand is a journey. This is just one step in the process. I know it feels like a lot every day you’re learning something new, but that’s how it’s supposed to be. Just pick one thing at a time, tackle little items each day and move forward.
MORE ADVICE AND INTERVIEWS
If you’d like my full plan for how to build your content marketing strategy, check out my free Content Marketing Starter Guide.
And here are some more of my most popular thought leader interviews!
- What Business to Start with John Lee Dumas
- Personal Branding Masterclass with Chris Ducker
- Built to Serve with Evan Carmichael
Don’t want to miss the next thought leader interview? Subscribe to the free B-team Insider Newsletter! And don’t forget to leave a rating and review on iTunes.
Talk soon!