3 More Steps to Build an Awesome Personal Brand
In the last post we looked at four steps to building an awesome personal brand. This week we will continue by looking at three more ways to build and enhance your personal brand.
1. Create more relevant content
Believing you know what your fans want, and actually knowing what content your fans enjoy the most are two different things. Take some time to research what it is your fans truly want to know about you and your music. Once you know the “what” and the “why”, you can target your content towards buyers, which may reach new audiences. Just remember that relevance is not a constant, but should be considered more of an ongoing conversation with your fans. Keep check on the pulse of your fan base and revise your content as needed based on the results you receive.
2. Create fresh and unexpected brand experiences
Branding has become the “in” thing to do for indie artists. With so many “brands” for customers to choose from, your challenge is to make your brand experiences fresh and unexpected. Edwin Bragg, VP of Marketing and Communications for a popular hamburger chain, Shake Shack, states, “We are all about creating a dialogue and being ourselves, that’s what people want, right?” Your fan base doesn’t want to interact with a version of you projecting a standard persona you think they want to see. They like that you are independent, unique and creative. Those are some of the reasons they follow you. Make the journey fun, exciting and atypical. Think from the standpoint of your audience. What would you, as a fan, like to see your favorite artist sing, play, engage in or offer?
3. Incorporate fan-generated content into your marketing plan
Fan-generated content will help you keep content fresh without having to do all the work yourself and it will help you keep fans engaged. Ideas can include adding fan photos from your concerts to your album cover pages, fan quotes on your blog posts, fan videos and audio on your website and social media, etc. Enter into your audiences’ world, while at the same time inviting them into yours. Book a couple of shows and invite select fans to the invitation-only shows to premiere a new release.
These three additional steps, combined with the four steps from last time, will help you to develop your unique and memorable personal brand. Now that you have the tools needed to create a memorable personal brand, return soon for suggestions on how to best use social media with your fan base.