Branding Byte #018

During the last year, I’ve been part of two startups and one thing struck me:

The level of uncertainty in a startup is insane. There is no such thing as a ‘plan’ of ‘previsions’. In this ecosystem, nothing beats practical feedback and market preferences.

Coping with that uncertainty is hard, and not everyone can accept seeing their work vanish from one week to the other because it is no longer a priority and you need to work on something else.

At the beginning of my journey, fresh out of a life where planning for 3-5 years ahead was completely normal It was frustrating to experience the startup life.

However, I quickly understood that relying on the same metric to motivate and organize my work as I did before won’t work.

If you subscribed to this newsletter it means that you understand the power of content, and especially how it can impact an existing business or help you build one from scratch.

Having a personal brand through content creation is the best protection against the constant change you face when building a startup.

See it as a security layer that will provide you with continuous options in your business because you successfully build an audience that trusts you.

Unfortunately, many startup founders believe it’s not an important part of their business and decide to postpone it.

It’s quite unfortunate when you see the level of leverage those that invest in their branding are getting. I might even say that the secret of many Startup’ success lies in the personal brand of their founders.

Startups Focus Too Much on Features.

The goal of a startup is to solve a pain experienced by their niche persona.

That doesn’t mean building the best product with the best features. What it means is building the right narrative with the right features around your Ideal Client.

But it’s understandable that building a Personal Brand is postponed:

• Time is scarce, the focus is on the product.

• It’s not accepted in all industries: fear of judgment.

• Lack of knowledge about how to build a personal Brand.

• Underestimate the power a personal brand can have in your business.

Been there, seen it, and I know how to deal with these elements. Let’s get straight to it:

Finally, give the reader a sentence of hope: you're going to explain to them how they can overcome all these problems you just laid out!

Step 1: Define Your Band Vision  

The goal of your content is to build a narrative you control and give you options and flexibility in the future of your brand.

For that to happen you need to explicitly identify what is your vision:

• Why did you launch your startup?

• What market are you going after?

• What are the pillars of your positioning?

• What is the mission you decided to give yourself?

These 4 won’t change even if your product does, creating content becomes, therefore, a natural component of your startup strategy.

Your narrative is an asset, one that has multiple uses, investing in it early on will help you:

• Become known in your market for a specific vision.

• Provide network opportunities based on your values as an individual.

• Identify leverage possibilities based on your positioning and value proposition.

Your brand narrative is the only asset that’s not duplicable by your competitors.

So take a personal inventory of your values, strengths, the unique selling point you want to provide, and a Brand statement that summarizes your positioning.

Going through this step is essential as it will shape the type of content you will create at your name.

Step 2: Consistently Communicate - What is your product about

While change is the only constant in the startup world, you need to be proactive and communicate about the evolution of your product with your audience.

What people think a product is:

• Pricing

• Industry

• Features

What a product really is:

• Pain solved

• Benefits provided

• Transformation to a desired state

• Materialization of a guiding figure

Your content is what distributes the information regarding your product, stop thinking about it as a technology and start thinking about it as a Guide that provides emotional relief to your audience.

Content lets you build coherent branding, you become known for a specific reason and it strengthens the perception people build of your product.

So now think about your daily work this way:

• Struggle with something? Write about it

• Interesting call with a client? Write about it

• Market news? Write about it

• New monetization strategy? Write about it

• Difficulty to find a Producr-Market-Fit? Write about it

• Need specific feedback? Write about it

• Noticed a success in your industry? Write about it

• Thinking about solving a pain differently? Write about it

As long as it doesn’t put your business in danger (competition stealing some specific information) you can write about it.

The goal of your content is to build a familiar presence, as a startup is about change, you better have the right data and feedback to make thoughtful decisions backed by concrete knowledge of your market.

Create a content calendar and commit to it, as for your content strategy I wrote a few months ago a complete newsletter about it that you can find: here.

Step 3: Be the most authentic version of yourself

Trust is the most important element of a startup journey. Whatever your positioning B2B or B2C you need to build an environment in which people look up to your brand.

• What makes you familiar and differentiable?

• What values can people sense reading you?

• Why will people use your solution instead of others?

   

Your personal brand is about humanizing your product and your startup as a whole. It may seem silly with it’s easier to buy from a brand with a face behind it than from a random brand that’s not familiar.

• Why do you use one restaurant over the other?

• Why do you buy one toothpaste over another?

These simple questions that you can ask yourself daily hold the secret to building a successful Personal brand.

Trust is the single element that can convert attention to action and if you don’t invest in content you're falling behind.

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If you found that useful, follow me on Linkedin, I help 4800+ people daily leverage growth through content creation.

Till next week for a new Branding Byte!