How to grow your business from branding and marketing

Hello guys I am Praneeth Kumar here and in this article, we will be looking at a brief guide on marketing and branding and how you can grow your personal brand or increase the brand of

your business using digital marketing strategies. You should be reading this article if you are a complete beginner who wants to learn digital marketing or grow your personal brand online, make money, and grow your business.

So let’s get started.

What is a brand and its types?

The brand is a business concept that helps people identify a company product or individual, it is like a perception, idea, or thought, it is something you can feel and think, or remember, for example

if you remember any company like KFC or McDonald’s’s, you can immediately think of tasty food like chicken leg pieces in kfc and mouth-watering burgers in McDonald’s and fast and tasty pizzas in Domino’s, and

you can think of tasty coffees and lattes in Starbucks, smell of coffee, and if you think about apple company as great amazing phones, great security, great IOS software, amazing performance, great camera, etc things like simplicity, and innovation as the brand perception.

This is a brand the companies have built around them.

Now, there are many types of brands you can choose to build like,

1. Personal brand
2. Product brand
3. Service brand
4. Corporate brand
5. Investor brand 
6. Place brand brand
7. Nation brand
8. Ethical brand
9. Celebrity brand 
10. Ingredient brand
11. Global brand

But in this article, I will help you understand how you can build a personal brand and a brand for your company like product or service brand using both digital marketing and traditional marketing strategies in specific.

But before that, it is important to understand the difference between the two.

What is personal brand?

Personal brand is personal and about individuals, like if you think about bill gates you can remember things like a great coder, great philanthropist, great guy, and avid reader, all these things, and you can perceive Elon musk differently, etc

The main advantage of building a personal brand is that you can start multiple businesses under your own name for example Elon Musk is a great example of a personal brand, and

he owns many top businesses like Tesla and SpaceX which are run by him, he also runs companies like star link, Solar City, etc, having a personal brand will help you stay unique in the market.

Other than Elon Musk you also have many athletes and sports people like Virat Kohli Cristiano Ronaldo Lionel Messi m.s Dhoni all these sports people have their own companies which are run under their personal brand.

This is the main advantage of having a personal brand but there are some downsides of it as well like it is not an investable business, and once the personal brand dies,

your business will not do well, It will become tough for you to stay authentic and It can be hard to scale the business, etc but I believe personal brand has more advantages than disadvantages.

What is a product or service brand?

These are also like brands on your products and services, how people perceive your service, business, etc

So let’s see how you can build your personal or product, or service brand in detail.

There are both advantages and disadvantages to this thing also like it will increase the customer loyalty to the brand, It will increase the awareness about the product to the customer and

people and more importantly it is an investable business and you can also sell it and get the cash whenever you want, It also helps your product stand out from the competition and the disadvantage can be that it is very competitive and expensive, etc

These are all the advantages and disadvantages of building a brand for your business

Now let’s take a look at how to build a brand for either your product or yourself.

How to build a personal or product brand and grow your business?

So I will be explaining to you how to build a personal brand or brand for your business and grow your business in 5 easy and simple steps for complete beginners.

So let’s get started.

1. Niche selection

The first step you need to do if you want to either start your own business or you want to build your own personal brand or a brand for your product or anything like that you will have to select a niche and topic or market whatever you call it.

For example if you want to build your own personal brand and you want to start a business with the name of your personal brand like how people like Elon Musk or sports athletes have multiple businesses under their own personal brand then you will have to select a niche.

Now you might be wondering that how do I select one well there are a few steps you need to follow and here is a beautiful image that describes how you can get a niche for your brand.

An ideal niche is just a combination of three things,

• Your talent
• Your passion 
• Market 

In order to identify the niche, You have to identify and know your strengths and weaknesses, what are your talents, like are you good at bodybuilding, Are you good at coding or programming,

Are you good at digital marketing or graphic design, video editing, public speaking or any other skill like that, After you identify your talent you have to make sure that you are really passionate about that talent,

passionate in the sense that you should be happy and curious to learn more about that talent, share information and help others with your talent, and last but not least you should also see if there is a demand and need for your talent in the market like can you solve any problem of people using your talent.

I know several people want to just go with broad niche instead of narrowing down to a single one but the problem in that is going to be that you cannot build a good brand, You cannot build authority and expertise in multi niche, You cannot sell many products and make money in a broad niche.

Let me give you some examples of businesses which have been successful by selecting a niche instead of choosing a broad niche.

1. Justdial- This is internet company that provides local search information about businesses on its website and app
2. Canva- This is a graphic design tool that you can use both on desktop and mobile and using this you can create amazing graphic designs and social media posts using drag and drop feature, when ever you think about graphic design tools for social media for begineers you think of canva, isnt it?
3. Tesla- this is an electric car company that manufactures and produces world class electric cars that sometimes exceed diesel cars like Ferrari and Porsche, when ever you think about electric cars, most probably tesla cars would come to mind because they are luxurios and fast.
4. Rankmath- This is a wordpress SEO plugin which helps you optimise your website for search engines and help in on page seo
5. Grammarly- This is a free grammar checking tool which will help you remove grammatical mistakes whenever you write something on Google docs and other places on the internet and also helps you paraphrase the content
6. Cars24-This is online marketplace where You can buy, sell second hand cars in India, This platform sells more than 1.5 million cars annually 
7. Olx- This is online marketplace and e-commerce store where you can both buy and sell second hand goods and products, This website helps connect the buyers and sellers and exchange goods

As you can see in the list most of these are multi-million dollar and billion dollar companies, what makes them special and unique is that they cater to a specific market and they are revolved in a particular niche, They are not into a multi niche category because of that they build brand awareness and customer loyalty,

for example if you see top companies like apple is special for creating great phones, laptops, ear phones and watches only and it is not into things like creating fridges, acs, other electronical devices, apple largely specialise in creating amazing phones, and google is specialized in search engine market.

Now, what if you dont know your niche or you dont have any speciality? Well, this was the problem i have faced in the beginning as well.

I know many people who have found a market, a passion but they dont have the talent or skill and are stuggling to identify their niche then here is how you can get through it.

Here is an image that describes how to build your personal brand and start a business.

This is called as masstrust blueprint which helps you create your own personal brand strong and for those who have not found a niche, what they should be doing is to fist identify their passion and interest, then they should be learning some skill which is in demand in the market like,

• Coding, 
• Video editing
• Graphic designing
• Cyber security
• Public speaking
• Digital marketing
• Web development
• Adobe photoediting
• Photography
• Nutrition
• Accounting
• Content writing or copywriting
• Technical writing
• Podcasting
• Body building & fitness 

Any other skill and gain knowledge about it and then You also obviously need to implement it in real life and practise it, After you get good experience of learning and practising it you can start writing about it on your blog and having a blog will not only help you create credibility and you can also rank

your articles on Google and get traffic free of cost and you can then collect email addresses through lead magnets of your target audience and build relationships with them, again After you write articles and when you showcase to other people then this will help you slowly build your expertise and authority

in the space and you can then get some consultation calls and provide advice or help others solve their problem by charging some money like for example you can offer video editing services for various YouTube channels

or help people lose or gain weight by your body building and fitness knowledge or help help small businesses create amazing websites using your web development skill, after that You can mentor and

teach your skill to different types of people and this will slowly help you master your skill and after that you can start your own business like sell any product or service where you teach your skill and solve a problem of your customer and this is how you make money from your personal brand and all starts from selecting a niche and learning some skill and knowledge and helping others.

2. Important marketing rules to remember

After you identify your niche it’s time for you to understand some important rules of marketing before you understand about personal branding that are,

• Marketing is basically science not any creativity or any belief or anything like that, there are various techniques and marketing strategies you can use to influence people to buy stuff from you
• Many people think that marketing starts after you create the product but it is wrong, marketing starts before you start your own business because if you see most people buy anything like any product or service if they have any problem or any need for it and if you want people to buy your own product then you will have to identify the pain points of your customers after you select your niche, understand what are the problems they are facing and what is the solution to their problem that you can solve with your product
• Marketing does not end when any person purchases your product but it continues even after someone purchases any product because customer reviews and ratings, testimonials and word of mouth marketing plays an important role so if you want to keep your business sustainable and scale your business then you will have to keep your existing customers happy and satisfied so marketing is not just about getting new customers but also keeping your existing customers happy so that they can give good reviews and ratings, purchase more products from you in future.

These are some important rules I believe you should be knowing before getting started in building a personal brand.

3. Formula to build your brand online

After you select a niche you then have to create content and build following if you want to either build a personal brand or a brand of your product.

This is more important if you want to build a personal brand, and there is a good formula called nCATT which was coined by digital Deepak as you can check it in the image below

Basically if you want to build a strong personal brand then here are the steps you need to follow,

• After you select a niche, You need to create content like articles videos images visuals podcasts lead magnets and many more types of content and share it with your audience on various platforms such as Facebook Instagram LinkedIn YouTube TikTok, and also on your website as blogs, This is how you grab attention of your audience, and when you regularly publish content related to your niche then you can build that authority and trust with your audience because you will be developing that expertise after regularly publishing the content and you will be seen as credible person by your audience by publishing content regularly

• After you publish content regularly for a couple of months or maybe a little bit more time, people will start perceiving you as an expert and this will help you build trust with them and then you can start converting your audience into leads and sales and get them to buy your product or service.

This is the formula of creating a personal brand or creating a brand for your business and growing your business and also growing your revenue in general.

In different industries you can find many examples like in digital marketing space there are people who have strong personal brands like Neil Patel Gary vaynerchuk digital Deepak brian Dean, and in finance space there are personal brands like Ankur warikoo, etc who have created strong personal brand

by creating content and sharing it on their website and social media profiles regularly over a period of time and this has helped them create a strong personal brand and influence on a particular group of people, and with their personal brand they have created multiple businesses under their personal brand and increased the revenue significantly.

4. How to use digital marketing for brand

I would like to dwell more on content marketing because it is the most important part of building any personal brand or building any brand for any product in general.

Here is a beautiful image of how you can use content marketing to grow your personal brand by digital Deepak.

As you can see in the image above that how content marketing can help you in various forms.

For those of you who do not know basically content marketing is creating content in form of videos articles podcasts images and visuals, PDFs and several other types of content and sharing

it on various platforms like LinkedIn Facebook Instagram YouTube which i have already mentioned earlier and you can also write articles around particular topics in your niche and publish it on your website and

slowly you can rank your articles on Google by doing SEO, You can also run paid advertising on platforms like Facebook and Instagram or on Google and bring people to your website or any landing page and you can collect their email address of your target audience with lead magnets and you can then

build relationship with your audience through email marketing using email marketing software like convert kit, and over a period of time as you continue to create content and share it on

various platforms Which I mentioned earlier and you will good connections and relationships with your audience through email marketing and social media platforms like replying comments and going live, This will slowly help you build trust and establish credibility with your audience.

There is something called as rule of seven in marketing which means that customers or people will not buy any product or service until they see and interact with product at least seven times, the more time you see any product or service on your device or on your television as ad or any other way repeatedly

it will increase the brand awareness about the product, it helps you get familiar with the product and slowly build trust and this is how you slowly convert your audience into customers using content as

you can regularly publish content and your audience would see, get value and help from it and by publishing content regularly they feel you are expert and authority and build trust with you and buy your product.

So at the end of the day, we use content marketing and other forms of marketing like email and social media only to build trust, increase brand awareness and maintain brand loyalty with a larger group audience and sell them something that is useful and unique and solves the problem of the audience.

5. Digital vs traditional, which is the best marketing strategy

Now, You might be wondering which platform you should be using for marketing whether it is digital marketing or traditional marketing then let me tell you you can either choose a hybrid or you can choose anyone depending upon the type of product you promote and the niche.

For example, if you promote any product like soap or detergent or any television, any food item, car, bike, any electronic device or anything like that then because the niche is quite broad, and because your target more general audience of any age then you can target traditional marketing as well like TV ads billboards and

radio ads because there are millions or billions of people who watch TV and billboards, but the disadvantage of this is that you cannot either measure your performance of marketing and you cannot personalize your marketing strategy, It is also quite costly and less customizable, 

but it works for most generic products which has broad audience and niche, and if you have some specific audience type and you have more narrow product like you sell some business software to some business professionals like any SAAS product then You should probably be using digital platforms to market your

product like Facebook or Instagram or Google where your target audience hangs out the most, the main advantage of choosing digital marketing is that it is quite cheaper than traditional marketing,

You can measure the performance of your ads through digital, You can personalize and customize your ads and marketing, You can reach a worldwide audience, It increases engagement and there are several other benefits of digital marketing over traditional marketing but as I mentioned earlier which one you should be chosen depends upon the type of product you promote and sell and your niche type.

Conclusion

To summarise the entire 3000 words article in 100 words, if you want to build your own personal brand and start a business then you would have to select a niche and for that, you need to have some skill and passion for it and there should be some problem that people are facing and are willing to pay money to solve the problem,

You would need to create and publish content on various platforms like social media and blog, You would need to then interact with your audience through emails and social media platforms and build trust with your audience and then convert them into sales.

This is exactly how you can build a personal brand or brand for your own product or service.

Do let me know what are your thoughts about building your personal brand or brand for your own business in the comment section below also share the article with your friends and let them get the value and knowledge of growing their personal brand.