SHOW YOUR BRAND SOME BRAND SELF-CARE
February is meant for so much more than romantic love! February is the month to celebrate friends, family, and all the other things you hold dear to your heart…including the business you have grown from the ground up. In a way, a business is kind of like your baby - a concept turned into something you love that grows every day.
Your business is essentially an extension of yourself, brand self-care IS self-care. This can be defined as the idea of a brand focusing on improving and maintaining its brand image and influence through ongoing strategies.
The goal of brand self-care is to always be attentive to what’s happening in the world and think of how you can adapt your business. To ensure your brand can maintain a strong positive image you must foster trust and loyalty among customers and consumers. Gaining that trust can be done in many different ways, below are a few of my tips.
How to practice brand self-care:
Maintaining brand consistency across all touchpoints
Like any progress in life, good things take time and consistency. To form a meaningful and large network of followers you must appeal to all platforms. A smart business tactic is being able to make your brand relevant enough to be on each platform. That means your business is adaptable, universal, unique, and simply brings something great to the table.
Regularly updating branding materials
Being up-to-date on the best methods of branding is key to success. Especially in the creative field, progress is only relative to what the newest idea/concept/tool is. You could be thriving with your business, but if you miss a new technique you might take steps back while everyone else takes one forward. No need to panic though, just make it a routine task to check other creators and platforms to ensure you’re not missing anything big.
Monitoring and managing your online presence
There are a million brands out there, so do all you can to make your brand presence online loud. Pour your personality and love into your business and give it the flare it needs to succeed. On top of that, create a strict schedule for yourself on posting and engagement tactics. Being your own boss has many pros but they do not come without cons. Your brand is fully your responsibility, no one will be yelling at you to make sure you post on time or meet deadlines, be strict about your structure, and stick to it.
Invest your time into Research
There’s a specific purpose for each online platform, to optimize your time and energy you need to know the ins and outs of them all. Instagram, for example, is an engaging platform. You can grow a community of like-minded individuals and loving consumers by interacting in the comments, stories, direct messages, and the shop section. As opposed to Pinterest, which is a search engine used to discover new concepts and ideas. Pinterest is the place to drive website traffic as opposed to forming relationships. Time is precious but allocating a good chunk, in the beginning, to make sure you are a social media expert will help you in the long run.
Utilize Business Tools
Today the internet allows us to assess to thousands of free/affordable business tools to aid us on our start-up journey, so use it. Some of the main ones out there are Click Up, Canva, Google Analytics, Adobe, etc. The power of a YouTube tutorial can take you from beginner to intermediate to advanced in a matter of weeks. Never be discouraged by the uncertainty of a platform, use your resources to learn all you can and crush it.
Celebrate Milestones
Don’t get trapped into an “all work, no play” mentality. Yes, a business is taxing and requires much work but it is also a visual representation that hard work can pay off. It is a gallery of your accomplishments. Celebrate little and big milestones alike. Treat yourself, plan giveaways, host events, etc. Always remember to acknowledge the hard work you have put in, it releases stress and gives you the motivation to keep working hard. ESM Creative turns 5 in March and you know we will be throwing a party!
