Your report card and game plan 📑

Your quiz results show that you’re a branding A-student, but your grades could be better in marketing. By refining your marketing efforts, you can amplify the impact of your branding initiatives and build a larger and more engaged community.

Your business’ rockstar area:

Branding

Where you could shine brighter:

Marketing

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What your results mean

Your prowess in branding shows that you have a solid understanding of how to shape the perception of your business in the eyes of your audience. You likely have a strong sense of your brand's values, personality, and core identity, which are crucial elements for creating deep connections with your customers. However, your marketing score indicates that there's an opportunity to enhance your strategies for reaching, engaging with, and converting your target audience.

While branding lays the foundation for building long-term relationships with customers, marketing is the vehicle for conveying your branding to the world. A good marketing strategy ensures that your brand reaches the right audience through the most effective channels and resonates with them. 

Your game plan in a nutshell 👇🏾

1

Understand key marketing principles to create a strategy.

2

Make sure your marketing strategy aligns with your branding.

Before we dive into the details, get familiar with the key concepts

  • A brand is the way that the outside world perceives your business. For example, most people view Apple as an innovative brand and leader in technology and Hermes as a brand with high-quality leather goods made for the wealthy.

    Branding is the decisions businesses make to shape the outside world's perception of their brand.

    Did you know that brands with well-defined and consistent branding have a 91% higher yearly increase in customer retention rate? Branding makes your ideal customer stay loyal to your business over thousands of competitors because they want to be associated with you or agree with your unique perception of the world. It is an element for further differentiation in a competitive world with thousands of great products and services.

  • It’s the foundation of your branding. A brand strategy helps you understand your target audience because you want branding that connects with them; enables you to analyze your competitors and your industry because you want to figure out how you can stand out and learn from best practices; and helps you create a unique brand story that resonates with your audience.

  • Branding is foundational; it's who your business is, and marketing is how it shows up. Think of it as your personality versus how it is expressed when you choose how to dress.

Here’s your detailed game plan ✔️

Social Media Marketing know-how and implementation:

There is no short-cut around this one — get clear on basic marketing principles (eg. The rule of 7 and buyer psychology) for small businesses on social media

  1. Based on those principles, create a repeatable system you can use to generate good and strategic content consistently

  2. Make sure you’re only focusing on one to two social media platforms at a time — once you master them, you’ll be able to expand (where does your target audience hang out most?)

  3. Maintain consistency across all platforms to truly build your brand. Every piece of content should reflect your personality and tone of voice both in messaging and visually, strengthening brand recall and loyalty

  4. Measure the success of your marketing efforts after a month by looking at key performance indicators in your social media analytics

  5. Look at individual posts that have succeeded and double down

  6. Look at individual posts that have performed poorly and learn from them

Branding (bonus)

While you’ve scored high in branding, here is a bonus checklist that will help you revisit your brand strategy and make it even stronger. This will directly reflect on your marketing:

Step 1 — who you serve (target audience analysis)

If you’re a branding A-student, then you already have a good understanding of who your target audience is. You can skip the first step but going back to the basics always helps.

  • What are your target audience challenges? Identify at least 3 clear challenges related to your industry.

  • Who is your target audience? Outline their general demographics.

  • Dig deeper — what does their day-to-day look like? What are their aspirations? What other brands do they really like and engage with? What are their values?

  • Create a user persona profile and bring your ideal customer life — give them a name, an age, a gender, a personality, a lifestyle, etc.. based on your research findings.

Step 2 — branding alignment

  • Review your branding and get clear on the following:

    • Your values (what do you stand for?)

    • Your pillars (what are the elements your brand focuses on?) Hint: these should be aligned with your values

    • Your personality (what keywords can describe your brand’s vibe?)

    • Your brand archetype/s

    • Your tone of voice (how are you going to channel the above into your messaging?)

    • Your mission/vision/promise/tagline/positioning statement

    • Your visual identity (logos, color palette, typography, photography direction)

  • Based on your target audience analysis: does your branding align with your target audience (eg. value alignment)?

Okay now that you have a game plan, here are your 3 options to achieve it 👇🏾

Grab the Streamlined Guide to Branding & Social Media Marketing 

Method breakdown

You’ll be guided step-by-step to create a brand strategy, visual brand identity, and social media marketing strategy. It’s essentially your brand strategist in a pocket and was created specifically for entrepreneurs like you, who understand the importance of branding and marketing but cannot hire an agency. The guide simplifies agency-grade strategies into a simple workbook with exercises, real-life examples across various industries, and cheat sheets. 

Pros

Affordable, no overwhelm, no confusion. Just follow the guide step by step and build your dream brand plus a marketing strategy based on buyer psychology, tried and true marketing principles, and a repeatable system you can duplicate and use forever.

Cons

It’s not a quick fix, you’ll have to dive deep into brand building and follow an agency-grade process. It’s simple and easy to understand, but you’ll be reading, writing, and designing. 

or

DIY completely

Method breakdown

Keep your checklist close and open your tabs. Browse the internet to dive into each sub-topic mentioned and utilise AI like Gemini or Chat GPT to help you along the way. 

Pros

Free

Cons

While there are some great free resources out there, most of my clients complain that the free stuff sound great in theory, but in practice leaves them even more confused. If you have time on your hands and you’re good at synthesizing information — this could work.

or

Call up an agency

Method breakdown

You’ll outsource your social media marketing and/or branding to an agency, and rest easy knowing that pros are handling it for you.

Pros

Expertly crafted — sit back and relax.

Cons

Time investment (weeks to months), cost (at least $1000), you don’t walk away with any knowledge, making you dependent on the agency for implementation and changes as your brand grows.