How to grow brands authentically.
Have you ever felt forced to write about a topic on social media? And, on top, you didn’t even get any views?
Maybe you’ve been told to post five times a day on three platforms and use the same structure over and over again. Because that just works. Yet when you get to the task of creating content, your mind goes blank and you’re unable to get out a single word.
You still write these content pieces, but without excitement, without an emotional connection, and without a personal touch.
The brand you’re shaping in public, just doesn’t feel like you. And it’s likely because you haven’t found your branding sweet spot yet.
It’s also the reason your audience doesn’t resonate with your content yet.
If you thought you have to replicate the practices of more advanced creators 1:1 and test every trend that exists to succeed — this article is for you.
To build and grow a brand that “feels like home”, you have to find your creative sweet spot and slowly work towards your goals by adding small sensations.
Here’s how.
Where Organic Brand Growth Happens
What do you do when you got lost in the middle of a foreign city?
You return to a place you already know and reorient yourself. The same practice also works in branding. The problem? Many entrepreneurs don’t have a home base for their brand, meaning a place they can return to when they got lost in content creation or marketing messages.
One way to find and establish your brand base is Allen Gannett’s concept called The Creative Curve. The concept explains how people achieve commercial success in any creative field.
To build something that stands out (creatively), you don’t necessarily need talent (it might help though). You need to find the creative sweet spot, that both offers familiarity with your personality and growth potential.
This spot is located at the intersection of what’s novel and familiar.
If you look at the graph, you would get most familiarity in the middle of the curve. This is where we feel comfortable creating. However, we know from other areas in life that our comfort zone doesn’t necessarily hold most of the growth potential.
But how can we combine familiarity with growth? By adding a layer of novelty to our brand.
It means, we’re deviating from the status quo only enough, so we
Through the eyes of our audience, it means we’re offering a brand that is both sage and intriguing.
According to the mere exposure effect, the preference of our audience toward an object increases with the level of familiarity.
But there’s a problem: too familiar is boring. And too new is risky.
We have to establish enough familiarity so that our audience recognizes us and we can build rapport.
However, Solopreneurs Often Do The Following
On social media
They look at other creators and try to imitate them, either in terms of topics, frequency, templates, or methods.
And I understand why. Because we believe the more we act like our idols, the easier and quicker we’ll get to our goals. I did the same.
I studied top creators and tried to dissect their content pieces into topics, forms, and structures — developing templates so I could replicate their process.
The problem? It never felt like me.
The way I used to write posts didn’t sound like me and I believe my audience noticed it too, which is why I never really got traction.
The same is true for trying to push through a specific amount of posts or forcing yourself to talk about topics you don’t care about — just because they are trending.
Yes, some people post twice a day on LinkedIn and it works. But the same people are probably not running a communication agency in the background with ten clients they need to serve. But I do. Which is why I cannot replicate their frequency. And that’s okay.
You don’t have to do what other creators are doing. Instead, establish your own status quo.
Forget trending topics and templated posting schedules and get back to your roots as an expert to create familiarity.
Then, once settled, slowly experiment with methods, topics, or ideas to add sensations for your audience.
In Public Relations
Unfortunately, most solopreneurs don’t do PR for themselves, even though getting messages out on earned channels like podcasts, magazines, or other creators’ platforms is a great way to increase your visibility quickly and build trust among your audience.
Those few creators who understand the importance of adding PR to their marketing mix, often don’t have a strategy in place.
Every month, they come up with new topics that are often only remotely connected to their core business and pitch them to journalists. The problem?
They leave journalists (and if published also their audience) confused due to too many content threads. This confusion is often also visible in their brand character.
Familiarity, however, is created when you spin the same topic in different ways, so it sticks with your audience.
And what about growth?
I want you to dream big and aim for coverage in Forbes or Business Insider. But promise me one thing: you don’t try to fly high quickly, as Ikarus did. Start small and scale in a sensible way, so you’re chances of reaching the sun increase exponentially.
What do I mean by that?
If you’re just starting your PR, don’t reach out to the big magazines, TV stations, or creators straight away. Your pitch and your topic will likely not be perfect yet and you don’t want to miss your shot because of bad preparation.
Familiarize yourself with the process and the mechanics of cold pitching your story, writing guest articles, and being interviewed with smaller media outlets, such as local newspapers or blogs.
Amy Porterfield, Tony Robbins, Tim Ferris, all have been mentioned in Forbes or Business Insider but it wasn’t the first interview pitch they did. It was more like the fiftieth.
Plus, by growing from small to big press, you’re also adding novelty for your audience and yourself.
How Do You Get to The Sweet Spot?
We’ve learned we have to establish the status quo and grow from there.
So firstly, answer the following questions for yourself:
What values do I currently represent?
How do I want to make business with clients?
What‘s my core business and where does it match my interest?
What does my target audience currently know about my industry?
Are they familiar with my topic or do I need to educate them?
What are the current industry practices?
These questions help you to understand what you want to stand for and where your business and personal interests overlap. They also show the knowledge level of your audience and how you should approach them to build rapport.
In short: they form your status quo and represent the preference axis.
What about the novelty aspect of the equation?
You know the end result you want to achieve with your brand. After establishing the status quo, you need to add innovations, ideas, new concepts, and unexpected methods one by one to create a sense of novelty among your audience.
By doing that you slowly shift the intersection down the familiarity axis toward the sweet spot, keeping a balance between the personal character of the brand and its growth.
Ideas You Can Implement
Here are a few ideas on how you can create familiarity with your audience on social media, in public relations, and in visual brand design:
Pick a color and font and use it throughout your visual communication. This way people recognize your content more easily.
Start and end your newsletter, general emails, or posts with the same introduction or words of goodbye. I for example always write “Alles Liebe” (German for with love) at the end of my email, instead of “sincerely” which all other people use.
Use the same tone of voice, such as humorous, floral, or straight to the point. Don’t try to write in a way you wouldn’t talk in real life as well.
Decide on a topic and write it down in twenty different ways, always changing only one element.
Showcase your current projects and how you’re helping clients right now.
Once you’ve established a brand status quo that you feel comfortable with, you can start moving towards your goal in mini-steps.
Here are a few ideas:
Start pitching yourself to other creators or small press outlets in your area. Scale by the size of the audience.
Consider guest lecturing at a university on your topic.
Write a book about your topic.
Develop new business models, concepts, or ideas in your area that can become standard resources.
Become a speaker at events.
Engage in social, political, or environmental activities if they are of interest to you.
Launch a course.
Your Take Away Points
The best way to grow a brand and keep its personal touch is to balance familiarity (both for you and your audience) with novel elements.
Before you head to the drawing board, I want you to remember two important principles:
Familiarity isn’t created by copying others. Familiarity is created by being you, developing your voice, and finding the people who see the world through your eyes.
Novelty is not created by jumping on every trend. It’s created by derivating just a little bit from the status quo, so the brand essence is kept intact while you move your audience from one milestone to the other.
Stay true to the roots and topics of your brand, and experiment slowly. This way you’ll scale your brand and it will tell feel like you.
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