You’ve spoken to your potential client and gotten to grips with their needs, you feel confident that you are a great fit and at this point, are ready to woo them into selecting you as a marketing partner. To seal the deal and win that perfect partnership, craft a seductive and compelling proposal that they’ll find impossible to turn down. 

To ensure your proposal is concrete, these are the elements you MUST include:

• An explanation of how social media marketing can benefit their business
• A list of the strategies and steps you will take to achieve their goals
• Proof that you are qualified and evidence of your previous successes
• A breakdown of the important details e.g. deadlines and costs

Include all of these in your proposal and you’ll be on your way to success. Your potential client will have all the evidence they need to make that final decision. Before you begin writing your proposal, keep reading as we’ve put together a step by step guide on how to do it best.

Determine the client’s goals

A great place to start is by finding out what their business and social media goals are. Once you know what they’re working towards, you can start to figure out how social media will help them get there. 

Suss out the client’s audience

Don’t make assumptions about their audience when writing your proposal. Collect as much data as you can about the client’s audience and use it to help you plan your strategy. If you have a relationship with the client at this point, ask them to provide you with any data or analytics they may have. 

Research their competition

Identify at least five of their main competitors and monitor their activity. Gaining an insight into their social media activities will help you identify any gaps, then you can put together a plan for how you’re going to fill it with your social media strategy. You should also ask the following questions when researching their competitors:

• How often do they post content?
• Is their content entertaining enough?
• Is their content useful?
• Which types of content do better than others?

Having answers to these questions will give you clear direction for your social media strategy. 

Run a social media audit

Investigate which social media channels your client is already using, identify which ones are most successful, and assess the metrics. Having a good grasp on what they’ve been doing, what’s been working and what hasn’t will help you identify growth opportunities. 

Create a content strategy

At this point you should be in a good position to begin planning your content strategy. Decide what content you’d like to produce on which channels, considering design, style and voice. Make sure you identify the strongest elements of your client’s brand image and capitalise on these. 

Remember, communicate with your client whilst you’re planning the content strategy, at the end of the day it’s their needs you’re trying to address so use them as a source of information. 

If you’re having difficulties putting together a great social media content strategy, check out this article we wrote. 

Write your proposal

If you’ve completed the last 5 steps, it’s time to put everything together into one great winning proposal. Remember to include:

• The client’s needs and goals
• Social media goals and objectives
• An outline of your tactics 

We hope you found this post helpful if there’s anything we can help you with, get in touch. 

Good luck!

You’ve created some quality content for your website and you start to see an increase in traffic. Unfortunately, though, the results aren’t quite as positive as you expected. Don’t panic, there’s more you can do to optimise your inbound marketing strategies! We’re going to walk you through another great SEO method that you might not have tried yet. 

Inbound vs Outbound Links

Today’s article is all about inbound links (or backlinks). These are different from outbound links (links from your website to another). Instead, backlinks are a type of ‘off-page’ SEO where you drive other websites to link your website and attract readers to your site this way. 

Backlinks can increase traffic to your website in two ways:

1. When someone else posts a link to your website on their website or blog, their readers might click on it.
2. Search engines rank you higher in result pages because backlinks tell them that your website is an authority on a certain subject. 

Sounds good right? Backlinks are a great way to get organic traffic to your sight. The more authoritative the websites are that link to you, the better your rankings will be and the more traffic you will generate. So, how do you build backlinks? Well, you have to earn them, and there’s plenty of ways to do this. We’ve created an extensive list of effective link-building strategies for you to have a go at. 

1. Produce consistent blog content 

If you’re producing regular blog content then you might already be well on your way to earning some quality backlinks. By maintaining the quality and frequency of your blog articles, you’ll naturally build authority on your chosen niche which will drive people to link to your blog. 

2. Link to other blogs

A really simple way to earn backlinks is by simply linking to other people’s blogs in your writing. If you do this enough, someone is bound to return the favour. 

Make sure you don’t go overboard with this though by linking to every Tom, Dick and Harry. Only link to another blog if the opportunity arises naturally in your writing. 

3. Write guest posts

This one might feel a little strange, but trust us it works a treat! Write a really good blog post and reach out to other bloggers to see if they’d be interested in publishing it on their blog. If someone bites, ask if they’d be willing to add a link to your blog. The result is that they get some quality content for their blog and you’ve earned yourself a backlink. It’s a win-win situation.

4. Produce handy resource lists

This strategy is the gift that keeps on giving. Put together a really useful resource list that’s relevant to your niche, for example if you’re a digital marketing agency you could put together a list of the best social media scheduling tools and post it on your blog. This will not only be helpful content for your readers, but great link bait too. Other bloggers can easily link to it instead of having to write out their own. 

5. Write newsjack articles 

You have to be on your toes for this one. By being the first blogger to comment on a news event, you’ll not only be favoured in Google’s algorithm for your freshness, but you’ll also be the blog post that everyone wants to link to when they publish their own version of the story. 

6. Write case studies and rave about your clients

Sing your clients praises in a case study about their business and they’re bound to link to you on their website. Showcase their great results and you’ll leave them no choice but to backlink you. 

Or, get on the other side of this strategy by volunteering for case studies. Offer up your time to be the subject of someone else’s case study so that they link you in their post. 

7. Offer free tools and templates

Going back to the resource lists we mentioned earlier, you can reap the benefits of being included in one of these lists by creating a free handy tool that other bloggers can include in their resource lists. 

Templates are another useful service that people will want to link to. Spend some time thinking about the kind of templates that make people’s jobs easier, for example prospecting email templates, and create shareable ones. Again, other bloggers might link to it in their posts. 

8. Write book / product reviews

Write an extensive (positive) review of someone else’s book or product and they’ll definitely want to link it on their own website. 

9. Design high-quality infographics and visual content

People love infographics. Create your own aesthetically pleasing and informative infographics for people to share and use in their own posts – they’ll link it back to you as the original source. If you’re not a designer, don’t worry, there’s lots of simple tools you can use to create your own compelling infographics. 

10. Make slideshare presentations

Similar to the last point – people love to share visually pleasing content. Pull apart your infographic and spread it across a slideshare presentation. Or maybe you’ve got some old ones you can repurpose. Either way, publish these on your blog or website so people can get sharing. 

11. Use comedy

Every marketer’s dream is to produce content that goes viral, and humour spreads like wildfire. Even the most ordinary business can find the private jokes in their industry. The Dollar Shave Club produced a perfect example of this, have a look at this viral video they created that worked wonders for their business. If you want people linking to your site, this is an extremely effective way to do it. 

12. Reach out when you post something great

If your company has big news to share, or you’ve put together an amazing bit of content, do some outreach to gain attention from the press. Getting published in industry publications will put your business in front of a huge audience, massively improve your credibility, and hopefully gain you those all important backlinks.

13. Team up with other companies

Partner with companies in complementary organisations to yours and work together to build each other up. They’ll want to talk about your business because they have a vested interest in your success. The bigger your company is, the more traffic you drive to their website, and vice versa. 

14. Get people to review your products

Obtaining positive reviews of your business is a surefire way to earn backlinks and attract new customers. Ask industry experts who’ve got credibility to review your products. There’s also product review websites you can utilise such as Trustpilot and Yelp.

15. Network

Building relationships with other webmasters will open doors for your business. If you can make real friendships with the people behind organisations, you’ll have a better shot at working with them when future opportunities arise. A company is much more likely to give your business a shout out if you’ve got pals behind the scenes. Networking is a crucial skill to have in the marketing world. 

16. Look for brand mentions

Monitor what other webmasters are saying about your business. There’ll be times when something they’ve said warrants an inbound link. For example, if someone quotes some data from your site, you’re well within your rights to ask them to include a link to your site.

17. Search for broken links

Utilise site crawling tools to identify outdated or broken links to your site. It’s natural that over time your website will change and elements of it will get updated, this can lead to the expiration of inbound links within existing brand mentions as they become outdated. Again, you’re well within your right to reach out and politely ask if the webmaster can correct the link. 

18. Track your competitors’ backlinks

Carry out frequent competitor research, weekly or monthly, to monitor your competitors’ backlinks. This way you’ll identify any new ways your competitors are gaining backlinks, and you’ll have the opportunity to hop on board and get in on some of the action. For example, if one of your main competitors has been recently reviewed, the chances are the review site will be interested in reviewing your product too. 

19. Encourage sharing on socials

A big part of off-site SEO is getting your content out there. If you can get people sharing your content regularly, you’ll rank higher on search engines and social feeds. This will result in even more opportunity for your content to be cited and referenced, along with those all important backlinks. Everytime you create content worth sharing, whether it’s infographics, white papers, blog posts or that humorous viral video we suggested earlier, include social sharing widgets so people can spread the love. 

20. Sponsor or speak at an event

If you sponsor or speak at an event, you’re guaranteed to get some publicity. The event host will value having you on board so don’t be scared to negotiate inbound links into your terms. 

Also, If you’re speaking at an event, you can use this opportunity to get some great content in front of an audience. Create an amazing slideshow presentation that people will want to share and talk about later – and hopefully link to you!

And there we have it, 20 tried and tested ways to build up your backlinks.

Good luck!

Why is social media the best place to advertise your brand? Well, around 4 billion people worldwide use it, that’s why. And since the Covid-19 pandemic, this number is growing rapidly. 

Social media platforms are the perfect tools to tap into a huge audience and get your brand the kind of exposure that is guaranteed to grow your business. 

So, without further ado, let’s look at how to create the perfect social media marketing strategy. 

Define your audience 

Before you do anything, you need to decide who your target audience is. To do this, create a buyer persona. This is a fictional representation of your ideal customer. If you already have existing customers you can compile data from them, if not, you’ll need to decide for yourself what kind of person will want to buy from you. Consider things like:

• Age
• Location
• Language
• Interests
• Pain Points
• Stage of life

If you’re finding this stage a little tricky, have a read of this guide we wrote on how to find your audience on social media. 

Set your goals

Next, you should think about what aims you’re trying to achieve with your marketing strategy. This way you’ll be able to track your successes and figure out if your investments have been worth it. It will also help to guide your activities in the right direction if you have a clear plan of what you’re hoping to achieve. 

Here’s some examples of the kind of goals you might want to consider:

• Build brand awareness
• Grow and manage an engaged audience
• Increase sales
• Obtain customer insights
• Identify and nurture leads
• Deliver customer service

Create great content

Now that you’ve established your target audience and your goals, it will be easier to decide what kind of content you’re going to produce. 

For example, let’s say your company sells recruitment software. You know that you’re targeting B2B customers, so your best bet is to publish content on Linkedin. Your content should be things like:

• Issues that are relevant to recruitment professionals
• Best practices that are useful to recruitment professionals
• Research within the recruitment industry

Check out your competitors

Keep a tab on what your biggest competitors are doing on social media. You can learn from what they’re doing, and compare your content against theirs.

If they’re publishing more content than you are… up your game. 

If they’re publishing content on more platforms than you are… up your game. 

If they’re creating more interesting content than you are, yep that’s right, up your game! 

Engage with your audience

Creating and publishing content is not your only job, you also need to engage with your followers. Encourage them to interact with your posts by using hashtags and CTA’s. Ask for their responses, and reply to them when they do. This will make them feel cared about, and help to build your online community and brand awareness. 

Follow these key points and you’ll be on your way to a flawless social media marketing strategy. If you need some extra help with your social media marketing, we’d love to help. 

Good luck!

New to blogging and wondering how to get some traffic to your site? Or, maybe you’ve been blogging for a while but your audience is as empty as it was on day one. Queue the tumbleweed. 

Do not fear! Growing your blog’s traffic is easy once you know how to properly utilise your social media platforms. In today’s post we’re going to talk you through the wonders of Instagram, and how it can be used to deliver a regular stream of traffic to your blog. 

Why Instagram is great for bloggers

First off, Instagram attracts over 1 billion users each day. That’s a lot of potential readers for your blog. When used properly, Instagram can serve as a great way to grow both your followers and your readers. Here’s how:

• It allows you to grow a community around your blog
• It’s a platform where you can promote your latest blog
• It enables you to connect with your readers

 Now that we’ve covered the benefits, let’s walk you through the best ways to create and operate a successful Instagram for your blog.

Choose a good username 

A good username will grab attention and draw people to your brand. If you already have a blog name, stick with that so you’re consistent across platforms. 

Pick a niche

If your content is all over the place, you’ll struggle to build a decent following. At the start of your Insta journey, you need to decide what your niche is going to be. This will be the topic or theme of your content.

If you’ve been blogging for a while you might already have a niche, for example if you write about food and publish recipes on your blog then you’re in a great position to build an Instagram page full of food related content. You could post video reels of the dishes being created, and photos of your final products. This will attract an audience who’re interested in food, and are likely to want to read your blogs.  

Master your Instagram bio

Think of your Insta bio as your elevator pitch. In 150 characters you need to persuade your audience to stick around and follow you. You can make use of emojis, hashtags and mentions to make it as interesting as possible. This is the only place you can insert a link too, so make sure you add a link to your blog here. 

Post frequently

It’s no good posting once in a blue moon if you want to build a substantial audience. Consistency is key. Everytime you publish a blog, create an Instagram post letting your followers know. Use high-quality images, attention grabbing captions, and of course, relevant hashtags. 

To optimise your growth rate, aim to post on Instagram 1-6 times per week. So, if you’re only publishing 1 blog per week, you’ll need to try and fill the gaps in between with photos and videos relevant to your chosen niche. It might seem like a lot of effort, but trust us, you’ll thank us later. 

Use relevant hashtags

Hashtags act as a discovery tool that allows anyone interested in your niche to find you. If you’re blogging about upcycling furniture… use hashtags like #upcycle #recycle #repurposed #homeinspo.

Top Tip: don’t use spaces in hashtags, anything after the space won’t be included in the tag. 

Include CTA’s in your posts

Everything we’ve said up to now will help you grow your account and gain followers. But how do you get those all important followers to take the next step and actually read your blog posts? 

This is where CTA’s come in. CTA stands for ‘call to action’, they’re words or phrases used to persuade your audience to perform a specific action. So if you want your followers to open a link to your recent blog post..tell them to. You could say something like the following: I went meat-free for an entire week, read about how I got on here, [insert link]. 

Engage with other bloggers

Within your chosen niche there is bound to be an entire blogging community. Interacting with others’ content will make you more visible in the community, and fellow bloggers might ask you to collaborate which is a great way to expose your brand to a tonne of new potential followers interested in your niche. 

Now you know how to properly utilise Instagram to grow your blog’s audience, there should be no stopping you! Go on, give it a try. 

If you need more advice on how to identify your audience, take a look at this blog we wrote on how to find your social media audience. 

Good luck!

Once a year your team should be sitting down and producing a marketing strategy for the following year. Why? Because without one your team is going to lack direction, and without direction it can be hard to push forward and stay on track. Plus, it will be almost impossible to put a number on the budget you’re going to need for all the projects, outsourcing and hiring to come over the next year. To make the ambitions and goals of your team a reality, a great marketing strategy is essential. 

In this post we’re going to talk you through each element of an effective marketing plan. Remember, every industry has different goals so you’ll need to personalise it to your specific company, but you can think of our guide as a template to work from.

What to include in your marketing plan

1. Business Summary

The best starting point for your marketing plan is to produce a summary of the business. It’s as simple as it sounds too – just make a brief summary of the organisation. Include the company name, headquarters, and your mission statement. 

2. Company Initiatives

Next, outline the company initiatives that are specific to the marketing department. This is a great way to map out the goals of your department; for example segment the goals of various upcoming projects and describe how these goals will be measured. 

3. Market Research

It’s likely that your company has already completed a thorough market study so this stage will be easy to complete. Split this step into two sections: customer profile and competitor analysis.

Customer Profile: Create a semi-fictitious picture of the ideal customer for your business and describe them. You should focus on their imagined traits such as age, location, goals, pain points, personal challenges, and triggering events. 

Competitor Analysis: Your customer profile should identify the challenges that your customer wants to solve. With this in mind, you can imagine the companies they might go to for these solutions. These companies are your competitors; identify them and evaluate their strengths and weaknesses and how they compare to your business. This information will help you identify gaps in the market that your company can potentially fill. 

4. SWOT analysis

SWOT is a great framework to use for evaluating your company and developing a strategic plan of action. It stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. A lot of this information can be gathered from the sections above, but be patient because it’s worth having if you want to identify your company’s future potential. 

5. Market Strategy

Think of this stage as your plan of action. Using the information you’ve put together so far, it’s time to lay out how your company intends to approach the market. If you’re struggling to figure out a strategy, think about this question: What should your company offer your ideal customer, to solve their solutions, that your competitors aren’t already offering? 

Having identified the product or solution you’re going to be offering, the next part of your plan is to create a list of the marketing channels you’re going to use to educate your buyers, generate leads and spread brand awareness. For example, if you intend to use social media channels, you can use this section of your plan to write down which social media platforms you’re going to use and how you’re going to measure their success. If you’re creating accounts from scratch, take a look at this post we wrote on how to find your social media audience. 

6. Budget

The final stage of your marketing plan is all about money. Dull stuff, we know. This step is essential though if you want to bring your marketing strategy to life. Itemise your budget by stating what you intend to spend on each individual expense, for example:

• Outsourcing 
• Software
• Ads
• Events

Establishing a budget also means you can calculate some financial projections for the year based on your ROI.

Creating a marketing plan is the best way to realise your business’ goals and put them into action. It connects everything together and makes sure that your team knows what to do, when to do it, to which audience and through the right channels. 

Good luck!

Whether you’re a newbie to the field or are an experienced digital marketer in need of a refresher, getting the lingo down can be tough. That’s why we’ve created this handy digital marketing glossary from A-Z of the most useful buzzwords all digital marketers need to know.

Audience

The demographic you are targeting your ads at in order to convert them into customers.

Backlink

A link that connects one website to another. Also called “inbound links” and are very important SEO tools. 

CTA – Call to Action

A word or phrase used in content to persuade the audience to perform a specific action, e.g. “buy now”

Domain Name

Part of a URL that identifies it as belonging to a particular company or organisation. E.g. in www.byter.com, the domain name is ‘byter.com’

Email List

A collection of emails used in email marketing. Each email address may represent a potential customer, business or outreach lead. 

Full-Stack Developer

A web developer or engineer who is capable of producing both client and server software. They work with both the front and back end of a website or application.

Google Analytics

A web analytics service provided by Google that tracks and measures website metrics such as which search engine was used to land on the site, where users are located, how many users have visited the site, how long they stayed on each page, and more. 

Hashtags

A metadata tag that is prefaced by the hash symbol, #. Hashtags are used for widespread content sharing, usually on social media platforms such as Instagram and Twitter. 

Impressions

Impressions measure how often your ad is viewed on-screen by members of your audience.

Java Script

A programming language primarily used for building interaction-based applications on websites or digital devices. 

Keyword

A word or phrase that is entered into a search engine. For the purpose of digital marketing, keywords are popular/ common words or phrases that are used in content to optimise a site’s ranking position. 

Lead

A lead is a potential customer, someone who may potentially or may have already shown interest in your product or services. 

Marketing Automation

Technology used for the purpose of streamlining marketing efforts to make them more effective. 

NoFollow

An identifier tag that tells search engines not to increase the ranking of the webpage it is assigned to.

Organic Listing

A natural or unpaid listing of a website on a search result page. The point of SEO is to optimise organic listings. 

PPC – Pay Per Click

An advertising method where advertisers will only pay for their adverts each time a user clicks on them. 

Quality Score

A metric used by Google, Yahoo and Bing! To measure the quality of ads. 

ROI – Return On Investment 

Measures the return on an investment relative to its cost. In digital marketing, calculating the ROI will tell you whether marketing and campaign efforts are contributing to revenue growth.

SEO – Search Engine Optimisation 

Increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results. For example, practising SEO can increase the visibility of your website on google search results. 

Traffic

Number of visitors to a website. 

URL – Uniform Resource Locator 

A web page address. E.g. www.byter.com is the address for Byter’s website. 

Vlog

A video blog. 

White Paper

An in-depth report or authoritative guide that educates an audience about a particular issue or problem.

XML Sitemap

A list of URL’s for a particular website. It is used by search engine crawlers to easily identify all of a website’s available content. 

Youtube

An online video sharing platform. 

And for Z….well, we’re not sure there is one. Please let us know if you have one!

Good luck!

Reaching customers is arguably the most difficult part of running a business. That’s where SEO copywriting comes in. If you’re wondering what it is and how it could help your business, we’ve written a simple guide of everything you need to know. 

What is SEO copywriting?

You’ve probably heard of copywriting – the act of writing text that aims to increase brand awareness. But, what is ‘SEO’ copywriting? Well, it’s a specialised form of traditional copywriting that contains keywords or phrases. These specially selected words are those your target customer is likely to type into a search engine because they desire the service or product you are selling. Ultimately, keywords will enable your content to rank higher in search results. Sounds simple. Right? 

Well, unfortunately, it’s not enough to just shove a bunch of keywords into your website content and hope it pays off. Your copy needs to be fine-tuned to the constantly changing search engine algorithms to ensure it ranks high on google. It also needs to be clearly written and enjoyable for your audience to read. 

4 Steps to successful SEO copywriting

To better understand what SEO copywriting is and how to do it, we’ve broken the process down into steps.

Step 1: Keyword search

Before you start writing, carry out some keyword research. Begin by channelling your customer, and ask questions similar to these: 

• What are people searching for?
• How many people are searching for it? 
• How do they want their information presented to them?

A lot of people bypass this step because it seems like a lot of effort when you already know what content you want to write. But, it really does pay off. Putting time and effort into the planning means your content is more likely to satisfy both what you want to rank for and what your audience really wants to read. 

Now that you’re inside the head of your audience it should be easier to create a list of keywords. You can also use tools such as wordtracker to help you decide on the best variations and combinations of these terms. You might then want to create a table of your keywords to summarise the information and order it according to some form of priority. 

Still a little unclear on keyword research? Take a look at this helpful guide .

Step 2: Plan your writing

We know, we know… more planning. But, if you want the writing part to go smoothly, then this stage is essential. Again, begin by asking some questions similar to these:

• What is the purpose of what you’re writing?

Answering this question will help you decide how you are going to write the article. For example, is the purpose to amuse your reader? Inform them? Or, is it to persuade them to do something? 

• What’s the key question you want your writing to answer?

Having this in mind will ensure your piece stays on track which is important because you want every word to count.

• What information is required for your piece?

You’ll need to make sure you adequately research the topic before you begin writing. Otherwise, you will risk running out of things to talk about or fail to answer the question your piece is intended to answer. 

• How do you want to structure your article?

A clear structure gives you a better chance of ranking well on Google. Your target readers are more likely to grasp your main points, and there’s a higher chance of converting them into customers if they properly understand your message. 

Step 3: Get writing!

Don’t let all of that planning and research go to waste, it’s time to get writing.

People often find it overwhelming to stare at a blank page, wondering where to begin. A good trick is to begin by mapping out the structure of your text, write your intro and conclusion, and then fill in the gaps. This way you’re breaking it down into manageable steps. Don’t worry about grammar and spelling, for now, you can perfect this in the final stage.

Step 4: Proofread and edit your text

With your SEO copy written, it’s time to make it perfect. In this final stage, you’ll want to remove sentences that are unclear or awkwardly written, correct any grammar or spelling errors and make sure your structure is well organised. It helps to pinpoint mistakes in this stage if you read slowly and outloud, you can also ask for feedback from someone else – a fresh pair of eyes will spot things that you’ve potentially missed. 

The aim of the game is to increase your brand’s search engine visibility. Using the right keywords in your writing is bound to have customers stumble across your content. But, if you want to maximise your success, follow our step by step guide on how to write a great SEO article that will not only rank high but be an enjoyable read for your customers too.

Good Luck.

Byter Team. 

What is branding? In broad terms “branding” is the idea or or image people have in mind when thinking about specific products, services, and activities of a company. This is both both in a practical (e.g. “the shoe is light-weight”) and emotional way (e.g. “the shoe makes me feel powerful”). Branding is the first thing you think of when you are asked about a particular brand. This concept also applies to personal branding.

For example famous people all have unique personal brands; Queen Elizabeth I, was famous for her red hair contrasting her pale face, accompanied by her extravagant gowns, she is known to this day as the Virgin Queen. In modern times big corporations have refined branding into art, with teams of people dedicated to massive advertising campaigns and carefully curated public relations. With the rise of consumer culture, more and more of the same products are being sold, and the only way to differentiate these products is through branding. This rise in ‘branding importance’ is now combining with the rise in importance of social media and micro-influencers.  

When you run a small business, you have an interesting branding dilemma. Do you solely represent your company as a corporate entity, like Coca-Cola does? (You have no idea who runs Coca-Cola.) This is the usual practise of corporations. It is how they appear professional and trustworthy. Or do you put yourself at the front of your company, essentially creating a cult of personality around yourself, like Steve Jobs did for Apple? 

If you sell a product, the corporate image is more important. If you sell a service, then the personality-based branding is probably more your cup of tea.

Here are 5 tips on creating your own personal brand:  

Branding, whether personal, or for a company, is basically the same. You must always find a way to differentiate yourself. Below are five steps to help you build your own brand.

1. Decide What Sets You Apart

• Look at what you do

• Look at what the others in your niche do 

• Work out what you did that makes you special: what can you do, or what do you do, that the others don’t?

• This USP (Unique Selling Point)  can be your product, or where you come from, or how you present your product, etc 

• Your values

This part of the process of branding is called differentiation. This is what separates Coke from Pepsi: two otherwise almost identical sodas. You can differentiate yourself through many things:  price, product, location, values, appearance etc. 

If you have a new and interesting product then it is probably easier to come up with a unique brand as no one else will be selling your product, but branding becomes more difficult if you are providing a common service or product. 

 If you are, say, a local plumber,  and you offer basically the same services and products as two other local plumbers, you cannot differentiate yourself from them through product, price or location. You can differentiate yourself by associating yourself with different values. For example, in Auckland, New Zealand, there is a company that provides general handyman services. They have called their company, Hire-A-Hubby. Their vans are pink, their logos are cute and funny. They are very recognisable. Hire-A-Hubby provides almost identical services to other less heavily branded handymen, but it had differentiated itself through its branding and has created a whole new market for themselves. Their target market is very clearly women who need handyman services. 

2. Make Sure the Right Content Is Being Found

This point is rather self-explanatory. If you are going to be your own personal brand, that means people will be googling you, to find out about your services. As a user of social media in your private life, you will have some kind of pre-existing footprint: photos from weddings, fishing trips, drunk Friday nights etc. If you set up a personal brand that associates you with say, wholesome family values, you do not want photos of your bachelor party on Hawaii being easily found by anyone who googles your name. 

You don’t have erase your entire online existence, however. It is a good idea, though, to google yourself and then do your best to clean up what appearsp. Make personal/ family pages private, so that strangers cannot see them. Do your best to get rid of any weird photos, or online profiles that can be easily traced back to you, e.g. you ran a Facebook page dedicated to some celebrity when you were thirteen. Delete or lockdown any accounts that you think do not match your chosen branding.

3. Start Networking to Build Your Brand

• You want to build a community around yourself. Your community will help spread your brand by word of mouth, whether on purpose or incidentally. If you build a community you are more likely to have good customer loyalty, and you will have a base which you can turn to in times of troubles. Networking takes time. You have to get people to become used to you and eventually trust you. You have to consistently interact with the people in your area, e.g. Commenting, liking, message sharing, etc, their content. You have to interact with people who come to you, do ‘giveaways’, polls, questions. Chat with them, put time into building up relationships. You have to choose a level at which you will engage with other people. If you keep interacting permanently,  people will find you annoying. But if you don’t interact regularly people will forget you. 
• Networking is basically a formal word for making friends in your area. You must make sure also that your friendships are on-brand. For example, if you are being a small, local  family-friendly plumber, maybe do not make friends with too many foreign drug dealers 

4. Find Ways To Make Your Personal Brand Stand Out. 

Once you have decided what your personal brand will be, what values will be associated with it? Who will your market be? What platforms will you be using to interact with customers? You will have to start creating content that will explain your brand and values to your customers. If you have chosen the personal brand format you will be having to sell a version of you to your customers. You have to get people interested in you, (well the version of you that you have chosen to be your brand). If you are using social media there are five main ways to get people interested in your personal brand. 

1. TELL YOUR STORY: people want to know stories so that they can become invested in your struggle
2. SHOW YOUR PERSONALITY: they want to know what you are like, social media is all about the person, they want to know what you like and don’t, what values you hold etc
3. MAKE IT MEANINGFUL: Instead of just commenting a heart emoji on 100 posts, and giving default business answers, actually take the time to talk to people. Make people feel like they are more than a faceless customer.
4. OFFER A BRAND EXPERIENCe: this is all down to your ability to pay attention to details. Small businesses on Etsy are a good example of this. They have their own special packaging, thank you card, and videos. They offer a very strong brand experience.

A good example of people who employ the above strategies, is fitness influencers. They often sell anything they can get sponsored for, so they do not have a fixed product. Their entire brand is their fun, quirky and above all very healthy personality. They often detail their struggles with weight loss, mental health or something else that allows them to tell a compelling story. This will take practice and probably quite a while to be able to create content that hits the right note with your customers and your brand.

5. Keep Your Information Updated

Lastly, if you want people to work with you, you have to keep your online presence up to date. This does not mean just your social media accounts,, you have to keep your Google listing up to date. Update your opening hours if you are a physical location, or check your reviews, answer questions etc. If you do not have a physical address you can still make sure your contact details are up to date. 

What is a social media manager? The Social Media Manager is responsible for a brand’s online presence, with an emphasis on social platforms. The Social Media Managers job can scale from being the only person in charge of a small brand’s entire social platform presence, creating all of the content and posting it; to managing huge companies online presence. In recent times more and more companies are understanding the vital importance of having an effective online presence, making SMM (Social media manager) one of the most sought after professions in digital marketing. 

What does a social media manager do?

Social Media Managers are in charge of the maintenance of the businesses online presence. So what are the responsibilities of a Social Media Managers? Some of a SMM’s tasks are monitoring, moderating and responding to audience comments; manage social media partnerships with other brands; and creating and posting sharable content such as videos and images. So what makes a good SMM? Communication, good copy, creativity and time management are all great skills to have as a Social Media Manager. This article gives a deeper explanation of the each skill set a SMM should have! Great read too!

Other skills you can work on to optimise your SMM skills:

• Literacy, and the ability to understand analyse

An obvious one. As a social media manager, you live in a world made of photos, but also of words. You have to be able to have a good command of the language, create engaging and interesting copy quickly. Another aspect you need to be aware of is your grasp of the language your brand uses to be aware of implications or be able to play with it. You will also need to know how to quickly research and analyse data, both from yourself and your competitors. being able to successfully analyse events and situations will allow you and your brands to keep up with trends.

• Being able to understand the various social media platforms and their analytics.

As a Social Media Manager, your sole job is to increase the effectiveness of your and online presence. There are four main sets of social media metrics that aid in evaluating the success of your online presence. 

Conversation rate – The number of conversations per post. On Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn comments and on Twitter replies.

Amplification rate – The number of re-shares or retweets per post.

Applause rate – Retweets, Likes, +1s, etc.

Economic value – The sum of short-term revenue, long-term revenue, and cost savings.

Evaluating the success of posts depends on the purpose of the post. Some posts are aiming to have a high reach. Other posts aim to have high link clicks or signups. 

• Being able to use at least one graphics package

This is another obvious one, you are working in the area of brands and branding is a heavily visual art. There are plenty of graphics packages out there, ranging from the simple, like Canva to the complex such as the Adobe suite.  You have to be able to make effective visual displays for your online presence. 

• The ability to plan.

When you are running social media for brands it is very important to have a plan for your content. This prevents you from posting low-quality content, running out of content to post, being unprepared and being unable to reach goals, or even have useful goals. When working for a brand, you have to plan your social media ahead of time so you can show it to your client for approval and have enough time to revise and change it. The interesting thing about social media marketing, unlike normal sales,  is the appearance of being new, unplanned, fresh and up to date. Social media managers have to hit a careful balance between appearing new, fresh, and off the cuff, to the customers and being carefully planned and true to brand with the company.  

• SEO knowledge.

Search Engine optimisation. This is thrown around as mysterious hard understand. It isn’t, it is mainly to do with websites and blogs. There are even plugins to sites such as WordPress who will help you with it. It is less important if you are only running on social media platforms like Twitter or Instagram.  

The best social media manager is someone who understands the platforms, the brand, and is flexible enough to mould both into a successful and engaging presence. It is a modern much more fast-paced version of traditional sales.  

• Being flexible/ spontaneous

As much as we have mentioned the benefits and importance of planning, we have also mentioned the necessity of also being a little spontaneous and taking risks. Sales live off this, you might accidentally create a viral trend, and become very important, or you could terminally embarrass your boss and be forced to put out an apology. Again here experience will help.  

• Valuable content 

Lastly, this is maybe not a skill but more of a statement, this is where social media sales is different from traditional sales. There are a lot of different marketing rules, but there is a general rule which is the 80/20 rule. This rule is 80% useful content talking about something other than yourself, and 20% talking explicitly about yourself. There’s another rule 70/20/10 rule. This rule is a refining of the 80% rule to help you narrow down what you need to post. 70% value, 20% promotion, and 10%, human. 

So, 70% of what the brand is going to post should be of value to its audience. Educational, funny inspiring etc. 20% promotion, discounts, sales, promo codes, giveaways etc.  10%  is the “personal touch”. These posts are often about things the brand cares about, brand values, or seemingly relatable personal things. (a good example of this maybe would be Wendy’s Twitter account when its creator took to roasting people for a few weeks).

In conclusion, a Social Media manager is a person who is responsible for a brand’s online presence. They are a combination of creatives, organisers and salesperson. The job is a flexible multi-faceted sales job, they must be able to understand the basics of advertising, like what campaigns are, but they must also understand the day to day stuff that goes into running a social media presence.

You can be your own social media manager as a business owner, but often that work can get too much for one person to handle. At Byter we specialise in Social Media Management, from content creation, strategy, management and audience engagement. If you need to alleviate some of your work load with social media marketing, don’t hesitate to give us a call or email (Contact page) 

You can also reach out to us on any of our Social Media platforms, we are more than happy to have a chat!