When you’re in public speaking, your face, your name, and your brand are all that people will know about you. If you cut out your brand, that leaves your face and your name vulnerable to public opinion with no strategy.
So, give yourself the best odds by creating a profitable public speaking brand.
3 Steps to a Profitable Public Speaking Brand
In three easy steps, you can take your business and brand from obscurity to popularity.
Step 1: Define Your Public Speaking Brand
Defining your public speaking brand is about getting clear in your message. You need to communicate exactly how you’re uniquely positioned to serve your audience. If you’re speaking to everyone on super general and impersonal terms, you’re speaking to no one.
How your public speaking brand is represented in the digital space can be what separates you from the competition. If you’re in a saturated market, you may be viewed as a commodity.
When you use your uniqueness to position your brand you will get you more customers. However, it is key that you define your public speaking brand. When you do this, you take power into your hands because you get to determine how your consumers perceive your business.
Time is money. The more time it takes to explain your offering, the more money it takes to market it.
-Juntae Delane
Without a precise definition of who you are, your clients will be confused and so will you. If you don’t know who you are and what you stand for, you can’t expect anyone else to either.
Create Your Elevator Pitch
A solid pitch will allow you to communicate precisely who you are, and what you offer in a quick way. This laser-like focus can help to set you apart from all the competition.
After all, if you don’t know what you want to get from your digital brand, you can’t begin to achieve it. Understanding exactly what you want from your digital brand will make the process of digital branding so much easier.
Your pitch is what will define you on the internet, so write down a few sentences that say who you are. Your pitch should include:
- Your name
- Your company
- The product/services you offer
- Who your target customers are
- What makes you unique
- A call to action
It is important to center these ideas and make them clear, so your target audience can understand, recognize, and seek out your brand.
Create Your Slogan
Creating an effective public speaking brand slogan will force you to be clear about who you are and what you have to offer.
If you don’t create a solid brand slogan, people may be confused or even turned off by it. When they get confused, they will likely go elsewhere. Even worse, if they are alienated by your slogan for one reason or another, they will form a negative opinion of your business.
So you’ve got to be clear. That’s why you want your brand slogan right at the top of your website and your social media accounts. And you want it to be relevant and of quality.
There are four specific categories to think about when creating your brand slogan.
- Identification: Your slogan needs to match your brand and your logo
- Memorable: Your motto should have staying power and be easy to remember
- Beneficial: Your slogan should highlight your value to customers
- Differentiation: Look at what others are doing and use your motto to say how you stand apart
Your slogan will need to be distinctly yours and match your unique brand. This may mean going with something like:
“Talk the talk like a pro.”
or
“Speak your truth.”
The direction you go in will need to complement your branding and bring focus to your unique qualities.
Step 2: Build Your Public Speaking Digital Brand
Before people visit or work with businesses, they almost always look them up online. This means that in most cases, your target audience will interact with your digital brand before they associate with your physical brand.
So, how do you make your public speaking brand ready for digital searches?
Build Your Home Base
To ensure that your audience gets the right information the first time, you must focus on building your home base. For most of us, our home base is our website or blog.
Your home base is a critical component of your digital brand. Your home base must be visually appealing, responsive, professional-looking, and easy to use.
The first thing you’ll need to do when creating your home base is decide on your domain name. You’ll want to make sure that your domain name has keywords that are relevant to your specialty. It will also be vital for you to get a branded email to correlate with your domain name.
Even if you aren’t ready to use your domain name, it is a good idea to register for them now. Registering early will ensure that when you’re ready to develop your webpage, the name you want will still be there.
SEE ALSO: Navigating the Web Design Process
Build Your Email List
If you want to succeed in digital branding, get serious about building your email list. Your email list is one of the most valuable assets for your brand. This is because it allows you to initiate contact with your followers.
There are a few ways for small businesses to grow their email lists. The first is to offer an incentive. This is how you woo your target audience and help them to realize you have something valuable to offer. Incentives can be:
- Links to your podcasts
- YouTube channel links
- Downloads of ebooks you’ve written
Adding an opt-in form on your website is an essential way to get your target audience’s attention and encourage them to sign up for your email list. You can include these on the side of your website, the bottom, or as a scrolling pop up. It all depends on your target audience.
Build Your Social Media Accounts
Your primary objective for building your social media accounts is to focus on interacting with your audience and building brand authenticity.
Being relatable to your target audience will separate you from the competition. If you are not sure how to do this, it is actually quite simple. You want to engage on social media the same way you would engage in the real world. So, treat customers and clients online the same way you would in real life.
When first starting out on social media, it is important to remember to only focus on one site. Having too many accounts can be overwhelming and spread you too thin to truly build any of them.
Facebook is usually the most popular channel to start with. This is because it has over a billion users of all ages. However, it is important to be strategic when posting on Facebook. You will have to decide how you want to use free or paid for content options.
SEE ALSO: How to Prepare for the Facebook Newsfeed Update
Step 3: Manage Your Public Speaking Brand
This is a part of your digital brand that will remain a part of your day to day tasks. Sometimes it can be in your best interest to find digital branding services that can help to manage this work for you. Many entrepreneurs and business owners wear many hats, and simply don’t have the time to post on social media and also manage an entire online strategy day in and day out.
SEE ALSO: Monitor Your Digital Brand
Leverage Other People’s Property
Blogging is communal. Those who participate in the community win. Once I tapped into that secret, I experienced more audience growth in six months than I had in the six years prior.
I started engaging in the blogging community and began leveraging other people’s audiences for my own benefit. It is your audience size that will determine whether or not you create a profitable digital brand.
-Juntae Delane
Finding blogs in similar niches as yours are a great start. Start out by participating in the comments section. After you have built rapport, then see if you can be a guest blogger for them later on.
Guest Blogging
When picking a place to guest blog, it is important to remember your public speaking brand’s values. You want to make sure that you choose a blog that also has similar values.
You will also want to check the guidelines of the blogger to see if they accept guest posts before you message anyone. After that, if everything lines up, then you can contact them and share why you’d be an excellent fit for their blog.
When going through the process of finding the right blog to guest post on, make a list of five blogs that you’d be willing to work with. Then reach out to them. The odds are pretty good that one will be interested in your contributions. Also, if your pitch is well thought out, you might just get a chance to write for all of them.
Repurposing Your Content
The constant pressure to create new and interesting content across multiple platforms all the time can easily lead to burnout. Especially if you are not super familiar with social media, it can leave many business owners feeling a bit like this:
Fortunately, you don’t actually have to singlehandedly produce brand new sparkling content all day every day from scratch to build a successful digital brand.
If there are several ways to say one thing, why do we continue to struggle when creating content?
-Juntae Delane
Instead of creating more and more new pieces, you can take apart pieces of old content that were popular and turn them into new pieces.
If you have several different problems that tend to come up that have similar fixes, you can repurpose the same content to address the various issues.
In this case, everyone wins. Some of the weight of content creation is lifted off of your shoulders. Also, at the same time, your target audience still gets access to the answers to their problems.
Final Thoughts
A lot of what will make people book you for public speaking events will be your digital brand. This gives you an opportunity to introduce yourself to infinitely more people than you could in person in a controlled and also strategic way.
These three steps to building a profitable digital brand will make sure that you stay on task while creating a strategic digital brand. You need to define your brand, build your brand, and monitor your brand for maximum success in the digital world.
What are some aspects of public speaking branding that you’ve noticed?
