Dare to be seen, do the Gary Vee thing
By: Stinne Friis Vognæs
Tags: Branding, Hacks, Entrepreneurship, Startup, Marketing

Everyone today is fighting for attention. Some would even argue that especially in the world of startups, entrepreneurs and the next big thing, having the attention of people is crucial to succeeding. Getting people’s attention for just a moment though is very hard work and takes a lot of strategizing and resources. So what chance do you stand if you want to get the word out about your new startup?

VaynerMedia visit to The Shortcut Lab (Photo by Aimal Hakimi)

Last week VaynerMedia visited The Shortcut to talk about branding and marketing strategy, especially for startups and NGOs who neither have a lot or HR or money. Brand identity and brand awareness are challenging for most entrepreneurs starting out and can often seem overwhelming and complicated. Luckily there are many simple ways to get started and here are three main ideas I took away from the VaynerMedia workshop.

Humanize your brand

Many people know that it’s a good idea to create an ideal customer persona. But what about your brand? What kind of person would your brand be? In the age of social media, the level of engagement from customers or potential customers with your brand is often very high. You need to understand who your brand is. How does your brand talk, what is it interested in and what kind of characteristics would it have?

Furthermore it can also help to consider the questions; ‘Where does my brand have the right to talk?’ and ‘What do we want to be the main authority on?’. Make sure you know the voice of your brand, where it is relevant and where your customers would like to find it.

Deliver good content and have a true fan base

It can be easy to forget the actual strength of being consistent, delivering good content and truly trying to serve the customers you already have. You have no interest in just attracting a lot of people; you want to make sure you attract more of the right people. Having a true fan base is crucial to your success, because these are the people who really believe in the service or product and they believe in you and your brand. They are your biggest promoters so don’t get distracted by making it big and always trying to find the easy win, put in the work and experience how these true fans might become your best marketing tool.

Document over create

Many startups gets stopped by not having a professional photographer, videographer, no fancy equipment and so on. Today we are so fortunately to have so many different channels, tools and ways to create content and engage on social media. That creates new unlimited possibilities for even the least marketing-savvy people to get started on social media. Most of us have a smartphone with a decent camera and it’s easier than ever to snap photos, make short videos or go live on Facebook. Even more important, we often get caught up in how nice something should look or planning huge campaigns instead of starting small. A much more straight-forward approach is to just start documenting instead of creating. Especially for startups this is a great approach because so many people are curious about what is happening behind the scenes and the challenges they are facing recorded with the phone with no editing can be much more interesting. Additionally this is also a great business move since the more you put out there the more feedback you will get. That means you can start to see what actually works and what doesn’t and constantly improve.

Finally, what really stuck with me though was a point about empathy. You need to be able to put yourself in your customers’ shoes. If you are not trying to develop your product or service in the best way possible for them, then what are you doing? Understanding and being able to think like your customer is vital for your success. You need to understand where your customer would like to find you and what they would like you to talk about. Understanding the consumer need and really mapping out the customer journey is a great first step towards growing your customer base and becoming a successful startup.