Key Takeaway

  • Brand strategy is crucial for long-term success. It helps you build meaningful relationships that transcend specific platforms or algorithms with your audience. 
  • It's never too late to develop your brand strategy. Begin by clearly defining your brand identity and creating a PRFAQ (public relations frequently asked questions) to articulate your story.
  • Regularly assess your brand health by monitoring engagement metrics, not just traffic. Strong brands cultivate loyalty and drive deeper audience interactions. 
  • When considering a brand pivot, move carefully and intentionally. Preserve what's already working while strategically shifting towards your new goals.

It goes without saying that anyone building a brand wants it to stand the test of time and continue making an impact on its customers for years to come. No matter how humble our origins are, we look at the Nikes, Starbucks, and Apples of the world and imagine our efforts paying off big.

But it takes more than a great product to make an impact. You also need to build a brand that resonates. 

A great brand strategy ensures your customers build meaningful, platform-agnostic relationships with you. So when their favorite social media platform goes the way of the dodo, you’re still top-of-mind, even without the algorithm pushing your content. 

But how, exactly, do you accomplish that? 

That’s exactly what our very own Ashleigh Respicio, Director of Partner Success Operations, wanted to know. So she asked an expert – Catherine Connors, current Chief Storytelling Officer for Demeter Media, and former Head of Content and Editor in Chief for Disney Interactive. 

Keep scrolling to read a transcription of the interview, or watch the full recording here: 

 

What Is Brand Strategy?

Catherine: Brand is one of those concepts, like content or design, that everybody feels like they understand, and yet nobody's quite sure what it is. It's easy for the idea of brand strategy or brand identity to get really slippery, especially for publishers who feel a brand is just synonymous with their site or platform. 

And so there's sometimes a bit of slippage between brand strategy and just simple brand identity. And usually, there should be a strategy that goes into brand identity. But it's easy when you're a publisher, influencer, or creator to just fall into the comfort of your identity, your personal identity, or your site identity as being your brand. 

You can get a lot of success by having an organically cultivated brand that's associated with whatever kinds of stories you're telling online or whatever content you're producing. But ideally, you're putting some strategy behind it. That is to say, you're thinking tactically about not just what your brand organically has evolved to be, but what you really want your brand identity to be. 

What is the story you want to be telling to your audience and your community? Where is that story taking you? Where is your brand? Not just: what's the force of your brand in the current moment, but the path you want your brand to be on. 

Do you want to look forward to a horizon where your brand becomes much bigger and more complex? Do you want to stay on the path that you're on and just continue to refine and hone it? All of these things require some strategic thinking.

Ashley: In general, is there a certain point in time that publishers or content creators should start thinking about brand strategy? If they haven't in the beginning, maybe they've just gone along with the identity, then at what point? Or are there factors that show the publisher that they should start to then build a strategy around that identity?

Catherine: The best time is yesterday. The second best time is now. It's never too soon to be thinking about brand strategy. That said, often for a publisher, creator, or influencer, especially those that really develop organically – there's some force, some power to organically developing a brand. 

If you think about the standard publisher origin story, where they have something that they're passionate about and they begin creating content around that passion online, they begin to cultivate an audience and it's coming out of a real interest or passion, something that they're, you know, they're deeply committed to…their brand evolves in relationship to their creative output and their relationship with their audience. 

That can be powerful because the organic nature of that brand development is such that it's responsive and the publisher is doing what works.

Even if I can stand over here as a brand strategist and put some strategy into it, there's something really powerful about the brand. This is why publishers can be so extraordinarily successful as media platforms. They're following their instincts and their intuition and that is not to be underestimated.

Brand strategy becomes a factor when a publisher, creator, or influencer thinks about how much control they want to have over it. What do they want to do with it? Is the brand identity one that they've organically cultivated, tracking what their goals and ambitions are, what their three to five-year plan is, and what their wildest blue sky dreams are? Are they on a landscape that they are defining and controlling themselves? And is their brand identity helping this?

Another way of thinking about the timing of building a brand strategy is at the moment when a publisher starts to think, “Oh, there's something much bigger here than just posting content online.” The moment when you recognize, “I'm doing something professional here. I've created something, I'm a media company, even if it's a tiny one. I have built a brand,” that's when you want to start to think, okay, how do I make this work for me?

Brand Strategy Basics: Where to Start, Defining Your Brand & PRFAQ

Catherine: The first and most important step is getting clear on what your brand actually is. And this might seem like a “duh,” or something that you expect one already knows. But you'd be surprised. 

Say, I’m a food publisher and I have built a brand identity around really delicious baked goods. I might simply think that I have an identity as a family-friendly baking site. But one of the things I'd want to start doing is going, okay, is that brand identity associated with me the person, or have I built a platform that doesn't rely as much on my personality? Maybe it's just a hands-and-pans kind of content play.

So ask yourself, am I the brand, or have I already organically built something that's bigger than me or that I'm kind of sitting behind? And then ask, how would I describe my brand to someone else? 

There's an exercise that businesses and startups often do, which is called a PRFAQ, or “Public Relations Frequently Asked Questions.” It’s an exercise of asking yourself, “if I were going to be interviewed tomorrow about my business, what are the points that I would need to hit on? How would I describe it?”

Succinctly, what am I offering, and when I've worked with publishers, creators, influencers, and startups, one of the exercises I suggest people go through is just write yourself a PRFAQ. 

Write yourself a little bullet list. For example, if Taylor Lorenz calls you up tomorrow and wants to interview the next great food influencer. Or if the New York Times has gotten excited about what you're doing. Essentially, if somebody reaches out and says, I want to interview you – ideally if anyone does that, awesome, congratulations – but do make notes! Don't go in cold. Go through the exercise of saying, “What will I say? How will I describe my brand? How will I describe what I do? How will I describe what my audience responds to?” That's a critical piece of this. Getting some clarity.

When you're trying to get your hands around who and what your brand is, you want to look at not just what you would tell people, but also if someone from your audience or your community was asked, “Who is this creator, Cookie Lady?” How would they describe you? 

That way you're getting a sense of what the actual story is that you're working with. And then you can start to think about, “Do I want to change this? Do I want to adapt this? How do I want to improve this? Where do I want to take this?”

Developing Your Brand Strategy

Ashley: Do you find that, when you're working with brands, influencers, or publishers, are they starting to think about this strategy? Did they try to create a strategy on their own where they found they needed an external viewpoint to help them pull the strategy out? Or is it possible for me to do this for my brand successfully?

Catherine: You can absolutely do it successfully on your own. You don't need me. Most people don't need a brand consultant or a strategist or somebody who's going to come in from the outside as an expert to help them.

It's great if you do because there's a reason why the Disneys and Nikes and Apples of the world have whole teams dedicated to brand strategy. There's an art to it. But for your average publisher, they've probably gotten a long way on their own already. And it's pretty straightforward to begin developing your own brand strategy. 

There are tons of resources out there. If you just Google “brand strategy,” or ask ChatGPT, you'll come up with a lot of resources. But it’s just fundamental storytelling. It's asking simple, basic questions. That's why I use the example of the PRFAQ. 

What's your list of bullet points you would talk about and explain in an interview about your brand? It's just asking, “What's my story, what's the story of my platform, and is my story reaching the right audience?”

The most important external point of view is your audience's point of view. Who do they think you are? How would they describe you? Why do they come to your site or your platform? 

You don't need to go out and ask them. It can be a thought experiment, but considering yourself as being in dialogue and conversation with your audience always, and being aware of how you are being received – that's something that only involves your attention and your imagination.

Ashley: You've worked with a lot of influencers and brands. If you go through the exercise of beginning to create a strategy, and you realize you actually might need to pivot, how would you navigate a pivot to what you are long-term? If I've gone down one path, how do you navigate that switch successfully?

Catherine: It's a great question. And I would say there's a question that precedes it a bit: how do you know if you need to pivot or if you want to pivot? Those might be related or they might be different things. 

You might want to pivot because you want to expand your content, interests are expanding, or you realize you have a goal that you want to take you beyond what you're already doing. 

Or you might be looking at your stats and your business situation and going, “I think I need to do something to zhuzh things up,” or maybe something's not working that you want to fix. 

All this to say, you need to ask yourself why you would pivot.

And pivot doesn't necessarily mean going in a completely different direction. It can mean just shifting a teeny little bit. It can mean just tweaking things a little bit. 

As an example, what if I'm a food publisher who wants to go from hands-and-pans and being sort of anonymous as a personality to being the next Bobby Flay or Martha Stewart, you have your answer right there. You can build your strategy out of that strategic move. 

In that instance, you need to shift as carefully and intentionally as possible, and continuously ask, “What do I need to do to start positioning myself more fully as a brand that has a human being at the center?”

I say carefully because I think sometimes, especially when a publisher feels like they need to make a change, or they’re feeling especially inspired, it can be very tempting to want to leap into it. But the best brands in the world are very carefully built. And they're very carefully tended to. 

Again, Disney is my background, so I often use that as an example. Part of the force of the Disney brand is that it's so consistent. And every time they tweak something or change something or expand into superheroes or sports or what have you, they're making sure that anything they're doing is consistent with the things that already work.

And so as a publisher, you always want to be asking yourself, am I avoiding throwing the baby out with the bathwater? I want to preserve whatever it is that's gotten me to where I am. I want to build on it and shift and tweak it, but I want to be careful to recognize what's already working for me.

If you're in a position where you're considering brand pivots to become the next Martha Stewart, you're doing something right already. It's just a question of, “What do I need to do to get to the next place?” 

Again, it comes down to storytelling. I've got this story. What would it take to shift the story slightly or more than slightly to accommodate where I want to go?

Brand Health: Maintaining Your Strategy

Ashley: For our larger brands, the established brands that have worked on a brand strategy, they've gone through the exercise. They've been working on those strategies for some time. How often should a brand revisit the strategy or audit it to improve it? Are there guidelines for maintaining an effective brand strategy?

Catherine: It varies. There aren't any hard and fast rules. It would be great if there were. 

You want to be paying attention to what you're doing. This tracks to the question we discussed a moment ago, how do I know if I need to pivot or if I want to pivot? You want to treat your platform as a business, and I'm guessing that everyone watching this already is treating it as a business. So you want to have a regular cadence of reviewing the health of your business. 

Your brand is core to your business. So as you look at your business model, you need to ask brand questions like: 

  • Am I growing at the rate that I want to?
  • Am I driving the revenue that I want to?
  • Am I on pace with my goals?
  • Do I have new goals? 
  • Am I rethinking my goals? 
  • How is my brand supporting this? 
  • What could my brand be doing better to support this? 
  • What might I do with my brand? 

Remember, your brand is your identity. It’s your story. It's your relationship with your audience. It's the thing that draws people to you. 

So every time you're doing any kind of assessment about the health of your business, whether it's part of a regular cadence, in response to a performance dip, you see an opportunity, or you simply had an amazing dream last night where you integrated fashion into my food platform, that's when you want to say, “what must I do with this or what can I do with this?” And begin thinking strategically about it.

Ashley: Going back to reviewing performance and metrics, are there any key indicators or metrics that you tend to look at to review the health of a brand? What would one look at to understand their brand health?

Catherine: The things that you want to look at are your engagement metrics, broadly understood. 

That is to say, a healthy brand is attracting more than just eyeballs, right? SEO (Search Engine Optimization) can get you eyeballs, but anything that is driven by topic interest doesn't necessarily have anything to do with your brand. And this is why building a strong brand is so important. It makes you future-proof around changes in technology and algorithms and that sort of thing. The more people come to you because of you, whether that's you, the human, or your platform, the healthier your business is going to be. 

SEO is obviously important to the vast majority of publishers, but it doesn't tell you a lot about the health of your brand.

Returning to my previous example, if I’m a cookie recipe website and I'm getting healthy traffic because I index high when people search for cookie recipes, that's awesome. But it doesn't necessarily mean I have a strong brand. It means that people are coming back again and again to my cookie recipes. I've got the right keywords, that sort of thing. 

So what I want to look at as a publisher is my engagement metrics and what they are telling me. How much time are people spending on my platform?

If I have comments, if I have a community, how much engagement is happening? If I have affiliate links, how many people are clicking through? To what extent are people doing more than just following a link from somewhere else to see my recipe? 

You want to get a sense of how much people are really interacting with you and engaging with your platform because that's a much stronger indicator of a healthy brand; they found something that they like and they're sticking with you. 

This is why, it's hard to shake social as a funnel. Social functions on brand recognition. There's some amount of search that happens, but really, the power of social is that people gravitate towards brands that they like. They gravitate towards voices. And so you want to be tracking, not just the number of followers or likes, but who comments, who reacts, and who is interested in your story. 

Ultimately, what publishers need to do here is to cultivate brand loyalty.

When your audience is thinking about cookie recipes, they’re always coming to you because they like you and your brand. They identify with it or it represents something aspirational to them. That’s the thing that gets you that stickiness and durability into a future that can be, as we know, uncertain with all sorts of changes to technology, algorithms, and the shifts of platforms.

Common Brand Building Mistakes

Catherine: The biggest mistake is simply neglect. This is a thing that you have the most control over as a content creator, as a publisher, as any sort of business owner. You're the author of your story, your business, and your brand story. You have a lot of control over this. 

We've just spent roughly 10 to 15 years where SEO was really an extraordinary driver of traffic to certain kinds of content. And it's been the engine behind some really big businesses. But SEO, like any other technology, any other dynamic in media spaces, is uncertain and it's not within your control. If you're dependent on any one source of business, you're vulnerable.

Your brand is your single best tool for being effective across diverse business and audience streams. And it doesn't require all that much. It just requires a little bit of attention and intention. 

You just need to look at the most successful brands in the world. The big brands like Disney, Nike, and Apple. The bulk of their success is that people love them, right? We love their products, their culture, their identification, and so we gravitate there, and that creates a lot of business security.

If you're not thinking about your brand, then you're missing an opportunity. And it may be that you can survive and even thrive by just having a brand that's sort of organic, you know, developed organically and you haven't had to put a ton of energy into it. While there are loads of examples of those out there, even in those cases, I would say they're missing a bigger opportunity.

In those cases, publishers that are strong just based on SEO alone or based on getting that kind of content could go stratospheric if they had a strong brand and were able to bring in other revenue streams. And for those that need a little bit more juice, the brand is really your opportunity to secure it. 

Make sure that you're not vulnerable to shifts in algorithms, platforms, dynamics, and technology. Make sure that you're in control of your own growth, and also that you've got the broadest possible horizon.

If you're a publisher of any sort, if you have any content or creation, ask yourself, “What are my wildest and most audacious dreams? What do I want to do with this extraordinary business that I've built?”

Branding is going to get you to those dreams, the partnerships that are going to take you there. It’s going to boost your independence and your business stability and it's going to be the path that gets you to what you really want to create.

Ashley: Wow, that was a lot of really good stuff that you just shared right there. As we wrap up, what are the most important takeaways for publishers and content creators?

Catherine: I think the two most important pieces of brand advice that I give are the ones that I stated earlier: 

  1. It's never too late to get a handle on your brand story, even if you feel I already have one. Just own it, be in control of it, be intentional about it, and be really thoughtful about it.
  2. The other is to have it be related to what your biggest dreams are. Dreaming big is one of the best things that you can do as a brand-based business. 

Again, Nike, Apple, and Disney, all the biggest brands, they're wildly aspirational and accessible. But they're aspirational because they set big magical goals. Martha Stewart became Martha Stewart because she had a vision of Omnimedia. Oprah, Gwyneth Paltrow, and all of the big food brands we discussed, they're all big dreams come to life. And audacious goals behind these. 

The best way for you to supercharge your brand strategy is to tether whatever story you're telling to a big audacious goal, to a big blue sky goal that you can make actionable by just simply asking yourself, “How does my brand story get me there, and how can I refine my brand story, deepen, enrich, and expand my brand story to get me there?”

Ashley: Those are great pieces of advice. Thank you so much for joining me today. It was great to have you on. I feel like we could talk for another half hour, but we won't do that for now. 

I would like for you to share where people can find you, and where you can be reached, social media or otherwise, so that they can reach out to you if they have any more questions.

Catherine: I'm @herbadmother on most socials like Instagram Threads, and Catherine Connors on LinkedIn. And Demeter Media is simply Demeter Media.

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