Building A Strong Brand And Online Presence
Nearly every single business has a brand. It could be their logo, a saying that is said, a certain song or jingle, or someone else that just clicks in your brain and makes you go ‘yep, that is that business!’ In order for your business to be both attractive and successful with the people in your niche, you need to develop a personal brand.
Developing Your Personal Brand
But that doesn’t just mean logos and jingles and a colorful font, but also your personal brand. A personal brand is going to set the tone for what people will come to expect whenever they work with your business, and a personal brand is extremely important. In fact, if you do not have a good personal brand, your business will suffer. No question about it.
For an example of this, let’s take two restaurants. Restaurant A has terrible food, a rough environment, and it is too loud, cramped, and hard to eat in. However, the service is top notch. Your every need at the restaurant is fulfilled eagerly and the waiters and servers make the best attempt to get to know you and make you feel welcome even if the rest of the restaurant is falling down around your ears.
Now Restaurant B has five star food, a fantastic atmosphere and ambiance, and it is a perfect place to sit and just have some fun. However, the service is nonexistent and when you do get a waiter or server to come see you, they are rude and the requests you have take way too long to get filled properly.
While you might not go back to restaurant A again, you will always look back and remember the fine service you got, and if you go back to restaurant B you will find that you can’t stop thinking about how terrible the service was and how much you wish you hadn’t gone.
Your side hustle is a business, and while you wear many hats inside of that business, when you interact with the customer you are one of the servers. How you treat them and how they interact with you is going to determine what they feel about your business. You might have the best side hustle ever that runs like clockwork and gets perfect products to your customers on time, but if you don’t treat your customers right and break the promises of service that you have given them, they won’t come back.
Likewise you might have a side hustle that is still experiencing those growing pains and makes a few mistakes, but if you get to know your customer, treat them like a king, and make sure that their needs are heard and met, they will keep coming back to you.
So what do you want the personal brand of your side hustle to be? Do you want a business that is all smiles and happiness? Do you want a business that gets your clients the products and services they want right away? Do you want a reliable business that every single person who walks in the door can depend on? If you take the time to really think about what you want your personal brand to be, then you can answer the much more important question of how to seep every part of your business in your personal brand. Then you can get back to providing the best experience you can for the customer.
Once you have your personal brand, then it is time to get technical with the professional stuff. Your side hustle is going to need to be online in some capacity, whether it is fully online or you have an online business that will promote your physical storefront. In order to make sure that your customers come to your website and want to stay on the website to make their purchases, you need to have a professional online presence.
Establishing a Professional Online Presence
This means that your website needs to be up to date, polished, and not filled with things that will take your customer’s attention away from the funnel you want them to go down. The funnel that starts with them on your website and ends with them buying all of your stuff.
So make sure that every aspect of your business website is easy to navigate, and that your customers have many different ways to get to your storefront and to click purchase. If something is wrong with your business website, such as a code error or an unresponsive link or webpage, then you need to get it fixed right away. A professional website is going to be the cornerstone of your online presence, and if you don’t know how to build a website or don’t want to learn from one of the dozens of website builders out there, then you can easily hire a professional to complete the work for you.
But of course, a professional website only works if you can get your customers to it. This is where marketing comes in. For this, you are going to need to go on social media and give your business some type of page. Of course, you shouldn’t try to be active on ten different social media accounts at the same time, but should focus on where your customers are.
Look at your customer niche. Are they all watching videos? Are they found on Twitter? Are they posting on Facebook? If you can figure out where and when your prospective customers are on social media, you can start to market to them. Also, pick a social media strategy you are comfortable with. If you aren’t comfortable showing up on video to make a TikTok about your business, then don’t. If you don’t want to write a long Facebook post, then don’t.
Leveraging Social Media for Marketing and Promotion
Try to strike a balance between the type of social media you are going to produce as well as what social media your prospective customers would like to see. Additionally, don’t be discouraged if this process takes some time, because despite what everyone thinks, no one goes viral overnight on social media. Your business might have to post a lot before you start to gain some traction, and even more before your social media followers migrate to your website.
Keep on building your online brand and presence, and then you will find yourself swimming in customers and having to deal with the abundance of success!