When it comes to building a global brand there are thousands of self-proclaimed Gurus to be found on the internet, who are only too willing to help you achieve that goal, for a significant fee.
Yet when you review their capabilities and their own on-line presence, what you find is that their presence is often neither significant nor global. Which really brings to mind the adage, those that can do, those that can’t teach.
To build a global brand you need to be building a tribe around the world, not just in your own location, country or timezone.
Global Brands require you to be reaching people in every continent, in every time zone, which given todays social media tools is so much easier than you might imagine. Which is why I am often surprised when alleged Guru’s don’t have a large following.
Having amassed a following of over 500,000 in under 3 years, which has helped me become recognised by Inc Magazine twice as a Top 100 Leadership Expert and Speaker, have my blog become the #4 Most Shared Leadership Blog, and get me recognised as the #1 Leadership Expert to follow on Twitter for 11 months in a row.
I wanted to share my FAST Approach to Building a Global Brand, which consists of 3 simple steps I have followed which has helped me achieve that.
Step 1 – Create good content at least 4-5 times per week.
Step 2 – Be intentional about building a following.
Step 3 – Engage, engage and engage some more
Creating content is often the part most people find the hardest. I know I did at the start. This was because I didn’t think my writing was good enough as I didn’t write like Shakespeare, Dickens or Wordsworth.
But actually that doesn’t matter, it’s more about what you say, the content. Sure it has to be written in a way that allows people to understand, but actually, the simpler we write the more accessible we make our thoughts. I always try to write things from a different perspective, make them different, from other people who write on the same topic as me.
Last week, for instance, I wrote an article titled 3 Leadership lessons from Marilyn Monroe. Now whilst there might be a few articles on Leadership and Marilyn Monroe, there won’t be that many, which then allows my article to stand out.
I always coach people to look at every aspect of their lives and think about it in line with their business and expertise and see what learnings there are that can be shared. For example if you want to become known as property expert, then what are the top 10 houses in the world that you like, then write review on that. What are you favourite movies that include interesting properties, or are about properties, like Housesitter, then write an article about that.
Once you start to open your mind you will start to find content everywhere, and content that if not unique to you, will not be all that common, which then helps you to build your brand. It’s also good to share personal experiences, because this really does make it unique to you, and people love content that has a personal element to it.
Be intentional about building a following. If you write it, they will come is a nice thought, but unfortunately thats not how it normally works. You need to have an audience for your articles, and there are two ways to do this, one is to build your own audience. The other is to use existing audiences. I share many of my articles on linkedin, Leadership Hub, and a few other sites, but I get many more views from my own audience, plus having a following also helps to build my credibility too.
But hoping to build an audience organically is really wishful thinking.
You have to be proactive about building your audience, whether this is advertising your fan pages, writing on other platforms – the bigger the platform the better, following people on twitter, or inviting people to Facebook groups.
There are many different ways of doing this, and you need to find the best way for you. A search on google will give you plenty of ideas, but you need to be intentional and you need to do this every week.
Once you get to a certain size your following will start to grow organically, but intentionally building will create much better results.
Engagement. Once we have built our following them, then we need to serve them, and we have to do this in two ways. We need to keep supplying them with frequent, good quality content and we need to engage.
To many people don’t communicate, they just broadcast. It’s a one way dialogue with little to no discussion which means no engagement.
We need to make ourselves accessible, start conversations and discussions.
When we do that we make connections this is what helps the audience become our audience, our tribe. If we invest in them, then they will feel more connected to us, and will look to invest in us.
This is not something we should look to automate, it has to be genuine. We can favourite, like, share or retweet interactions thats all good, but what really gets people engaged is when we comment, and start discussions, that takes the engagement to a whole new level. This creates our tribe and helps to build our brand.
So to build a Global Brand: Create good content and post it 3-4 times per week; Be intentional about building a global audience; and then engage with your audience. When you do this you can look to build a global brand FAST!
If you want more information on how to build a following, check out my FAST Approach to Twitter Webinar which will tell you all you need to do in order to build a following on twitter FAST.
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