Be More You is our motto for 2019, but what’s it all about? It’s about making your brand authentic, which is a topic we’ve mentioned quite a few times over 2018 and something we’re growing ever passionate about – especially when working with a range of small businesses and organisations across Wales.

In a world where we are awash with businesses from every sector, it can be hard to stand out from the crowd. We’re constantly thinking of new and innovative ways to market ourselves, to push ahead of our competition and be seen. Of course with digital marketing this can be a bit easier, if your competition is slipping behind innovative methods of marketing, you can take up the newer ways and get noticed. Marketing isn’t all about the digital realm though – you also have traditional marketing methods, networking, attending events and shows and many more besides.

Your brand is what comes across when all of this marketing is going on – in previous years perhaps the effort has been to produce a clean, modern and consistent brands – with logos, fonts and colours. But your brand personality is just as important, if not more so when it comes to marketing in the forms mentioned above. We’ve talked for a few years now about being personable online (in terms of your social media) – being more authentic and showing your followers or potential customers that you’re real, not hiding behind brand guidelines.

How can you be more you?

  1. Forget selling at every opportunity – show your followers and potential customers that you are normal! Share your day to day, travels (if your work requires it), birthday celebrations in the office. This is especially important on social media, but you can also follow this ideal through to personal marketing – networking and events. Most of what you could share, you probably already do! If you’re a family run business, share pictures or moments of the family perhaps. It just shows your personality behind the business.
  2. Be open and transparent – this is about being open about your business, more so than ever. Let people in, show them how you make your products for example (you could do a cool video for social media or your website). This doesn’t mean having business-based rants if a customer rubs you up the wrong way, but more opening up to people about your business. Always think back to “be more you”.

We do have many other tips and tricks to “being more you” with your branding and business, and we will be running workshops during 2019 (find out more information by getting in touch) focused on branding and social media marketing. The important thing to remember though is to establish how your brand comes across currently, is it authentic, honest and true to you?