Maximizing Your Brand Reach: How to Promote Your Brand Using Other Brands

Branding has become an important subject in today’s world. With the increase of businesses and start-ups, being informed about branding and how to promote your brand is a great asset. There are various ways of promoting a brand. The popular ways to promote a brand include; website creation, SEO, Paid social media advert, influencer advertising etc.

Zeroing in on influencer advertising, it is the use of an influencer to promote your brand. Influencers are your brand’s best advocates. They are people who have established credibility in a particular category. They have the power to affect consumer purchasing decisions with their authority as opinion leaders. Influencers, typically, have a large number of followers who read their content often and are influenced very subtly by it. That is why leveraging influencer-generated content to promote your brand can help your business grow quickly.

Now, what if you are an influencer and can promote your brand using your other brands? This is where personal branding comes in. Have you thought of yourself as a brand? And have you thought of ways you can use your personal brand to promote your businesses and initiatives? Did you also know that you can create new brands to promote your already existing brand? In this article, we take a detailed look at how to promote your brand using your other brands.

Promoting a brand using your other brands has proven to be very beneficial and easy. If you already have a successful existing brand, it won’t be tedious to use that brand to promote a new brand. For instance, if people know and love you as a singer, should you open a boutique or a clothing line, you would have no difficulty promoting it. This is because you have won the hearts of many using your brand as a singer. Because you have a successful brand as a singer, promoting your brand as a boutique owner would be very easy.

Again, let’s say, you are a real estate developer, how do you promote such a brand? You can create a different brand to promote your real estate venture. For instance, if you are great at business consultation, you can create a brand offering business advice to people. Since many people are interested in how to go about their business and make money, they are likely to be attracted to you as a business consultant. They are likely to see you as a person who is intelligent, of integrity and purposeful.  As you win their hearts as a business consultant, you can drive their attention to your real estate venture.

As we have seen, promoting your brand using your other brands, firstly, means creating a brand through identifying a skill or talent that you can share with the world to attract their attention and win their admiration, and using that brand to promote your other brands. Before we go any further into this, let’s take a look at what brand is.

What is a Brand?

A brand refers to unique design, sign, symbol, words, or a combination of these that is used in creating an image that identifies a product and distinguishes it from its competitors. The process of creating a brand is known as branding. Examples of brands include Nike, Adidas, Apple, Microsoft etc.

There’s also what is known as a personal brand. This is where the focus of your branding moves from products or services to yourself as a person. Your personal brand is how you promote yourself. It is your unique way of combining your skills, experience, and personality in the way that you want to be known by others. It is how you present yourself to the world through your conducts, words, beliefs and attitudes.

You use your personal branding to differentiate yourself from other people. With a successful personal brand, you can succeed in your business in a way that no corporate branding can possibly succeed.

How to create a personal brand

Since you would need a successful personal brand to be able to promote your other brands, it is necessary to know how to build a personal brand. These are a few points:

    • Build Your Platform

Personal branding is all about making yourself known to the world, that is, sharing with the world, who you are, what you can do, what you stand for, what you believe and don’t believe etc. There’s no better way to do this than to take advantage of the internet/social media. If you are going to have a personal brand, you will need a website to create your virtual platform. Your website should be your name. You will also need social media accounts that represent your brand. You will use these platforms to share your voice.

    • Identify Your Uniqueness and Your Strengths

What are your strengths? Perhaps, you can write inspirational articles that build up people or you have great oratory skills or you are an expert in a particular field or you can sing, dance, draw, rap etc. What makes you unique in the way you do these things? There are several people who write, speak, sing, dance etc. so what makes you stand out of the crowd as a person? Identify that and capitalize on it. If you are unsure about your strengths and uniqueness, you can ask your friends and relatives.

    • Perfect your strengths and uniqueness

Once you’ve identified your uniqueness and strengths, perfect them. Knowing how to do something is not enough, take a step further, read on it, take courses to perfect it if you have to and keep practising. Learn all that you can and become an expert in that area. You can never stop learning. Read, absorb, and teach.

    • Share Your Knowledge

It’s not enough to learn it; you have to teach it and share your knowledge by helping others. Use your website and/or social media accounts to share what you know and can do. As we earlier said, to promote your other brands, you need a brand that can attract the attention of people to you as a person. Sharing information, entertaining people, inspiring people and demonstrating your talent are good ways to easily attract the attention of people. So don’t sit on what you know and can do. Share them with the world. Do this through videos, social media, and writing both online and offline. This is where you prove you know your stuff and gain exposure from doing so.

    • Be Yourself

Find your own style. You don’t have to do what everyone else is doing and just follow the crowd. Use your style and uniqueness to create a niche for yourself. Let people know you for who you are. Let people see you as different. Find your own style and create a new set of footprints for others to follow in.​

Benefits of a personal brand

    • You become an influencer

Through good personal branding, you can become influential. Your personal brand helps you stand out from everybody else. You can use your personal brand to demonstrate your knowledge and skills in your areas of expertise. It attracts people to you who admire you and aspire to become like you. With a consistent personal brand, you gradually build your way as an influencer in your field.

    • It makes you memorable

Your personal brand can be vital to you professionally. It is how you present yourself to current and potential clients. It gives you the opportunity to ensure that people see you just the way you want them to, instead of in some arbitrary, possibly detrimental, way. It prevents people from assuming who you are. In many ways, your personal brand is what makes you memorable. It is your personal brand that helps you stand out from the thousands of other people like you.

    • It builds trust

A personal brand gives you the opportunity to highlight your strengths and your passions. It helps people believe they know you better, and people have much higher trust in those they feel they know; even public people they have never met personally. People easily believe people they feel they “know”. They are easily persuaded by such people. It is no wonder that companies love to use celebrities and people with influence to advertise their products.

How to use other brands to promote your own brand

Having become an influencer through your personal brand, you can go ahead and promote your other brands. All you need to do is to use your existing successful brand to drive the attention of your followers to your new brand. In no time, your new brand will become successful because people already know and believe in you through your personal brand.

Also, if you already have a business but need some influence to drive it ahead, then you can also develop another brand that’s likely to attract the attention of people. Such brands should usually be brands that educate people, entertain them or inspire them to reach their aspirations. Many people are attracted to such brands. So if you have knowledge or expertise in a field or you have a talent that can entertain or even if you can aspire and challenge people to be their best, then why don’t you capitalize on that? Create a niche for yourself, share your knowledge, talent or skill and attract a lot of followers and then use that brand to promote your business.

Benefits of using other brands to promote your brand

    • Less stressful

Promoting your business can be very stressful especially when you are putting in all the efforts but are not achieving the necessary results. Many Start-up owners get discouraged as a result of this. Many also go about looking for influencers to market their businesses, which doesn’t come on a silver platter most of the times. But if you have created a niche for yourself, through your personal brand, it will be much easier to promote your business using your own personal brand.

    • Less cost

It cost a lot to promote your business either through traditional media such as TV, Radio and Newspapers or through paid social media ads. If you are using your personal brand to promote your business, then it means that you have already invested in your personal brand, so you don’t need to use a lot of money in promoting your business. This cuts down the cost for you as a business owner.

    • You gain the trust of customers or clients

Because people are familiar with your personal brand, it is easier for them to trust you. As a result, they are not reluctant to work with you or even recommend you to friends and relatives.

    • You are more likely to retain customers or clients

As long as these customers or clients love you and what you do, they are likely to keep working with you.

Challenges involved in using your other brands to promote your brand

Even though it is less stressful and reduces the cost to use your brand to promote your business, there are certain challenges that come with it.

    • What affects one of your brands affects all.

If you are using your personal brand to promote your business, then what happens to your personal brand is likely to affect your business. Since people are attracted to your business because of your personal brand, any taint in your reputation is likely to affect the patronage of your business. Using your brand to promote other brands, therefore, means that you have to be careful about your image and know how to protect it.

    • It takes a lot to build a successful brand

It is less costly and stressful to use your successful brand to build your other brands. However, it takes time, effort and money to build a successful brand that you can capitalize on to promote another brand. So anyone who wants to capitalize on their brand to promote their business must be prepared to put in all the effort, time and money required to first build a successful personal brand. It takes a lot of time and money to build a successful brand, so if you don’t have that much time and can’t invest that much effort, then you are likely to use other means to promote your business.

In conclusion, promoting your brand using other brands is very beneficial. For young entrepreneurs, this is a great opportunity to share your knowledge, skill and talent with people, gain exposure, gain followers and capitalize on that to drive your business forward. This is a great deal as you don’t just get to promote your business but to promote yourself too. At the end of the day, people know you personally and know the businesses you run. That adds up to your personality and even increases the admiration people have for you. To build a brand and use it to promote your other brands, however, means that you must be ready to invest all that it takes and be ready for challenges that come with it and how to solve or manage it.

 

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