6 steps to grow your personal brand on instagram

You know that feeling of familiarity when you mess up, but painfully realise you have been here before (more than once)? This was me all of last week. Run down, a bit burnt out and wondering how I’ve managed to end up feeling like this. What’s ironic about the whole thing is that previous to this – when I’m working 10 hour days and spending my weekend at the office, I’m actually enjoying it. It’s hard to drag me away. I love my work and get energised from it. Until I don’t.

You see at the time, I feel invincible and like I’m gaining so much momentum that I forget (again!) that it does catch up with me eventually and then I have a week with hardly any energy trying to recover. Will I ever learn?! It starts easily: first I start to stay back late a few nights to squeeze some extra work in, then I forget to eat lunch until 3pm most days. Then before I know it it’s been 2 weeks since my last yoga class.

I’ve since spent the past 2 weeks trying to get back on track and have a bit more balance and consistency in my routine. You see the thing about self-care is that when your feeling good, you don’t think you need it. When your making great progress building your business, it’s easy to dismiss time to meditate or go for a walk.

The exact same thing happens when your trying to grow your brand on social media. When everything is going well and you’ve got all the clients you need, it’s easy to put off posting on insta. It doesn’t seem like a priority and do you even really need to? Then, once you need some extra leads in or have a new promotion, you realise you better get back into the routine of posting asap! When if you had kept just tipping away at it, you would have saved yourself the stress.

Good old hindsight am I right?!

So why not take a little bit of time to make a plan for growing your brand on instagram so you have a consistent instagram strategy that works hard for you.

Know your audience

The key to building a brand (whether personal or business) is knowing your audience so you can speak to them directly. People buy from people they know, like and trust and so you need to be able to relate to your audience. Even if you have nothing to sell right now, it’s still vital to know who you are talking to if you want to consistently build trust. Luckily on instagram, you get access to powerful analytics that can help you dial in exactly who they are. Check your analytics to see their age, gender and even the posts they have engaged with the most and start looking for patterns. Need a helping hand with this? Grab our dream client worksheet here.

Hone your message

If you are not clear on your message, you can’t expect anyone else to be either! It’s important to get really clear on what your message is and what you want to be known for. Think about how you want people to feel when they interact with your brand? Inspired, educated, encouraged? I like to create themes that help me share my story and message. This will also help you to create content easily. Some of my themes for posting are Behind the scenes, my personal story, client work, inspiring quotes and funny memes. Check out this post if you want some tips on creating a memorable brand message.

Keep your visual style consistent

Having a uniform visual style makes your brand unique and memorable. Whether it’s always using the same filter or colour palette, finding a way to make your instagram feed distinctive allows people to know what they can expect from you and this builds trust.

Be vulnerable

There is something really powerful in sharing your vulnerability and allowing people to see the real you. According to Dr Brene Brown, it allows people to trust you and relate to you more easily. In this day and age, people are sick and tired of seeing photoshopped magazine covers and want to connect on a deeper level and see the real you. It’s up to you how much you share so just do what feels comfortable to you. It may seem self-indulgent but if there is a lesson in the story for your audience then they can come along on your journey and really relate to you.

Show up

As my Brandfluence students will tell you, this is a topic that is very close to my heart! There is no such thing as overnight success so do not get disheartened if you’ve posted a few times and are not getting traction. You really need to stick with it and be consistent if you want to build a strong brand. Showing up daily is the surest way of doing this. If you don’t have time, try batching which means you schedule a weeks worth of posts in one sitting. That way you just have to think about it once a week.

Incorporate video

Video is a powerful tool and will be a huge help in building your brand on instagram. Video allows people to really see you in an authentic way, without the safety of edited words and photoshopped pictures. It is definitely something that gets easier with time. I was terrified of doing video initially, but now I really enjoy the process of editing the video and it’s amazing how much you can use one piece of video. The same video I will use on IGTV, which then feeds directly into a post and I also share it to my story.

It also goes on YouTube, LinkedIn and my facebook page – talk about maximising your efforts!

I’m in the process of creating lots of new videos right now in fact so if you have any tutorial requests or questions about branding, social media or video, pop them below and I will make a video on the topic 🙂

Here’s to dreaming big,

Kady x