Personal Branding: How Do I Increase My Brand Exposure?

If you are new here and don't know me: Hi, my name is Alexia Palau and I have been working in Marketing for over 15 years.

I have a background in Performance Marketing and I have worked for 5 startups and 4 large corporations including Sony PlayStation, Decathlon, RS Components and River Island.

I have been consulting for several years on and off and in the past year I have focused on increasing my exposure on LinkedIn, understanding what works and what doesn't to surface what driving +20% in revenue growth consistently looks like. My services include Marketing and Automation consulting (Strategy and Execution), Business and Career Growth Coaching and I also participate in speaking engagements on Global Leadership and AI.

The Marketing Projects that I have been typically hired to deliver millions in revenue with are Omni-channel Growth Audits, Horizontal and Vertical Efficiency, International Expansion, SOPs and Adoption (including Automation and AI).

I am not telling you what I do for no reason. Everything I will include in this newsletter has a reason. The growth you see is the result of having a background in Performance Marketing and I will break it down for you.

1. The Marketing Funnel: Understanding the customer journey from awareness to conversion and beyond.

   
   

2. The Customer Journey: Mapping out customer interactions to optimize every touchpoint.

   
   

3. Defining Your Marketing Strategy: Developing a clear and actionable plan to achieve your marketing objectives.

   
   

4. Defining Your Offering: Clearly articulating the value proposition of your products or services.

   
   

5. The Test & Learn Approach: Embracing continuous experimentation and iteration to refine strategies.

   
   

6. Scale What Works: Identifying successful initiatives and expanding them for maximum impact.

If you'd like to learn more about these points, let's book some time. Today I will only deep dive into a couple of key points.

Past the Marketing Funnel:

2. The Customer Journey: Mapping out customer interactions to optimize every touchpoint

While the marketing funnel provides a high-level overview, the customer journey maps out the specific path a customer takes when interacting with your brand, from their very first touchpoint to their ongoing relationship. It's a more detailed, customer-centric perspective that focuses on understanding their experiences, emotions, and needs at each stage.

Mapping the customer journey involves:

Identifying Customer Personas

Creating detailed profiles of your ideal customers, including their demographics, motivations, pain points, and behaviors.

Defining Touchpoints

Cataloging every interaction a customer has with your brand, both online and offline. This can include website visits, social media interactions, email communications, customer service calls, in-store experiences, product usage, and more.

Analyzing Actions and Emotions

For each touchpoint, considering what the customer is doing, thinking, and feeling. What are their expectations? What frustrations might they encounter? What opportunities exist to delight them?

Identifying Opportunities to increase Brand exposure

Pinpointing areas where the customer experience is suboptimal or where there are opportunities to enhance their journey. This could involve streamlining processes, providing clearer information, or offering more personalized support.

Creating a Visual Map

Representing the customer journey visually, often using flowcharts or diagrams, to make it easy to understand and share across the organization.

By meticulously mapping the customer journey, businesses can gain invaluable insights into their customers' experiences, identify areas for improvement, and optimize every touchpoint to create a seamless, positive, and memorable journey that fosters loyalty and drives business success.

Great, now that we have clarified that you will need to build your Marketing Strategy with LinkedIn being part of it. Multiple points are important within it, but I will only cover one.

• Establishing Measurement and Evaluation Metrics: Defining key performance indicators (KPIs) to track the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and regularly evaluating progress against your objectives. This allows for data-driven adjustments and optimization.

A well-crafted marketing strategy is a living document that should be regularly reviewed and adapted to changing market conditions and business priorities, ensuring its continued relevance and effectiveness.

4. Defining Your Offering: Clearly articulating the value proposition of your products or services

Defining your offering to increase your brand exposure goes beyond simply listing features; it's about clearly and compellingly communicating the unique value and benefits your products or services provide to your target customers. A strong value proposition differentiates you from competitors and resonates deeply with the needs and desires of your audience.

You need to define this before building your Content Strategy and Calendar.

Key aspects of defining your offering include:

• Identifying Core Benefits: Tangible and intangible benefits customers will experience. Do Market research. Ask people.

  
  

• Solving Customer Problems: Clearly demonstrating how your offering addresses specific pain points, challenges, or unfulfilled needs that your target customers face.

  
  

• Highlighting Unique Selling Propositions (USPs): What makes your offering different and better than alternatives? This could be superior quality, innovative technology, or exceptional customer service.

  
  

• Understanding Your Target Audience's Needs: Tailoring your value proposition to speak directly to the motivations, aspirations, and concerns of your specific customer segments. Define your Content themes.

  
  

• Crafting a Concise and Memorable Message: Developing a clear, compelling, and easy-to-understand statement that encapsulates your value proposition. This statement should be used consistently across all marketing and sales materials.

  
  

• Providing Evidence and Social Proof: Backing up your claims with data, testimonials, case studies, awards, or endorsements to build credibility and trust. Always. If you don't have the data, find it.

  
  

• Considering the Emotional Impact: How does your offering make customers feel? Does it empower them, simplify their lives, bring them joy, or alleviate stress? Ask for feedback. Always.

A well-defined offering is crucial for effective marketing and sales, as it provides a clear reason for customers to choose your business over others and helps in attracting and retaining the right audience.

Everything you do across channels needs to tie back to your adding value tied to your offering. Every contribution, every comment, every post, every newsletter, every reaction. And align with the Marketing funnel.

5. The Test & Learn Approach: Embracing continuous experimentation and iteration to refine strategies

The "Test & Learn" approach is a dynamic and iterative methodology that prioritizes continuous experimentation, data analysis, and adaptation to optimize marketing strategies and tactics. In today's rapidly evolving market, relying on assumptions can be detrimental.

This approach encourages businesses (or you as your own Brand) to make informed decisions based on real-world performance, rather than just intuition.

Key principles of the Test & Learn approach include:

• Formulating Hypotheses: Before launching any new initiative or making significant changes, clearly defining what you expect to happen (your hypothesis).

  
  

• Designing Experiments: Setting up controlled tests to validate or invalidate your hypotheses. No test is a bad test if informed by data. If it fails at small scale with sufficient data, then that is something you have learnt from.

  
  

• Collecting and Analyzing Data: Rigorously tracking relevant metrics and gathering data from your experiments. Key word "rigorously". You don't have to have deep analytics in place or pay thousands for a tool, just start tracking.

  
  

• Drawing Insights and Conclusions: Interpreting the data to understand the results of your experiments. What worked? What didn't? Why? What can be learned from the outcomes?

  
  

• Iterating and Optimizing: Based on the insights gained, making informed adjustments and refinements to your strategies and tactics. This could involve rolling out successful changes, discarding ineffective ones, or running further experiments to explore new variations.

  
  

• Documenting Learnings: Maintaining a record of experiments, their results, and the insights derived. This builds a knowledge base that can inform future decisions and prevent repeating past mistakes. Be aware that market conditions can change, and that also plays a role in results in some cases.

  
  

• Fostering a Culture of Experimentation: Encouraging a mindset within the organization that embraces risk-taking with quick recovery (fail, but fail fast), continuous improvement, and learning from both successes and failures.

The Test & Learn approach ensures that marketing efforts are constantly being optimized, leading to more efficient resource allocation, improved ROI, and a deeper understanding of what truly resonates with your target audience.

And that's it. To increase your brand exposure, at this point you scale what works and that's how you develop the exponential growth curve. This methodology works across all industries, business models and sizes. B2B, DTC, Agency... Any country, product or vertical. Solopreneur or Fortune 500 global corporation.

And it is how I have delivered +20% growth consistently.