Hi, this is Jules and welcome to the full party. Recently on this podcast, we've been talking about
branding and this is geared towards new artists and entrepreneurs who have a creative project
that they're focused on and want to bring into the world long term. We're talking about branding
because it's an area that I focused on over the past few years as a designer. I've been creating
content for over a decade and whether that's through blogging, social media, or graphics and
online visuals, I've learned a thing or two about branding. And if you want to know more about
branding and the components that make up a good brand package, that's going to be your fonts,
colors, icons, and imagery, and your initial mood boards, you can listen to that episode on
Branding 101 Effective and Easy Branding for Entrepreneurs and Artists. Today, we're going
to talk about brand values. Beyond aesthetics, branding is tone of voice. It's the words you use.
It's typically the type of quality and standards you have for your work. In this episode, we're
going to assume you already have a long-term creative project or entrepreneurial endeavor
you're working on. And before we begin, I want to start with a framing, a grounding exercise for
our minds. If you're just starting out, if you're a bootstrapping Billy or DIY Daniela, please have
some empathy for yourself. The best thing you can do as you approach your branding, as you approach
your creative project, is to continue trying. Keep trying until you get some momentum, even if at the
moment you show up for practice and that practice is just for you to build confidence. The worst
thing you can do is essentially lose consistency. Now, the reason why I say this is because I am a
person who creates in the age of the internet. And I think before the internet, I took creative
lessons, piano, design, and I would still show up and practice for myself, even if that meant not
performing for an audience. These days, we can show up online and essentially give a performance
to the algorithms that be. And unfortunately, no matter what platform you're working with,
algorithms judge you first and foremost by how consistent you are. And then that consistency
determines who your content gets pushed out to. There is a favoritism based upon consistency,
so I want you to focus on this first. Keep this as a value you hold near and dear as you think about
your artistic and entrepreneurial journey. Next, I do want to say, if you are not a beginner,
let's say you're a multimillion dollar artist with teams of creatives, then I really want you
to take these branding values with a grain of salt because you're the person who at the end of the
day is the artistic executive and director of your vision. And there are many ways to create assets
in the world today, whether that's through AI and graphic design tools. And I think many people
believe that they can essentially cut out other creatives from the decision and design making
process. But with that, I've also seen a lot of decline in creative work. And to me, if you've
built up your brand as a designer or an entrepreneur, I feel there should not really be any reason for
this. So whether the decline in design quality is based upon lack of judgment or lack of creatives
working on a project, my hope is that defining values in branding will ultimately become the
foundational tenets that help to redirect aesthetics and goals to more cohesive and easy to
understand message that benefits everyone, not just the face or the head of a brand.
So today we're going to cover three topics. The first topic is coming up with a list of traits
that define your audience in order to corral and frame your brand values. And then second,
we're going to discuss abstract values to guide your mission and your brand. And then third,
we're going to talk about this one value that I don't truly think anyone can ignore these days,
and it's ROI, return on investment. And please stick around because return on investment,
I think first and foremost should be based upon your choices, things that you care about. And
ultimately, the idea is to grow and become stronger as creatives and entrepreneurs. So this is
important. It's something worth nailing down in the beginning and it will ultimately become a tool
that will help you measure your growth. So let's go ahead and dive in and start with our first topic,
which is how to define your audience. I find one of the easiest ways to define your audience is to
come up with a simple list. You can make a list of traits that define your audience. For example,
if you're a musician, maybe your fans are people who enjoy nature, folks who have dogs, like to go
camping. You can break this up into larger categories, women in their twenties or thirties
who like to go on hot girl walks, who love to be creative, love to have fun, but are definitely
type A at times. And that for example, is how I've defined my broader audience. For me to go into an
example of my specific audience, I like to reach out to those who are interested in creative projects
who consider themselves to be independent decision makers. And I tend to cater towards a more female
audience because I don't feel that there are a lot of podcasts made by women geared towards women
specifically on the topic of creativity. Now, this list will definitely vary for you based upon
whatever your creative project is or whatever product you're trying to promote. Ideally,
you've already spent some time into choosing whatever creative endeavor you're going to work
on. And ideally, this is something you like, something you relate to, because you're going
to have to show up for this topic regularly in your aesthetic and your branding decisions. And so
it's good to choose something that you can work on for the long run. Going back to this topic of
creative podcasts, for example, even though there may also be men in their forties who consider
themselves to be feminists or soft boys in their twenties who are trying to create a punk band,
and maybe even AI obsessed teens living with their mommies listening to this podcast,
I ultimately prioritize the first list I mentioned, women in their twenties or thirties who like to be
creative as my primary audience because that's a specific choice that will guide who I speak to,
it helps determine tone of voice, and I choose not to cater to others even though they may listen to
my podcast because then it gets into a territory of topics I simply can't speak to nor do I desire
to. I personally made the decision that I want to use my lived experience to help my specific
audience. And the best way that I've determined to do that is to find overlap in those who I can
speak to who can trust that I've had personal experiences that they can relate to. So for this
first topic, I want you to create a list of traits of your audience and go ahead and write that down.
It can be a quick list, set a timer for about 10 minutes, and just bullet point it out. Our next
broader topic will address abstract values to include in your brand. And abstract values are
a great way of defining the reason for being that your art or your product serves. Some examples of
abstract values to include are trust, kindness, brutal honesty, and encouragement. It's great to
define abstract values because this helps get into the territory of range and tone of voice that you
might address in your copy, your copywriting, if you're a musician, maybe your lyrics. And the
reality is human beings have range. None of us are entirely corporate, rule-following entities or
hormonal, outbursting biological creatures. We have range. For example, I can be a bit of a chaotic
person who likes to make memes, but I also pride myself in knowing the rules and operating with
integrity. And while the tone of voice might change beyond these two personal traits I have
within myself, I think that having broader values of trust, kindness, brutal honesty,
and encouragement ultimately help to create a fence for these other traits that fall within
the range. With this, you might consider what your mission is. And this mission can be broader. And
while there are smaller values that you have like trust, kindness, brutal honesty, encouragement,
a higher vision is something like I want to create content for the greater good and higher vision of
my audience. I want them to be able to feel like they can create despite the fact there are many
changing facets in the world of creation today. And I think this mission is something that you
can keep personal to you, but ultimately it is a guiding light that helps you show up and make your
work when it feels like the small tactical things get in the way. Again, this is going to be different
for you, but I encourage you to start out with some abstract values and write them down next to
your list of the audience and what traits they have. Write down at least five to six abstract
values. For example, I included trust, kindness, brutal honesty, encouragement. Some other values
you might have include moving forward, growth, grounding, calmness, creativity. And I think it's
important to also hone in on what exactly these things mean to you so you can get more specific.
And more specificity will ultimately remind you of the unique purpose you serve with your brand.
The third topic we're going to talk about today is ROI or return on investment. And we can't get away
from talking about ROI because the reality is one of the reasons why we want to create branding is
so that we can essentially measure whether or not these values that we have, these abstract values
and aesthetic values are creating a sort of desired outcome. And I think it's good to think about
ROI in these terms, not just in terms of financial investment, because many of us start out creative
or entrepreneurial projects without much monetary investment at the beginning. And you can think of
your time as one of the main things you can invest, especially if you don't have a lot of capital
upfront. And I think this is what separates a brand that is created just for funsies, just to look
cool and a brand that actually accomplishes its goals. When we think of return on investment,
we want to think about smart goals and smart goals are specific, measurable, actionable,
realistic, and timely. When we talk about specificity and creating return on investment,
we want to have a specific goal. So these specific goals can be things like gaining more followers.
Okay, how many followers? Gaining more likes, how many likes? Gaining more signups, how many signups?
We want to create some sort of specificity around the goal that we're trying to attain. And that
helps with the next facet of smart goals, which is being able to measure with social media these
days, there are a lot of metrics to pay attention to, but I would consider thinking of at least one
or two metrics that you care about. And I honestly even recommend that you don't use things like likes
and followers to determine the success of your goal. For me personally, I think that social media
platforms can be quite addictive. And I find that specific goals that are more important are things
like output. So creating a goal to put out at least one podcast episode a week. And then from
there, it's easy for me to measure whether or not I did that episode is extremely actionable for me
as well, because I can set aside time to create the podcast and I know what days I'm recording,
and that makes it actionable for me. This is another reason why I don't recommend using likes
and follows as a way to guide your goals, because they're not exactly actionable traits that you can
control. I find that many people who go into the line of work of social media, a lot of times don't
necessarily know what attracts their audience or they can't control for when they get their audience,
they can mostly control for how often they create their content. So I would start from
that broader perspective of when you create your content, how often you put it out there,
and think of those in terms of being specific, measurable, and actionable. In smart goals,
we want to discuss if something is realistic and timely. It's a good idea to really think about
if your growth is realistic. And what I mean by this is that you might see growth due to some
sort of favor by the algorithm, but realistically, the algorithm changes a lot. And what works for you
one time might not work for another. And that can really interfere with broader timeline goals. And
so I think it's a good idea to not necessarily create for algorithms or people outside of you,
but to nail down specific goals that you have for yourself. And think about your goals in terms of
a broader timeline, let's say three months to a year, and then break it down even smaller to think
about what goals you have for yourself in three months and a year. Where do you want to be a year
from now with the product you make, with the content you make, and then from there, create a
schedule that you can realistically follow in order to show up for your audience. So today we
talked about how to define traits of your audience. And then we talked about broad abstract values to
include to help guide the content that you create for your audience. And then the third thing that
we talked about is return on investment and how to create smart goals for you to set up your week,
your quarter, and your year. I want to end with some journaling exercises in order to help you
think about these as they pertain to you, because we're all going to be different. We all have
different projects we're working on. And so I have three journal prompts for you. The first one is,
what do I care about? And how do I demonstrate that care through my work? The next one is,
who are my fans? Who are the people I support and inspire with my vision? And the third one is,
what's my offering and how does it directly impact my audience? Take at least 10 minutes to journal
answering each one of these questions and then go through the exercises within this podcast again,
and you'll be well on your way to defining what your brand values are. And that will help you
determine what aesthetic choices to make in your brand even more. So after you've listened to this
podcast episode and completed the exercises, feel free to listen to Effective Branding 101 again
and see if that changes what you might have done before, because ultimately our aesthetic should be
married to a larger vision based upon values. If you enjoyed this episode of branding on the pool
party, this month I'm doing a series on branding brand values and taking the years of experience
I have from creating content in social media and a variety of other contexts to help you create a
brand that makes sense, that is long lasting and is more actionable and helpful to you and your
audience. Please follow this podcast on Spotify, give it a like, and if you enjoyed it, share it
with a friend. This has been Jules and I will see you next week.