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Building a business, designing a website and investing without seeing a return on your efforts is an indescribably frustrating experience. If you feel this way, you’re not alone - as there are millions of entrepreneurs who’ve faced this at one point or another. 

The question many have though, is why new entrepreneurs experience these droughts more often. You know, the sales, website traffic and low social engagement drought. If you haven’t had this, this article can still help perfect what’s already working. If you have experienced this and still are, today’s is your lucky day - I’m going to open you up to a new world of marketing possibilities.

As a close to day 2 & open to day 4 of 7 days of marketing with the twitter space, podcast & this article, I hope this provides clarity for anything in the twitter space and regarding increasing your sales. 

6 key topics:

Intro: what is brand authority and how to build it?

1. Building a buyer persona
2. Harnessing user generated content
3. Social media audit benefits 
4. How for conduct a social media audit
5. How to conduct an advertising audit
6. Competitive analysis

Sidenote: I elaborate on developing a social media strategy and how to grow your following online via the Content Marketing Guide. Download it HERE.

What is brand authority?

When you look in any industry, you will find thought leaders with followings, articles, successful brands and tons of content that’s insightful and often motivating. For example, thought leaders in the makeup industry are Jackie Aina, NikkiTutorials, & Pat Mcgrath. In music, for example, thought leaders would be Beyonce, Doja Cat, JayZ, Rick Ruban, Lady Gaga & Tay keith, for examples. 

Each professional listed is considered a thought leader for different reasons, most have grown very loyal followings. However, outside of their fan bases, they’ve also established trends, disrupted industries, stepped outside of the norm & challenged the status quo - successfully too.

There are several ways to become a thought leader including:

• Providing industry insight and advice that is useful and relevant
• Establish new creative methods that change people's way of thinking
• Regularly creating content that’s relevant to your industry and niche
• Answering questions that many avoid
• Understanding how to explain complex things in simple terms
• A constant learner, sharing new knowledge without focusing solely on your personal agenda.

When used collectively, these things lead to you becoming a thought leaders. Eventually, over time this helps you build authority - which is when what you say actually has the power to influence those listening to you. If what you say has the power to influence others to buy books, courses, seminar tickets, and change their business practices - you are a thought leader and you’ve built authority within your community.

Until you build this community and establish authority, this is why you aren’t getting the sales you want and seeing the results you desire from your investment. Once you learn how to do this and develop a strategy to stay consistent, you will see significantly more positive outcomes. So, today i’m going to share with you how to overcome this via developing a digital strategy, finding your audience, and staying visible long enough to grow a community.

Sidenote: I elaborate on developing a social media strategy and how to grow your following online via the Content Marketing Guide Download it HERE.

How do you build brand authority?

To begin building authority for your brand, you must first understand where your brand is digitally. You can accomplish this by building a buyer persona, completing a brand audit, social media audit and competitor analysis. After this, you should also develop a social media and digital marketing strategy, which can help you better align who your audience is and how to connect with them. 

Collectively, this will lead to organic user generated content, where your followers who became customers start sharing content about how awesome you are regularly, which will lead to people trusting you easier and more quickly.

To help you get started, I created a brand authority freebie for you, download it HERE.

The benefits to completing this are bountiful for your business, especially if your goal is to grow a supportive audience for your brand and cause. Additionally, if you master the art of digital medium flexibility and understand how to generate multiple streams on content on different platforms you’ll see growth faster as well. The reason being that Social media is the ultimate way to do inbound marketing for new leads, but it cannot replace email marketing, blogging, PR coverage, SEO, or establishing brand authority with relevant partnerships .

In the process of creating content to become a thought leader, you’ll become more personable and human to your audience - which is what truly allows people to fall in love with your brand. To accomplish this, a social media and marketing strategy helps you create processes that align directly with your businesses objectives and goals, making it easier for you to meet them.

Sidenote: I elaborate on developing a social media strategy and how to grow your following online via the Content Marketing Guide Download it HERE.

Buyer Personas is needed & must include:

• background - career & personal life
• Identifiers - who are they? What do they own? What do they love?
• Goals - what do they want to accomplish?
• Challenges - what are they trying to overcome?
• Demographics - age, income, location
• Where are they online - platforms they use & what they shop on
• Favorite brands - who do they shop with? Why?
• Favorite websites - what is a user friendly experience for them ? Who provides this?
• Favorite tech - 
• Interest - hobbies? Pop culture they love?

Metrics

I created a freebie & interactive worksheet for this section. Click the orevieimage to download it.

Social media audit benefits

• can I help you develop a social media strategy relevant to your goals
• Can discover trends in your social media to modify campaigns
• Provides additional value and insight for your customers and the perception of your brand
• Can give your team members a look at what works best for your platforms
• Develop new KPIs
• Determine best times to post 
• Determine best channels to use
• Identify best practices for engagement 
• Adjust ROI goals & budget 
• How to maximize resources 

What goes into a social media audit

• social media channels used
• Internal channel owners
• Number of followers
• Channels used that are not owned
• Profile consistency
• Content Performance
• Best and worst performing post
• Post with most engagement
• Post frequency
• Publish times of the best post
• Video views
• Click through to content
• Post reach and impressions
• Number of Twitter mentions
• Effective keywords
• Response rate
• Sentiment

Advertising Audits

• budgets
• ROI’s 
• A/b test results
• Results from optimization 
• And everything in a social media audit

Analyze competition  - can show what gaps you need to close.

• how do they use their networks
• How do they use social media
• How many followers do they have
• Content Performance
• What types of content perform the best
• How do they engage with their audience

To help you get started, I created a brand authority freebie for you, download it HERE.

After your audit, you'll be ready to develop a new marketing strategy that incorporates user generated content. As the holy grail of marketing, UGC includes reviews, blogs, unboxing videos, pictures with products etc. & also promoting your products using your companies hashtag. 80% of people trust UGC more than business generated content, so if you're not prioritizing it - you're missing out on guaranteed sales.

Here's some easy ways to get UGC:

• Ask your customers for it when they receive their packages.
• Offer your customers something special to create it.
• Create a quiz & tell people to share their results using a special hashtag.
• Create a competition & the winner with the best UGC wins a prize.

Get creative with it, they'll do it for the right offer.

This won't be easy, but nothing in business ever is. If you wanted to, you could get this all done before December is over & go into the new year with a clear strategy. You deserve that much, right? Give yourself an environment to grow, & you will. The same goes for your business, it just needs an environment to thrive in.

If you found this article helpful, comment down below & let me know. If you feel inspired or motivated, tell me on twitter & tag me @Touchedbyty .