Google has stated that in recent versions of its algorithm, brands are valued more highly compared to keywords. At first, this was met with some disappointment: would that mean that sites built by big companies would do extremely well, while smaller businesses and entrepreneurs struggled?
Of course, this is not what Google meant! Instead, Google meant that it wanted to see websites create brands for themselves and NOT just try to target a single keyword (so no websites called getsixabsfast.com, please!).
This makes sense when you consider what a brand really is: a commitment to an ideal, a specific goal, and a promise to your audience. Here’s how that all plays out.
This is one of the most crucial early decisions that you will make when beginning your Facebook marketing campaign. Your branding, of course, refers to your logo and cover image, but it also applies to your page name and to the tone and quality throughout.
A brand is essentially a mark of quality, and it should tell the visitor exactly what they can expect. This is important because it is what’s going to make your page worth subscribing to.
Think about it, if it's vague what a Facebook page is all about or what kind of content it will be sharing, then you won't know whether it's something that you're likely to be interested in or not. As a result, you would be unlikely to follow it.
On the other hand, though, if you visit a Facebook page and you see that they are all about a subject you love and that each post is consistently high quality and entertaining, then you'll know what you're getting, and you'll be keen to subscribe.
This brings us to one of the most important tips you'll learn in this guide: don't try to appeal to everyone. If you try to get your site to appeal to everyone, then you will find that it doesn't particularly appeal to anyone. You need to know your audience and consistently cater to them specifically. This is the only way you can create a page that is consistent and focused.
Even better is a brand that makes your page into less of a product or business and more of a movement. This is why all the best big brands that you've heard of have 'mission statements'. These are statements of intent that tell the public what the company is all about, what it stands for, and what it is trying to accomplish. If you can do all that through a brand, then people will be happy to follow you and identify with you. Conversely, if all you ever do is post spam while trying to earn money, then no one is going to believe in your brand enough to become a true fan.
So, you need to communicate all this through the correct choice of logo, name, and profile image. You can also try to convey it as far as possible through the basic description that you can add to your page.
Finally, you need to make sure that the use of your logos and your name is consistent across all other channels - other forms of social media, your website, your advertising, and your products. This will make your business appear more professional, and it will help increase brand awareness so that your fans can quickly and easily identify content or products from you.
The same thing applies to your website, of course. You need to make sure that your site loudly communicates what it is about and who it is for. That means, once more, identifying your target audience and making sure that every aspect of your website, your content, and even your marketing speaks to that audience and carries the message you want to convey. That means being consistent, and most importantly, it means having something to say.
This is the difference - the secret sauce - that makes the most successful websites successful.
It’s also why the hundreds of websites I work with on a regular basis never achieve their full potential. Too many websites exist simply to make money. The creators of these sites will look at the market and identify niches or products they think can make them money. Let’s say that they are interested in fitness, so they start selling fitness supplements as an affiliate and publishing content to their website.
They hire a writer to write generic fitness content. And because that writer doesn't know anything about fitness, they will have no option but to search for common terms (how to get abs) and then rewrite the content they find.
The sites are too small to compete with the HUGE players in this niche, like Bodybuilding.com. The Facebook page is too uninteresting for anyone who is really interested in fitness to follow. The same goes for the Instagram page (which only posts stock images because the site owner isn’t interested in fitness).
And the content is way too generic (and covered in ads) to be linkable. Nobody is going to share this content, and a lot of people will leave right away.
Now consider how a brand like the real-world fitness site Nerd Fitness works. This is a site that’s all about combining fitness tips with nerd culture. It is also inherently appealing to a very specific audience: people who love comics and want to get into shape! That’s a small but very niche target audience.