Unlocking Branding And Marketing Success 🔑

Often, I get these questions Branding and marketing? Are they the same? Are they not the same? Do you need both? And if you do, which one should you start with? I have all your questions answered in my Branding and Marketing 101.

Branding and Marketing

Branding and Marketing are not the same thing. Branding is about the aesthetic, the voice, and just kind of like what people get on a first glance. Marketing is the promotion piece of business. I think that a lot of people get them confused and start asking questions. Which one is most important to have? First? It depends. I think you need branding first, and then you go to marketing. However, they're not the same. Branding is the look and the feel, and marketing is the promotion and the point to get sales. I didn't know if I realized that most people don't know that they're not the same thing. The branding is the why, the marketing is the how, marketing is the tools, you need to bridge the gap between the two. So obviously, marketers will market, and they'll say marketing first, and then branding, which we're on the opposite side of branding, and we'll say no, you need branding first. The thing is, you can mark it all you want, but if there's not a why, there's no perfect brand personality, there's no brand, anything for people to connect to, then you're just marketing to no one. I think it's important that you have personality, your brain in order first and your brain can also sell for you, and then the marketing comes in. When marketing comes in you just use it to bridge the gap of the tools that you need to get you to where you need to go, right, that's your funnel. That's everything else to get you from Plan A to Plan B.

The best example that I can think of in my head is, for example, even with social media as an influencer, your brand isn't what you think of you. It's not about you at all. It's what your audience thinks of you, right? So a marketer would say, I'm the queen of reels. Branding would say my audience would come to me and say, Oh, I hear, or I've heard that you are the queen of reels. So that's the difference. It's based on what I'm saying about myself or the brand, versus what my audience or my customer thinks. Together then they do the work for me too.

What is Branding?

“So, Branding like your logos, your color schemes, your website, it's how do you present? What are the personas? What is the personality of your brain? Are you exciting? Are you? You know, who is it for? Who are you marketing to?” With branding, people assume that it's your logo and your brand. It's a part of it, but its not just that simply, in terms of branding, it's literally marketing. Marketing starts we're branding begins. Branding is what your audience thinks of you. Your branding is the brand story you're telling, it’s the personality that people are getting from it. The marketing is the tool to bridge the gap between your brand and the marketing, because to market something doesn't make sense if there's no brand. It's a waste of money to spend on marketing with no brand. You need both. Every business needs both, but they’re two hugely different. Because what am I marketing to you? What am I giving you? What is the problem I am solving? What value am I giving you? Am I teaching you something? Am I entertaining you? Or is it a convenience that I'm giving to you? So, it's deciding which one of those spaces that you're going to take up and give value to? And then once you have that in order, then you market that product or service, because it is already going to sell itself. Why will it sell itself? Because you've told the brand story, your audience knows & believes in your brand, you've proven value and now they want it or know they will miss out without it.

Taylor Winbush on When Branding and Marketing Don’t Work Together

We noticed this a lot with Facebook ads, if you have a business and you're running a Facebook ad, it is not conducive for you to run ads when your marketing is not set up. Period. I've seen this happen a lot when I was working for another agency, but what will end up happening is you're sending all this traffic to your website, that’s not converting. That's the difference between having your brand set up and then marketing, versus having the marketing first and then setting up your brand. If you market before your brand is established, you're essentially wasting money, you're wasting your ad spend budget. Then on top of that, you're having people have a very bad first impression of your business. So, if they see the ad again, then they're less likely to actually purchase from you. You want to make sure that you have the branding setup, and then you want to have the marketing.

Q&A with Sara Lovestyle & Taylor Winbush

How do you find the confidence to tell someone/ have someone trust your business?
Let’s say we run an agency, an ad agency, and I'm struggling to tell someone what it is that I do. But if I know someone needs my services, if I know that I can make their lives easier, if I know that I am running and operating a business at a high level, and I have this skill set to really grow your business, results, testimonials, etc. its easy. If you believe that your service is going to do the damn thing, then it's not that hard to tell that story. But testimonials are going to be a huge, huge, and then being able to show actual proof that your business works.


When you know that you have a solution, and you're so confident within that, you're going to want to tell people about it, because you knows it's going to solve people's problems. You don't feel weird about promoting your business, or you don't feel less than, when it comes to having the confidence for your business. Then you tell them the brand story.

How do you work a brand story into your business?

So what is the why behind your business? And do people know why you created the product? Right? Is there a specific story that can resonate on an emotional level, to decide if your business is the right fit for them? I know a lot of times; it is really about connecting emotionally and then having the rationale behind it next. So, it is emotion first, then rationale, a lot of people usually try to do the rationale and the information upfront, and then do the emotion last. However, by the time your brain tries to process a rationale, they can't connect with it, it's too late to add in the emotional piece.

That's what separates people who have a highly successful business and those who don't, or those who are very successful marketers, because the assumption is that you are trying to use logic to sell, and it doesn't work. You can't get emotional consumers because they don't purchase based on logic.

Have you noticed that? You know, sometimes, like impulse shopping, a lot of the time is emotional. Can you get people to connect with your brand or your service? Can you get people to connect with the product? Is it something that reminds them of something? Or can you make them more money? If you can make them money, there's going to be an emotional attachment to why that is their goal

How do you select an effective way of branding and marketing to benefit your business?
In terms of effectively branding, it's the story. So, who are you speaking to, because you can't serve everybody? This is probably an odd correlation but for example, if you ever go to Cheesecake Factory, you know there is so much on the menu, and you're overwhelmed, and you don't know what to pick. So, you go there, every single time, even though you go in saying I'm going to try something new today, and you don't. You don't want to be like the Cheesecake Factory menu for your product or service, because you cannot serve everyone, and then people get overwhelmed. They get overwhelmed. And then they don't either follow you or they don't want to purchase from you, or they don't want to deal with your service because there's too much happening. So, if you are brand new, tell the story to who specifically you're speaking to. Are you talking to me? Are you talking to professional women? Are you talking to professional, you know, corporate men who are in (x, y) in a specific lane, right? So, figure out who your avatar is? Who is that one to three max people that you're speaking to, and that you can build a story for each of those people?

Where should someone start with branding? Could you do it yourself?
You can do it yourself. For people that maybe are starting on their own, they don't have a large upstart capital, and they don't want to invest a lot of money in branding, but they want to invest majority of their money in marketing and promotion. So, if there's a lot of different things that go into branding, so we talked about this all the time, like, there's something called a buyer's persona. So, you want to have three different types of people with like an avatar, basically, of what type of person they are, how old they are, what their interests would be, and how would that product serve them. Then go through and figure out what your brand colors would be, what your tagline would be, what your mission statement would be, and a lot of the basic branding things will come from your business plan. To be honest, your mission statement, like your who, what, where, when, and why, that's especially important. What do you want people to feel? And what's their first impression of your business? That's the most important thing and also creating your brand story.

Branding shouldn't cost you anything. Branding is, like, when you come up with exactly who you're speaking to. What is your brand story? Who are you? And who are you not. What you do? It's like, who are you? If you're selling a product, you need to say, who is the product? So, a good example is for example, water bottle companies. They may have a description on their bottle that just says where the water is from, and how purified it is, but that doesn't really give us an idea of who the company is. So, who are you? What's the story? Why people should trust you? What solution are you solving? Those are just a few basic questions.

I'll put it like this, branding is deeper than a color scheme and a font layout. Absolutely. So That stuff is less pretty, but you want to get to the nitty gritty of those four questions first, and then from there, you can kind of build upon things. And then when it comes to selecting your color palette and font, you can do research on what color schemes and what color palettes will match with your target audience. And then also what, which for example, if you have an older generation, they may like Times New Roman, rather than a san’s serif font. And then if you have a newer generation, they want something a little bit more modern and sleeker when it comes to their font. So that's something you can take into consideration. And then there's different fonts and color schemes based on different industries. And then the colors obviously represent different moods, like what mood are you trying to portray? So, all that stuff is last, but you just need to get to the nitty gritty of Who, what, where, when and why?

How do you feel about using LinkedIn?
LinkedIn is a goat and is slept on very much. Utilize LinkedIn. LinkedIn is good for business. So, LinkedIn is good for if you want to work in business, or collaborate with other businesses. It's also good for influencers, if you try to find the right contact to pitch to brands. It's also good for if you are a business startup, and you're looking for investors, or you're looking to swap and barter services.

The interesting thing about LinkedIn is that's where the money resides, the people with the actual money and the decision makers are on LinkedIn. So, it's easy to find them and then even convert over to Instagram, because most of the time the decision makers, they got about 100 followers, maybe 1000 followers, like it's not you know what I mean? It's just easier to build that relationship. Because a lot of it is relationship based. So, I love, love, love, love LinkedIn, I've made some really, really great connections over there. I don't even post over there rarely, but I do keep those connections and the line of communication open. That's where you can find the social media management for basically every company, or the brand managers and even if you're an influencer and you want to do brand deals or content creation, that's a great way to do it.

How do I get sponsors and or connections on LinkedIn?
To collaborate with other companies, before you even start pitching stories, is particularly important to make sure that your brand aligns with their brand. We talked about this all the time. But it's important to make sure like, when you're pitching a brand, just start with a little piece of knowledge. You want to find out what their weak points are and see how you can solve that problem. It's just so you are your brand too. And you also must market yourself. So, I think the marketing yourself goes into pitching. But when you're creating your own personal brand, you must figure out what problem are you solving for everybody, specifically the brands that you're reaching out to. But LinkedIn. If you can't find them on LinkedIn, they may have an email on their website, and or you may be able to just DM them and get their collaboration email. Make sure that you are currently making content that looks like the kind of content that they would pay for. Because there needs to be that brand trust already there. So, when they come to your page and you pitch, you don't want them to come to your page, and there's nothing on your page that looks like what they would post. Then they're not going to work with you. So, make sure that your content looks and sounds like what they're already about. Study them.

What recommendations do you have for attracting sponsors?
For events, I would create a brand, create a deck, and then tell them what they would get out of it by working with you. I think sometimes we're pitching, especially for sponsored events. It's one thing to pitch a brand and tell them what they like. However, at the end of the day, brands want exposure, or they want to make money. Those are your two options. If you can't tell them why you can do these two things, you probably should reconsider or reconsider your pitch. So, are you going to bring more eyes to their brand? Do you have an email list? Is this an audience that they don't have? And so, you can fill the gap for them? Is this something where you know if they are sponsoring the event, what is it the brand cares about and is going to get out of it not? It's not the other way around. It's what can you do for me? That's it, and you need to be able to clearly tell them either with data or whatever what it is that that they can get.

How do you determine what a brand's weak point is?
For example, if you go to a large brand page, they may not have any reels, they may not have any guides, they may not have any content with people that look like you. They may be missing content that highlights a specific demographic that they could be missing out on. But you know that your audience will be the person or the group of people that they could target, and they could expand their demographic and audience and then therefore, expand their sales. So, there's a lot of different things. And I know specifically for brands, the reels are just as important for a brand that sells product as someone who's an influencer. So, they may not have that content. You don't always have to as an influencer, you can also double as a content creator, you do not always have to promote brands on your page, you can just make the content for them, and then sell it to them. You will rarely see branded or ad copy, you'll rarely see ads or sponsored content on my page. I personally prefer to create content for the brand to be paid that way. And so yeah, so the way that I think about it is like, branding is really, macro. And then marketing is micro, it's important. But that brand allows you to expand in a way that marketing can't, when starting a business with small capital.