Who are you? What do you want to be known for you? You might think you know the answer to these questions that a surface level but in this video, we're gonna dive deep and identify who you really are as a Creator and a brand on Instagram.

It's important to know this because it's gonna help you differentiate yourself from your competition and help communicate to your followers why they should be following you. Let's be honest. There are a lot of people trying to grow on Instagram right now, according to Instagram. There were more than 200 million business accounts that were engaged with on the platform in 2021. That's some tough competition, right? It is a very saturated space and some people even think that maybe it's too late to get started on Instagram and that it's too hard to grow now, but I can tell you it is definitely possible. It's just about finding your spot within those 200 million accounts and communicating clearly to your potential audience. What you can offer them that's different from what everybody else is offering figuring out who you are what your identity is as a Creator is what is going to help you stand out from your competition. It's what's going to make you memorable and ultimately it's what's going to help you guide your followers along that ‘Know, like and Trust Journey’ that we've been talking about without truly figure out what your identity is.

Now, you're gonna struggle to build a brand that can be consistent that can connect with your audience and it's gonna make it harder to make bigger picture decisions down the road. So it's important that we do this now and your identity isn't just your brand colors or your fonts or your logo. Yes, these things are very important components of the visual side of your brand and we'll talk about that later in module one. But for now we want to get back to basics and talk about your purpose as a brand your vision and your values. This is the core of who Really are and figuring out what those are is going to impact your decisions around your visuals your content and your growth strategy. So now that I've hopefully convinced you of the importance of getting a clear brand or Creator identity for yourself.

Let's walk through the steps and the questions that you can ask yourself to really figure this out again, you're gonna want to make sure that you have your course workbook handy and look for the exercise about brainstorming your brand identity because we're gonna walk through that together the first major question that you want to ask yourself is ‘what do you stand for?’. Earlier I mentioned purpose vision and values. Those aren't just trendy marketing terms. They're the basis of who your brand is and how you're gonna set it apart from others. How will you impact the world or at least your little corner of it What feelings do you want to inspire in your audience? What do you want to be known for sometimes? I think it can be helpful at this stage. Try to ask yourself these questions separate from the financial implications.

Obviously a lot of us go down the Creator career path because we want to make money doing what we love, but when you're trying to figure out who you are aside from the monetization of it all try to ask like what kind of content would I create if I knew that I would have a guaranteed income no matter what that will help give you a little insight into your values your vision the community that you want to grow then you can bring back in the financial side of it later. The next major question to ask is who is your target audience and don't say everyone marketing expert Seth Godin said “when you speak to everyone you speak to no one” and that couldn't be more true. If you try to appeal to everyone you're not going to make that special intimate connection with anybody. Super beneficial to have a really clear idea of who your audience is and what kind of content they want to see. It's important to have a balanced perspective on both the demographics of your audience and the psychographics. If you're not familiar with those terms demographics refers to the kind of objective statistical data, like people's age their geographical location their gender those sorts of things where a psychographics refers to the kind of more nuanced complicated stuff like their interests their opinions their beliefs.

So sort of think about who your audience might be from a demographic perspective as well as a psychographic perspective and having all these things written down and listed out is really going to help you when it comes to creating effective content that's going to connect with those type of people all of the most effective high growth Instagram accounts on the platform right now. This is the reason why they're growing because they've clearly Identified the target audience and they make content that connects with them. So don't underestimate the importance of this step.

Another major question that you're going to ask yourself is who is your competition? I know we all like to talk about community over competition and I truly do believe there are space for everyone on Instagram. So don't feel like just because there's lots of other people out in your Niche that you can't also create content like that. But I think it is wise to have a good understanding of who else is out there. What are the kind of accounts that your ideal followers are already following and ultimately you're not studying your competition so that you can mimic them actually quite the opposite you want to see what else is out there. And then determine how can you stand out from that? What can you offer that's different from what's already on the table Try to go beyond just looking at the surface level branding stuff when you're starting to research these other accounts in your niche instead dig deeper and really try to get a sense of their voice their perspective their beliefs and try to identify spots where you're similar. And where you're different and when you can identify those differences, you can really lean into them.

Finally. You want to ask yourself? What is your voice how you choose to speak with your audience can make or break your connection with them? It's important to establish from the outset what you want that connection to feel like how you want to speak to your followers. Then you can determine the type of voice the type of language that you can use to make that connection happen. I often think that when creators are starting out with caption writing or any kind of copywriting in General on Instagram. We tend to lean towards a more formal type of language that can feel a little bit awkward and not very authentic to your end reader this is because a lot of us are used to writing, you know, essays in school or resumes or cover letters or whatever. So we feel like oh writing is like this formal thing. But really especially on Instagram you want to lean into a much more casual voice and casual language because it's gonna feel more like a human being and the kind of thing that your ideal audience wants to read.

I think it's great to start from a perspective of writing as if you were writing a text to a friend and then think about how you might modify it a little bit based on who your ideal audience is and like how they demographically it's like a graphically you might vary from that imaginary friend that you're thinking of and of course. You also want to think about your values as a brand and what kind of language aligns with that. I think it's important to consider how you can make the voice of your brand as inclusive as possible. So now it's time for you to work through these various questions on your own and once you've come to some detailed and clear answers to each of these questions, then meet me over in lesson 2.