Brand Building Marketing Strategies with Nick Westergaard

Building a brand from the ground up is no easy challenge. And growing an existing one may not be any easier unless you have the right strategy.

Both efforts require the ability to tell the best story about your brand. Building this story starts with asking yourself the right questions.

Our guest Nick Westergaard gives us the questions to ask and guides us on the journey to build a better brand.

Conversation points:

Nick, I’m going to start off with a soft-ball… Mainly because you have just recently written about this.

Speaking of BRANDS, you wrote an article addressing what you think are “Two questions to ask about your brand”. The two questions are “Where are you now?” and “Where do you want to be?”

1. Starting with “Where are you now” you present 3 guideposts. Share with us these three and how we can apply them to our brand.
2. Ok, now “Where Do You Want to Be?” What are 3 points to consider here?

Nick, we’ve experienced small companies that manage to have huge brands, while we also know of large organizations that despite their size and history, struggle to benefit from ‘brand’.

This, to me, takes money out of the equation.

3. So for an organization that blames budget on their lack of brand, what do you say to them?

Let’s talk Business Brand vs Personal Brand.

Neil Patel (a very successful and well know marketer) said that he regretted placing his personal brand out front, rather than his business brand.

You and I both have websites for our companies and websites for our personal brand.

4. Have you ever struggled to decide which is most important or which should come first?

Nick, everyone wants to find some shortcuts. And there must be some in Branding.

5. Are there any branding hacks? If so, do brand hacks stick?

To wrap up, I want to talk about some of the ways that startups and individuals go about building their brands.

For smaller companies and startups, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, etc. seem like good starting points. But, as our friend Joe Pulizzi says, don’t build on rented land. He’s typically referring to content, but some organizations build their whole brand on rented land!

6. When new brands don’t have much of a platform for themselves, what are some of the things they should consider while building their brands on rented land?

Lastly, Nick, I am tremendously grateful for your time and insights today. I know you do a lot of speaking, have some great books, and a successful podcast, so please tell us a bit about them and how to find them before we go.