Cam Kirk, an Atlanta photographer, walks through building a modern brand: define your why, find your competitive edge, invest in strong visuals. Pick a specific niche audience instead of everyone. Younger consumers want fast visual content; older ones want transparency. Word-of-mouth and micro-influencer partnerships work best.
Hey, what's going on? This is Cam Kirk, creative entrepreneur based out here in Atlanta, Georgia. Some of you guys might know me as a photographer. Some of you guys actually might know me for more of my business accomplishments, you know, most importantly, Cam Kirk Studios here in Atlanta. First thing you have to do is actually know your business story yourself. You gotta know what it is that you're trying to accomplish And I like to always say it's your why. Like, why do you even exist? Why should people care you exist? Why should people care about your business? You have to be able to answer that first to be able to express it and deliver that message to an audience or potential customers. I think with everything you do in business, it's important to understand where you and your company lies within the grand scheme of the market. It's important that you do some self-discovery to learn why your customers might be more attracted to your brand or why they might be attracted to another brand. And then once you can realize what that competitive advantage that you have, what makes your brand unique or what makes your brand special, that's what you just wanna dive in on 100%. The look of your brand is what people see first. The first thing they're gonna be attracted to. And in this day and age with the internet, you're not only competing with locals in your own neighborhood or in your community. You're competing with the world. So in order to stand out, it's important that you have the right look and the right visual representation and the right content. It's literally everything. Creating a strong visual brand identity doesn't come easy. If you're an individual that's not used to working in content, I think the first step is to find someone that has that eye and to figure out exactly How you want your brand represented and how you want to be portrayed visually. Invest in it, take it serious, and be consistent with it. A brand identity is all about consistency. Any identity is about consistency. You can't market yourself one day and then take 3 days off. Marketing has to be an ongoing, nonstop practice. So it never stops, no matter what level of success you're at. You have to keep going because there's so many new products being made today that it's so easy for your audience to be swept away from you or fall in love with something new. You gotta stay on their mind. The first step you should consider when it comes to launching a marketing strategy campaign is who exactly are we targeting? Who is the specific audience that we want to reach with this campaign? If you go to the drawing board and your answer is everyone, you're already wrong and you already missed it. There's not a single successful business in my opinion, that doesn't have a niche market, no matter how big and how global they might be. You got to be able to identify your consumer so visually and so vividly that you should be able to draw a picture of them. You should be able to tell someone where they shop at, what clothes do they wear, what other brands do they support, what music do they listen to. It has to be that detailed because when you're marketing, you don't have time to waste marketing dollars on people that would never be a fan or potential customers of your brand. If I'm marketing on social media, you got to do research on these, on these age groups. 18 to 30, much more into visuals. They're used to consuming content as fast as you can move your thumb. So whatever content I'm trying to deliver to them needs to be visually appealing and it needs to catch their attention within potentially 1 second. But if you're talking to an older audience, they want to know the brand qualities. They want to know the brand ingredients. They might want to know what goes into making this. They're much more concerned with the behind-the-scenes layers of these products or brands or services. It's very important that we truly, truly take our time to understand all of the tools out there on the internet. So search engine optimization is a great way for a lot of aspiring brands to get some traction built off the backs of some bigger brands. So that goes into being able to define your business clearly, and that goes into being able to define other areas of your business that your audience might be attracted to. So you have to know your competitors in order to potentially bid on ad space through their search engine. When someone is looking for Company X, even if they're not looking for me, but Company X is a competitor, I might look to have my brand show up as a secondary option to them through search engine optimization. Word of mouth will always be, you know, the most beneficial marketing tool, in my opinion. You go to some of these business pages and the first thing someone will do when they go to buy a product is to read the reviews or to find a customer review. People tend to believe other humans a lot more than they tend to believe a company just advertising to them. Which is why influencer marketing works, right? You hope that your influencer ad comes off as organic as possible, where it feels like a word-of-mouth thing versus it being like, oh, this person got paid to say XYZ. And I often find it funny that a lot of brands tend to make the mistake in thinking the higher the number, the higher the influence. And I think a lot of recent studies have actually shown you get a lot more bang for your buck dealing with micro-influencers. Micro-influencers are smaller influencers, maybe locally, maybe within a certain region, or within a certain company, or within a certain industry, who have sometimes just as much influence or more influence than some of the mega stars or the mega players in those worlds. So I think the first step in finding the right influencer for your company is to actually find the best organic fit. Sometimes the best marketing, the best people that can really help your brand are the people that see you as equal and that treat you with that same level of respect and that appreciate those opportunities.
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