7 Steps to Build a Brand From Infancy to Empire

If you're the ambitious type, you want to know how to build a brand — and then how to turn it into a media empire. You’re in good company. beehiiv creators tend to be an overachieving group. This guide to developing your brand covers both how to create a brand and how to set it up for rapid, sustainable growth.

Branding is largely a matter of first articulating your purpose and place in the market, then developing signature content and style. Growing your brand beyond its infancy requires you to apply the same clarity, consistency, and strategy to your business's processes that you do to its products.

Think of these seven steps as a ladder to climb–and don’t forget to tell us how the view is at the top!

How to Start Branding

Your journey starts with discovery. Who and what do you want to be? No matter the size of the business, successful branding revolves around a consistent message and identity. Outline your brand identity and then fill it in with content and other brand assets.

1. Definition: Identify Your Brand's Value Proposition

The best scaling strategies for your newsletter start with finding the right niche. After all, the heart of a brand isn't its logo but rather its purpose. What kind of content or services does your target audience want? How do you meet that need?

Before you can grow your brand, you have to define it with a clear value proposition, which is both your promise to your audience and your selling point.

A strong value proposition distinguishes you from competitors in the industry, wins over prospects, and keeps your business focused. The best are unique, clear, and customer-focused.

Ask yourself the following questions:

• Who is your audience?

• What problem do you solve for them, and how does your solution fill a current void?

• What makes you or your approach the best fit?

Combine your answers into a clear proposition. Then refine them into a brand statement you can share with others. The phrasing should be simple, specific, memorable, and concise.

Note that your value proposition isn’t your slogan — although it’s often the base for your slogan. Once you have a solid statement, you can consider how to convey the heart of it in a few words.

Brand Value Propositions: The Streaming Wars

Think about the different value propositions offered by two of the biggest content providers around: Hulu and Netflix. Both offer huge on-demand digital libraries that feature original and third-party content.

To win a share of this competitive market, they highlight the features that distinguish them. Hulu presents viewers with the latest content, enabling people without a cable subscription to keep up with their favorite shows. Netflix, on the other hand, highlights convenience and personalization. Content is ad-free, and recommendations are heavily featured.

Their value propositions might look something like this:

• Hulu: In addition to our vast media library, we offer the latest content from network TV shows, allowing cable cutters to watch their favorite shows soon after they air.

• Netflix: We offer subscribers an ultra-convenient, ad-free viewing experience, and personalized recommendations to help them navigate our huge content library.

Create your value proposition. What distinguishes your newsletter from other brands in the same niche?

2. Style: Create Brand Elements and a Brand Guide

Develop an easily recognizable brand identity. At every touchpoint, your audience should encounter the same style and message. This coherent brand experience fosters trust. Your audience knows what to expect when they engage with your content.

You can look at any brand to find examples of the essential brand elements. Businesses create signature:

• Logos

• Color palettes

• Fonts

• Voices

• Imagery

• Slogans

As you research how to brand your business, pay attention to the brands with which you interact, particularly other newsletters. What makes them immediately recognizable?

Brand Style Guide: An Essential Reference

Create your brand style guide with guidelines for your message, writing, and visuals. Start by setting down your mission statement, value proposition, and slogan. Content creators should continually keep these in view.

The writing section should cover your brand personality, desired reading level, words to use or avoid, and proper formatting and punctuation. Start with a popular style guide (such as the AP stylebook) and outline any brand idiosyncrasies. Then set out rules for your brand’s visuals. Include your logo, colors, fonts, and type of imagery to include.

Two tips:

1. Many design sites such as Canva have ready-made templates and examples of brand style guides to make the process easier.

2. The more clear and detailed your guide is now, the easier it will be later to scale up content production and incorporate new team members if desired.

Have fun with this step. You’re designing the flag and regalia for your media empire.

3. Supply: Craft Quality Content

Learning how to build a brand is irrelevant unless you generate the content to support it.

Be strategic. Strong one-off articles aren't enough. Develop the topics and creative processes that will allow you to scale. Quality content creation is a lot of work, so leverage time-savers such as beehiiv's templates and other content creation tools that make it easier to create videos, graphics, or social posts.

You'll also want to systematize your quality control. Audit your content for consistency, accuracy, and polish. A few reminders:

• Verify all facts before going live.

• Write so that all sectors of your audience can understand you.

• Use spell-checkers and other grammar tools.

You might create a checklist for yourself. Not only will you guard against the inevitable mental lapses that plague us all, but (again) you'll make it easier for other creators to contribute down the road.

How to Grow a Brand

It’s time to take your brand from its first baby steps to a full run forward. Expand your readership, and carve out a space in your industry community.

4. Community: Engage Your Audience

Community-building is a crucial part of how to create a brand. Your newsletter should be a conversation, not a monologue. Listen to what your readers tell you. Open rates and other newsletter engagement metrics are good sources of indirect communication. What proves popular?

Direct communication is also important — and it’s easy with beehiiv. Sure, you should pay attention to website comments and emails from followers, but you can go further by asking your audience what they want to read. Matt Gray (The Soulful Entrepreneur) attributes part of his beehiiv success story to regular polls about audience interests and future topics.

Engage users on social media platforms, too. Ask questions, provide feedback, and show appreciation for those who take time out of their day to interact with you online. An active presence on your favorite platform also helps you spark interest in potential subscribers.

But put your newsletter in place first. Moe Hayek (SeedPhrase Daily) wishes he’d started his beehiiv newsletter early enough to capitalize when he went viral on TikTok. Social media attention is fickle. Be prepared to capitalize on it when it strikes.

5. Collaboration: Gain Credibility and Exposure

Collaborate with influencers and other content creators. You’ll gain access to your audience, and their support will help you establish credibility in your niche.

Make sure to research potential partners. Consider their audience demographics, content style, and previous collaborations. Before starting a project, both parties should clarify what they hope to achieve and how both parties will benefit.

When reaching out to new people, highlight your most inspiring or provocative work as evidence that you know how to build a brand and how to contribute to theirs. Develop your library of thought leadership pieces — innovative and insightful ideas in your field. Thought leadership is a powerful brand-building tool in its own right and an appealing asset when networking with other creators.

beehiiv Recommendations: Show Love to Get Love

Not all networking has to be collaboration-based. Find other beehiiv newsletters you think your audience would like and let them know with our recommendation tool. The creator will be informed of your gesture and can reciprocate with a single click.

6. Collection: Build Your Email List

Use list-building tools to expand your audience and capture leads. These will help you make the most of email marketing campaigns.

Create pop-ups and welcome gates, and add in-line captures to your content. These tools are how to build a brand without a legion of minions. (Your army of doom comes later in the media-empire process.)

beehiiv Referral Program: Your Best Friend (and Their Friends, and Friends of Friends, too)

Your best list-building tool is beehiiv’s referral program, which lets you turn your subscribers into a growth channel. By incentivizing individuals to share your content with their friends and networks, you quickly increase your reach.

You can offer high-value rewards such as discounts, exclusive content, or early access. For example, Nicole Ripka (Gayjoy) offered her audience an exclusive guide to NYC Pride events in exchange for a single referral. Not only can you bring in new readers, but you’ll also get existing ones more engaged with your brand.

According to Justin Schnell (Even the Odds),

“A built-in referral system is probably the best thing you can have… I spoke with five third-party newsletter growth companies and none of them worked with [previous platform] Substack…With beehiiv, the referral program is there already, it’s a consistent method of growth that you don’t have to think about.”

Need proof of concept? Even the Odds gained more than 10 thousand subscribers in the first year.

7. Scaling: Turning Your Brand into a Media Empire

Growing your brand means getting bigger. Scaling your brand is the secret to sustainable growth. An aggressive strategy that doesn't first address issues such as expenses or quality control will lead to problems down the line. To scale effectively, you need to increase efficiency.

As a content creator, you can provide your content to a larger audience without an equivalent amount of extra effort.

Organize

The bigger you are, the more organized you need to be. Use project management tools to plan and schedule upcoming posts, stay organized with ideas or topics, and monitor workloads and performance.

Systematize

As you scale your content business, develop operational guidelines as well as brand style guidelines. They’ll help you ensure consistency in the quality of content, detail any divisions of labor, and onboard new team members.

Consolidate

What did we do before cloud technologies? In addition to sharing applications, make sure that all members of your team have access to the information and projects that they need.

Automate

One of the most important tools for scaling a content empire, automation streamlines mundane tasks, freeing up more time and resources to focus on higher-value tasks. It allows businesses to scale up operations even with limited resources.

Analyze

Track your progress and refine your approach accordingly. Scale up marketing successes and discard ineffective tactics. beehiiv analytics help you understand which initiatives best drive your brand’s growth.

Monetize

Unless your goal is to provide a free public service, you can’t neglect your bottom line. Profit is more than an indicator of performance. It's an essential factor in sustainable growth. You may want to reinvest back into your operations or capitalize on an opportunity. Heck, you may even want to eat at some point.

How to Build a Brand Quickly: Pick the Best Newsletter Platform and Put It to Work

An email newsletter is a great place to start your brand. It’s also the perfect method of scaling up an existing business.

And now, you know how to do it. First, create your brand. Establish a strong value proposition, find your style, and start building your content library. Then grow your network, community, and subscriber list. Keep growth sustainable and speedy by taking advantage of scaling tactics and beehiiv tools.

We believe in you, and we’ve seen these steps work for other brands. Check them out. In truth, there’s only so much general how-to-build-a-brand content that will help you in your quest for world domination. If you want to scale your email newsletter to greatness, learn from beehiiv success stories. You might start with Milk Road, the rocket-like beehiiv publication that went from 0 to 250,000 subscribers (and got acquired!) in ten months. Sounds pretty good, no?