At a Glance

Industry: Lifestyle + Personal Brand
The Challenge: Bring multiple businesses, interests + areas of expertise together under one cohesive personal brand
The Project: Develop the brand identity + create and execute a multi-platform content strategy
The Goal: Grow the founder’s online presence, build meaningful connections with her audience + support future offers
The Result: 125.1% increase in Instagram followers, 2,700% increase in YouTube subscribers + 307.7% increase in YouTube views

What Do You Do When You Are the Brand?

Building a personal brand can get complicated pretty quickly when you aren’t known for just one thing.

This client was an entrepreneur, author, and businesswoman with multiple businesses, interests, and ideas she wanted to talk about. She understood the opportunity social media gave her to build an audience around her, rather than any one company she owned, but figuring out how all of those different pieces fit together was another story.

Because what do you post when entrepreneurship is part of your work…but it isn’t the only thing you care about? How do you create consistency without boxing yourself into talking about the same three topics forever? And how do you make sure someone can land on your profile and understand who you are when your work doesn’t fit neatly into one little niche?

She didn’t need to become less multifaceted to make her personal brand easier to market. We needed to find the through-line connecting all of those different parts of who she already was. And then, because this project began at the start of 2020, everything changed…

Creating a Brand Big Enough to Hold All of Her Interests

Before we could decide what she should post, we needed to get clear on what her personal brand actually represented. We developed a visual identity, including her logo, colors, and fonts, to create consistency across her platforms. But the more important work was defining the larger ideas we wanted people to associate with her.

From there, we developed content pillars around topics including entrepreneurship, social justice, and personal growth. Those pillars gave us enough structure to create a recognizable personal brand without forcing every part of her life and work into one overly specific niche.

We then built a content strategy across Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube, using a mix of static content, video, and live conversations.

The goal wasn’t simply to make all four platforms look consistent. We wanted someone to encounter her content in different places and still come away with a clear understanding of who she was, what she cared about, and why they might want to continue following her.

And Then 2020 Happened

We had a strategy and a content plan…but then, 2020 did what 2020 did.

Suddenly, blindly following the marketing plan we’d created months earlier didn’t make a whole lot of sense. People were dealing with uncertainty, isolation, changes to their businesses and daily lives, and larger conversations around social injustice. This client didn’t want to continue publishing content as though none of that was happening simply because it was what we’d originally planned.

So we adapted.

Instead of asking, “How do we keep the original content calendar going?” we started asking what her audience needed from her right now and how she could use her platform in a way that still felt aligned with who she was. Connection became an especially important part of the strategy.

Using Social Media to Create Actual Connection

With people physically separated from one another and spending more time online, we leaned heavily into Instagram Live as a way to create real-time conversations. She began hosting weekly Lives with different experts around topics including business challenges, personal well-being, and social injustice. Those conversations allowed her to use the platform for something much bigger than simply increasing her follower count.

She was able to bring people together. And because those conversations were connected to the same themes we’d already identified within her personal brand, the pivot didn’t require her to suddenly become someone completely different online. The format and circumstances changed, but the foundation of her brand didn’t.

That’s one of the reasons I think getting clear on your larger brand strategy matters so much. A good strategy gives you direction without becoming so rigid that you can’t respond when your business, audience, or, in this case, the entire world changes.

Knowing When It Was Time to Change Again

But adaptability doesn’t mean finding one thing that works and doing it forever, either. As the pandemic continued, we could see that people were still engaging, but we also recognized that the strategy needed to evolve again to remain sustainable and relevant.

At the same time, the business itself was changing. She was preparing to launch a webinar series and mentorship program, which meant the content needed to start supporting those goals while still maintaining the larger themes her audience had come to expect from her.

So we diversified the content strategy…again. We continued incorporating entrepreneurship, social justice, and personal growth while intentionally introducing content around the new offers. Paid advertising was also added to expand the reach of those offers beyond the audience we’d already built.

Rather than treating her marketing strategy as something we’d created once and needed to stick with, we continued asking: What does the business need from the strategy now?

What Changed?

Over the course of our work together, the personal brand experienced significant audience growth across multiple platforms.

Instagram followers increased by 125.1%, expanding the community she could regularly connect with through her content.

YouTube subscribers increased by 2,700%, significantly growing the audience opting into her long-form content.

And YouTube video views increased by 307.7%, giving that content considerably more visibility.

Those numbers are exciting, but I don’t think the biggest lesson from this project is simply that we grew her audience. It’s how we did it. We didn’t force her into a tiny niche to make her easier to market. We didn’t continue following a content calendar that had become disconnected from what her audience was experiencing. And we didn’t keep doing something simply because it had worked a few months earlier. We created a clear enough foundation that we could adapt the execution without losing the brand.

Does a Personal Brand Need a Niche?

I don’t think building a strong personal brand means choosing one tiny thing you’re allowed to talk about for the rest of your life….especially if you’re a multi-passionate entrepreneur, that can start to feel pretty limiting pretty quickly.

But your audience does need some way to understand what connects the things you share. That’s where having clear content pillars, positioning, values, and a larger point of view becomes useful. They give your audience a sense of what they can expect from you without requiring every single post to be about the exact same subject.

For this client, entrepreneurship, social justice, and personal growth were different topics, but they weren’t completely disconnected from the person behind them. The personal brand was the thing connecting them.

How Often Should You Change Your Social Media Strategy?

Probably more often than you think—but not because you need to chase every algorithm update or trend that comes along.

A social media strategy should give you direction, but it shouldn’t become a set of rules you’re afraid to change. Your audience changes. Your offers change. Your priorities change. Platforms change. Your capacity changes. And occasionally, something happens that completely changes the context in which people are receiving your marketing.

The question isn’t whether you’re perfectly following the strategy you created six months ago, it’s whether that strategy is still supporting what your business and audience need today.

Sometimes the answer is yes, and sometimes it’s time to adjust.

(But as a general rule of thumb, I like to re-evaluate at least every year).

What This Project Taught Me About Strategy

This case study also comes from an earlier chapter of Magnolia Creative Co, when personal branding, content creation, and social media management were a much larger part of the work I was doing.

But there’s something about this project that still shows up in the way I work with businesses today: I don’t believe strategy should be rigid.

Whether we’re talking about your marketing strategy, client experience, systems, project management, or operations, I’m always looking at what makes sense for the business you’re actually running — not what you’re theoretically supposed to be doing.

Because sometimes you create a really good plan and then something changes. Maybe the market shifts. Maybe you launch a new offer. Maybe your team grows. Maybe your capacity changes. Maybe the thing that worked beautifully two years ago suddenly requires approximately 37 workarounds to keep functioning.

That doesn’t necessarily mean the original strategy was wrong, it might just mean the business has changed, and the strategy needs to change with it. And learning how to recognize that — and then figure out what comes next — is a skill I’ve carried with me through every version of Magnolia.

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