In this course Andrea Casanova, a digital marketing and branding expert born in Venezuela, raised in five countries, and currently residing in Los Angeles, CA, teaches us about expanding and growing your brand.

What does that even mean and how do you know you’re ready to do it?

Knowing how to pivot, grow, and re-invent yourself as a person can be complicated enough– let alone doing it for your brand. Andrea will help you break it down into manageable pieces that allow you to take the whole process one step at a time.

You might be ready for a portion of the information in this course and not another, but the beautiful things about these steps and tips is that you can visit (and re-visit!) them at any point and as many times as you need to over the quarters and years of your business’ growth.

Where do you want to go? What’s the goal? Manifest where you want to be. Before you can get where you’re going, you’ve gotta know where you wanna go! You can do your manifesting in lots of different ways: thinking the thoughts, saying your intentions and goals out loud, writing them down, but Andrea’s favorite way by far is making a vision board.

A vision board is a visual manifestation of your goals, dreams, and hopes. You can do this analog-style with scissors, magazines, glue, and a poster board or... you can do it digitally! Andrea even has Adobe Express template you can use. Check it out in the template collection at the end of this article!

The first place to start is identifying what your story is. Andrea says she creates a sort of character of herself as my starting point. She writes down everything she’s been through in in third person.

Andrea says we always give others more grace and empathy than we give ourselves, so writing down the details of who and why you are the way you are before you start telling your story gives you that outside empathy.

One of her personal storytelling tools is something she calls angles. Once she pulls all the different pieces of her story together they became her different angles, or storytelling points, that she can use to find common ground with my audience. For example, her personal “angles” are being a Latina immigrant who openly talks about being an entrepreneur who lives with mental health ups and downs. She recommends you do this too because it becomes way easier to create when you can easily find common ground with your audience.

The next logical place to go from identifying your story might feel like diving right into content brainstorming and planning, but Andrea first likes to go into psychology. Your audience perception of you is determined by everything in your content, including, but not limited to:

Harnessing these things, Andrea teaches that you can create a pattern in your audience’s mind that can be triggered by something that reminds them of you. To be unforgettable, develop a signature cue, like a repeating introduction or catchphrase. Visual cues like colors or camera angles can work too. Repetition should be used to your advantage. Look to brand archetypes such as the sage, hero, explorer, and jester to tap into universal characters.

After that you can move into content types. Everyone wants to be the “next best friend” online, Andrea says, but she thinks that’s where a lot of creators go wrong because they're too focused on trying to be someone everyone will like. The truth is that to be successful you need to reach and resonate with the right people. You and your content are right for certain people and not for others, and that’s okay!

Andrea notes that often when people think of their content pillars they’re thinking way too niche, which makes it difficult to expand their brand from that point. Try this analogy to think about your content a little differently...

Zoom out and think about your content like a jellyfish.

The head of the jellyfish represents your values and the themes you’re passionate about. The tentacles are your content pillars that allow you to explore related content in greater depth.

Taking those content themes and turning them into content series is a great way to keep your audience coming back for more. (This is a theme you’ll probably hear throughout many of our creator’s courses!)

From there, Andrea breaks content down into three tiers of varying degrees of commitment and effort. Different tiers of content enable you to show up in accordance with your availability and energy.

Her content tiers is a great segue into batching content. By creating when you’re at your best allows you to save work and leverage it on a rainy day. Pro-tip: you don’t have to engage every trend.

Ending this section Andrea shares practical tips for brainstorming:

Let's review what we talked about:

Thanks for joining us for this course!