Council Post: Invest In Branding For Long-Term Success

Fast money is never a reason to get started in business.

That’s because it’s not realistic. Building a brand that will last and continue to grow takes upfront money and time to create. Money comes once the initial time and money have already been invested.

The idea of branding is fascinating. When you create a successful brand, it will live beyond the individual who creates it and establishes an identity of its own. I am inspired to create something meaningful beyond myself and willing to invest the time and money to make it as big as possible.

I started my e-commerce company almost four years ago. It began with a small investment of capital and more than a full-time commitment. Since beginning our original brand, we have also added two other companies. Our Instagram account has over 500,000 followers, and we’ve made seven figures in lifetime sales. This is a perfect example of how investing in your brand can pay off — not necessarily from direct e-commerce ROI, but from the connections and network that are gained that lead to having multiple streams of income through the same brand.

We are yet to take payouts from our initial company because we continue to reinvest in branding. We started paying ourselves only through one of our additional companies after it was created two years later. Now, with our branding and e-commerce expertise, we have achieved great success.

To put it shortly, branding isn’t about what you are doing today, this week or even this year. It’s about what you hope to achieve in 10 or more years of developing the brand. Keeping this in mind allows you to think about the bigger picture of what you are trying to accomplish with your brand. Branding is not sales, but sales are a result of branding.

When a brand is successful, a large number of sales can be made. Also, the power behind a brand can be used as a base to create other forms of revenue, as we have done with our other companies.

Remember to be creative. In order to develop your brand and not burn out, a high level of creativity is needed to push through hard times. The creator has to be the No. 1 believer in the brand, or it won’t get to where it needs to be in order to grow awareness and succeed as a business.

Anyone who is just starting their journey into e-commerce branding should consider developing a presence on both Instagram as a staple and TikTok as the current emerging platform to be active on. Brand creators need to stay on top of current trends and develop a unique social presence.

Branding is how the world perceives what you created. Success is directly proportional to what the market thinks of the image you have created for your business. Make it count, and give it your full effort.