Your brand is more than your logo, colours and the content sitting on your social media feed.
Your brand is more than your logo, colours and the content sitting on your social media feed. The people behind the business, how they speak, what they know and the personality they bring to it are all part of how people experience your brand.
Yet a lot of businesses still keep those people completely behind the scenes.
Showing the personalities behind your brand gives your audience something a polished graphic or product photo can’t always provide: a real person to connect with. Over time, those faces, voices and personalities can become just as recognisable as the visual identity of the business itself.
There’s a reason face-to-camera videos, behind-the-scenes content and founder-led content have become such a big part of social media marketing. They give audiences a better understanding of who is actually behind the business.
That doesn’t mean every owner needs to become an influencer or every employee needs to be on camera. It means identifying the people within the business who have something worth sharing and giving them an opportunity to do it.
Maybe it’s the owner who knows the industry inside out, a team member with a big personality, or someone customers already know from visiting the business. These are things your competitors can’t copy. They can offer similar services, create similar graphics and follow the same social media trends, but they don’t have your people.
That personality can become one of the biggest differentiators in your content strategy.
Consistency matters here too. Showing someone once probably isn’t going to transform your brand recognition. But when audiences repeatedly see the same faces and hear from the same people, familiarity starts to build.
They begin to recognise who runs the business, how they communicate and what they stand for. The business starts to feel more familiar before someone has even walked through the door, sent an enquiry or made a purchase.
We’ve seen this happen through our social media work with Dicey Riley’s in Wollongong. When we first started working together, we quickly saw an opportunity to bring more of the people behind the pub into its content. George, the publican and owner, was willing to get involved, jump on camera and let his personality come through.
Over time, people started recognising George from the content when they came into the pub. Customers would mention videos they had seen or come up and say hello because they already felt like they knew him. His personality had become a recognisable part of the Dicey’s brand.
The point isn’t to put someone in front of a camera and hand them a perfectly written script that sounds nothing like them. If anything, that can work against what you’re trying to achieve.
Good social media content creation should find a way to bring out what is already there. How does that person naturally speak? What do they know that could be useful to the audience? What stories can they tell? What makes them interesting or relatable?
Not every business needs the same approach. A restaurant owner, builder, personal trainer and lawyer are obviously going to show personality in completely different ways. The goal is to find what feels natural for the people behind that particular brand rather than copying whatever style of founder content happens to be trending.
Businesses need to be part of the process
There’s also an element of trust involved. You can outsource your social media marketing, content strategy and production, but an agency can’t manufacture the people and personality that exist within your business.
The strongest results often come when both sides are involved. An agency can identify opportunities, develop ideas and create the content, while the business brings the knowledge, stories and personalities that make it worth watching in the first place.
Dicey’s is a great example of what can happen when a business is willing to do that. The team trusted the process, got involved and allowed us to build content around the real characters within the venue rather than creating something that could have belonged to any pub.
Businesses spend a lot of time thinking about how their brand looks, but how it feels and who people associate with it matter just as much.
Social media gives businesses a direct way to build that connection. You can show the knowledge within your team, introduce the people customers interact with and give your audience a genuine sense of who is behind the brand.
You already have personalities within your business. Instead of keeping them behind the scenes, consider how they could become part of the way you market it.
280-282 Crown Street
Wollongong, NSW Australia