If you spend any amount of time with Elly and Nora Creative, you’re going to hear us talk about buckets. A lot. Buckets are the bread and butter of our branding strategy. It’s a crucial element to understanding any business and business owner.
Since we’ll be mentioning buckets a lot, we thought it would be valuable to break down what exactly a brand bucket is and how you can identify it yourself to strengthen your content.
What is a brand bucket?
Simply put, a brand bucket is a theme/topic that is relevant to your brand. It’s an intersection between who you are personally and what your brand represents commercially.
No brand is about just one thing. Even if you only make one product or focus on a single, hyper-specific audience, you will have multiple buckets that relate to your business.
Think of your brand buckets as your Instagram Highlights topics or your blog categories and tags. It is the grouping of the concepts around your business into simple and semi-broad themes.
Why use brand buckets?
Whether you’re someone who has been struggling to get traction on social media or you’re having a hard time making sales, getting clear on your buckets is an essential part of connection, growth and ultimately success.
Typically when we see a brand struggling to grow it’s because they haven’t locked down who they are online. Who someone is online versus who they are in real life versus who their competition is can look wildly different depending on their buckets. And even if you’re just learning about buckets right now, doesn’t mean you aren’t already using them.
Brand buckets are there to give you clarity and focus while also protecting yourself and your brand from distracting and unnecessary content.
They are also there to help you establish yourself as an individual. Even if you’re in the same niche as someone else, that doesn’t mean your buckets will be the same. And creating some boundaries for what you do and don’t do will help audiences connect with you even faster.
Let’s talk about an example.
Fitness Brand #1: Nancy Pants Exercises
What is their brand? Solopreneur focused on fitness, health, and nutrition while navigating her busy life as a mom.
Who is the person? She is someone who got into working out late in life after struggling with weight fluctuations post-pregnancy. She had rough pregnancies and even rougher postpartum realities. She hates dieting and loves coffee.
What is her product? Fitness camps, online coaching and healthy, but delicious recipe cookbooks.
Possible Buckets:
- Exercises that can be done at home with minimal equipment
- Exercises you can do with your kids
- Meal prep that even toddlers will enjoy
- Fourth-trimester body image inspiration
- Coffee of the day
An entire brand can be created around just these five subjects. Hundreds of pieces of content can be drawn out without deviating from this plan.
Fitness Brand #2: Fancy Pants Nutrition
What is their brand? Solopreneur focused on fitness, health, and nutrition while navigating her busy life as a mom.
Who is the person? A longtime fitness lover who is having her first baby and trying to maintain as fit a lifestyle during and after pregnancy as she did before. She lives for green smoothies, does yoga on breathtaking mountaintops, and once participated in the Fittest Woman in the World competition. She adores her dog.
What is her product? She works with big-name brands to promote athletic wear, sporting equipment, and advanced athletic training programs.
Possible Buckets:
- Weightlifting while pregnant
- Quick returns to fitness post-pregnancy
- Strict nutritional adherence for maximum performance
- Adjusting nutrition for pregnancy, nursing and maintaining energy
- Fitness competitions (throwbacks and new)
At their core, both these brands are focused on health and wellness during motherhood, but these women are drastically different. They have different needs, different strategies, and wildly different stories.
There will be an audience for both of them, but those audiences likely don’t have a ton of overlap. Despite being in what seems like the exact same niche, using buckets they can truly distinguish themselves.
Could they both post exercises, pictures of their meals, and photos with their kids and be true to their brands? Yes. But would they be unique?
The main purpose behind buckets is to make sure you are digging deep into what makes your brand you-nique. Diving below the surface and really rooting out the overlap between who you are and what your brand can be.
Excluded Brand Buckets
When establishing your brand buckets, it’s equally important to decide what ISN’T going to be a subject you cover in content.
Going back to the above examples, both women could also include “The role fitness plays in your marriage” as a subject, but neither of them has to do that. Deciding to include a bucket while another is left off the table is yet another differentiator. Neither of them, however, have to focus on that theme if they don’t want to.
How do you decide which buckets you shouldn’t include in your brand?
- If you don’t like it… don’t do it (even if others in your niche are)
- If you struggle to come up with ideas for content around that subject
- If it’s too personal and you’d rather not expose that side
- If it’s highly controversial and something you’re not resourced or educated enough to speak on
- If it departs too far away from your core content and doesn’t support your business in any way (just because it’s important to you, doesn’t mean it’s always a good fit for your brand)
Having a coherent brand is as much about what you don’t say as it is about what you do say. A brand can easily get confusing if it’s jumping all over the place. On the other hand, if a brand only harps on one subject over and over, it can get boring and make you seem one-dimensional.
Create your buckets in a way that sets you apart, fits your interests and passion, discards that which doesn’t belong, and gives your audience very clear opportunities to connect with you.
How to figure out your buckets?
While most can agree on the fact that buckets are important and will help immensely, the next question is how to do it? If they knew how to identify their buckets, wouldn’t they already be doing it?
First of all, knowing the subjects within your brand and writing them down are two different things.
Then deciding you won’t deviate from that in your content is where the magic really kicks in.
There are a few things you can do to get solid on your buckets:
- Look at your current content that is working best and sort them into categories
- Poll friends, family and audience members on how they’d describe your brands
- Do competitive research and write down what you think their buckets are
- Rank your favorite subjects within your brand
- Put yourself in your customers’ shoes and describe what you see (good and bad)
At the end of the day, you know how to create content. But maybe you get distracted by shiny objects. Or maybe you struggle to commit to a content schedule because you have too many ideas you don’t know where to start. From the photos you post on Instagram, to the YouTube content to your blog subjects and even your logo, knowing who you are by establishing your buckets will bring immense clarity to your brand. And that clarity will help ensure you’re drawing in your ideal customer.
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