Content Creators: Build Your Personal Brand with Sonic Branding

Tired of relying on the built in royalty free tracks on instagram, youtube, or whatever social media platform you are on? Feel like they don’t exactly capture the vibe you are looking for?

Sonic Branding is what you are looking for.

Youtubers have been privy to this idea early on, but now tik tokers, instagrammers and short form media creators are starting to catch on.

On Youtube, a content creator may have a special intro jingle made or will consistently use the same piece of background music across all of their content. Some like the popular cooking series Binging with Babish may rely on a royalty free track that they use consistently in nearly every video they put out while others like Mr. Beast even commissioned composers like Hans Zimmer to create custom scores for their videos.

The Babish example is interesting because even though it is a licensed track, his consistent usage over time incorporated it into his brand where as in the Mr. Beast example, he actually hired a composer specifically to elevate the story telling in this video.

Influencers and content creators are starting to realize that music is not just a background element in their videos and if/when they want to increase their engagement and brand recognition, they can start incorporating a sound strategy to further enhance.

What we would traditionally call a “theme” in Hollywood is what brands would call a “Brand Anthem”, and for personal brands such as influencers or content creators this brand anthem really is is a personal anthem that encapsulates their whole spirit or vibe into an easily transferable emotion via the power of music. Music is the quickest and most direct way to convey your vibe to an audience and should be a central pillar in your branding strategy.

With that, consider the potential to pitch to advertisers too that you can incorporate their brand identity into your own via music - you can help connect the brand with a new audience by blending two auditory identities. If the brand doesn’t have a brand identity yet this is a great opportunity to go above and beyond in your delivery and have a custom music made for their sponsored content demonstrating this. You will really stand out this way.

If a brand came to you for a sponsorship deal and gave you $10,000 for a post, there is an expectation that a large portion of that money would go into increasing the production value. You may travel to a fancy location, hire a proper photographer and lighting team. But if your reel sounds bad with a blown out mic and an inappropriate music choice, this whole reel is essentially useless.

What would sonic branding entail for a content creator?

A typical sonic branding package for most entry-level creators would be the creation of a brand anthem, tarting the process of building an internal custom music library, and creating a sonic branding guidelines document.

The Brand Anthem will function as your channel’s main “theme”. It is a quick and easy go to piece of music you can use in countless numbers of situations without needing to think too hard about what piece of royalty free music from your built in app or subscription library is perfect for this video. A problem with library music (aka canned music) is that there is no exclusivity to it. The music has no connection to your brand, and can actually be associated with other brands or products that go against your brand’s messaging and can actually create negative feelings of association in your audience.

This brand anthem can be have multiple variations, cut downs, and stem groups (different layers of music turned on/off) to start building you an internal brand music library with a cohesive and consistent sound - all based off this one track! For short term content especially, this can save you so much time and effort as you can take these tracks and then build templates to your custom audio in either Canva or CapCut. These tracks don’t need to be the “only” music you use, but it is a great way to start brand building. Similar to how you wouldn’t use just the color purple all your content, but it may be a prominent part of your brand’s visual identity.

A sonic branding guidelines document is essentially the same as a visual branding guidelines doc, but this time it focuses on your audio and music choices. This can come in handy when trying to figure out which library music tracks are appropriate for the type of crowd you are trying to connect with. For example, when you subscribe to a music library and have access to millions of tracks across every genre, how do you know what’s appropriate? Your personal taste may not allign with the brand identity, or you may have someone else picking music if you’re working in a larger team. At a bare minimum, this document will help outline what is and isn’t appropriate but can go all the way to detailing when and how to use specific audio cues in your content or experiences. The sky’s truly the limit here, and this document should be ever evolving as your brand grows and changes over time.

Interested in getting this process started? Contact us at joe@electricraindrop.com today to get a free consultation call or join our mailing list for a free PDF on how to get started with sonic branding on your own for free today!