How to monetize and and grow your brand—straight from a UTA Expert!
Jacqueline Siegfried from United Talent Agency shares strategies for diversifying income, growing your audience, and mastering social media trends.
We’re back with another #ForYou, By Them, our monthly Q&A series…
Building your personal brand on social can be challenging, especially if you’re like most people and don’t have a team behind you.
The good news is that more and more creators are being signed by the big talent agencies. Sure, most of us don’t get agents, but that’s a great sign of the viability of this new industry. It has ups and downs, but with plenty of data telling us that consumers trust people over brands, the worlds of Hollywood and business are taking it seriously
Since so many people are still one-man-banding it, we decided to go to our friends at the United Talent Agency for an insider POV on how you should be thinking about your brand (or, if you do something like exec social, your boss’ brand).
We are especially big fans of UTA’s IQ team, which provides research, analytics, and digital strategy advisory services to clients. AKA their advice always has data behind it. You all loved last year’s piece with Matt Feniger, so today we’re bringing you a tips-packed Q&A with IQ’s Jacqueline Siegfried.
Jacqueline is a digital strategist and data analyst who works on the Client Strategy team. She leads the development of actionable, data-backed strategies for high-profile clients across the entertainment and digital media landscape.
In this Q&A, we dive into Jacqueline’s expertise on:
How creators can diversify their income streams
What thought leaders (and those who aspire to be them) should do more of
Current and future trends we should all be thinking about
M.T. Deco: Let’s say a client has just signed to UTA and is now beginning to work with your team on upping their game on social media. Knowing that you have clients across industries and likely with varying audience sizes, what are a few common tips you find yourself giving when getting started with someone?
Jacqueline Siegfried: A lot of our initial work with clients begins by taking a step back and looking at the holistic picture of their brand. Our clients range across various verticals but almost all have a public-facing brand, with social media being a critical asset for communicating that brand to fans, partners, and buyers. Not to mention that many have varying comfort levels with social, as well!
So, we typically begin by speaking to them about their goals and looking forward. What do they want to accomplish in the short, medium, and long-term of their career? What is the relationship they hope to build with their audience along the way? In addition to that, it’s understanding what their current relationship with social media looks like, what they’re comfortable sharing publicly, their passions/hobbies, and generally getting a deeper knowledge of who they are as a person to inform an overall strategy that they’re excited about – one that taps into target audiences, builds credibility in the spaces they want to have authority in, and, just as importantly, is something they can do consistently and long-term while avoiding burnout.
Oftentimes, people can get lost in the shuffle (or the pressure!) to pump out content without taking the appropriate step back to identify their larger goals and how they want to show up online.
From there, we then get into more tactical things like figuring out brand pillars, platforms they should consider, best practices for growth and audience engagement, and performance/audience analysis. As you can imagine, these pieces are very dependent on and specific to the client we’re working with!
Is it accurate to say that the clients you work with are wanting to use social media to expand their income streams? If so, what are some ways they can do that?
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The rest of this interview is exclusive for paid subscribers. For more from Jacqueline on platform monetization, tactics with approaching trends and the platforms / partnerships she’s loving most right now + more, upgrade to paid ⬇️