Personal Branding

Dominica Lumazar 0:04
It’s Christmas week.

Rory Carruthers 0:07
Welcome to the Christmas episode of The BPB Podcast. I am not Dominica Lumazar.

Dominica Lumazar 0:16
And I’m definitely not Rory Carruthers.

Rory Carruthers 0:20
But this is the bpb podcast and this week we are going to be talking about how to build your personal brand.

Dominica Lumazar 0:28
How to build your brand. It’s my favorite topic in the entire universe. So hold on to your Santa hats people, because this is going to be a good one.

Rory Carruthers 0:39
So, fun fact, since Christmas, we have our Christmas sweaters on. Yes, I hope you’re watching this on video because

Dominica Lumazar 0:49
it’s gonna be mighty confusing if you’re not actually so we highly encourage that you just like stop listening. Go to YouTube because you’re gonna want to see more what is on your super ugly sweater you have on.

Rory Carruthers 1:02
I have a cat and he’s he’s got a little scarf that hangs off at night. And he’s got some What do you call this? tensile? tensile? Yeah. tensile

Dominica Lumazar 1:15
is on? Is there a little booties? Oh, yeah.

Rory Carruthers 1:19
Yeah, those are booties. And yeah, this is in honor of my my cat speech who passed away this year.

Dominica Lumazar 1:26
Oh, rip speech. coolest cat ever.

Rory Carruthers 1:29
Oh,

Dominica Lumazar 1:30
I do love that sweater, though. I have to say I’m a little jealous. As you’re saying it does. So my sweater says bite me. I’ll back up. So you can see what we got going on here. This was this was a gift from my husband last year. And it’s the best thing ever. I will always have this sweater. Yes, it’s a little gingerbread man. It says by me, it’s fantastically hideous, and really makes me smile. I’m just jealous of your hat. That’s really what it comes down to. We have decorations and all kinds of fun things because it is Christmas week and 2020 is so weird. So let’s just make it a little bit weirder with having our own virtual Christmas party. All right, so we’re just going to jump right into it. And we’re going to just immediately talk about establishing branding. But let’s start with the basics here. And if you know what we’re talking about, continue to listen, because I feel like there’s going to be a lot of golden nuggets in here that maybe you haven’t thought about before. Branding changes all the time. And we’re also going to talk about what it looks like to rebrand a little later in the episode of fastest stage you’re currently in. But right off the bat. And Rory, I want to I want to have you answer this because establishing branding. What that truly means is you’re you’re figuring out how to tell your story through your brand. So can you talk to that a little bit?

Rory Carruthers 2:48
Okay, well, you know, when we’re developing our story, we got to look at like, what, what is the story that we need to actually share with people? What’s the thing that’s going to be compelling to motivate them to have a connection with you and your business? And also, what is the story that is going to reach them emotionally, that they’re going to want to purchase from you and believe in what it is you’re doing in your business? Right? What are some strategies that like, where do you start when you’re looking at developing the story for a brand?

Dominica Lumazar 3:23
It’s a great question. So I always start with, why and how did we get here? So say, it’s like a client comes to me, right? And they say, I’ve got this great idea for a golf club company. Okay, well, tell me how we got here. Like, why is that something you have an interest in? and usually it comes down to like, I really like golf, people. That’s not enough. Let’s let’s get down to more nitty gritty like, did you grow up playing golf with a great uncle? Did you? Is there a story around how you thought of this great idea? Like, how did you come to this epiphany to get to this point. And more often than not, there’s always there’s always going to be some sort of story where it starts with a Yeah, you know, it was a really beautiful sunny day, I was out on the green. Maybe I was having a couple of drinks, my family was all around me. And I had this great feeling. And I thought of this idea. So when you have that feeling, that’s what we need to put into the brand. We need to somehow within five seconds or less. And we’ll talk about the five second rule. We need to somehow develop a story that is so to the point that has your brand message, your promise what you’re going to offer to your customers. And something that I think is so so important, which is overlooked when brands are being developed, is what I like to call the three perspectives. So the strategy around this is pretty simple, but I make my clients go through this process. The first perspective to developing your brand message which goes hand in hand with your brand story is the customer perspective. So how is the customer going to think of what you have to offer? The second is the internal perspective, does it feel true for you? Are you just out on the green one day and you thought this would be great? Let’s see, what happens is, it’s something that you’re going to be wanting to do every single day. You ask yourself that, and sometimes, like at this stage of the conversation with my clients, they go, No, and then they scrap it and move on to something else. So we have to ask ourselves these these bigger questions. And then the third one is marketplace for perspective, which is what Rory and I do a lot is a ton of research to even see if a brand is going to be viable. Well, before a product is even developed, we need to look at the brand itself. Right? So So what do you do? Right? What do you do with your clients when they come to you? And

they’re they’re looking to, to get a brand off the ground?

Rory Carruthers 5:56
We’re looking to to strategize around First off, you know, image and appearance of we know what the business is going to look like. Also titles of products, like how can you title something that is going to instantly capture the attention of someone who’s going to be you know, finding out about your product? Yeah, what we’re looking for is to get specific, right? So if it’s, if it’s golf ease, that’s not very specific. What do you mean by that? something more specific is how to Okay, how to shoot under par.

Shoot, is that

Dominica Lumazar 6:32
I have no idea, I don’t play golf

Rory Carruthers 6:35
you’re the one who came up with the golf analogy here?

Dominica Lumazar 6:39
Well, this is good. This is like a good challenge for us. We came up with this fake thing. And now we have to talk our way out of it.

Rory Carruthers 6:47
Okay, so how to how to how to hit how to shoot whichever one it is.

Dominica Lumazar 6:54
whoever plays golf? Will you please message us?

Rory Carruthers 6:56
Yeah. under par? Yeah. And in under 30 days, in three simple steps, something like that. Right? Or like,

Dominica Lumazar 7:04
increase your backswing in.

Rory Carruthers 7:08
Right? Exactly. Like, yeah, getting more more specific. Right?

Dominica Lumazar 7:12
Yes. Yeah. It has to be more specific.

Rory Carruthers 7:14
Yeah. How to hit a line drive. You go with one quick adjustment, something like that. Right? Like, I mean, we’re talking about like a little bit how to, as opposed to, like a product brand. But what we’re looking for is the thing that’s, that’s going to explain the process. And it can be a branded process. Right? So the Seven Habits of Highly Effective golfer, okay, nice. All right.

Dominica Lumazar 7:41
When in doubt, put a seven in front of it, right? Yes.

Rory Carruthers 7:47
So when when when doing that, you’re letting the person that is, you know, looking at your brand, or your product, know instantly that it’s for them or not?

Dominica Lumazar 7:58
right? Exactly. When I think of branding, whether it’s developing a new brand, doing a rebrand, launching a new product for a brand. I always think of it like a handshake when we used to be able to give handshakes, right? It’s that first impression. And you you seriously, you only get five seconds or less to make that impression. Either. It’s the last one or it swing and a miss. They’re not gonna it’s not going to connect. So how do we connect those dots? Well, there’s a lot that goes into that. It can be anything from color, it can be anything from the tagline, it can be the the the product title, like we’re always talking about, Rory, let’s talk about color a little bit in color psychology, because I know this is something you’re like a master of and if anyone has it, hopefully you have gone to our YouTube channel or gone to our website, you’ll see all these different colors on our website, and it’s for a reason. So Rory, walk us through that a little bit.

Rory Carruthers 8:54
If we look at colors each have a meaning and a feeling associated with them. So we start there and we say okay, well, what colors do we want for the represent a brand, they’re going to evoke emotion in a different way. Based on the colors that you choose, there’s a reason that a lot of business companies choose various shades of blue, because it means trust. And it means stability. And that you know, this is this is a company that that you can work with now, lighter shades of blue, mean a more youthful five and darker shades of blue tend to be you know, more like the IBM the more established bigger brands. So, there’s actually a color called IBM, blue, blue. Yeah.

Dominica Lumazar 9:44
What’s fascinating Look at all these major social media platforms, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, they’re all blue. It’s like this. Come on, come on. We’re like welcoming you to Be on our platform and you can trust us. It’s

very interesting. Yeah,

Rory Carruthers 10:03
Instagram does have a multicolored

Dominica Lumazar 10:05
multicolor, yes, but there, there’s, there’s a couple of different Instagram logos. And they did that. And they, they pulled in the, the more of like the rainbow ish vibe to bring in a younger audience. So it’s, it’s, I’m sure there’s a lot more behind the psychology of why they decided to do that. But I’m assuming that that’s probably one of the main reasons.

Rory Carruthers 10:25
Yeah, it wasn’t like that in the beginning. No, that’s, that’s a rebrand,

Dominica Lumazar 10:29
see there you go and, and, and a successful on at that if you’re looking at your phone, you’re scrolling through your apps, the blues, just all kind of like mixed into one another. So it’s, that was a good call for them to do something different to to help them stand out from other competitors, like Snapchat,

Rory Carruthers 10:45
though, with the yellow, right? Yeah, yeah, that pops and against all the other brands. So sometimes, when you’re, when you’re choosing your colors, you’re looking at standing out from your competitors. And sometimes you’re trying to evoke a certain emotion, like red can mean passion, but it can also mean anger. So you have to be very careful. And there’s different shades of red, you know, so you have you, you pay attention. And a lot of companies will go through testing different colors and different logos. And they’ll get feedback. Now, if you’re, you know, in a business where you’re just building your own brand online, you may have to go the route of putting something out there and seeing how it does. I’ll give you an example. So I tested this, when I used to do proposals for my business many years ago, I tested changing the colors on my proposal. So my, my main brand logo is blue. But my proposals for whatever reason, I had put red mm, Merman. And I just left it as red left to this red. And then I was like, but it doesn’t match my brand. You know, it’s like, I’ll change it to blue. I change it to blue and the proposal started tanking. Interesting, right. So it’s also in you know, having having logos and colors can also be in the context of how you’re delivering it. So the blue In my opinion, what happened was, the blue is great for the website, because it establishes that trust Hmm, but it’s, it doesn’t evoke enough emotion when you want to make a sale

Dominica Lumazar 12:17
or establish urgency, maybe or Yeah, establish urgency

Rory Carruthers 12:21
get people is, you know, blood pumping, like I’m going to do this and make a decision to move forward in my business, whereas blue is just nice and calm. Right.

Dominica Lumazar 12:31
So at it.

Rory Carruthers 12:32
Yeah, there’s like little things like that. Now, why did we choose orange as our bpb, you know, logo brand?

Dominica Lumazar 12:41
Well, you and I were very established from the beginning, we wanted it to be bright. And we knew that orange is a very good call to action color. And if you look at like Amazon, for example, their buy now buttons are orange, it’s like kind of a goldish, orange color a lot, a lot of big box stores there by now is orange, and it creates the immediate action to make something happen to purchase something to watch something to listen to something. And when you’re scrolling through 1,000,001 podcasts in a day looking for something new. We had to do that to stand out. Because there’s so many good podcasts out there. We were just hoping like, well, let’s have the color play with us and not against us. So, it so yeah, it’s working out good.

Rory Carruthers 13:27
Well, yeah, and that’s why we put the like, we twisted the the big on the on the logo, so that sideways captures your attention a little bit, you know, we’re just trying to think of like, how do we make this stand out still be true to like, you know, the business world, but also stand out. So that people it’ll capture people’s eyes. And now you know, if you’re if you’ve been following us on YouTube, you’ll notice that we we just did some of our brand to have much more brighter colors in the background of our title cards, to to capture and to have different ones every episode, so that people can instantly recognize Oh, that’s that episode. And you know, and it gives, it gives us also data to work with to go, oh, some of these colors are in certain contexts or capturing people’s eyes. So, you know, back, you know, back when we were building, you know, brands years ago, we only had to look at things in the general, you know, this is what we want the colors for the business to be. But as you’re building brands these days, you have to look at it, okay, you have your main color or a color palette that you’re working with. But then you also have contextual colors of that you’re using as part of your brand to stand out depending on the platform that you’re that you’re promoting on.

Dominica Lumazar 14:50
Well, it’s not just the platform, it’s it’s also your target audience, right. So just just because I might really love let’s say purple well My target audience, my main target demographic is typically these larger corporations. And for whatever reason, it’s usually men like between ages like 40 and 65 that I work with. And so Purple’s probably not going to be the color that’s going to, like help my business grow, just because I might like it. So it’s important to look at those things, it’s like, yes, going back to the brand message perspectives, right, where, where you have to look at the internal perspective, it’s okay to not put all of yourself into your brand, right? Pick maybe one or two things you like. The font is also very, very important. scripty font versus a serif font, it makes a huge difference. If I see big block letters, I’m my brain immediately goes to Oh, it’s something that’s youthful. It’s something that is geared towards a younger audience. If I see something that’s like overly scripty, where it’s kind of hard for me to read, I’m thinking that’s probably like a gormet food or something, or a wine, a winery, who knows something in that category. So fonts really make a big difference. So take the time, really take the time to do the research for your brand. Now, it’s okay, if you don’t absolutely love your logo, there are so many different times. For myself, I know Rory to where we have gone through so many different logos where it’s like, I didn’t like it, let’s change it, let’s just change the whole thing and see what happens. It’s okay to do that in the beginning. But it is important to not do it all the time. Like give yourself the grace to like do it once or twice, land on something you like, and then roll with it. But another thing that’s important to note here is that sometimes we have to age with our target demographic to continue to get reoccurring income. So what that means is, maybe you’ve had a really youthful logo and your clientele has been all these, you know, youthful individuals that are now moving into adulthood, well, maybe you need to design something that’s a little more up to speed with with where your audiences going, you have to grow with them. So that doesn’t mean go crazy and change everything, a couple of tweaks here and there, it shows that you’re paying attention to your target demographic. And so the next stage is, is testing and we’re gonna love this right, we test test, test and test some more, because without testing, how the heck do we know what to do? So right, what are some ways that we test for brands to put them out into the marketplace?

Rory Carruthers 17:33
Well, first of all, I also want to just to mention one more thing is that clarity, being able to read logos is really huge. Now, we talked about sometimes scripty fonts, with luxury brands, the majority of luxury, luxury brands, if you actually look at them, you can still read their logos, even when it’s very small, you know, or from a distance. And the reason that you need people to be able to read it, so they can instantly recognize it. If it’s too scripty, or, you know, or the font just with with the word with the letters that you have for your name, it just doesn’t work for some reason, the spacings not right, and it makes any you look at it and you start just glazing over. Like I don’t know what this is, what what this is trying to say anymore. Like you have to pay attention to that because people are going to, to look at that. And they’re just not going to have any clue what the name is. Mm hmm. You know, and you have to be careful with letters that sometimes might end up looking like other letters. Right? And then then they don’t, then they’ll be if they have to take a double take to understand what your business name is, then you’re losing.

Dominica Lumazar 18:49
Mm hmm. All right. Yes. laughing because I see it a lot where clients will come to me and say, This is our new logo. And I’ll just go Ah, and they look at me like you don’t like it. I can’t read it. I have no idea what this says. So, yeah, don’t put your marketing people in that position to break your heart. Just pick pick a good font.

Rory Carruthers 19:12
So testing, yeah, testing. So testing. And there’s there’s multiple ways to do it. I mean, there’s there’s places online that you can actually just send logos out and have like 50 or 100 people give you their Yeah, your their responses on it.

Dominica Lumazar 19:27
Their honest feedback. This is important Guys, do not do not think that the testing ground is good when you’re sending this to family and your closest friends. This has to be from either perfect strangers, or people who have been your paying customers before. It’s okay to do surveys and ask them if they like something, but do not go to your family and say what do you think and then make that your deciding factor because it might it might not be the best decision for your business.

Rory Carruthers 19:56
Yeah, and I’ll say I’ll say that they’re not like even even the people giving you feedback, they’re not always gonna be right either. Or, you know, of course you have it, you have to balance that. But if you’re getting if you’re getting, like, what you’re looking for is things like what’s, what is the name of your, your business, I don’t, I can’t read it, things like that, that’s going to be pretty universal. If you start, if you see a trend of stuff like that, you got to pay attention to that, you know, contrast with colors is a big thing. So, you know, say you’ve got like a brown background with a black font, that’s probably not going to stand out very well. And people are going to have a hard time. You know, if they have to look in and squint to try and see what you’re, you know, the font, you know, what the title of your businesses or your process or whatever it is, then, again, that’s, that’s an issue, the contrast is also going to come up in context of where you’re using your logo, right? So let’s say you’re putting out a PDF, that work, you know, has a black background on it. Yeah, well, you’re gonna use probably a white version of your logo. But on your website, if your website’s white, then you might be using a black version, or a color version of your logo. Right? So, again, context also matters, because you need to create that contrast so that it will stand out. Mm hmm. So another thing to think about as far as luxury brands is that very few luxury brands have very vibrant bright colors.

Dominica Lumazar 21:23
Red, red, white, and black. That’s it. So there can be a pop of color, but it’s, but it’s usually like a very bold, and that’s it.

Rory Carruthers 21:34
So yeah, single single color.

Yeah, yeah.

But in most cases, you look at most luxury brands, it’s it looks classy, because they are using blacks, whites, Silver’s golds, things like that. Yeah, yeah. So if your brand lends itself to that, or if that’s how you want to be perceived in the marketplace, you can use that to your advantage, because there are preconceived ideas about what colors represent. So you can use that to your advantage. And if you’re wanting to convey that you’re like, the luxury brand of this, then have your logo, tap into that. Mm hmm. And set yourself apart now, you know, then there’s the whole creative aspect where Yeah, maybe you can have that pop of one color, just to really stand out. But you’ve also got to understand that when you’re building a personal brand online versus a company that has millions and millions of dollars, that they’re investing in their advertising, they can, they can buy their way into people’s minds, regardless of their logo, sometimes

Dominica Lumazar 22:36
totally with the right marketing and positioning.

Rory Carruthers 22:39
Yeah. Whereas you know, you don’t want to do that you want to be as clear as possible, and, and position yourself properly so that you’re not having to spend all this money just to get into people’s minds. You can, you can use it to just stand out and be like here, this is what is that. This is what this is who we are, this is what we do, and be very clear about it.

Dominica Lumazar 23:01
clarity, clarity is key. Along with clarity, I often find that the best, best remedy to doing any sort of online branding is to keep it simple. That is my secret to online branding success. Keep it so simple, because everyone wants to overcomplicate when I think of taglines, I’m, I’m constantly motivating and encouraging my clients to keep it so simple. I mean a few words, get the point across, let them know what they’re going to be getting out of the experience by buying into your brand. That’s something that I feel like is missed as well. When we are purchasing anything, anything we are buying in, we’re spending our hard earned dollars eyeing into a brand. What does that brand all about? So you want to make sure that your brand has everything you want to portray. And it’s a challenge like I challenge all of you to like look at your own personal brands. Is it portraying exactly what you need to get across in five seconds or less? And now I sound like a broken record, but this is just step one important. For example, okay, BMW, the ultimate driving machine I’m in it tells me exactly what it is. It tells me exactly what I’m going to be getting out of the experience when I get into my Beamer. I’m going to have the ultimate driving experience and it’s the best machine ever. Right? But if you can come up with something like that, then you’re off to the races. And like Rory said, like don’t don’t spend you know, millions of dollars trying to buy your way into people’s minds. Just think about it really strategically for yourself and make it make that impression super lasting so that it makes someone go Hmm, you don’t need to get an Instant Buy Now just make someone go Hmm, because then that’s where ad retargeting and positioning come into play. So let’s talk about ways to get brand exposure. We get this question a lot, a lot, what are the best ways to get my brand and my business online? First and foremost, social media platforms are free. Put your logo and your brand on every thing, everything that’s free, because it’s going to help with search engine optimization, and keeping brand consistency. What other ways worry what other ways to have some online brand exposure?

Rory Carruthers 25:32
images, Mm hmm. As many images as you can put out, other, you know, if it’s your personal brand, and you are the brand that has many images of yourself that you can, you know, some of these are going to be your everyday life, some of them will be business space, some of them will be, you know, photoshoots, and things like that, that you’re putting together. But the thing is, is, you know, not because you don’t want to get too overwhelmed with this, but you can repurpose a lot of stuff to work for you.

Dominica Lumazar 25:59
Well, let’s talk about that. And how you and I do that with the podcasts that might inspire

Rory Carruthers 26:03
people? Sure.

Dominica Lumazar 26:05
So we start our whole repurposing right here with what you’re seeing right now, if you’re watching this, if you’re not watching this, that’s okay. That’s part of the repurposing that we’ve done. We record video at the same time we record audio, right there. So now we’ve got two ways to get our information out, we

Rory Carruthers 26:27
take clips of the video on the audio tool that we use for promotions, we take quotes from things we say and turn them into quote images. We also take Yeah, this transcription, there is you photos that we take while we’re doing the podcast, or right after you know what else to do.

Dominica Lumazar 26:49
The thing that I love so much about the way that we repurpose is once the transcription is done from this, I can pull out so much of that information to use for social media quotes, it gets turned into a blog post, it can get you’re into pretty much anything. And nobody would ever know that that came from this one episode unless we say that. So there is a mountain of information just in one podcast episode that we can repurpose over and over and over again for years to come. So we are all about teaching our clients to work smarter, not harder. And this is one of the ways to do that. But you just have to be thinking bigger picture to set these things up ahead of time for yourself. And I’m not gonna lie, like doing the podcast stuff. Sure, we can back me up on this. It’s a lot of work. But now that we’re on to Episode 20, this is Episode 20. It’s amazing. We are getting into a rhythm. And so if you decide to do this sort of content creation where you are repurposing, you will find what rhythm makes sense for you in your business.

Rory Carruthers 27:50
Just think to think about it like this, okay, let’s look at a musician. Okay? Now, if they’re releasing a new song, they don’t just put the song up and say there’s that what do they do? They make a music video, yeah, they make a lyric video, pray, make a, you know, a playthrough video of you know, then playing the song, they, they do a stripped down version of it, they do remix version of the song, they then then they go and then they you know when when bands can actually tour, they go out and they perform that same song over and over and over again to get it to people and create an experience for them. So you think about that. So they created one thing one time, and it’s just continues to snowball into all the other things that they can do. You know, they write the lyrics so that people can find the lyrics online. They, you know, create music books so that people can learn how to play the songs. I mean, it just goes on and on. You know, yes, there’s a bit of effort to create the initial content, but it can be expanded into this realm of other content in pretty much anything that you do. I mean, we do this with books, books, turned into audiobooks turned into mini courses, turn into, you know, video courses, turn into YouTube videos based on your book, turned it into Facebook Lives, turned it into, you know, quote cards from quotes, you say in your book, like it just goes on and on Take, take the things that you’ve already created and make them something that you can actually benefit from long term and use this, the that that thing you’ve created as a starting point a jump a way to springboard, springboard. Thank you, springboard, there all the rest of the promotions and things that you’re going to do.

Dominica Lumazar 29:42
Yeah, I’ll take even one step further. For those of you who haven’t picked up on it yet who follow me on my personal Instagram at Dominica Lumazar, just about 95% of my posts are just passages from my book, but I’ve just why reinvent the wheel. I’ve already written the book. So I just Grab it from the PDF, and I stick it in as my caption, and it’s great. So yeah, if you have a book, The Power of repurposing is very big.

Rory Carruthers 30:09
Yeah, and you can outsource some of this stuff too, if you want. You know, if you’re like, I don’t have time to do that, well, you can actually send your book to, to someone and say, I want you to go through I want you every time you use a quote, highlighted in the book that you’ve used, it may make a make a quote card, and then you’re going to post it on my social media. Yeah. And I want you to post X number every, you know, every day, every every week or something like that. Right? I mean, you’ll you’re giving them years worth of content, the things that they can be doing just with that one step there. Yeah,

Dominica Lumazar 30:43
absolutely. We got on this topic, talking about brand exposure. And the ways to do that. And this is just an amazing way to do that. One of those challenging things that always come up for clients and business owners seems to be the timing, like where he was saying, so don’t work as hard. Just do it once, repurpose it, move on, move on to the next thing. But we all know that being online and playing into the algorithm is really important. So along with doing all that content creation, the power of positioning that creation is really important. And I know you’re a master at that.

Rory Carruthers 31:19
Well, okay, so positioning is about is all about how you’re presenting yourself in the marketplace. Mm hmm. Okay, so you got to look at, you know, what is that perception that someone has when they come to your website? Does your website look credible? First off, do you look legitimate, okay, and there’s certain factors that go into that. Okay, is your website secure? Let’s start there. Oh,

Dominica Lumazar 31:43
these everyone. SSL certificates these days are practically free. Get it? most, most hosting companies, good ones will include them for free.

Rory Carruthers 31:53
Yeah. And so you just have to, you know, check a box, flip it on, make sure it’s turned on, that provides a level of cross trust and credit, credibility, right? You start

Dominica Lumazar 32:06
crusty credibility, credibility

provides a level of crust.

Rory Carruthers 32:17
So when you have your crusty credibility,

Dominica Lumazar 32:20
okay, what did I so rudely interrupt you about positioning, other ways for brand exposure, social media, brand, consistency is very important. It’s one of the things that I see so often, where it’s not consistent, meaning, let’s say it’s your face, or like a headshot of a professional looking headshot, and that’s on Facebook, and then you go over to LinkedIn, and it’s your logo, okay, or you go over to YouTube. And let’s say everything’s green, when your logo is blue on LinkedIn, like, it just doesn’t make sense. So it’s important that you stick with a theme, and roll with it. And that’s a great way to start your testing process where you don’t have to pay anything, you just need to be consistent about it, put it everywhere across the board, and then you’ll be able to get some feedback and people will be able to find you. That’s the other thing, if they can’t find you, because your logos are all messed up. That’s a huge problem.

Rory Carruthers 33:20
Well, yeah, and, and, and people, when they’re going from one platform to another, they go from your website to say your YouTube channel, if it’s not consistent, it creates a disconnect for them.

Dominica Lumazar 33:29
Right? So it breaks trust. That’s another Yes.

Rory Carruthers 33:33
Exactly. So when we’re talking, you know about your profiles, right. So we talked a little bit about, like strategies within what you’re doing kind of like, oh, like change your colors, colors of your title cards, or, you know, or of your images or whatever it is, you know, on Instagram, you can use, a lot of people will have a filter that’s custom designed for them, that they can put on every single one of their images. So it has a certain look, that is part of their brand, right? And you can you can do things like that, but we’re talking about is bigger picture of your website, the actual profiles, your your banners, on your profile, your images on your profile, that are you know, for your main thing, let’s make them all consistent or as consistent as possible, you know, and they’re all going to be like different sizes, and you’re gonna have to design them in different ways. But the general theme needs to be there so that when they go from one platform to another, it all looks like you they recognize the brand. And then you know as you’re doing your marketing, that’s when you’ll be testing some of the other stuff to see what’s going on. And if you do a rebrand rebrand it all

Dominica Lumazar 34:41
rebrand it all Yeah, don’t just do one platform. You have to do it all. Yeah. And Rory actually reminded me this the other day, when we were creating some new ads for the podcast. I had like a really random image is very sweet image of these two little boys on like, go karts. Like that image is so cool. Like, let’s use that and it made sense in the context of the wording that we were that we had on the ad. But Rory was like, that has nothing to do with brand. People might click on it. But that’s not what we’re after we’re after people to like, come to YouTube and download the episodes. And so even if something’s getting a lot of clicks, because it’s either cute or whatever is going on, to me, that doesn’t, that doesn’t say success, the success is the end result that you’re really going for. It could be sales, it could be downloads, it could be a lead, something like that. So be thinking that you don’t want to be spending tons of money, even if you’re getting a lot of clicks, again, right back to that trust and disconnect. Right. And right, Rory had to pull me way back in. Like, it needs to be a picture of us. And it needs to lead to the site. And here’s why. And he’s totally right. But sometimes I you know, see that, yeah,

Rory Carruthers 35:52
and there’s different types of advertising, right, some of it is to promote yourself as a brand. And you want to get your name and your face and your logo everywhere, as much as possible. So that’s one aspect of it. Because, you know, say, for example, if someone comes to your website, you can retarget them, which means to show ads on on social media platforms, and on Google, and when when someone comes to your site, and, and that could be branded, that could be like, Oh, you came to my site, and maybe that’s the first time you’ve been to my site. Here’s a bunch of stuff of you know, who I am. And, you know, you want people to like, see your face everywhere, or, or see your, your logo and see, you know, and and get that feeling of, Oh, this person like really has a lot going on? Well, this business really has a lot going on. We’ve talked

Dominica Lumazar 36:44
a couple times on this podcast about the seven different touch points, right? Where, for whatever reason, it can take sometimes seven times for people to see your face, or we’re product or brand online, before they’ll even click or before they’ll really kind of engage. And that’s it. I think a lot of that, that idea is behind the fact that we’re just scrolling, like you’re looking through your newsfeed and you’re scrolling on social media, or you’re on Google, and you’re looking for something and you miss it. And it becomes an

Rory Carruthers 37:13
impression. Well, and that’s, and that’s with interruption marketing. So there’s interruption marketing, and there’s intent based marketing. So when you’re interrupting people with your advertising, such as on Facebook, where they’re there to do something else, as opposed to a Google search, where they’re actually looking for something potentially specific, like, you know, if they’re looking for best blenders in 2020, or whatever it is, right? That is going to be a signal that they are looking to purchase a blender. Right. Exactly. And and that’s different than then someone being on Facebook, and like, you know, writing a message to a family member, and this ad pops up and you’re like, What is this about?

Dominica Lumazar 37:59
I don’t need a blender. What? Yeah, but we mentioned the power of ad retargeting. So for those of you that aren’t familiar with, with what Rory was talking about, you have to think about it like this. You’ve all been on Amazon before, let’s say you wanted to buy a jacket. But you decided, you know what, I don’t really want that jacket right now. So you go over to Facebook, and you’re writing a message to a family member. And there’s that exact same jacket with a link that you can purchase it right now. But it’s on Facebook, that is how powerful ad retargeting is, it’s just going to follow you around until you either say I don’t want to do this anymore, or you buy the dang thing. You can do that for your own business. That’s how powerful that is. And it’s not like you’re stealing data, I want to be very clear about this. This is something that people have opted in, they whether they read the agreement or not, when they were on these platforms, you’re allowed to pixel them and get that information to provide them the best and user situation. So if someone’s coming to your site, and they clicked on golf clubs that you had for sale on your new fancy, you know, golf business website, but they decided not to purchase well guess what you now pixel them and you can retarget that exact same product to see, maybe they forgot or they were interrupted by their kids or whatever it is. So you’re just providing them the experience in which you’re assuming they want it to have via your website.

Rory Carruthers 39:22
Yeah, and and you know what we’re talking about with your brand. If they just go to your homepage and nowhere else, then you can send them more about your brand and your images just to make them more aware of you as a business. But then when they actually take a specific action on your website, say they go to a sales page to purchase something but they don’t, then that’s when you drive them back to that product that that they’re you know, interested in. Yeah. And that that becomes a lot more specific and you’re not at that point you’re not branding anymore, because they are looking to purchase you just need to get them over the the hurdle now. I will say that In the year two, we may not have pixeling anymore. It’s an opportunity that as part of the marketing world that we can tap into, at this point, things are going to change, things are already in place to change, it’s going to look different. There still be ways to market and stuff. But the opportunity we have right now, to utilize this and to continue to grow our businesses in this way. I mean, there’s nothing like it, then there’s never there hasn’t been anything like it. And in the future, there may not be so like, utilize these strategies in your business that are working and effective right now.

Dominica Lumazar 40:33
Yep, do it right now. And as things start to roll out, and new marketing strategies and techniques become available to us, I’ll tell you right now, Rory and I are going to be on it 100%, we will share everything that we’re going to learn. Because yes, I agree with you 100%. I don’t even know if we’re gonna have it in two years, maybe maybe one more year, we’ll see. But yeah, I think things are shifting a lot. So something new, something new will be developed, will be on it will burn it in and out, figure out because we have. So let’s talk about reviews and how to leverage that in your brand in a huge way.

Rory Carruthers 41:08
reviews on your website.

Okay, so let’s look at that the reviews that you choose to post on your website. So you may have, let’s say 100 reviews, you don’t want every single one of those reviews, you want the reviews that relate to your brand, that gives you the best shot of connecting with someone. Okay, now in certain platforms, you’re not always going to have control of that. So say someone’s leaving you a review of your business on Google, all the reviews are there for people to see good or bad, you know, or whatever it ends up being right on the things that you can control can control your views and put in alignment, the ones that serve your brand, the most. The people who say the things that most reflect what you know, you’re wanting people to know about your business.

Dominica Lumazar 41:59
Quick note, though, make sure that those reviews are current. If someone goes to your website, and there’s a date on it, and it says like 2014, that’s not going to build a lot of trust. So you want the most recent ones that are going to be beneficial for your brand.

Rory Carruthers 42:15
Yeah, and that’s another thing is Google actually has stopped taking any weight from reviews that are more than six months old. So you’re gonna need to consistently be getting reviews as part of your business

Dominica Lumazar 42:30
agreed. Back to me, okay.

Rory Carruthers 42:36
Back to you, Dominica.

Dominica Lumazar 42:38
Thank you, Carruthers. So, one really powerful technique is that Rory and I have used for the podcast for my business for his business is we actually create ads out of those reviews, which is really powerful. So it can be you know, a headshot of you and image, just the review that links to, you know, your website, and it just creates that pixel creates that connection. It’s been very powerful. I looking at the data today, I think for our podcast, that’s probably been one of the biggest drivers for for new downloads, I would imagine is probably using the reviews that we’ve gotten on iTunes and repurposing, that repurposing that content for ourselves. And using that those really solid reviews, thank you, by the way to everyone who leaves reviews for us. That’s so, so helpful. If you haven’t left a review, please do so on iTunes, because it just helps us get the word out on all these new techniques to other entrepreneurs and business owners. That’s an aside, anyway, yeah,

Rory Carruthers 43:39
but exactly what you’re saying is, you know, we didn’t just say, oh, we’re only going to have this show up on Apple. And that’s it. Now we take those, and then we use them and promote them to other platforms, so that we can use those reviews to reach a larger audience. And whether that’s on website, whether that’s through ads on Facebook, or Instagram, or YouTube, or whatever it is, you know, we’re always thinking, Okay, well, how can we reuse this in a different way? Because that review becomes an asset. We do this with our clients to where, say they get a review on Google, well, then we put it on their website, we then we put it on their social media platforms, we’ll take images of it, make a post about it. We’ll say thing you know, with a book review, for example, you get a review in you can say you can make a post take the person if you know who the person is, that gave you the review and thank them. Yeah, like Shoot, shoot 20 second video, thank you so much. You I mean, you left this great review, you said you know my book was life changing and that it did this and this and this for you. Thank you so much. I’m really glad to help you and thank you for taking the time to leave a review, right? People love that they love to be appreciated for what they have done. Just like you know, we are very appreciative of the reviews that you’ve left for us, because it helps it ultimately helps in our business. And it helps other businesses because we’re able to get our message out and help people with their businesses.

Dominica Lumazar 45:04
Yeah. So thanks, everybody. Truly. Yeah, it’s, it’s very humbling. And we’re very grateful. For many of my clients, there’s often a fear and anxiety around doing a rebrand. And I want to be encouraging and clear that once you decide to make that decision and actually follow through on it, you’ll feel so much better. Because I feel like as business owners, we get into this, this cycle, this like mind chatter cycle, where it’s like, what happens if we can’t worry about that, we just have to go for it. And a lot of that comes from doing a rebrand, like, what happens if I lose my clients by doing my current clients, or what happens if my customers don’t know how to find me? Well, there’s ways to do a rebrand where it’s soft, doesn’t have to be crazy, abrupt right, you don’t have to rip off the band aid, all the way, you know, you can just go a little bit and like take a take a step at a time. And I know that the most important aspects of branding, hands down is making sure that the customer is the hero of everything. Your brand is not about your experience, it can be about you and your mission. And that’s fine. But it should be about what your customer is going to be receiving from you. And if you can focus your brand’s logo and tagline and make sure that your target audience is is clear in what you’re wanting to portray to them. Like all of that makes sense, then you’re going to win every time. If you’re trying to portray your luxury brands to a bunch of 13 year olds, it might not pan out too well. So you have to know who you’re talking to. Right?

Rory Carruthers 46:54
Right.

Dominica Lumazar 46:56
It’s pretty, pretty important. So always be sure to put your customer First, make them the hero and your company’s mission. Super, super important. And if it’s done correctly, then they will always come back and think of your brand as the authority or the go to product for whatever it is that you’re offering. Make sure that their experience is the winning component here. So a few things to ask yourself, maybe maybe you haven’t done this in a while. And I would actually have a piece of paper and like write it down for yourself at some point like, okay, what’s your brand’s logo? And what’s the tagline? Does it help your target audience understand how your business can help them? are you solving a problem? That’s a whole other deal. We have a whole episode about that. Is your business solving a problem? Because it will make you the authority? And then are you making positive that your brand’s mission is making your customer, the hero and all of it? Those are the big questions you got to ask yourself, if you are in a position where you’re getting ready to do a rebrand, don’t be worried about it, it’s okay. You can ask for help. You can always reach out to us, we love to do audits, don’t be worried about how it’s going to go because you just have to go for it or else nothing’s ever going to get done. And if you’re in a position where you need to do that, then there’s a reason something’s not working. So the first step is recognizing that you needed to do it. And that’s good.

Rory Carruthers 48:24
That’s a good thing. Well, yeah, and if you have a fear that you’re gonna mess up your rebrand, first off, that’s why you need to test. Okay, a lot of a lot of companies will just rebrand something without testing. And they’ll just put it out in the hole in the marketplace. And we’ve seen those disasters sometimes. I know, there was one recently, where, you know, they redid the logo, and it was just like, No, you should not have redone that.

Dominica Lumazar 48:49
There’s so much to branding, that it’s hard to pack it in like a 45 minute episode. So we’re really we’re getting, we’re talking like surface level certain aspects of building a brand for yourself and what that looks like. So if you want to go deeper on any of this, let us know because we may need to do another episode. Even more, you know, deep deep on a lot of this stuff.

Rory Carruthers 49:11
I’m gonna just mention like in our online world, now that everyone is doing, zoom working from home, you know, with social media being a much more constant in our lives. And us being on video a lot more. You have to think about, what is the environment that you’re portraying yourself in? How’s that part of your brand? Okay, I’ll give an example. Okay, I saw this interview it was David Spade and Jerry Seinfeld. Okay. Were there you know, probably doing a podcast. I don’t know. I just quickly watched the video. Okay, so you’ve got Jerry sitting there in his office which has this like nice background. It’s got, you know, you can see a little bit of the view off of the side. You know, it’s just his office, right? But it’s, it’s nice. And he positioned himself and put his computer where it looks nice. And it had, you know, in, in design terms that have leading lines to draw your eyes to certain things in his background, right. But then you had, you know, David Spade sitting there and the way it was positioned, you could see like, all the plugs coming out of his wall, his wall was white or what it was just random stuff up. There’s like a filing cabinet or something in the corner. You know, it was like,

Dominica Lumazar 50:32
like mine.

Rory Carruthers 50:34
No, but no, no, I mean, like, he was, it was like, nothing was set up. Like he was like, he didn’t even think about, you know, how this is gonna look. Now, if you look at, like what we did for, you know, our Christmas theme here, if you can, if you’re watching the video, you’ll see we put up Christmas lights, and, you know, Dominica has got like, Merry Christmas there. And, you know, I put stuff around the guitars and stockings were like, you know, we’re creating the theme around what we’re doing. This is part of, you know, the brand for this episode, the brand of it’s Christmas time. And this is something you can you can do yourself as what you’re doing. But also think about, like, what it what is the brand that we’re portraying, in our everyday life in our in our businesses. And some of that is, it’s going to be, you know, this is, this is my, my house, or this is my kitchen where you’re doing something right? You’re maybe you’re showing something in other in other instances, it’s going to be like this for me, because I do most of my calls my trainings and stuff in here. You know, this, instead of having a blank wall behind when I moved into this house, I was like, Well, what can I do? Well, you know, my backgrounds as a musician, I could put guitars on the wall. Right? So that’s one aspect. And then what it does, is most people, when I get on with them, they go, Oh, look at all those guitars great is when it opens the conversation, because they want to know more about that. And I can say I was professional musician for many years.

Dominica Lumazar 52:10
Almost every single interview we’ve done. That’s the first question people ask when they get on with us. It’s about your guitars.

Rory Carruthers 52:18
Yeah. So and you know, it was partly intentional, right? I did think about it as as part of my brand. Now, it’s not part of my business brand. You know, I thought about like, should I put all my books and stuff and not our client books up on bookshelves behind? You know, and that’s one thing, and I can eat. But I decided for me, every time I mentioned music, it creates a bond in a different way. And it positions me as someone I guess in in the eyes of people who aren’t musicians, I don’t know if it’s cool is the right word. But like there’s a certain quality that comes along with being a musician that people like, they’re like, who I like being friends with musicians and stuff like that.

Dominica Lumazar 53:00
Yeah, so it’s comforting in there gravitated towards you, it’s fun to watch, actually, on this

Rory Carruthers 53:06
side of the screen. Yeah. And they get to get to see a different side than just the business side, as well. Because we do so much stuff. And like even on this podcast, we talk about so much stuff in business, but people want to connect on that personal level. So if you can find something that’s just part of your life that you’re passionate about, whether that’s you know, in my case, music and guitars and stuff like that, or you know, maybe maybe you’re really into bird feeders, and you have a bunch of bird feeders hanging in the background, or whatever it is, right? No, put in that personal aspect. So that becomes part of your brand, because you don’t you don’t want to be putting a fake brand out there. You know, it’s got a like, even more so now than any time in probably, you know, the history of the internet. People are looking for authenticity. Yeah, they want to know that they can trust you and that who they’re getting, like who they’re talking to is the same person that exists in the real world. Exactly. Yeah, so. So you know, and that’s why we we allow people to see what we got going on. Right? And who we are. Mm hmm.

Dominica Lumazar 54:17
I’m pretty boring. And that’s just who I am.

Rory Carruthers 54:21
Yeah, and if you’ve won awards or things like that, so like, I know, a guy who has multiple Platinum albums, from bands that he’s been in, he just has them behind on the wall. And you know, it’s like part of his brand, because he wants people to instantly know I know there’s a lot of people with Click Funnels awards and things like that. They put him behind their videos and things like that Book Awards, you you know, you have the Book Award, as well.

Dominica Lumazar 54:45
I do and I packed it up when we evacuated and so one of the first things I grabbed like all my mics, all my use equipment, my awards. Thanks for the reminder.

Rory Carruthers 54:59
Right, but it’s So these, these are the things and we’re, we’re all evolving, we’re all testing things, we’re trying different things, seeing what connects with our audiences, you know, you can move things around, you can rebrand your environment, you know, you can have multiple environments. So this isn’t the only environment that I have with the guitars. Just if I turn, like my whole stuff sideways, it see I have a book shelf. If I turned it completely around, you’d see where I could be standing in front of my big screen that’s in front of me, so that I could do a presentation, right. So there’s different things that you can do even within the confines of just one room, you can have multiple angles and things that you set up. You can you can also build us what I call like a film studio or YouTube studio, if you’re doing a lot of video, where you turn a room that’s specifically set up to do that, where you know, you might have a couch or tables and things and props that you can move in and out. And you’re actually like designing a little mini set for yourself for your business. So these are all parts of your brand. The thing that makes that stand that makes you stand out from everyone else is the personal aspects of it because anyone can have a couch. Anyone can have a, you know, a lamp, right? But what are the things that are unique to you, that really work as part of your business.

Dominica Lumazar 56:20
I really like my lamp that’s over here in the corner, so

Rory Carruthers 56:23
no one can see it though.

Dominica Lumazar 56:24
I know.

Rory Carruthers 56:27
If there’s something that is in your environment, that when you’re doing a sales call when you’re filming a video that shouldn’t be there, like pay attention, like move it out of the way like I had a camera before we were shooting that was was up because of shooting something else took the camera down just because it was a little distracting. And it was taking away from all the Christmasy stuff

Dominica Lumazar 56:53
lulla lulla very Christmassy. I must say this is sad. It is. It is. Well, I hope that you guys have gained value from this episode, because there is so much more we could go into. But for the sake of everyone’s sanity, we’re gonna cut it here. And if you guys would like more information or have specific questions on branding, you can always email us at Hello at bpbpodcast.com and you can reach out to us on all social media platforms as well. Anything else worry.

Rory Carruthers 57:29
Merry Christmas,

Dominica Lumazar 57:31
Merry Christmas. We hope you all are wearing your fabulous ugly sweater. And yes, even though this year is a bit different, I’m sure for all of us. You know, we’re we’re just again, always so so grateful for you taking the time to to spend this time with us and to listen and to offer feedback and leave us reviews. Thank you. Merry Christmas, everybody. We will catch you on the next episode. Bye.

Rory Carruthers 58:00
Hey, thanks so much for listening to the big picture business podcast this week. On the next episode, we’re showing you how to start an online business. We’re giving you everything you need to know such as how to make money doing what you love, how to get started with no website, how to set yourself up from the beginning to earn passive income. And we even do a step by step of how to start affiliate marketing so that you can get money coming in. Even if you don’t have a product or service in the beginning. New episodes are released every Tuesday. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find us online at BPBpodcast.com. And we have the full video episodes up on the BPB podcast YouTube channel. So check them out. Alright, see you in the next one.