Lessons - The Power of Personal Branding | Theresa Depasquale - CEO at Capture Social Group LLC

In this lessons episode, you'll learn how to leverage personal branding as a long-term performance marketing tool. Discover strategies for authentically growing and engage community, creating effective content and balancing infotainment across platforms without feeling overwhelmed. This episode highlights the importance of clear messaging and choosing the right platform to kick start your brand's success. People have a hard time understanding how it could be a performance marketing tool. Like you said, over time, it can increase your row-as. But day one, it's not like you light up an ad set on Facebook or on Google and immediately you see the traffic coming in. It's a nurture campaign. It's time. Yeah, totally. Yeah, so you have to build it up over time. So I think the best time to start is always yesterday, right? And this is where you got to start building. I mean, you built your personal brand for fitness category for a fitness business. And then it's interesting. It echoes what I'm experiencing right now. I built a personal brand for actually no reason at all. But now that I've moved between companies and move between different things that I'm working on in my life, like the eyeballs follow. And even if not 100% of the people that cared about your personal brand when you were in fitness, care about what you're doing now with social, some of them do. And then you build a community and then they sort of follow you throughout your career. And I think that this compounding effect is really lost on people. They don't understand, like you look at Gary Vee, I mentioned this all the time and this is obviously like an OG personal brand builder, right? You see the businesses he launches. He launches businesses, like it's going at a style, like empathy wines, VaynerMedia, VaynerSports, V friends, whatever the hell other business he does now. He just launches them against his audience and you immediately have a million people, two million people, 10 million people. They look at this new product. Yep. He has eyeballs. He has eyeballs. Some more people should do this. Totally. I agree with everything that you're saying. And I think that like one of the things also about when you're saying like starting and then pivoting, people will follow you because also it's really inspirational for them. I'm like, I've had so many people that are like, I just, you're so inspiring. Like I can't believe you did that. It's like making me think about what can I do? And like they love being part of that journey. They love it. So I think people think they get scared that they might not have that. And you're going to lose some people. I mean shoot. I probably have 10,000 perverted men when I stop posting fittest. Which is fine. That's also okay. So not a big deal. My stuff. So get off my page. But I'm just saying I probably lost more. I think I at one point I had like 260,000 followers. So I'm at like, I probably lost like 40,000 followers when I stopped posting. But it doesn't matter to me because like they were never going to buy my stuff to begin with or just purge a page. Exactly. You know what I mean? So now it's like, I have genuine people who actually care about my stuff. So sort of like a beginner's playbook for thinking through personal brand content. You mentioned one sort of tactic, which is batch producing and then content repurposing, which is a really smart tactic. Maybe just walk through what that process would look like because then I also want to understand the message that somebody would deliver when they're actually creating what should that message be spoke about authenticity, which is a buzzword that's thrown around like a lot a lot. So we'll get into that in a second. But yeah, first that that's sort of like that tactical thing to make it less stressful. Okay. This is such a big topic. But I mean, I think the part, the first thing you really need to understand when you're going to do this and this is where I'm, this is what I'm great at, is like looking at your personal brand be like, what is my message? Like what are my core brand topics? Like what am I going? What is my expertise? And I think a lot of personal brands like make the mistake and they just talk about too many different things so their message gets drowned out lost. And so it's really being clear on like, what are those core brand topics? Like what is your marketing content? Because your marketing content is different than your core brand topics, right? Core brand topics are what it's going to position you as an expert and build that trust relationship with your audience. And the marketing content is what's going to drive people to take an action. They're going to subscribe or sell, right? It's overcoming objections. So it's like having that marketing strategy from the top is what will help outline what you should be talking about, getting really clear on that content. Like here's what we need for you. We need these videos. And then you can, depending on what platforms you like, you know, like we've got clients that love TikTok and I have clients that just despise it. You have to understand I just did a blog about this. Reels for TikTok. We just broke down everything because there's a, both platforms are great, but it's like really understanding me as a personal brand is my audience on there. Do I even do I like doing content like that? Like TikTok's more trendy. It's fun. It's going to be a lot more like, you know, they've danced challenges and like videos and do you have to do that on there? No, but TikTokers like that, right? So is that are you, do you're a personality like that? No, I like more of like a serious thing, right? So for me, I'd prefer Reels. It's like understanding where you can leverage your time. So that's an important component of building for two. I don't agree. Like this drives me insane with Gary Vee that, you know, when he's like usually omnipresent grand card on two, right? You should. Yeah. This is on every platform everywhere. And you should bring out content five times a day everywhere. I don't agree with that because what that's doing is it's totally like discharging people that don't have a 40-person content team following them around because they can produce that kind of content because they literally have a team of people traveling with them on their private jets, filming them at every angle, editing all their videos, most entrepreneurs and personal brands like they can. It's overwhelming too. It's so overwhelming. It's like stop. Stop saying that because what you're doing is people are going to do nothing because they're so overwhelmed. So just pick one platform that you love. Start mastering that one. Can you put content in other places? Yes. Take the videos like we talked about repurposing. Take one video, put it on YouTube, and then you can cut up and make it real. EM saying Reels or TikToks or whatever you want. You can turn, transcribe, enter into captions. There's so many things you can do with with content. But just pick one platform to start that you love master that platform. When you master that, then you can go to the next platform, mess the next one. But like I don't agree with them when you're building personal brand to like focus on everything all the time. I think you should really like crush one and then move to the next one. And I guess yes. So that just depends on what you're comfortable with really. Like there's no right or wrong answer to that. It's what do you love doing? Do you love doing long form YouTube videos? Do you love doing short form, entertaining TikTok videos? Do you like writing? Blog style captions because that could be Facebook or Instagram. Like what do you like doing? Do you like taking pretty pictures? You want to be more influencer? You know, like it's it's really going to be like what suits your personality? I saw a post on your social and I just pulled it up when you were just giving that that sort of rundown. And I thought it was a really interesting post. It was the old social versus the new social media. It was like a couple of I don't know March 10th. It was like earlier this month. And it was like preaching instead of store old social was preaching buying followers reposting content self-absorbed captions and constantly promoting. And then the new social is storytelling, creating an engaged and loyal tribe, creating meaningful content. Captions that provide value for your ideal audience and constantly providing infotainment and infotainment something you speak about a lot. So maybe this can be a segue into that. But can we before we go into infotainment as a concept, what does explain this diagram that I'm looking at? And I just read it through. Maybe I'll try and find a way to post it on the video. But walk through what this means. So basically I've been on Instagram for a long time and we didn't talk about how I got started this. But I started back and up like when the Apple literally it must have been like barely year old. So I've seen the Apple moves then. When I started Instagram, it was so easy to grow because it was like share for share share repost content. I had a share page that I sold marketing on. Um, Chloe Kardashian followed my page. It was a big fitness. It was squat for that booty. It was a fitness page. It is so great. I saw I made so much way on that page because I would basically I grew this huge page. And then I would like have a girl pay me or I would say, hey, share my page and then I'll push on my page. And so I grew to like, it was one buzz with followers like this. Um, and that was just such a different time in Instagram. Like things were just different. It wasn't about what it is. It was a different landscape. Um, it also was like more about like just numbers, numbers, video, video, like everyone just wanted a big following. But now it's with algorithm and like with so much more competition people on the platform, you've got to really stand out. You've got to provide value. And like I always talk about with personal brands, unless you're freaking Kanye West, Beyonce, the rock or whatever, you cannot post whatever P1. You have to post up for your followers. Your social media is not for you. It's for your followers. If you want to grow a large engage tribe. So it's really that's where the infotainment piece comes into. It's like, how are you providing value for your followers? Number one, they want to be entertained. Most people come on social media be entertained. Then they may want to learn something they like to be inspired to. So infotainment is like every time you post you should be either motivating or inspiring, educating, right? Given the practice of vote or entertaining them, it's best that you can always include all three in your social strategy. And, and has your love for Instagram changed that all over the years? I mean, you just mentioned something that's very important. Like Instagram is now there's more creators than consumers of content on Instagram. And you still love it as much as you did. Oh, that's true. Is that true? I don't know. I don't know. I think it's true. I'm making up data. Here's a really big differing jager that we need to discuss when you're talking about personal brands because there is influencer creators, right? You can have a strategy for that where there's expert brands. It's two totally different strategies. So when you come to the Morgana road, which way are you going? Because influencer creators are going to have a very different model. They want to get as many eyeballs as they can on their page and they typically make money by ads or sponsors or ambassadors or affiliates or something in that nature. If you're an expert personal brand, you want to get people who are liking you and your stuff and you want to get a direct response. So you want to obviously grow in numbers, but you want the right kind of people on your page that are going to be interested in your product so that you can leverage out for your business. And so that's two totally different strategies. And so when we're looking at the expert model strategy, there's actually not. I mean, I want to say, again, I have to go look at the most recent research, but probably about nine months ago, we did a post on my capture. It's at your social butterflies, my business page. But basically, they talked about how there's like only out of like, you know, a couple of billion, like what is it? Almost two billion people now on Instagram. It's like two million marketers. So great, right. Creators are different. It's a different model. But marketers, not it's still, you might think you're like behind, but you're actually it's still there's still a lot of people still doing what you're doing, which is like if you haven't decided yet, they're still sitting on the bench. And so it's like you said, if there's a time to get in, it should be yesterday. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.