In the latest episode of the Branded podcast, we talk about a few of the common mistakes many people make as they begin to develop their professional or personal brands. Learn from the mistakes of others (and us) and avoid making these mistakes for yourself:
Lack of Clarity
What do you do? Surprisingly enough, this is a question that is not always easy to answer or to communicate with others.
When you lack clarity about what you do and who you’re trying to serve, it can lead to brand confusion.
For me, I was clear about what I wanted to do with Favorite Daughter Media but I fell into the common trap of trying to be everything for everybody. I launched the company to focus on building brands through podcasting and podcast guesting, but took on projects outside of that specialty just because I had the capability. While that allowed me to start making a profit early, it didn’t help me establish a clear purpose for my brand.
What I learned was to focus on the projects that truly excite me so that I could spend each day doing something I loved. But I also learned that your brand is allowed to evolve and it’s okay to change what you offer and who you offer it for.
Lack of Authenticity
When we lack clarity about what we want our brand to be, we can start to lose our authenticity.
It can be easy to conform to what you think each potential client wants from you, but once you become clear on your offerings and what is authentic to your brand, you’ll begin to recognize when a potential client is not the right fit.
Comparanoia™
Comparing yourself to others is something we all do every day. When it comes to branding, you can really damage your brand by trying to bend to what you perceive the “standard” to be.
There are healthy ways to compare. When you compare your brand to others in a Venn diagram, you can find ways to collaborate and help each other grow rather than trying to compete.
Listen to the full episode for more discussion around these topics!
https://youtu.be/7HGqjIURNJI
Transcript
Larry Roberts [00:00:10]:
What is happening, everybody, I’m Larry Roberts.
Sara Lohse [00:00:12]:
I’m Sara Lohse, and this is Branded, your comprehensive guide to creative branding.
Larry Roberts [00:00:17]:
And on this episode of the podcast man, I wanted to jump in there early, right in the middle of Sara’s intro, but on this episode of the podcast, we’re going talk about some of the mistakes that you can make with personal branding. And they’re pretty easy to make and they’re pretty common, in all honesty.
Sara Lohse [00:00:33]:
Yeah, these are definitely ones that I have seen. These are things that I have tried to avoid in my own brand. And I’m sure they’re going to resonate with probably everyone listening. I’m sure everyone listening has either made one of these mistakes or actively tried to avoid it. So let’s dive in.
Larry Roberts [00:00:52]:
Well, I think a lot of it revolves around what do you do? I’ve got friends of mine in the podcast space or even in the marketing space, and they have businesses. I don’t really know what they do. They’ve got a brand, I know who they are, I recognize them, I recognize their logos, but I don’t really know what that means to me as a consumer. So they tend to lack clarity in their mission, in what they’re doing, what’s their vision, what’s their mission, what’s their goal. And one of the things that gets me even more is you can ask some people and they can’t even tell you.
Sara Lohse [00:01:25]:
Yeah. And it’s interesting that this is the first one that we talk about, because this is one that I don’t know if you planned on admitting it, but this is one that you struggled with.
Larry Roberts [00:01:35]:
Why do you want to put me out there like that?
Sara Lohse [00:01:37]:
I don’t even I mean, hey, we got to be authentic, right?
Larry Roberts [00:01:39]:
We were friends.
Sara Lohse [00:01:41]:
I remember having the conversation with you when you realize I have this really strong brand, people recognize me, but they don’t know what I do.
Larry Roberts [00:01:49]:
Yeah. I still struggle with it, even with the clarity that I’ve established over the last probably twelve months, if even that. In all honesty, maybe I’m giving myself a little too much credit there by saying twelve months. But I think it’s something that a lot of people struggle with is determining exactly what they do, because especially as new entrepreneurs, and I’m only in this game for two and a half years now. I was in corporate for 25 years, but didn’t break out until January of 21 to do my own thing. Now, I’ve had businesses and stuff in the past, but they were mostly side hustles. And the one opportunity I had to step out, I wasn’t quite brave enough at the time to walk away from that guaranteed check and take on that business role. But when you do step out, initially, I think you’re so panicked and you’re so anxious to have a client, any client, any client will do. You just want to make money. So regardless of what the client is oh yeah, I can do that for you. And while that’s great on a temporary scale, yeah, it puts a little money in the bank, but it doesn’t do anything to establish your brand.
Sara Lohse [00:02:56]:
Yeah. It’s that problem of trying to be everything for everybody. And I’m sure that’s something a lot of entrepreneurs have dealt with. It’s definitely something I have dealt with. I think it was a big piece of why and how I launched my company. It all kind of played into this clarity and the way that I dealt with it. When I was launching my company, I had been a one person marketing department for years, so I was used to having to be everything for everybody. I had to be the designer, the copywriter, the strategist, I was everything. So it would have been really easy for me to launch my own thing and just become a full service marketing firm. But the way that I looked at it is that’s what I’m already doing? So what’s the point of me going off on my own, building my own thing if I’m just going to be doing the same thing that I was doing before?
Larry Roberts [00:03:56]:
You right.
Sara Lohse [00:03:57]:
Yeah. It would be different because I’d be working for myself. But in what I was doing, like you said, I had that guaranteed paycheck. So why best with it if I’m not going to be changing what I’m actually doing? So the way that I decided to handle that moving forward was I thought about what it was about what I was doing that made me the most excited. Like, which projects have I worked on that I get lost in the work? And for someone with ADHD, that’s not common. I struggle to keep focus on most projects, but there are those projects that just excite me to my core that I could work on it for hours, forget to eat that day, because I just can’t pull myself away. And what I found was it was all within this idea of helping people guests on podcasts and helping people build their personal brands. So when I launched my company, I wanted it to focus specifically on that one thing. And so when I launched that’s what I did. I focus on building personal brands through podcast. Guesting but I did the same thing. My first project was a website rewrite. My second project was creating a promo deck for a podcast. If someone said, hey, this is what I need and I knew how to do it, sure, yes, I’ll do it because I have bills to pay. So it wasn’t until I was kind of more established in my own company that I was able to say, this is specifically what I do. If this is what you want help with, I’m the person to come to. But it was a very conscious decision, but it wasn’t something that I can even implement right away.
Larry Roberts [00:05:44]:
Yeah. And have you started seeing some results from that. I mean, people now understand your brand and understand the clarity of your message and what you do.
Sara Lohse [00:05:52]:
Definitely. I think I’ve kind of become a thought leader in podcast guesting and in personal branding through podcasts, which has been really cool. I’ve become a referral opportunity for a lot of people that I know who they don’t know anybody else who does what I do. They know other people who work in marketing, they know other people who work in podcasting, but they don’t know anyone who specifically helps people become great podcast guests to build a brand. And because of that, because of how niche that is and how specific that is, anytime something like that comes up, I’m their first call. So it’s been really cool to see how that changed and to be able to stop taking on the projects that I don’t love and focus my energy on the things that really make me excited.
Larry Roberts [00:06:47]:
That’s one of the worst things is actually taking on those projects that you end up not loving, and those tend to take the longest for whatever reason. But that clarity in what you do, I mean, it’s absolutely critical, and I struggle with that too. But once you start establishing that now, you have to understand too, that we’re really not done refining that brand. We have clarity in our message, we have clarity in our mission and our vision, but who are we doing it for? And we can still find ourselves in the same position even if we know what we’re doing and we isolate it to what that particular niche is. But then we could find ourselves in a position of doing it for just about anybody instead of doing it for a particular audience. For an example. Again, when I branched out, I had this grand scheme that I was going to get all these launch clients for podcasts, and I was going to get these clients from social media. At the time, clubhouse was the bomb, and so I was getting clients from clubhouse, but at the same time, those clients from those types of environments, they’re not exactly clients that typically have a large budget, and you got to have a lot of clients. If you’re launching a podcast at $600 a pop, that’s a ton of clients to make up for that six figure salary that you walked away from just that previous January. And I started realizing long about August that, oh, the people that I’m targeting with my marketing plan really probably aren’t the people that I need to be doing what I’m doing for. So I had to change gears because again, you step out from corporate and you find yourself two thirds of the way through the next year, and you haven’t even gotten near that salary you walked away from yet. You go, oh, maybe this isn’t working. So I had to find clarity on not only what I was doing, but who I was doing it for and had to figure out where I was going to start finding clients that really fit my business model that I had conceived prior to leaving. So that’s something that is something that’s absolutely critical. And while sometimes we may take that first step to try to find who we’re doing what we’re doing for, it doesn’t always work out as how we initially planned. Even though we’ve identified them, we may not have identified that. Right. Audience. So what would you do in that type of scenario?
Sara Lohse [00:09:10]:
Yeah, I think the first thing to say on that is that our personal brands are not a set in stone thing and our companies don’t have to be set in stone. I think our personal brand is ever evolving. I think it’s something that could change daily based on what’s going on in the world and where we’re finding our passions. So I think it’s perfectly fine if anyone’s listening to this and thinking like, well, I thought I wanted to do this and I thought this was my audience, but I’m not so sure anymore. It’s okay to change it and it’s okay to evolve and it’s okay to grow. And I think that’s really an important thing to make sure that people understand is that you’re not pigeonheld to something just because it’s what you identified yourself professionally as. You can grow.
Larry Roberts [00:10:04]:
How often has a pigeon ever held you?
Sara Lohse [00:10:08]:
I don’t want to bring up my personal life in this. Thank you. My love life is personal. Thank you. It’s a really strange visual I now have in my head. Thank you for that.
Larry Roberts [00:10:21]:
Yeah. Hopefully, everybody.
Sara Lohse [00:10:23]:
Pigeons are very snuggly.
Larry Roberts [00:10:25]:
You may not know that around Sara, just holding her tightly on a high wire, just on a podcast episode.
Sara Lohse [00:10:36]:
We did it at the same time, but you’re much better at it. I just said coup. You did the whole tongue roll thing. I don’t know what you did, but I can’t do it. Can I go back to the question, please?
Larry Roberts [00:10:47]:
Sorry, I got sidetracked. You said pigeon held. I’ve never heard the term pigeon held.
Sara Lohse [00:10:52]:
You’ve never heard the term pigeonholed?
Larry Roberts [00:10:54]:
Pigeonholed but not held. Pigeon held.
Sara Lohse [00:10:59]:
Congregation like a past tense of the congregate conjugation. Go back to high school Spanish.
Larry Roberts [00:11:05]:
Let’s go. Yeah, I failed miserably. I mean, I knew my name Pedro, and that was it. That’s about all I got out of it.
Sara Lohse [00:11:12]:
That is not your name in Spanish class.
Larry Roberts [00:11:14]:
That was my name. Hola, me llamo pedro.
Sara Lohse [00:11:18]:
As me learning to lie so early.
Larry Roberts [00:11:20]:
Anyway, get back to being held by your pigeon. Sorry.
Sara Lohse [00:11:25]:
Anyway, the question was figuring out your audience, I think.
Larry Roberts [00:11:33]:
Yeah, something like that.
Sara Lohse [00:11:34]:
Yeah.
Larry Roberts [00:11:37]:
It was not only we started off talking about making sure you know what you’re doing and that people know what you’re doing, then we moved into who are you doing that for? And that’s where we’re at. And that’s how the pigeon got involved. Please, Sarah, continue.
Sara Lohse [00:11:50]:
Leave my pigeon out of this. Thank you. This conversation is for the birds.
Larry Roberts [00:11:58]:
I knew if we set the stage, a pun was coming in it’s. Yeah.
Sara Lohse [00:12:03]:
You’re so welcome.
Larry Roberts [00:12:04]:
Thanks.
Sara Lohse [00:12:05]:
So I had a similar problem, sort of when I started out with figuring out who my target audience was, but I think I had a very clear idea of who I wanted it to be and that was helpful. But people talk about creating your avatar and it’s like this one guy with a name and this is his entire life. That’s never worked for me. I’ve never been able to just create my ideal single person. For me, it was more about I want to work with people who are doing good for the world. And because I had focused my company on kind of on raising voices, I call it using your outside voice, but it’s amplifying messages. It’s helping people join these global conversations and be heard and spread that message. If that message wasn’t one of positivity or of just something good, I want no part of spreading that message. I am not here to spread hate. I’m not here to spread negativity. So it became very clear to me that my audience was people with positive messages. But then I had the same issue as you. I was going to these podcast conferences because they were kind of my safe space, like we mentioned, with Outlier, how it feels like a family reunion. So I go to these conferences because I know people there and I’m comfortable there, but it took me several months and several events to realize, I’m going to these because I love them, but I’m not going to these because I’m able to build my business there. Because the same with you. You were talking to people who don’t have the budget to do what you wanted to do. I was talking to people who kind of already knew what I had to say a little bit when I really wanted to talk to entrepreneurs and small businesses that had a message but didn’t know how to say it or didn’t know how to join that conversation. So, podcasters, this is what we’re great at. So, yes, there are still ways that I can help and ways I can work with this community and I will forever want to work in this community. But I also had to start branching out and going to events that were more general or that were industry specific in a different industry so that I could reach people that were my target audience.
Larry Roberts [00:14:45]:
Yeah, and knowing that is absolutely critical. And it kind of goes back to our previous episode when we were talking about establishing that personal branded. And having that personal branded can also define for you what you do and define your audience for you as well. But in defining that, and I think this is going to be a reoccurring theme on just about every episode, but we have to have that authenticity. And a lot of times we’ll try to conform to fit a narrative in order to find a client. And then we find ourselves in a position of where we either can’t reinforce that brand proposition that came with that inauthentic approach we took or we start finding clients that aren’t necessarily our ideal client. So again, after you know exactly what you’re doing and you know who you’re doing it for, you have to come correct, if you will. There’s a nice little hip hop term for you. You got to come correct with your brain. You got to be authentic. That goes back to me doing a TikTok dance, I guess. That would never be very authentic. As a matter of fact. I’ll do it. Send me one, I’ll do it. You send me a TikTok dance, I’ll do it. So we’ll make happen. Don’t do anything crazy, Acrobatic. Just keep it simple. I’m old, but we’ll figure it out. But again, that authenticity comes into play there and I don’t think we can talk about authenticity enough.
Sara Lohse [00:16:10]:
No, I mean, like you said, that’s going to come up in every single episode that comes up every time I speak to anybody in the industry. That is just the number one rule I want to say that people have to follow it’s just to be authentic. Because if you’re not being authentic, your message won’t resonate, people won’t connect with you. And it can be obvious. I mean, there are good actors out there, but if someone is not being themselves or some aspect of themselves because like we said, we all have our different hats, but it’s obvious and it kind of repels people who are searching for that authenticity.
Larry Roberts [00:16:47]:
Yeah, and I think sometimes we find ourselves caught up in being inauthentic because we suffer from what they call comparanoia.
Sara Lohse [00:16:56]:
Comparanoia. It is the 8th deadly sin.
Larry Roberts [00:17:00]:
Is it? I don’t know. But I know it’s something that I suffered and probably still suffer from time to time where I get paranoid because I’m comparing myself to others around me. I get paranoid as to whether or not my brand is effective or my messaging is effective, or I’ve chosen the right audience or I’ve chosen the right service or product to offer to that audience. Because I see other people around me that are experiencing certain perceived levels of success, and I go, oh, my God. That’s working for them. Why would it work for me? And so I start comparing myself to these others and get caught up in that and tend to try to make changes to what I’m doing with my products or services or my attention to my audience or my perceived brand or my authentic approach to what I’m doing in an effort to meet what I’ve determined. In my head are the standards set by those around me. And I think that could really do a lot of damage to a brand right out of the gate, honestly. And this ties back to authenticity as well. If you’re comparing yourself to the people around you and making changes based on that comparanoia that sets in, then the odds of you maintaining that authenticity pretty much go out the window.
Sara Lohse [00:18:17]:
Yeah, I think some levels of comparison are healthy and I’ll explain what I mean in a second. But I think the most important thing to have first is just a very strong sense of what your personal brand is and who you are. So that when you do start to compare, you can do it in a different light. So kind of where I’m going with that is I have met people who do similar things as me and I do compare, but I don’t compare as a way to want to change or want to copy them. I compare as kind of a Venn diagram. I’ll use an example actually. It was from Podfest. So I went to Podfest and prior to the event, someone had reached out to me on LinkedIn and he also was in the Podcast Guesting space. And he reached out to me because I was two. So in my head, I was like, oh, he’s going to try to compare what we’re doing and see who’s better. And it was going to turn into this competition and I couldn’t be more wrong. So what ended up happening is I met him in person at the event, and we had lunch together. And what we did was just dive into what each of us does and how we do it and kind of created a little bit of a mental Venn diagram, because this side of the Venn diagram is what I love doing, where I specialize, kind of what I’m really great at. The other side is what he’s great at, what he loves doing. And in the middle are kind of the pieces either of us are missing that we could fill in for each other. So I love the creative aspect of podcast guesting. I love helping people craft their stories. I love creating lead generation tools and designing and writing things for that. He loved the more technical aspects and figuring out ROI and all of that strategy piece of it. So he could send his clients to me to actually help them create those lead magnets because he doesn’t do that. And I could send clients to him if they want to go a deeper dive into some of the strategy stuff that he has been studying and talking about. So, yes, we’re comparing each other, but we’re comparing it as a way to help each other grow. And it can be a really hard thing to change our mindset in that way because like I said, that wasn’t where my brain went automatically. My brain went to comparison for competition or comparison for just a way to cut myself down. But seeing how he automatically thought this could be an opportunity for both of us has really helped sway my thinking for that. So I think if you’re going to find someone to compare yourself to, actively try to do that, try to find the ways you guys can support each other instead of actively trying to find reasons to stop doing what you’re doing or reasons to change.
Larry Roberts [00:21:34]:
Yeah, I love that. That’s amazing. There’s a lot of value there. It was hard for me to visualize a Venn diagram.
Sara Lohse [00:21:42]:
It’s the two circles. I thought it was there’s two circles and then they overlap in the middle.
Larry Roberts [00:21:48]:
But if it has three, that’s a Venn diagram, too, right?
Sara Lohse [00:21:52]:
You can add a third one, but that’s getting a little advanced. Let’s slow down.
Larry Roberts [00:21:55]:
Let’s just keep it simple, then. Let’s keep it but in all honesty, that was tremendous. I mean, that’s a great example of exactly how you can leverage people that are even in your same space to evolve and grow and complement each other. I think that’s amazing. And before we move on, I want to say we use the term comparanoia. And that was actually established by a friend of mine, David de Giorgio. He actually did a TEDx, and he coined and actually has the trademark on the term comparanoia. But it’s interesting because over the last several years, I met David three or four years ago, but even in that space, I’ve seen that word take off. And a lot of times he doesn’t get credit for it, but he does own the trademark. So please, no cease and desist. David. I appreciate it.
Sara Lohse [00:22:36]:
We cited our source.
Larry Roberts [00:22:40]:
But no, I think that’s amazing. That’s definitely a pitfall that many entrepreneurs fall into, especially with their brand. Is that comparanoia? So learn to partner with, collaborate, and grow together with people that are in a similar I mean, they can even be in a different space, but there’s still potential opportunities there for us to draw our own Venn diagrams and leverage the strengths from others and maybe even modify or evolve our processes as well.
Sara Lohse [00:23:08]:
That’s how we got here.
Larry Roberts [00:23:10]:
It is how we got here. That’s an interesting path to how we started this podcast. Two pretty much polar opposites, generational opposites, and the whole nine yards there.
Sara Lohse [00:23:23]:
But I think we were good at looking at what we were doing and what we are enjoying and then realizing the other one had kind of opposite strengths. So it became real easy to make that Venn diagram, and we took it a little literally and have a pseudo side company called Favorite Hat Media just for fun. But it came out of seeing what the other one was doing, where it was similar, and then where we could support each other.
Larry Roberts [00:23:54]:
Yeah, no, it’s tremendous. And speaking of support, we love doing this podcast, and we love having you listen to the podcast. So if you found some value in this one today, do me a favor, hit that subscribe button. So we can continue to bring you these amazing episodes each and every week with Brandon visit.
Sara Lohse [00:24:10]:
Listen to Branded.com to leave ratings and reviews, listen to all of our episodes. Thank you so much.
Larry Roberts [00:24:14]:
We’ll see you. I’m getting the last word.