Ep. 281 – NEXT-LEVEL Branding Tips w/💡 #1 Bestselling Author & Branding EXPERT Kate DiLeo!

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Welcome to do this, not that, the podcast for marketers. You'll walk away from each episode with actionable tips you can test immediately.

You'll hear from the best minds in marketing who will share tactics, quick wins, and pitfalls to avoid. We'll also dig into life, pop culture, and the chaos that is our everyday. I'm Jay Schwedelson. Let's do this not that.

We are back for do this, not that podcast presented by Marigold. And today we have, like, a really cool human being. So who's here? We got Kate DiLeo. Now, if you don't know Kate, you stink.

But the reason I asked Kate to come on is I am horrible with getting my brand message right for my business. Maybe you're bad at it with your business and Kate is like the person. If you said, who's the person? It's Kate.

She's a number one international best selling author of Muting the Megaphone. She also is the. Well, she's a lot. She's one of the top speakers at Inbound, was the top rated, whatever. She's a great human being.

I did a horrible job of introducing her. Kate, welcome to the podcast.

Hey, Jay, it's great to be here. Thank you for having me on the show.

What a disaster. I am. All right, since I royally screwed that up.

Before we get into how we can really get our brand message right, because I can't even get an intro out, let alone get my brand message out, we're gonna solve all of that. Tell everybody who's Kate. What is your story? How did you become you?

I have no idea. No, I'm kidding, honestly. You know, here's the long and the short. You ready for this? I very much zigzagged my way into branding.

Probably like a lot of older millennials. I'm almost 40 here. I had no intention of going into this field. Actually started way back when pre PhD for linguistic anthropology.

Loved language, loved the art and science about how language shapes culture and communication. And the market crashed and I had to go get a sales job. Jay. And I was cold calling IT professionals to sell them $2,500 training classes.

So I was thrown to the wolves. And it was in that particular job that I learned the power of a brand pitch. Both a good one and a bad one because they gave me bad scripts.

And I was about to lose my job two weeks into this sucker, and I had to figure out quickly how I was going to sink or swim. So I actually, in that job, Jay, had to throw the scripts out unsubscribe everybody from the Eloqua email campaigns. Oh, and I decided to go rogue.

Oh, and I went rogue and I decided to think about what would I want to know if I were on the other hand side of this call.

And I tested out a formula that I've now spent more than a decade of my career proving out that I now teach internationally called the brand trifecta. And it's super simple.

It's just getting at the heart of what people want to know, which is a brand pitch, which is tell me what you do, tell me how you solve my problem, tell me how you're different. So fast forward. It worked so well in that sales job that I got recruited into the marketing department to write pitches for the rest of the team.

I got recruited into the agency world.

I started side hustling building brands, went full time with the business and I've now worked with about 350 companies to take them through my program.

That is awesome. I love the initiative that you took and how it turned into a whole explosive, incredible career. And it really has.

I mean you are super well known in this space, super well respected. So I'm excited to dig into this. So let's first lay the groundwork for the people that are listening.

If you are a small business, if you're a big business, if you're a business to business focused business, if you're a business to consumer focused businesses, everything that you're about to share with us apply to all of those versions of businesses.

Yes, it does. Brand, at the end of the day, quintessentially is your path of least resistance to revenue.

So what we're going to unpack today is what are the three core components of a brand message that regardless if you sell B2B, B2C any or all the above, you're a branded house or a house of brands, it doesn't matter.

You've got to have certain components that lay the framework, Jay, of what you open the gate with to compel somebody to want to self select in and take the next step. And.

All right, so if I got this right, you said there are three core components and I'm going to guess what they are because I could read your mind. And then you're going to tell us what the story is. Tagline, value proposition, statement and differentiator statement. Did I nail it?

It's like you've done your research today, Jay. I mean, unreal.

All right, hit me with the I want to talk about tagline. I mean, are you going to tell me, like, just to say, like, just do it and that's it.

Like Nike, I mean, what do we, what do we gotta do here with our tagline?

Oh, my God, this is such a great question. And then, by the way, don't let me forget to talk to you about why that formula works and why that order of operations works for those three things.

But let's talk about this tagline thing because I get asked all the time like, well, Kate, how come some companies can have. Just do it. Okay, so let's break this down for a second.

In the world of taglines, I just want to state there's typically six common structures in the English language. So let's just put that out there from a language perspective, there's six structures. And I'm not going to go into that right now.

I'd bore you to tears. In general, though, what you have to remember is that your tagline is your first line of defense. In any brand conversation.

In B2B versus B2C, you're actually addressing two different things.

So the reason that Nike and some of these consumer brands can get away with something like just do it or you're worth it, something very ethereal, very out there, is because the first question that a consumer has when they experience your brand is, tell me the promise of who I will be or what I will experience when I have your products in my hand. Tell me the promise of who I will be or what I will experience when I have your products in my hand.

However, if you are selling B2B and you are a business that has to sell to other businesses, my friend, you cannot have a tagline like just do it and have that cut it. Which is why B2B taglines are often more boring. They still need to be provocative, but they have to get at this is what we do.

So building brands that drive revenue, it's very clear, it's very to the point. It speaks to the premise of what you do for the business. Not nearly as fluffy and cool as just do it, but why?

Because the first question that a business is going to ask you if you're selling to them is what what do you do? So if your tagline does not address that in the first five seconds of your brand conversation, you've lost them, they're gone.

So let me ask you a question, though I don't have a tagline, is that regardless of what my tagline is, is having a tagline in your opinion, like a table stakes, like, it's a must do. Everybody needs A tagline or. You don't really need a tagline.

No, it's a must. It is a must. Why is that? Because buyer psychology suggests that it's a conversation that a brand opens the gateway to.

So let me kind of back into this for a second. A lot of people talk about brand in terms of storytelling, Jay, which I really am an anti storyteller.

It's not that I think that storytelling is bad in and of itself, but hang on, I believe, I think storytelling belongs further on down in the conversation. Have you ever gone into the room.

Do you not like stories? Like, if I start telling you a story, you're like, duh, I don't like stories.

I don't like it. If you walked into the room and you shook hands with me, Jay, you tell me your name and I ask you what you do.

Are you going to launch into some complex stories? Say, let me tell you about the time I was five, Kate.

No, Right?

No, you're gonna get to the point, right? The problem is that we took the greatest concept in the world of storytelling, which again, I think, like, what Donna Miller had to say was great.

I think his whole thesis is great. But we went rogue with it. As marketers, nobody told us how to write the damn thing. So the problem is the storytelling content is great.

But your customer doesn't give a crap about your story until you can tell me in five words, what do you do? Really? And then, oh, how does that solve my deepest heart pain value proposition statement.

Okay, and apples to apples, how are you different better than the competition Differentiator statements. If you can't get that out in the first 15 to 30 seconds, they're not going to self select in and go. Now that makes sense. Now tell me how it works.

What's included, what are the features and the benefits and what's behind it and who's the team behind it? Where did you come up with this amazing thing, AKA story based content?

This is like. This is both great and stressing me out. I will tell you. I've been in this, I've had a marketing services business for like 25 years.

And I completely given up on trying to tell people what I do for a living. Like, if I'm out my wife and we're at a dinner and someone's like, what do you do? I go, just go on to the next person. I can't. I can't even go there.

It's torture for me. So I've given up.

Are you saying though, that there is a very simple way to just be like, here's my tagline, here is my value prop, and here's my differentiator statement. I could do that in like 30 seconds. That's a real possibility.

Yes, it is a real possibility. It's 100% a language framework. It's super simple. It's very clear cut.

How do you do it? How do you get started without hiring Kate? How do I sit down after I listen to this episode? Okay, I gotta do these three things.

Tell me simply, how do I do it without losing my.

All right, so can I tell you what the buckets of work are? It's very practical. And I. And I talked this out because this is very simple stuff. Okay, so here's your buckets of work.

I think if you're gonna go, okay, I feel like my brand is like 60, 70% there, but I feel like we're not kind of hitting the nail on the head to convert people quickly. Okay, Step one is you gotta know your brand's tone of voice or personality, how you show up in the world today. Why do I say that?

Because brand is not aspirational. So if you're gonna go write a message, you don't actually write for who you think you're supposed to be or how you're supposed to sound.

You need to write for who you really are. Because the principles that, like, attracts light, if you're not authentic, people are gonna smell it a mile away, right?

So you gotta know your voice and write in that authentic tone of voice. Number two, you gotta know your icp, your target audiences. But here's the kicker on this.

You cannot just say, oh, I serve midsize manufacturers, or I serve marketers of those midsize manufacturers. You gotta go deeper to understand the psychological pain of those humans who are the humans behind the category.

So what you need to actually develop, a simple exercise that you can do is number a paper one through 20. And what I want you to do is document. What are all the buyer criteria of an ideal client that you would love to see?

Could be decision making style, it could be level of bureaucracy, it could be, you know, all the things that you would love to see. And why do you do that? Because if you don't know what ideal looks like for your client, you're never going to spot. Great.

You walk into a room of 100 C suite leaders of 100 midsize manufacturers. How do you know the 10 or 20 or 30 whose business cards you need to get? Jay.

So you got to know who you are, then you got to Know who you're actually going to talk to. That's highly qualified.

And with that, the final step is you got to know the heart pain you solve, not just what you offer, but what's the bottom line Heart pain that you actually are selling for them. And this is the hardest part for most people because they're so close to the business.

While our product solves this, this, this, this, this, this, and this. What's the sum of those parts? What's the burning platform?

When you get that piece that enables you to write the tagline, value prop, and differentiator statements where it creates the oh, my God, you get me moment. And in particular, your value proposition statement in your tagline. Do that. Where they're like, yes, yes, that is compelling.

Holy crap, I need to have a conversation.

I love all that. But here's something I've struggled with, and I want to understand what I do about it. So in my agency, we do all these. Lots of services, okay?

But I've learned over the time is that anytime I try to describe to somebody, oh, we do these 15 things, they zone out, they don't care. That's, like, way too much information.

But then if I focus on just saying, oh, we do this one type of service, we get hired, and then over time, we kind of grab more business from them because, like, oh, you also do this. We kind of, like, you know, permeate our way through their org.

And that's not good because we're not really articulating out of the gate all the stuff that we do. But anytime I try to articulate all the stuff that we do, it, like, is like, you're a big loser. I don't know what you actually do. This is annoying.

So is that a good move to try to, like, go in the door with one piece and then get the other stuff, or should you figure out a way to articulate the whole thing all at once?

See, there's. Here's the hiccup. I want you to reframe that. It's not about trying to articulate all the things you do.

That belongs to, like, a services page on a website. I'm talking homepage copy here.

Imagine I come to your website for a second, and in the first 30 seconds, I need to see a tagline and a value proposition statement above the fold of the page, and I start to scroll, and then I see your top three differentiators. Okay, this is what we're talking about here. Before I even click on services. What? Really?

I'm trying to get you to Drive at here is the value and the bottom line. Value you create up and how you do that are all the things you deliver. Product A, product B, service A, service B.

We do ads, we do SEO, we do this, we do this. We do graphic design, website and email, campaign. Okay, that's, that's the thing you could deliver.

So that, what is it to drive revenue for your clients? Is it so that they achieve their business goals? Is it so that they protect their margins? Is it so that they accelerate innovation?

Is it what exactly is the promise that you can hang your hat on and say, my name is Jay.

And at the end of the day, this is what I do for companies and I will put my reputation on the line because I know that the way that we operate and the work that we do will drive this.

Nice. I like that. I'm going to do that. So let me ask you this. How do you know you're listening to this? You're like, well, I might have this problem.

I might need to rethink on this. Is there a way to like, be like, I'm going to go grab John Smith over here, who's never saw my website, doesn't know my business.

I'm going to ask them to look at it and tell me if they understand what I do. Like, how do you know if you need to kind of go down this path and you have an issue?

Because sometimes we're too close to our own brands, our own companies.

Great. So there's a couple ways for you to very organically do this without having to go do a bunch of customer research.

Not that I'm not a fan of customer research, but unless you want to go spend an arm and a leg. All right, couple things. First and foremost, I want you to go look at your recent win close, you know, loss ratio.

Did you actually ask them for people that didn't close with you, why they didn't? If you're not asking that, you should be. That's the first thing.

Was it really a budget issue or was it because they found a different value than what somebody else was offering? That's the first question.

The second thing that you can do that I think is important is to look at your core metrics in a few ways in particular, I want you to look and understand, is your sales cycle getting longer? Do you know how long your sales cycle is? And have you seen that it's getting longer and longer to close a deal?

That's an indicator that brand pitch could be an issue. Somebody's not getting it right away.

So you're spending more time having to explain more time having to be on calls with somebody to get them to this moment where they're like ready to convert number of qualified prospects into the pipeline. That's another big indicator. Out of everybody that comes in, how many of them are actually like primed, high quality.

That's a brand issue that typically signals like you're going after the wrong people with the wrong message. If it were the right qualified candidate with the right message, they'd be coming, going, I freaking love what you said there.

How much is it going to cost? Those are two huge indicators that I want you to think about. Now, if you sell B2C, especially if you sell Ecom, here's what's interesting.

I want you to also think about time on site. This is fascinating. Brands that do a really good job that I've actually helped clients do is we see a decrease in time on site. You're like, what?

So we see an increase in sales and a decrease in time on site. Well, why is that? Because they understood so quickly in the first 30 seconds on the homepage, they went and shopped.

So sometimes what needs to happen here is you need to actually think differently about your metrics as well. That shopping cart abandonment will go down. Time on site will go down.

You've got to look at your existing metrics and actually understand where are things getting slower and where are we finding this stress point and friction in our processes and our close ability. That's where you're going to signal we got a brand pitch issue that we need to kind of do the quarter turn, a tightening of the bolt.

I love that because you're not just looking at the attribution metric or how many sales or revenue, you're actually looking at the things that get you there. So that's. This is awesome. I've learned a lot. All right, before we wrap up all this chaos, how does everybody get involved with your world?

Where do they find you? Put in the show notes and consume your content? What do they do?

There's so much we could have talked about today, by the way. Okay, so first and foremost, you know, I'm a simplest person. So if you want to find me, go find me on LinkedIn.

That's where I tend to post most of my content. Kate DeLeo. And you can also check out my website, www.catedeleo.com. lots more coming there.

But if you have any questions, check it out. Send me a message. Happy to answer any and all questions that you have as it relates to building a brand that drives revenue.

Kate, you are awesome and for Everybody out there, Dileo is D I L E O so Kate dileo.com check her on LinkedIn. She is great. Kate you rock. I will talk to you soon.

Cheers.

You did it. You made it to the end. Nice. But the party's not over.

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