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

0:08Welcome 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 Schwetelson. Let's do this, not that.

0:40we are back for do this not that podcast presented by marigold today we have like a really cool human being so who's here we got kate delio 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'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.

1:21Kate, 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 really 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 going to solve all of that. Tell everybody who's Kate, what is your story? How did you become you? I have no idea. Okay. 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.

1:54I had no intention of going into this field. Actually started way back when, pre-PhD for linguistic holistic 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.

2:32So I actually in that job, Jay had to throw the scripts out, unsubscribe everybody from the Eloqua email campaigns. Uh-oh. And I decided to go rogue. Uh-oh. And I went rogue and I decided to think about what would I want to know if I were on the other side of this call. And I tested 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.

3:07So fast forward, it was 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 for 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.

3:42If 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 buy.

4:21All 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 just 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 got to do here with our tag 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.

5:15I'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.

5:51However, if you are selling B2B and you are a business that has to sell 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 promise 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.

6:28They're gone. So let me ask you a question though. So 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 there – 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.

7:08I believe – Hot table. 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? and say, let me tell you about the time I was five, Kate. No. You're going to get to the point, right? The problem is that we took the greatest concept in the world of storytelling, which again, I think what Donner Miller had to say was great.

7:40I 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? And then, oh, how does that solve my deepest heart pain? value proposition statement. Okay. And apples to apples, how are you different and 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?

8:15Where 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've completely given up on trying to tell people what I do for a living. Like if I'm out with 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.

8:51And here's my differentiator statement. I could do that in like 30 seconds. That's a real possibility. It is a real possibility. It's a hundred percent of language framework. It's super simple. It's very clear cut. And 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 got to do these three things. Tell me simply, how do I do it without losing my mind? So can I tell you what the buckets of work are? It's very practical. And I, and I, and I taught this at the time because it's very simple stuff. Okay. So here's your buckets of work.

9:20I think if you're going to 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 got to 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 going to 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 going to smell it a mile away, right?

9:49So you to know your voice and write in that authentic tone of voice. Number two, you got to 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 got to 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.

10:22It 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 man-sized 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 solving for them.

10:57And this is the hardest part for most people because they're so close to the business. Well, our product solves 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 and 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.

11:33So in my agency, we do all these lots of services. Okay. But what 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.

12:13I 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? Well, but see, here's the hiccup. I want you to reframe that. It's not about trying to articulate all the things you do. That belongs on 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?

12:48This 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 and website and email campaign. Okay. That's, that's the thing you deliver. So that what is it to drive revenue for your clients? Is it so that they achieve their business goals? Is this so that they protect their margins? Is this so that they accelerate innovation is what exactly is the promise that you can hang your hand on and say, my name is Jay.

13:27And 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 in 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, I'm going to go grab a 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?

14:04Because sometimes we're too close to our own brands, our own companies. Great. So there's a couple of 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. A couple of things. first and foremost i want you to go look at your 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?

14:46And if you've seen it, it's getting longer and longer to close the 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 b to c especially if you sell e-com 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 i've actually helped clients do is we see a decrease in time on site you're like, what?

15:40So 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 things getting slower. And where are we finding this stress point in 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 you know the uh 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 uh uh wrap up all this chaos how does everybody get involved with your world where do they find you will put in the show notes and consume your content what do they do ah there's so much we could have talked about today by the way.

16:39Okay. So first and foremost, you know, I'm, 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.katedeleo.com. Lots more coming there. If you happen to be a huge inbound fan, like I am, I'll be back. Jay and I will be back at 2025. We'll see you there on stage. We rockin' and rollin' as well as a number of other conferences globally here this year. But If you have any questions, check it out. Send me a message. Happy to answer any and all questions you have as it relates to building a brand that drives revenue.

17:16Kate, you are awesome. And for everybody out there, DeLeo is D-I-L-E-O. So katedeleo.com. Check her out 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. Subscribe to make sure you get the latest episode each week for more actionable tips and a little chaos from today's top marketers. And hook us up with a five-star review if this wasn't the worst podcast of all time. Lastly, if you want access to the best virtual marketing events that are also 100 % free, visit guruevents.com. So you can hear from the world's top marketers like Damon John, Martha Stewart, and me.

17:59Guruevents.com. Check it out.