1811 – Brand Strategy with Chaya Glatt of Brand Authority

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2:08Let's push the boundaries of customer experience together.

2:16With us right now, Kaya Glad. Kaya, it's so great to have you. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me. You bet. So you are a branding strategist, marketing strategist, and copywriter. Your website is kayaglatt.com. To our friend that's listening, the easiest thing to do is just click on the show notes, click on the little information cover art, keep clicking around, you'll find a direct link, Kaya, to your website because we've got some free stuff that we're going to be sharing today. But Kaya, tell us a bit about your work that you do in the world. Okay. So I'm a brand strategist and copywriter.

2:51So what that means is you have a business, right? Maybe you have a new business. Maybe you've been around for a while. But what happens is you are growing. You're gaining traction mostly through word of mouth referrals. And at a certain point, you say, hey, we want to scale this. And the word of mouth referrals are either drying up or they're not enough. How do we get in front of more people? And not only how do we get in front of more people, but how do we show up in a way that makes it clear that we're the best choice, better than our competitors, sometimes who are sort of formidable and have very cool, flashy websites, right?

3:29So what I come in is I help you figure out what your message should be first, right? And then how to put that on your website in the most compelling and persuasive way so that anybody who checks you out online should turn from like sort of warm, maybe interested to very warm, very interested. Yeah. How do you help derive kind of that key messaging in a way that might be challenging for a founder or a leadership team to be able to do for themselves? Yes, might be. Always is. Always is very challenging to do for yourself and challenging for anyone to do for themselves, even for me as a copywriter to do for myself.

4:13because what happens is we have this, what I call entrepreneurial enmeshment syndrome where I am my business and I'm just too close to it to see it clearly. So we have a process, right? And I call it my MAD formula, which is an acronym standing for market, audience, DNA. So the market is your competitors. So we do that competitive analysis. We take a look at what's already out there. What claims are they making, right? What are some of the niches that are already owned? Where is there an opportunity for us to stand out? Or even just looking at our competitors, what are some of the habits that everybody out there is already doing that we need to make sure we're doing too?

4:56So like if all your competitors have case studies and you don't, you want to make sure you got a few case studies. So that's the market part of things. Then there's the audience side of things, which is the biggest piece, because you always want to make sure your message is targeted at your customer. Right. You're not trying to sell to your competitor. Don't worry about them that much. You're trying to sell to your customer. So that's where we focus the most. OK, so what I actually do is I interview the client's customers. Right. So if you're an accountant and you're trying to figure out how to get more clients as an accountant, I will talk to your clients.

5:37I'll ask them a few targeted questions and anyone can do this. You don't need to be a trained interviewer. You don't need to be a copywriter. You can have anybody on your team run customer interviews as a standard part of your process. right? So every time you have a client that's happy after a certain number of, you know, months of engagement that they've worked with you, you set up a customer interview, you get them on the phone or on a Zoom call, make sure it's recorded. You ask them a few targeted questions like what was going on in your business that led you to reach out to me, right? And if you're an accountant, they might say something like, well, our numbers were all over the place and we couldn't make any decisions, right?

6:18And you are recording this conversation, You're documenting what your customers are saying and you're continuing to gather information. So asking more targeted questions like, OK, when you decided you needed an accountant, what are their options? Did you consider and what was the tipping point that led you to choose us? So what happens is as you're asking these questions, you're getting an in to the brain of your customer and exactly what they're thinking about as they make their decisions, which is extremely helpful as you are trying to persuade others to become a customer. And then the other questions that you want to ask are about the experience that they had with you, because what you're trying to do is draw out those meaty, detailed selling points that are your secret sauce that you may not even be aware of.

7:10So that's when you ask, tell me about your experience. They will tell you what they liked about you. And that's how you know what really matters to your audience. I can't tell you how many times it's happened that a business thought that their big selling point was this. And then the customers told me a totally different story or a similar story, but with a lot more detail and nuance. So that's the A. The market, the audience. and then the D is for the DNA. So that's your brand DNA, what makes you tick, why you do things differently maybe than some others do them, all the specific things that you know you are exceptional at.

7:55That's the process. That's the research that we go through. And when we pull it all together, we get a lot of clarity about what your messaging needs to be. Yeah, I love it. So Kaya, I'll ask a silly question here, but now that we have AI tools, We don't need copywriters, right? I'm sure you love that one. You had to go there. You had to go there. So AI is a good tool, obviously, right? We're not going to start a battle with AI, although there are some copywriters who want to do that. It doesn't replace the human analysis and the fresh, unique angle that you need in order to have really compelling copy.

8:37So definitely use AI in whatever pieces of the process it will serve you, but you definitely need the human strategy part there. So somebody is making decisions about how you should position the brand, AI is not going to be able to tell you that. AI can give you data about your customer sometimes. Sometimes AI can summarize lots of complex information for you. So you can feed it all those, you know, feed it transcripts of all those interviews and say, you know, tell me what's the biggest pain point. Tell me the five most important pain points that keep repeating themselves in these interviews.

9:17You can have AI do that for you, but then you want to have a human brain who's strategizing, figuring out how to position the brand, figuring out what that hierarchy should be. Like, what's the most important message? What's the secondary message? Things like, how are we going to segment this for our different audiences? You know, we're not going to get rid of humans yet. Yeah. And I'm curious, by the way, Kaya, I'm going to put a plug in for this. You have a great LinkedIn account to follow. And I was going to get your take on that. So in the realm of messaging and communication, what do you see working really well?

9:59because you have very high engagement on LinkedIn. You have a really good following and you share good content. What's kind of your philosophy on social? Thank you, first of all, for your kind words about my LinkedIn content. Okay, philosophy on social. So I guess the biggest mistake that people make on social is viewing it as I can just get on LinkedIn and sell. No, you cannot do that. and people hate that. But you know, it's kind of a newbie mistake where if you're new to social, you're like, oh, look, I can get thousands of people to see my sales pitch. So let me write a sales pitch, you know, or I've had people reach out to me and say, I'm going to do a big LinkedIn post for the new year.

10:46And I'm like, what's a big LinkedIn post? You have no control over how big your LinkedIn post is or how many people are going to view it. LinkedIn is a long game. So if you are ready to invest in a long game and do the effort that it takes to get results in a little while, not today, not tomorrow, but maybe in three months, then it is an absolutely fantastic tool. And my philosophy is two things, be valuable and be human, be valuable and be human, be valuable and be human again and again and again. Show up consistently, share information that is valuable to you that maybe you wish somebody had told you a few years back.

11:36Right. Say stuff that are going to matter to people, that's going to make a difference to somebody and say it in a human way. so that you're likable and people will imagine that it might be fun to talk to you and will want to talk to you. So if you can do those two things, be valuable and be human on LinkedIn, in your posts, in your comments, and in your direct messaging, then that's the key to the long game. Yeah. Yeah. Kind of funny when you're talking about, you know, I'm going to do this, or, you know, like a new mistake, right? It's like, I'm going to broadcast a message to hundreds of people.

12:17You do that, lands with a thud. Then your best hope is to broadcast to dozens of people because again, like the social media algorithms know who the spammers are and they know that people don't like it. And so just naturally, if that's how you show up and behave as a company and you're frustrated that you're not getting the reach and engagement, you might want to look at that kind of messaging And Kaya, hire you. You might be able to help them. Tell me a bit about what engagement with you looks like, like when you typically start with a client, like where do you begin and where do you go? Okay, great question.

12:54So the engagement follows my MAD formula. So it's the market audience DNA research, right? So that's what we start with. We start with the research phase. So we start with the DNA. That means I sit down with the founder, with whatever, you know, key team members are there, are going to be involved in the decision making. And we do a kickoff meeting where I ask some tough questions, make everybody think, right? Like we're not here to be an echo chamber. Like if you say to me, well, what's so amazing about our product is that it's so high quality. I will say to you, okay, so why does that make a difference to the customer?

13:36Your product is high quality and therefore what is going to happen differently in my life? So we ask the tough questions. We make it about the customer. I keep refocusing the team on how is that important to anyone besides for you behind your desk, right? So drilling down into the brand DNA and with a very, very hyper focus on why the customer will care about those things. Then we go into the audience research and the competitive analysis, which me and my team do kind of on our own. I don't need to involve the client in that. And then I bring all the research together and I create a brand strategy brief, which can be a anywhere from 40 to 100 page slide deck.

14:28That's going to be the brand of Bible. Yeah, you're like, whoa, that's a lot of pages. It's it's formatted very cleanly. So there's not a lot of information on each page, but it's broken down into this is our audience. These are the segments of our audience. if we're targeting all different ones. This is the message that we need to tell our audience. This is how we're going to tell it. These are our selling points. These are the objections that our audience has. Here's what's holding them back from buying from us. Here's how we're going to overcome those objections. Here are our credibility builders.

15:03So beyond just testimonials, I was so happy with them. They did such a good job. Everybody on the team went above and beyond, right? Everybody says that. Yeah. What do we say that is actually credible that makes people believe our claims? So all that information goes into the brand strategy brief. That's the Bible. I present it to the team. We go over it. And then once that's done, we're able to move on to actual messaging touch points like the website or their corporate brochure or the LinkedIn strategy. Everything else kind of grows out of that brand strategy. Yeah. Yeah. Kaya, your website is kayaglatt.com.

15:48And I know that you talk about, like you share, like you've got resources that you give away. Do you mind maybe sharing some of those things that's our friend right now? Like I've enjoyed this conversation. Kaya clearly knows what she's talking about and they want more Kaya in their life. Okay, sure. So I have a bunch of free resources and they are available for download. So I've got an ebook called 15 Brands to Love, Loathe and Learn From. That is like really fun and light way to kind of get your feet wet in the realm of the brand strategy by seeing what some other brands are doing and kind of like peeling away the mask of why they're doing things this way.

16:33And there's some really cool, fun brands in there as well as some very serious B2Bs in there as well. So you get a little bit of everything. I also have an ebook, the Madly Effective Copy Guide, which gives you short and sweet tastes of how to write copy if you're going to DIY things. For marketers, I have a get paid to think video series if you want to learn how to position your offer as a strategy offer and get paid for the time that you're thinking. And I also have a masterclass on brand strategy, specifically for designers, because they often find themselves as a client will come and say, make a logo, make me a logo, right?

17:20But what the client really needs is a strategy. So we have a masterclass on that. Nice. Again, your website, kaiaglatt.com. That's C-H-A-Y-A-G-L-A-T-T.com. We've got that linked up. Kai, what do they click on to access those free resources? So that should be linked up too. That's a special page just for the resources and we'll link that up as well. All right, good. So to get that, we've got that in the show notes for this episode as well. Kai, great conversation. Happy New Year to you. Thank Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. And happy new year to you as well.

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