2068 – How to Empower Business with Strategic Branding with Rockstarr & Moon’s Rachel Minion

0:05Hey there, thoughtful listener. Are you looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, influencers, influencers, and clients? Well, I've had private conversations with over 2 ,000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from. I've got a free video you can watch with no opt-in required where I'll share the exact steps necessary to be 100 % inbound in your industry over the next six to eight months with no spam, no ads, and no sales. What I teach has worked for me for over 15 years and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies. Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high ticket sales appointments.

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1:05with us right now. It is Rachel Minion. Rachel, you are one of the co-founders of Rockstar and Moon. Your website is rachelminion.com. And I share that website because it will link off to some of the projects that you're working on, including Rockstar and Moon. That website, by the way, is rockstarandmoon.com, but it's rockstar with two R's at the end, rock star and moon. Rachel, it's great to have you. Boy, it was so hard for me to hit record on this episode because you and I instantly started talking about music. And, you know, before we get into this, I'd love to just kind of talk about the wisdom or brilliance of your brand because it is.

1:48It's like you could, like when music fans get together, I mean, they can talk for hours, right? About this shared experience. And I suspect, again, that's kind of what led to your branding. Well, it's the common denominator that really brings us all together. It could be a Beatles tune. It could be a Pantera song. It doesn't matter. There is that commonality where every single person who goes to see a show, there is an energy. There is an aliveness. There is something that you can't put into words. And it is that feeling that we want to bring. I created Rockstar and Moon because I was always told I was a rock star at work.

2:29Great. What do you do with it? I can't name a brand that. But I was sitting out. We had just closed my parents' business. I'm trying to figure out what in the world do we do and how do we do it? And how do I create something that gives me an extra skill set? I can do a marketing company, but what do I do? So I'm sitting in Dewey Beach. I'm behind the big bottling cork. Here are the waves of the ocean. It's dark. The moon is out. The stars are out. And it all came together. Rock star and moon. Well, I love it. And, you know, do you mind sharing just a little bit about branding generally? It's a bit of kind of what you oversee, but do you mind just talking generally about like when we're thinking about how we communicate our brand, why, you know, commonality or, you know, it's like why that's so important or valuable in many cases?

3:25I think if not every case It gives the life force and that energy to your company So when you get on a call with me or you get on a call with my business partner, you'll see guitars in the background Immediately you're now thinking rock star. They have something to do with music and guess what we have zero musical ability We have marketing ability Here's a brand. We bring that front and center. You come to my website. You're going to see guitars everywhere. You're going to see that fun. You're going to see the playfulness. We have a technology called the growth amplifier. Everything fits together.

4:01And that helps to build out a brand infrastructure. And when we're building out this brand infrastructure or authority infrastructure, what we want to do is have a strategic backbone where we create a position so your brand is recognized, it's respected, everything is congruent, and you can then be looked at as that go-to leader in the industry. Everything is integrated from communication channels, so you're not going to hear something from me that says, hi, how are you? Now it's going to be like, hey, Rockstar, how are you doing today? It's going to have that energy and that light. I love it.

4:39I'm jealous. I wish I had your brain. Now that I'm thinking about it, you know, well, what's nice about this too, and I think, you know, particularly for those of us who are in service-based B2B businesses, like where we spend time with our clients, you know, it is so critical to get the right kind of people to work with. Otherwise, it's just miserable. Like if you don't have that right dynamic or you have a bad client, I mean, that is just a tax that soaks not only you as the founder, but it's a tax on your team as well. And so what I like about - The power of saying no. What's that? It's all about the power of saying no and being - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

5:21But the point I was getting to is the brand allows us, like it's a positive filter and it's a negative filter. So what I like about your brand, and again, I think this is a common message for all of us, is use your brand to filter and weed out the bad people. Talk about who you, you know, or you don't have to say this directly, right? But just, you know, talk about who you don't work with. We do, you know, for us, you know, it's just like, we do not work with bro-y marketers. It's not that I don't like bro-y marketers. It's just, it's just, they just don't work with our system. It just, it's anathema.

5:56So now I don't have conversations with bro-y marketers. we have a question that we ask in every discovery session if you're a wwe wrestler you're getting up for a big presentation on stage what is your walk-on song it is the ultimate stumper but at the same time this tells me everything i need to know about your personality can we work together or are you someone who just really can't feel that same manager. Yeah. Wow. That's fascinating. Yeah. That's interesting. So to our friend that's listening right now, think about the questions that you could ask and it might appear silly to some and it might appear silly to someone that you don't want to work with.

6:43And that's a good thing. Rachel, I want to get into your domain expertise around marketing too, because obviously that's what you do. Do you mind sharing just a little bit about your superpowers? Again, particularly, you do a lot of work at B2B. Do you mind talking a little bit about that? The bottom line is for all of our clients, we build out a brand infrastructure. It helps to build that reputation that commands attention, it earns trust, and it creates a lasting impact. But the really cool part of all of this is I don't want to work with you forever. So when we're working with our ideal clients, when I do my job right, not only have we grown them, we've grown them so much, they are starting to bring in someone internally and they can take our processes.

7:28They can take our frameworks. They take our systems, everything we've created. And here you go. So now we have that seamless handoff because I want my clients to win. We have a mission. We want to double 100 businesses in the next five years. we are working to grow that and for the small business community that's our not only our mission but it's our why that's why we exist we are here to support and serve yeah do you mind sharing a little bit about um the trends that you are seeing in marketing like what are you hooking into right now is you not just just generic marketing for b2b but do you mind maybe getting a little granular about what you see working well right now versus yeah no we don't work on that.

8:15So my clients are all B2B. And what we see immediately get effect and get into algorithms is a LinkedIn newsletter. That LinkedIn newsletter has been revamped. So now, if I start a LinkedIn newsletter today, every single, well, they start with anywhere from 10 to 50 % of my connections will get a notification in their inbox asking me to subscribe. From there, Any single time I post, that goes straight to their notification bar. So immediately you will see, hey, Rachel Minion just posted a newsletter. The cool part about this is that also helps to grow subscribers. It costs nothing. And if you have that content engine that's giving you blogs, why not reutilize this for snackable content here and redirect somebody to your website to book a call with you, whatever that may be.

9:07And immediately it gets impact. One of my clients, we have growing over 6 ,000 subscribers. He never had a list ever. Another one of my clients, we doubled her subscription list in two months. Based off something she was building for like five years. Yeah. Tell me a little bit about, sounds like you have high value of an email list. Tell me more about that. I love having an email list. I think that those emails are so valuable. But it may not necessarily be emails that you're all about because getting into the inbox is really hard. How do you get not marked as spam? How do you work on deliverability?

9:45You need a team that can work on that for you. But there's also the other side of the world with a LinkedIn connection and getting deeper into the connection so they are constantly seeing your content. What we want to do is create a way that you continually nurture the people that are in your system and bring them back so that they can think of you as just that one thing. You will think of me as the rock star marketer. You will think of my client as the ultimate for CEOs who are looking to exit business. You will think of other clients in those particular ways that we're branding. And every article, every piece of content, everything they see, we want to keep nurturing that.

10:21So the minute somebody says, oh, I need a marketing team. I'm already there. You've known me for it could take a month. It could take six months. It could take a year. But it's constantly there. We had a client of ours who grew that newsletter, posted content about a 1031 exchange. We post every other week. Two months later, one of his connections saw the newsletter, called him immediately, and he got an$11 million deal out of it. It may not happen fast, but that's the nuance of building demand and making sure that you stay warm, whether you're actively doing it or not. yeah um and in terms of like um what you have seen falling out of favor in b2b marketing um you know and i'm kind of thinking about some of the lead gen stuff that's just you know what what do you see not working but maybe you see you know gurus and and other marketers still advocating for it and you're like, people stop.

11:30It's you can do that. It's just going to be real expensive and probably not work as well as some of these other things. Anything on your list? Oh yeah. So what I hate and gives me that cringe factor. And every time I just feel icky, I want to go take a shower is when I get some ridiculous guarantee from a child who has never done this. They, this must be their first job. They're giving me a guarantee. I'm going to make a million dollars in the next three months. They're going to give me a guarantee that's so stupid. They think I'm going to sign up. And there's a lot of people who do, and that's great, but they never get those expectations met.

12:06And then there's that distrust and the upset and it sucks. It's the churn and burn businesses that are saying, hey, I'll give you a guarantee. You're going to make a hundred thousand dollars in new calls in the next two weeks. It doesn't work that way. Business has never been that simple. If it was, we would all be retired. So that's where we go for the no BS method of how we do things and put it out in the marketplace. Because if it's not clear, if it's not believable, nobody cares. They will never, ever, ever believe. But don't worry. Those that are clear, they're concise, they say exactly what they're going to do.

12:45That's who you go to after you've gone through a turn and burn. Yeah. Okay. So our friend that's been listening, you know, and obviously they're in B2B, obviously they want to grow. Do you have any long form content? Do you have resources? Do you have things that folks could likely from here and they want to learn more and they want to see what's working in demand, gender growth, hacking, authority building, you know, that sort of thing. where would you recommend they go? Come to my website, rachelminion.com. I have 18 playbooks that are ready to roll for marketing. You will become a marketing rock star from them.

13:25I have three frameworks. We are constantly growing our content engine. So if you're looking to get a quick start, quick wins, we have those playbooks available for you. Yeah. And so again, you're, Sorry, I'm on rockstarandmoon.com, Rachel Minion, and that's just R-A-C-H-E-L-M-I-N-I-O-N. And to our friend that's listening, we have the links for everything included right now. Rachel, if you're looking into your crystal ball for 2025, what would you recommend to all B2B founders, you know, kind of in that six to eight figure territory? What do you think that they really need to make a focus on for the year ahead?

14:11My belief is congruence. If we take a look at all the different activities that you're doing, first, we need to see the data, making sure that these are playing out. But is the message that you're putting out there absolutely congruent with what you're saying on social versus what you're saying in emails? Are you talking to the right people with the right message? If you're going to, well, I'll give you an example. I helped Verizon rebuild their website from the ground up. So at Verizon Wireless, if I'm an iPhone customer, why would you ever send me emails about an Android? An iPhone customer since the beginning, since iPhones came out, why give me something that's completely incongruent?

14:51I don't think you know who I am. And it doesn't fit with the brand messaging of the value that you've given. So what I think in 2025, we need to be really cognizant of how not only we're coming across the messaging that we're using, all the different platforms so that it is omni-channel, and look to see how it's resonating. You'll know how it's resonating based off the data. And it doesn't mean go follow any shiny object. Don't go jump on TikTok. Don't go jump on all these other platforms. Let's get really good at what we're doing and making sure that's hitting first before we do that. And then we work on who your ideal customer is and keeping to dig down.

15:29So we hit those pain points appropriate. Yeah. Again, rachelminion.com, rockstarandmoon.com. Rachel, been fun chatting. The pre-interview chat was equally as enjoyable. It's always fun when you can geek out with your fellow geeks. And you and I are both huge fans of live music. uh we're both it sounds like we both love a lot of the same genres and stuff a lot of 90s rock so and you're not that far from me so i'll see you at a show yes right oh i'm sure we will be at i'm sure if we were to go through our previous concert schedule my wife and i probably go to a live show about once every three weeks uh at this point now and um you know that was something i think after COVID that we really committed to.

16:19Like, we're just like, you know what? We miss community. It makes us happy. Like, I feel better about the world. I'll give you a sharing example. There was a, so locally, and I mentioned this to you, Orlando or Central Florida tends to be, it's a real hotspot for tribute bands, second only to like LA in terms of total number of tribute bands, I believe. And so it's nice. So like, if you love all these famous, you know, kind of classic and, you know, original, like these artists from the nineties and so forth, like there's a tribute band in Central Florida you go to, but you know, I was at this once, you'd mentioned Pantera, but I went to a Metallica hardwired who I'm sure you've seen.

17:01And then the Pantera experience. And, you know, it's like, I looked around, like when everyone just like really getting into Metallica and I'm like, you know, in our day-to-day world, these are a bunch of people that we may or may not have much in common, but man, we have this moment in common right now. And then I started thinking about, you know, the work week and, and how like looking around, it's like, man, you know what? There's a lot of people with a lot of stuff going on in their lives. There's a lot of, you know, people that work their tail off all week long. You know, they've got the stresses of the week, all the things, you know, systemically that they worry about.

17:38But in this moment right here, we are a community and we are one together. And we get to this cathartic, you know, kind of like, you know, it's like, you know, again, you know, they're coming in with blackened, you know, or something like that. You know, it was just so liberating, so freaky. So anyway, there's my little soapbox about how much I love music. Rachel, again, thank you so much for this great conversation. Rockstar and Moon, rachelminion.com. Rachel, thanks for joining us.

18:12Thanks for listening to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur Show. If you are a thoughtful business owner or professional who would like to be on this daily program, please visit upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. We believe that every person has a message that can positively impact the world. We love our community who listens and shares our program every day. Together, we are empowering one another as thoughtful leaders. And as I mentioned at the beginning of this program, if you're looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, and clients, I have had private conversations with over 2 ,000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from.

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