142 - How to Build a Brand That Sells: Strategies for E-Commerce and Service Businesses with Kristina Rajzer

Speaker A: Personal brand is stronger than company brand. If we are talking about the small and medium companies, uh, for sure for the big companies it's different. But, uh, for the small and medium companies, for example, for E commerce, personal brand is a really important because you are keeping your audience with you till then. So again, you can change the service, you can change the product, but your audience will always be with you because of your brand, because of who you are. So I think this is super important to keep an eye and to push the resource on personal branding, to build this, to build connection. Especially now with the era of AI, when everything is AI generated, people don't trust so much to the content, to the everything. They're like, no, no, no, no. Uh, so I think in this case, human to human communication, personal brand can really help to build this relationship with the audience.

Speaker B: Welcome to the SEO Leverage podcast where

Speaker A: we talk about search marketing and conversions.

Speaker B: Welcome back to SEO Leverage. This is episode 142. We are going through probably one of the most interesting times since I started doing marketing more than 20 years ago. Getting old here. Um, and with AI, there's one topic coming up and actually I know a few influencers like Gary Vee years ago said, what's actually going to survive is the brand, it's the branding. Um, whatever happens, the brand is going to be most important. And now, especially in E commerce, but also other areas, even the personal brand, but also the founder brand or corporate brand is just extremely important. So I'm very much in SEO, technical, uh, e commerce, etc. I'm not the best person to talk about branding, I think, but I think I invited one of the M people that knows the most about this, which is Christina Reiser. Welcome. Kristina.

Speaker A: Hi, nice to meet you. So thank you so much for this opportunity. It was amazing.

Speaker B: It's great to have you on the show. We got introduced by a common, uh, friend, Jason Barnard. Shout out to Jason, uh, who is really great at what he's doing and knowledge panels and making sure algorithms figure out what needs to be known about a person. Uh, shout out to Jason here from Kalicube, who you, uh, were working with as a brand strategist. And I got the idea that you really have a lot of thoughts about this topic. A lot of experience here if you're working with other clients as well on this topic and also found us directly. So I'm really glad to have you here. Can you kind of tell us a little bit about your background so everybody gets to know you better?

Speaker A: Yeah. Uh, so for the past 15 years I was always around the marketing in a different aspect of the marketing. I love marketing. Marketing is my uh, SoulMate. But um, three, four years ago I just discovered that actually branding, it's much more powerful strategy. It's a part, it's still part of the marketing. It's still something what will be always aligned with the marketing. But they discovered that branding is also very, very important if you want to have long term goals and achieve something bigger. So that's how I turned my marketing expertise to the brand strategy and started to help companies build a brand across them and their leaders.

Speaker B: So interesting, interesting. It's a race is a very interesting topic. I think people conf. There's uh, a lot of confusion about brand. Right. Everything. I think working somehow with marketing has understood that we as a person, we are a brand whether we like it or not. Uh, but what would you say is the difference between corporate branding and personal branding?

Speaker A: Yeah, that's a good question. So when we are looking to the company, we think we need a corporate brand. And um, when we are looking into the different tactics for the branding, for the corporate branding and we can name different, like partnership, uh, it's employee branding, there's different, different tactics which you can use to achieve the long term goal which you want. And uh, I would say that personal branding for C levels, for CEO, cto, uh, even, even the investors and everything. So it's very important because it's empowers. This is some tactics which helps to build corporate branding because if you have a strong personal brand, then it also helps the company's brand. It's also protecting company brands. So there is a difference. Yeah.

Speaker B: Interesting. I heard one thing once which I found really interesting where they defined brand as what people are saying about you when you're not in a room. So you leave the room. Whatever people say, this is your brand, whether you like it or not. So I always try to say, okay, what are those things that actually first of all create a brand? Is it the logo, is it the design, is it the product? How would you come to a brand? What's the first conversation you have with a company where say hey, this is what I think your brand is right now or how do you go about it?

Speaker A: Yeah. When we are looking to all the marketing processes, again we are going back to the marketing. Marketing. When we are going, we are looking for the marketing, how the audience see us, where our ICP channels. And then based on this basic information, we want to understand how we want to represent our soul, our company soul. And Then it's also regarding the personal brand, how we want to represent our leaders, in which expertise, where these people will be. So I think branding, it's not even a logo. I think branding, it's the communication strategy. How you communicate and how you represent your company, how you want to show them that they will understand. Because it's also, you know, where people, uh, people are saying autisticity, all this stuff like we just need to show up. It's not actually correct. If you want to be understood by people, you need to understand how to speak to them, that they will in the studio and perceive you in the way you want to show.

Speaker B: Mhm. Do you, do you find people when they create a company and start getting the first clients, start selling the first products, do they have a clear idea what kind of branding they want to build?

Speaker A: No, it was quick. I think we all started with um, vision, uh, mission. I want to achieve something. Every company started with, uh, some statement. I want, want to fix this in the world, I want to bring this to the world. But with the years, years, years, the people and especially CEO understand that it's a changing. So here we are coming, rolling back to marketing strategies is a short term. You have a product, you sell the product, you can change the product. You're trying to fit into different markets. Uh, Visa branding, it's something bigger, it's a long term, it's again bigger picture of your company, it's a representation of your company. So when you're talking about the branding, you actually, you can change it. So you are changing the marketing strategy, so you're changing the services, but you can change the brand something what is still with you till the end. So it's your soul, it's something what you are trying to show and connect emotionally with your audience.

Speaker B: Mhm. So is it fair to say that even, even if you're not conscious about your brand, your branding, you're already building a brand just by the way how you act, how you talk to people.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's story. It's story. And based on this story, what you're going to say, what you're going to achieve, this is your branding. This is a core of your branding.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: So companies are super afraid, uh, in the first year they're like we need a brand strategy. You need just to start building something. You need just to start understand who you are, what's your company, what's your values, what you want to change and bring to the world. And uh, this is exactly the core which will be, which will Help you to build a ah, really strong personal brand in a couple of years because again it needs a time to build it.

Speaker B: Mhm. Do you think the personal brand should go before the corporate branding aspects? Is this something that goes hand in hand? Is there a priority to this?

Speaker A: My opinion that personal brand is stronger than company brand. If we are talking about the small and medium companies for sure for the big companies it's different. But uh, for the small and medium companies, for example for E commerce, personal brand is really important because you are keeping your audience with you till then. So again you can change the service, you can change the product, but your audience will always be with you because of your brand, because of who you are. So I think this is super important to keep an eye and to push their source and personal branding to build this, to build connection. Especially now with the era of AI when everything is AI generated, people don't trust so much to the content, to the everything. They're like no, no, no, no. Uh, so I think in this case human to human communication, personal brand can really help to build this relationship with the audience.

Speaker B: It's interesting you raised this. I have a couple of thoughts here. We have one E commerce site for example that has been actually growing an audience as a personal brand and then created all kinds of different websites and brands. We're now pretty much trying to consolidate all those websites with their shopping with one shopify site. But it is interesting, like you said, this person is an expert in her field. She has like her audience built up over the years. All trust based, referral based, word of mouth etc. They just hop from one brand to the next. She builds something new, she takes her audience with her. This is something one of my major regrets of the last 20 years is that I always thought I needed like a corporate brand first and be known for the corporate brand which is extremely difficult, especially as a small agency because it's always the personal recommendation. Right? We've got SEO leverage, we have got platform leverage. We had ecom tuning at some point years, uh ago. We were programming, we were marketing all kinds of things. And it is interesting how it's still, whether you like it or not, is the person very often for small companies that counts. So the earlier I feel you really bet on your personal brand and start developing it, the more leverage you have with whatever other brand you want to build up.

Speaker A: Yeah, uh, I think it's the biggest investment which you can make for yourself and also for the company. It's to build your personal brand, to build the right audience around you because this, this is loyalty, this is something, what is building the trust, loyalty from the people. And they will believe in you, they will believe in your company.

Speaker B: So how do you, how do you go about building a personal brand? And somebody listens to this and say, yeah, it's true, I never focused on my personal brand. What, what would be some like two, three actionable steps. You would recommend somebody to really start focusing on it.

Speaker A: Well, for the founders I definitely would say like uh, don't keep everything on yourself because this is the biggest problems when the founder decided to build a personal brand and they don't have a time for this, they don't have resources for this and everything is like, you know, just taking time. So I would say, uh, take a person, maybe your assistant or anyone who will help you build a real clear plan. Because again, personal brand, it's not about to write a LinkedIn post. It's to identify the right channels. Where is your icp? Where is your audience, where you want to be shown? And we have a different. Yes. So when we are looking to the audience, we have a two different audience for the each person. First is ICP and second it's to build authority, for example in the market, industry related audience. So you need to keep in uh, in mind all different type of the audience and for them different type of the channels. And it's better to have less channels but better optimized than to have everything and to not have consistency with the content and to not have high quality content. Because this is also very important for personal brand.

Speaker B: This is um, something we find a lot as well where people just kind of push stuff out but never really did an audience research or audience platform research as we call it here as well, where we just check on which platform do I have, which kind of audience. The audience I have on YouTube might not be looking for the same things that the audience that I have on LinkedIn. Like you say it might be industry peers on LinkedIn I'm connected with, but it might be my actual ICP, my ideal client profile here that I find ON um, on YouTube, for example. So having this as a first step on the research, at some point we introduce this and it's okay whether you think you know your audience or not. We're just going to start with an audience platform research. And once we really like scan um, hundreds of Reddit posts and see what kind of challenges do people report, uh, we don't get those aha moments. We very often look for companies in SEO where it's like, hey, this is actually a topic area that's interesting, interesting for my audience, but I never talked about it because it was just never on my ranking keywords list or whatever. So this is very, very often when it comes to branding, try to support from an audience research perspective as well, just to make sure that whatever we put out really lands with this audience. This is more important now with AI than ever, where AI takes whatever we put out and tries to associate it with our brand somehow. We want to make sure this is useful content that our audience is actually going to enjoy. Yeah, I have a question about this personal branding stuff. So um, you um, have your, you're obviously a personal brand, you have your agency recognized. Um, how do you for example personally balance working on the recognized brand versus working on your personal brand?

Speaker A: Um, yeah, so, uh, before they recognized I had a different name with agency and then we did rebranding. So we've been like B2 marketing. And uh, at some point I just like realized with my experience with working with other companies that it's not going, it's, it's going to work. But I don't want to push my resources, you know, on the name of the agency, so I better push my name. And even for me, I can't share that. I'm um, I couldn't say that I'm very good on online for my brand, but I'm pushing a lot of resource for the offline. So I have a really huge offline, uh, strategy for the Slovenia market for example, which is working really good on me where I need to be vlog, networking and all this stuff. And then I have something like 40% of the resources I'm pushing online.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: But you know how we say, yeah, marketers has always problem with their marketing so

Speaker B: never heard this, I've never heard it.

Speaker A: So um, yeah, I don't have um, consistency which always my clients have. So I'm pushing all my clients every day. Like we need, we need, we need, but I don't have someone to push me. So that's my problem maybe.

Speaker B: This is definitely one of the, one of the pieces of advice I got from my mentor team Schemke. At some point to deal with your own company like your best case client, we just say, okay, this is exciting. This is one client. We are working with this brand as a client we're doing here in SEO, for example, when we most had our agency, uh, grow in terms of quality, traffic and leads was when we just put ourselves actually first and said we are the most important client we have here and we do exactly our processes and our stuff for us in the exact same way, with the same resources etc. And then suddenly you'll see things grow. This was actually a major, a major breakthrough here as well. Um, if somebody search is now building the personal brand, they obviously want to have some way of measuring Am m I now a better, more important personal brand, more authoritative personal brand than I was last year. After my consistent efforts with my team helping me ideally or an assistant helping me to maintain the consistency. Um, what would be some ways to measure um. That what we are doing is actually heading in the right direction. Branding is obviously not something we can attribute directly to sales. We don't have to do six months branding strategy and the implementation. Now we are having twice the revenue necessarily. Um, but how do we know we are on the right track?

Speaker A: That's a good question. So I always start with my clients. I always start asking them what actually want to achieve from the branding. Because we can do many stuff. Yes, we can uh, build uh, we can lead the industry for example. And this is completely different. This is uh, the KPI which we are looking like. Uh, media coverage, PR coverage, you know, mentions of the companies, uh, how the articles for example are going with industry related blocks and all the style how it's going to. But then we have another for example goal to just increase brand uh visibility. So then we are looking into the traffic, how the content is going. Just a normal visibility. KPI is you know, nothing special. But what I would really highlight that there is still we can track the sales leads from the branding. It's when the clients are coming directly, when they're searching your name and coming directly to the website.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: So we can say that this is something when your personal branding is working because somebody needs to hear your name and to go actually to Google to find you to go to the website to book a call. So then person realize the person really know who you are. So this is when personal branding working on your sales.

Speaker B: Interesting. I remember a project we were. This was the SaaS project back then I think. Um, and what we figured out and it took us a while because we were essentially getting really really good traffic based on the keywords people were using to find the site but the keywords didn't convert directly. What we did find is that we were. Because organic was the only channel we actually were raising brand awareness and people would then search for the brand and convert from the homepage. So we just saw. Okay, this is. There's a correlation there it makes sense to work on bringing in more quality traffic because we know down the line we are going to get more trial signups and more sales and actually grow the business this way. So very often we see those direct hits as well. Even now with AI we see like homepage visits is starting to become like a really, really important metric because sometimes it's not even a link in AI answers now it's just mention mentioning you. Right. So somebody searching for a brand strategy agency, um, seeing recognized, they might type in recognized agency into Google, come to your website and now you see it as homepage traffic. You don't really know where it comes from but it probably is related somehow to brand awareness people get from uh, either socials or AI or obviously your offline activities. I've seen you on some videos, on your socials, on um, speaking at events and stuff like that. It's really good stuff. Definitely. I think one of the most powerful things I have done was at some point fly from Spain to Sydney and attend a physical and in person event, make a lot of connections that we are still in touch with years later. So this branding, I think we just have such like an online mind right now. We think everything happens online just because I have made a campaign or published a post or commented somewhere. But there are so many connections, um, offline as well with branding. Right?

Speaker A: Yeah. Well actually I want to give you some really nice story uh, to share. So I had one company and um, they didn't want to push to the personal branding but they wanted to push with the company branding. And then when I started to track actually keywords, the Google search, everything, I realized that uh, their company is highly associated with only one person and it was their sales representative. It was two dangerous but because he was super active online, you know, he has amazing LinkedIn, he was posting on the all possible communities from their company name. He was super active online. Every, every article, everything was touching his name. So then the Google started to understand that okay, for this company the main person is this person and it's very pity because it wasn't founder of the company, you know. So then we are asking a question like uh, we are pushing so many resources on this and the resources needs to bring the right results. If you're not somehow connected with your company or other person from your company is more related to the company in Google search than you, then there is something wrong with the strategy.

Speaker B: I think you definitely want to offer them shares of the company so they never leave. Um, but I mean the best example actually at the event in Sydney, I got uh, to meet Tim Solo from Ahrefs in person. He's the cmo, uh, from Ahrefs and he would be one of those examples. Right. So I guess he probably has some sort of participations I guess because he's so tied to the company. But it's really hardly anybody knows the founder's name. They know the brand, they know Tim Solo from his activities and um, he's obviously extremely active with a big marketing team in the meantime, uh, doing this. But his name is very much associated to this brand. He's the face of the brand, he is active. So this is definitely the moment where we need to put something in place that this person doesn't leave.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's actually one of the tactics for the corporate branding. It's employer branding, you know, so when they're pushing their employees to show uh, inside the company, stories inside the company, you know, um, feelings and emotions, everything to the content on the social media. And it's actually very good, very good especially for the medium sized companies or big companies because then it's much easier to hire people. Also you can represent the uh, culture, everything you got attached with your audience on a deeper level. So yeah, definitely one way to go.

Speaker B: Absolutely, absolutely. I just always feel when I see like sales reps trying to do like this employment branding or employee branding, they didn't get enough training so it feels like very, very cold, very generic. They just share like company news and yes, the company has done bought a new machine or has a new location now. Nobody cares. Right. What I really like is one thing a client does right now. They hired a 20 year old guy who's, who is going to um, construction sites they work on and filming and creating short videos and those are the videos the sales reps now start sharing and those videos really work. Whereas like you say show behind the scenes. This is how this works, this is how we put this element in place on this job site, for example. So those are the things people obviously resonate with. Whenever it's just mentioning your name, sharing your logo, etc. I've seen so many things in this regard where also they put like all employees together and say now, uh, everybody now needs to have a LinkedIn profile and put the logo up and share the company blog news and stuff like that. It's not landing right.

Speaker A: Uh, when the company decides to have this MP employee branding they need to understand not everyone can actually be a face of the company. Not everyone feel comfortable to do so. So yeah, they need to be really careful with trying to inspire people to do but not also, you know, over complicate the process or push them. So it needs to come from the, from the heart of the person who is working inside the company. So then you can feel the real emotions, you can feel the real culture of the company and this is something what will work better especially now.

Speaker B: M Exactly how we're obviously an SEO agency working a lot with e commerce sites. How have you seen personal branding actually affect or support SEO efforts?

Speaker A: Yes, definitely. Um, personal branding is going to help to the ecosystem, ecosystem on the Google ecosystem. The search especially now AI search also uh, when you're building your personal branding then everything, your audience is automatically is also connected to the company. So every traffic, everything will be connected. So Google is also going to give more credibility and trust to the company content if he see that there is a person behind who is also credible.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: One thing I found, I found really interesting and I tried to point it out because it always makes me laugh when people are not consistent with their personal brand. Um, and they might say okay, on LinkedIn they're like a high level consultant, C level executive, I don't know what. Then you check out their Instagram profile, it says lifestyle designer. You check out their Pinterest profile and it's probably woodworker or something like that. And then you might find them on YouTube where they are an influencer and they don't understand that Google thinks these are different people. Uh, so I think consistency is just so hard because on the one hand people want to kind of show for authenticity that hey, I'm um, actually a real person. So in my case I'm also a woodworker and I do my woodworking stuff. I'm actually an SEO and AI consultant and I have my agency. There are so many hats we are wearing these days. So I feel people are not connecting those. They kind of pretend to be somewhere else on a different uh, somebody else on a different channel. Which for AI and Google is really really difficult because they have no idea that this is not two different people with the same name. They don't know that those people are connected if the information is not consistent. So very often what we see working well is when you just mention all your things on all profiles consistently and you want to bring across on LinkedIn that you woodworker or you want to bring across on um, YouTube that you're also interested in lifestyle design and maybe have a consultancy there but you want to be consistent across channels. So all those four Things you do together are actually tied to your person and across the different networks. The engines can actually follow you and understand, hey, this is actually the same person. And then assign this credibility as you say, connect the dots between you, your activities and your brands or your websites etc. To actually help you get more credibility for your content as well.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's actually uh, that's very, actually interesting topic because you know, I also figure out that there is a many, many situations when people want to show different aspects, different type of services which they offer. You know, somewhere there is a hobby, somewhere there is a, uh, uh, company side, somewhere there is a just personal Instagram for example. Very important to optimize the information across all the channels and to keep it consistent and to keep the same, the same message which you are trying to share, it can be different on different channels, different type of the message, but this, the message which you're trying to share, it needs to have same. And in this case, uh, when people want to have different, different, um, they want to show different sides of them on channels. I always say that maybe this is something, for example, if you want to show the side of you when you're, I don't know, uh, cooking on the kitchen, don't do it under your personal account, but create the account when you are going to show yourself explaining something and name it as a micro brand under your company brand, uh, uh, under your personal brand, do it as a different entity and grow the audience in the different entity. But don't mix with your personal name because then it will be, yes, it will be Google and AI won't understand actually what's going on because why we are having different messages across different channels, different audience and then you're pushing down the results just because of this problem, uh, because of not consistent and optimized uh, channels.

Speaker B: So somebody doing completely different unrelated things should rather have multiple profiles even on the same channel in order to make it clear. I think it's also even clearer to the algorithm. Right. So what kind of audience should I show your posts to? If you talk about marketing today and gardening tomorrow, I don't know who is interested in your profile. Somebody coming to your profile and seeing like a clear theme is more likely going to follow you and the algorithms are going to have an easier time matching you with the right people as well. I want to ask you one last question before we wrap this up and we let you go. Appreciate the time you're taking for this. Um, a lot of times I get actually the question and I never Have a good answer for it. How much private stuff should people show on their personal profile? So obviously I have my personal profile, but I might be at an event where say hey, this could actually be something interesting for my audience. But am I getting too far away from the marketing and AI and consulting stuff just by sharing that I'm on a particular event? What would you advise people how to handle this?

Speaker A: Yeah, that's actually very important. That's very important aspect. Uh, so every time before we are starting to work on a personal branding or even uh, a uh, branding for the company as well, uh, I'm asking the questions uh, for the founders, like how do you feel if this, this will happen? So for example, when we are working on a personal brand, I'm going, I'm asking them like how do you feel if people will say, uh, your daughter, uh, looks different from other girls, how do you feel this? And she's like, oh, I feel offended. And then like that's why you don't need to share about your daughter pictures on the personal profiles. It's example. But uh, every time, every aspect of your life, you need to go through and ask yourself how do you feel if the people will offend you or will start to push you or say something bad about you? Because once you're building online visibility, there will be nice comments, there will be bad comments, there is people who can use some sensitive information against you. So you need to always ask yourself if I am as a person prepared to share this. If I am for example ready to share that I was working with this company, is this company had a really good reputation or this they had a better reputation which can affect me in five years, for example. So when we are building the personal brand story, this storytelling, this is nice uh, story which we want to share about the personal, personal uh, life. We are going to each detail and checking like is this something you really want to be hesitated? Is this something you really want to share and you don't afraid that people will use it against you? Is this something you're not afraid to show? Do you want to show uh, some of your weakness? Maybe something, you know, uh, because now in 21st century everybody got the idea that if I'm going to share everything around and this will show my tool myself. But we need to be really careful. You know, somebody can say like hey I have ADHD and they won't get hurt by this. But if the CEO from the company will start to share some personal problems, that this can cause a problem also for the company.

Speaker B: So it's actually, actually interesting how, how individual posts can actually cause to start a company sales. Right. So I think very often, especially for larger companies, it's important really to monitor their key employees personal profiles as well and social media profiles. I think to step in and say, hey, this is not necessary something if you have our, uh, company name next to your profile, you don't necessarily want to share this or if you connect it to I don't know how many of our clients and you now start crying on an Instagram story. Those things can cost you sales. Right? The way I try to think of it is whenever I have a post, I think, is this a good ad for me, for my company, or is this a bad ad for my company? So everything I put out in terms of like this podcast, we put it out because I think it's interesting for my audience. It might, might raise some awareness about our, what we do, what you do, how, uh, we are connected also in supporting branding and e commerce, etc. So we put it out. But also when this is a posting, for example, under my personal profile, I will always definitely spend a second thinking, is this something. I, uh, believe if a client sees this, they're going to be happier to be working with me or are they going to say, hey, maybe I need. I have second thoughts now if I should really work with this guy and invest in his services. So I think a lot of thought should go into those postings.

Speaker A: Yeah, and I actually, uh, I always suggest, like for the people, for the owners who don't want to delegate this task, like, uh, posting, creating the content. Uh, I always suggest to take uh, a break a couple of hours, one day before posting something. Because sometimes we have these emotions which is coming to us and we're like, oh, I think this is a good idea. I want to share this with the world. And then, you know, and then boom, a lot of comments and people misunderstood you because again, it's not the problem that you're sharing something with the world. It's a problem how you communicate this, that people will actually get your idea, that people will understand it the correct way. So it's not always, uh, it's not so easy like to come and say, this is a red apple. You know, you need to give context why you're talking about the apple, why it's important, why it's red, in which color of red and from which tree. You need to give context for your idea, otherwise people won't get it.

Speaker B: So I always have a problem with the advice. People very Often give that you need to be like authentic and you need to be vulnerable and you need to show your weaknesses and you need to show your weak moments. Nobody wants to work with a weak consultant. Nobody is going to work with you because they just saw your nervous breakdown. Right?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: It's not going to be that thing that recognizes if you surf and you say you're surfing and I'm surfing as well, or I uh, live surfing. This might increase the chances of me wanting to have a conversation with you, but just showing how you're never able to stand straight on a surfboard and show how bad you are when you suck at it. Probably not. Maybe not. Uh, the best way to show that I always have my problems. That this authenticity I think only makes sense to a certain extent and has its limits. So obviously you want to know it's especially now with AI this is a real person with definitely real challenges as well maybe or with a real life, uh, after switching off the computer as well. But I always have this problem what authenticity also actually means.

Speaker A: Yeah, it needs to have some limits because we sometimes forget that we are still professionals. We are someone who is expert in something, we are trying to build something. So um, it's amazing that we are also humans and we can share some emotional uh, moments with the audience. But if you're showing like once it's okay. But if this is consistent then it can more broke your reputation and your brand than for actually support it. So it's out there. It's really nice. It's amazing that you know, sometimes people can show their pictures with the dogs. It's nice that sometimes they can go on picnic and have a nice picture and say, hey, I'm on picnic. It's amazing. But there is some line when you need to understand, okay, this type of the contents can be like 15 of my content. All other content which I'm producing, I'm still as a expert, still as someone who is leading industry, I need to show share, I need to explain, I need to be so, um, yeah, definitely I wouldn't go to the, you know, I wouldn't go to cardiologist who is going to push on Instagram. Um, I'm using chat GPT to check how to treat the house.

Speaker B: Look how shaky my hands are today.

Speaker A: I will be like, yeah, okay, but

Speaker B: this is exactly what people are doing, right? I remember a really famous marketer, uh, she was really famous on Instagram and she started showing her nervous breakdowns on live Facebook videos. And whenever I see her, I associate her with her Crying moments. And I was actually following her for years before I just thought I was. This is not. It just doesn't add up, right? It just doesn't add up. I don't even think her program is legit anymore if she is in such a bad situation. Obviously everybody can go through problems. Uh, everybody has their problems, their issues, their challenges, etc. But at the end of the day tomorrow you're going to ask for a sale again. And the sale is going to require people to trust you and I think see the best in you, not necessarily associate you. I mean, those weak moments, they are really strong, right? You bring across a weak moment, it might be much stronger than the last 20 really good postings you had. And in terms of impact and people might emotionally relate to you, etc. But at the end of the day they need to make a decision. Especially in B2B, they need to defend their decision. Somebody taking out this person you hired for the company, having one breakdown after the other, or showing how bad they are at different things they're doing, it's not going to be in your best interest. But I like your idea of having different profiles. There might be a profile where you share your dog pictures and there are going to, uh, be people following you because they actually enjoy your, the pictures of your dog. And there might be a gardening profile and there might be a woodworking profile or surf profile. Um, it's so easy and free to have those profiles and actually share pictures and stuff with people who actually care about it. I think clients couldn't care less about whether I upload a picture of my dog or not. Probably. No, because sometimes she's sleeping in the background. Uh, but it's not necessarily going to advance a potential sale, I guess.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, definitely. Um, as I mentioned, personal branding, it's all about how you want to represent, to describe, to inspire other people. So, you know, uh, it's always people, uh, need to keep in mind, do I want to show up myself, show what is going on, or I want to inspire, build the audience to build people around me who trusted my idea, who inspired by what I'm doing. And together with this audience, we are going to fix, to change the world, you know, to fix the world. So this is the idea, uh, when the professionals are going to build a personal brand, they need to keep this idea. I'm not going to show up. I'm going there to build and to change something.

Speaker B: Awesome. Perfect. I think this is a good closing statement. We are going to wrap this up. We let you go. Cristina, thank you so much for coming to the show. Kristina Reiser, uh, a lot of people are going to listen to this and want to reach out to you, have a conversation how they can improve their founder brand, the personal brand, their corporate brand. What's the best way to get hold of you?

Speaker A: Always just then it's just direct message. Uh, I'm always, uh, with, uh, emails and always with LinkedIn. So, yeah, I love the messages. I think this is the best way to approach and this is the best way just to chat.

Speaker B: Perfect. We're definitely going to put links to your contact details over at seoleverage. Com Podcast. This is episode 142. Christina Reiser, brand strategist, thank you so much for coming.

Speaker A: Thank you.