What the CEO of Australia’s Fastest-Growing Branding Agency Says Is MOST Important For Growing Your Brand

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How is branding shifting now that AI is hot on the scene??

Does branding even really MATTER anymore?

Should you be building a personal brand or a corporate brand??

How does your messaging and content come into play when it comes to your branding??

And what should you be focusing on most when you’re in the beginning stages of building your brand?

Omg this interview was sooooo good!

I sat down with Dain Walker – the CEO of Rivyl , Australia’s fastest-growing branding agency – to answer all these questions and more.?

Hey Posse, what’s up? It’s Alex.

And oooooohhhhhh boy I am SO excited to bring you this interview with the incredible Dain Walker.

You already know that I geek out about all things copywriting and marketing…

But did you know that branding is one of my FAVORITE things to study and experiment with??

When I created my brand, the Copy Posse, I knew that I wanted to focus on my branding AND messaging first and foremost.?

I put a lot of time and effort into making sure they worked seamlessly together.?

And I believe that is a big reason why we have been able to grow a global community and 7-figure brand so quickly.?

But when it comes to building a brand from scratch – and all of the things you need to know and consider – there is no one I obsess over more than Dain Walker.

Who Is Dain Walker?

Dain is a content creator, brand strategist and the CEO of Australia’s fast-growing branding agency – Rivyl . After just a few short years in business, Rivyl now has 30 employees and has helped their clients with everything from brand strategy to brand identity , naming their brand & products, creating killer logos, brand packaging, copywriting & content creation, and so much more.?

Whether it’s a fresh start-up or a globally recognized brand, Dain’s obsessed with disrupting the world of branding…

I freakin’ love what it says on his website:

“Nailing a brand is like writing a hit song. It’s more than words on paper or a melody in your brain. It’s the feeling you get when you dance on the kitchen table. It’s the lyrics that live rent-free in your head, sticking like Bubble Gum to the underside of a vandalised school desk.”

YES. This guy knows branding.

And his content is some of the best I’ve seen when it comes to building a personal brand (and as you can see, a lot of people agree)…

I can’t wait for you to hear what he has to say…?

Now let’s get into the interview.

Branding With Dain Walker

Alex:

Hey Dain, welcome! I am so excited you’re here!

Dain:

I’m excited to be here. Let’s do it.?

Alex:

I have been fangirling over your Instagram for so long. And I’m not going to lie, I loved it when I messaged you and you’re like, I have copywriters on my team and they follow your stuff. I just think everything you do is so, so brilliant.

I know you’re coming to my mastermind Reign next month to do a whole deep dive branding training with my Reignmakers, but I couldn’t keep your wisdom to myself in my mastermind. I wanted to share, you know, with the Posse around the world. Today we are talking all about personal branding and you are someone who is an expert in personal branding and well all types of branding actually. And that is evident on your Instagram and through everything you do...

So I’m going to just jump right into the question because it’s an easy one, but I’m really curious to hear your answer. How would you define branding?

Dain:

It’s a great question. I think there are a lot of different answers out therefor, for what it is. I think for me, you know, there’s the dichotomy of words because you have brands, branding, brand strategy, and brand identity.

I like to separate them because I think they’re all slightly different and you know, brand is what the market says you are. So you can think whatever you want about yourself, but then the market tells you what you are. So that’s what I think a brand is.

Brand is the market’s definition of you and what you do and who you are and where you are in the marketplace. You know, we all have an opinion about Red Bull or Nike or Apple, and we all think we know what those brands are.

Branding is trying to define that trajectory.

So what exactly is the position that you want to be in in the marketplace? How do you want to be understood? What do you want people to think you are and how do you actually start to begin to exercise that?

So then brand strategy is creating the mud map or the roadmap or the blueprint on how to make that take place. And then the brand identity is how you look and how you feel and everything from your colors to your logo and the outfit that your organization or that you wear.

And trying to figure out how to get these things to work together is my life’s body of work. It’s why I built a company around branding. I think a lot of people have misconceptions about what it is and what it means to build one and how much freaking work it takes to do it right.

Alex:?

Oh my gosh, totally. And branding, like to your point, can seem like this very vague concept. I love how you broke it down into those different buckets, which makes so much sense to me. I’m curious where you see messaging falling under that brand umbrella, because I know a lot of people tend to think brand and they immediately think design, right?

Like they think the colors, the font, the logo, but I also know that you post about messaging, you know, taglines and different ways that you’re communicating.

And so how do you find, because we have a ton of copywriters in the Copy Posse obviously, how do you find that copywriting and messaging fits into an overall brand and how brand and copy sort of play off one another?

Dain:?

Yeah, I think if you look at some famous examples, we always use the big brands, but I think we all know what they are and it’s easy to understand them.

Like if you take a brand like Nike, the tagline just do it was a campaign that they ran at one point in time and it was such a successful campaign that they were like, let’s continue to use that.

And it was originally a slogan now to tagline, you know, it was a call to action and they realized it kind of embodies the entire ethos of Nike. So I think when it comes to messaging, you have brand messaging and then you have marketing messaging and I think oftentimes they get convoluted or misunderstood one way or another.

I think brand messaging is when you’re communicating your story, the reason why you exist, the why a customer should listen to you or care.

Yeah, it’s kind of the spirit of the brands. You know, in Nike’s case it’s like, well we believe in, you know, the pursuit of greatness, right? So this is copy that could be used for marketing purposes, but it’s more about brand building.

So brand building copy is copywriting that speaks to your entire market suite. It speaks to all of your audience. It’s the thing that kind of threads them together. It’s like, well we can all just do it, right?

Whether I’m playing basketball or tennis or running, that message applies to everyone. Whereas marketing messaging, I think is a bit more specific. So then that might be about, okay, we need to activate this new campaign for a product that is specifically for running.

So then let’s write some campaign material around how, you know, this shoe can help people perform and do better when it comes to running. So I think for me, the way I kind of separate it when I’m working with my team here is when we’re writing copy for brands, you know, the question really should be how does this help their position in the market? How does this help people understand why they exist and why they should care?

Whereas marketing messaging is a bit more like, let’s get something specific to happen because of this copy. So are we trying to build a persona or are we trying to get them to do something? And I think that’s where I kind of split the two generally speaking.

Alex:?

I love that. Yeah, I mean it’s similar to what I teach where I talk about brand voice because especially in like, I’ll use my world as an example. I mean there are so many people teaching marketing and messaging and copywriting online.

And so when I created the Copy Posse, I knew I wanted it to be edgy. So my “Just do it” is “Let’s dedouchify the internet” and because if I could sum up the Copy posse in one sentence, that would be it.

But that then trickles down into all of my messaging because if I’m going to use words like “dedouchify” in my marketing and my, you know, brand stories and everything that I talk about, then that kind of gives you a sense of the tone and the type of brand persona I’m trying to build.

And so I love that distinction between yeah, brand voice is sort of what makes you relatable almost as if your brand was a person and, and you’re trying to relate to your ideal audience. And then marketing is like, okay, how do I couple this, this brand persona with actual messaging that gets the point across what I’m trying to do. I don’t know if that resonates with what you’re saying.

Dain:

Well, well said. You said it perfectly and I think, you know, one of my favorite quotes is from David Ogilvy where he says...

If it reads like copy write it again.

And totally what I take from that is, you know, oftentimes when we’re writing messaging, especially in particular when we get a junior come in and they’re starting to, you know, work on their first project, they can get a little technical, they can get a little caught in the details.?

And I think what we try to do with the juniors is we try to help them realize like, hey, how do we paint a picture in people’s minds? Not just tell them the technical ’cause the technical’s kind of boring.

Like how do we get them excited? How do we give them goosebumps?

And I think one of the best things that we get our team to focus on is imagine you’re having a one-on-one conversation from the brand’s voice perspective to the target audience.

You’re not speaking to the audience, you’re speaking to an individual. So when we share this with our team, it kind of clicks in for them, oh okay, I have been writing for the audience, I need to write for the individual and I need to write it in a way that’s like, you are having a conversation as the brand voice.

And if you can take that approach and wear that hat, the copy comes out a lot better and they start to find it easy to write. Because they’re not worried about the technical anymore, they’re just now having a conversation.?

Alex:

And that’s the secret sauce of a great copywriter. To kind of echo what you just said, back when I was the creative director at Mindvalley, we would get more formally trained writers come into work at the company and they were almost harder to train in the Mindvalley brand voice or any one of the other brands that Mindvalley represented.

And it was almost easier to say, Hey, forget what you know about technical boring writing and instead just put yourself in the shoes of the brand and who it is that you’re speaking to. And so I always say to my community, yes, it’s important to like know grammar and all of that.

Like, I’m not saying it’s not important, but like I laugh anytime someone calls out a typo because I make typos all the time.

For me, copywriting is about making someone feel something, even if it’s anger over a typo, but it’s not about writing perfectly.

And I think that as soon as someone realizes that and you can just sort of sink into the emotion of it, writing actually becomes a lot easier.

And this is going to shift into a question I have because you mentioned technical copywriting can be quite boring.?

I’m so curious to hear about your perspective on the way that brand and the importance of brand is shifting now with AI on the scene. Because from my perspective, I’m like, great, there’s this awesome tool that can make our job as writers or designers easier.

However, it can be really boring or completely off base if you’re not careful. And so I’m just really curious how you’re navigating this sort of post-AI world and how it pertains to branding.

Dain:?

I think it’s an important conversation and a lot of people have been worried about it for some time, even maybe before this really hit the headlines globally, copywriters were rumbling in the background of like, hey, this technology’s coming out, what does this mean for us?

And I think it’s pretty scary, right?

And what I think it’s done is the entrepreneur who’s at the very onset of building their business, who’s trying to bootstrap it, are harder to sell. Let’s just be really honest because this individual’s now doing this themselves and tinkering with it. However, the back end of that is that entrepreneur is, and knowingly so guessing what they should be doing so that they’ve never needed so much consultation.

So in a weird way, I think we are seeing an increase in inquiry for copywriting because more people are attempting to do it themselves, realizing that it’s difficult and then reaching out for a consultation.

So they might still write material or speed up the process and they might even be some people in their ignorant bliss thinking that some of the stuff they’re writing is great even though it’s not. But I’m seeing more people reach out asking for help, “Hey, I’m trying to do this myself. Clearly it’s difficult to use AI the right way. Can you please help me write better copy?”?

Regarding the actual copywriter themselves, I think one of the skills that they need to focus on now is how to sell. Because if you’re a copywriter and you’re a great, you know, artistic writer and you can write technically and you can write emotionally and you can do all of these different things, I think what is difficult for business owners right now is knowing how and what they’re doing is the correct thing.

So if you can get good at producing free media, starting a conversation with these small business owners and having them reach out and have a conversation with you, if you work on your sales skills, you’re going to outperform the market radically. And a lot of copywriters I know struggle to sell.?

So I think if you could pick up that additional skill, you’ll still, you know, be able to pay the bills and do extremely well because business owners need consultation, they need support, they need help, they need guidance, maybe more than they need the copywriting.

And if you’re giving them the guidance and the support, they’re going to want to have you do the copy. They’re not going to want to use the AI ’cause they’re like, this person’s helping me more than me trying to do it myself, so let me just have them help me with it.

And I think, yeah, where we really need to put on the entrepreneurial cap right now is because great, there’s all these tools out there in a weird way, it is bringing a lot of people into the creative space. It’s bringing a lot of entrepreneurs into the creative side of business. It’s just, I think it’s shifting how, how the conversation takes place. It’s not necessarily taking meat off the plate.

Alex:?

Yeah, yeah. Oh, you said so many things that resonate. I mean, first of all, we’ve actually seen an increase in people looking for copywriters on our own job board since AI.

And I think it’s exactly because of the point you made where now creating online messaging and businesses is more accessible to business owners who maybe before would never even dream of of doing it because it was too hard.

And let’s be honest, if you’re an entrepreneur not making any money and you’re bootstrapping it, you’re not going to invest in hiring a copywriter anyway.

You would just kind of hope to figure it out on your own until you got your business to a point where you’re ready to invest in that skillset.

But to your point, so many business owners are now using AI to write copy and then realizing, oh, I think I’m missing the mark here. I need someone who’s going to help me with the thinking side of things.

And I mean, that’s why I embed marketing training into absolutely everything I do. And my definition of copywriting is marketing plus writing as opposed to just writing.

Everybody, I mean, a sixth grader could write a sales page and just sort of wing it if they didn’t know what they were doing. But if you actually have the marketing, then it all, it all makes sense and it flows and you know, it’s speaking to the ideal audience .

I mean, we could go, I could rant on this all day, but what I’m, what I’m getting at and I’m curious what your thoughts are on this, it’s becoming easier and easier, right?

So the bar has been lowered for people to essentially start businesses or build brands, so to speak. And so I’m really curious how you have seen branding shift in terms of how truly valuable it is to build a brand today?

Dain:

I think you make a good point. The barrier to entry is really low. And I think this is really cool. Like if we go back to our parent’s generation when they would clock off from their job and go home, you know, they didn’t have the ability to go on the internet and build a company, you know, whereas our generation, we take this for granted, we can go on the internet 24/7, if you have a job you hate, you can go home and you can freelance and you can post yourself in job boards and you can produce media and produce content.

And the world’s seeing it in live time. And when the Americas are asleep, you know, the Australias are open. Like it’s what an exciting time to live. And I think that if we just compare that to our parents’ generation, man, they had it way harder than us.

I imagine being a copywriter back then, my god. So I think that with everything that’s happening right now, the barrier entry is really low, which is really exciting. It means a lot of new people who didn’t think they could play are now playing.

And just to add to that, a lot of people don’t realize this but 3.7 billion people are going to be joining the internet in the next three years with Starlink and everything else that’s happening.

Like the internet’s going to get a lot louder, a lot busier, and a lot more crazy. And I think, you know, what I’m seeing happen is because a lot of new people are coming into play, they’re, they’re learning the same business lessons we all learn. Okay, business is actually hard.

Getting customers is actually difficult. Yeah, making sure the customers are happy isn’t an easy thing to do. Producing social media content kind of sucks sometimes.

I think we’re all learning these lessons together and yeah, what business owners are needing, they might be reaching out for a need with copywriting, what they really need is someone in their corner who’s cheerleading, whatever they’re doing and helping them solve their problems.

And I think copywriters are extremely intelligent people. They live between creativity and marketing and research . And I think that if you can lean in and help business owners with their strategy and their fundamentals, then it’s going to be really easy to sell the copywriting. ’cause we, we tell this to our customers, you’re not buying the graphic design from us.

You’re not buying the logo and the colors and the fonts. The design has a job to do and that’s to live out the strategy, right?

A customer might come to you and say, I need copywriting for X, Y, Z, but then if you look under the hood and go, okay, but who are you talking to? Why is it this audience not that audience? You know, how come you’re focusing on these values? Have you explored trying to create new values? Why is your voice this? Have you tried researching other voices?

And if the customer or the business owner’s like, I don’t know, this kind of stuff, they’re basically in the palm of your hand and they need strategy. And you can sell strategy, you can sell research.

And I would debate that that’s even more valuable to them than the copywriting. Because if a business owner is looking at you to get a copywriting job done, great, you can make money for that. But what about if you become an invaluable business, consult to them, you know, to help them with their strategy, a thought partner, they’re going to pay you more, they’re going to value you more.

And then when you write copy, they’re going to ask you what you think versus tell you to rewrite it for some nonsensical reason.

Alex:?

Exactly. And I mean, and let’s be honest too, right?

Like we talk about this barrier to entry being lowered, meaning everybody can start a business which means you know, what is even niche anymore because there’s so many people doing so many things online now that the barrier to entry is lower.

And so I really think brand becomes what sets you apart from other people.

You know, I truly believe that the reason why the Copy Posse grew at the rate that it did is because I just like leaned so hard into being this like feisty sassy little disruptor. And that resonated with the people who were looking for a new voice to follow in this industry.

And so I’m curious, and I know you talk a lot about the difference between corporate branding and personal branding.

I want to talk about that a bit right now because you know, I have a brand Copy Posse, but then I also have a personal brand. But what is truly the difference between, you know, these two different types of branding? What is the difference between personal branding?and corporate branding? Are they treated differently or is it all kind of one and the same?

Dain:?

I think that branding is, it’s the same set of principles. I think they’re applied differently.

I think personal branding, for me it’s again, they, they both cross-pollinate. They both translate. But I think where if you look at it as more of a sliding scale, a personal brand is more about your character, whereas a company brand’s more about your capability, right?

I go to a company ’cause I want them to be capable of solving my problem. I go to an individual ’cause I like their character, right?

So I might go to you because I really like your sassy disruptive nature. That’s your character. I’m attracted to that. Versus a company it’s like, well Apple, I know that they have this ecosystem that I can trust. It’s simplistic and it’s relied upon. They’re capable of, you know, looking after my needs.

So business is more about capability, personal is more about character. The other one is like, you know, personal brand is typically more conversational than a company brand.

A company brand, no matter how much they try, they’re still going to come across as promotional or transactional. It just comes with a logo. It comes with the nature of the beast. And I think if you run a corporation, people just expect it to be trying to sell them something.

Whereas you can be a personal brand and give away educational resources and people don’t even realize you’re selling to them. They just think they’re in a conversation with a human being.

So I think the story component can be louder and stronger with a personal brand. You can lean more into your failures.

Whereas a company, you don’t really want to hear a company talking about their failures, you know what I mean? But not as much as an individual. I think we like individuals ’cause they’ve failed, they’ve overcome, they’re flawed.

We love people who aren’t perfect.

If you look at someone controversial like Conor McGregor, he’s not a perfect character, but that’s why we love him so much.

And I think that companies, if they’re imperfect, unfortunately it’s more of a hindrance than something that’s going to help them.

So I think there’s just these nuance differences.

And I think the big one is a personal brand in my opinion, can scale a social media brand a hell of a lot quicker than a corporation or a company ever could.

Yeah. If you are trying to build your company through like a name or an enterprise versus just you showing up with your face and teaching yourself, you’re going to see your personal brand 400x outperform a company brand.

Because on social media we follow people.

We don’t like to follow corporations. Or if we do follow corporations, we follow the person behind it. Right? We love Steve Jobs behind Apple or Richard Branson behind Virgin or you know, Tim Cook behind Apple or you know, Oprah Winfrey behind her organizations.

I think it’s, we, we love to follow people because for two reasons.

One, we follow people we want to become like, or we follow people we feel like we already are. Like that’s easier to create chemistry or romance than it is for a corporation to say we’re capable of solving a problem.

Alex:?

Yeah. I love that you said that. ’cause it echoes. So I was recently chatting with a friend who had, who had exited a very large marketing brand that was a brand, but he was very much like the face of the brand, like I am for Copy Posse. And you know, that went amazingly well. And then he’s like, okay, it’s time for me to launch my next endeavor.

And despite the fact that he had this very well-known name in the marketing industry, he decided to launch a brand that was just an organization title, right. A brand name. Or like a faceless brand if you will. And he recently, I saw him speak on stage at an event where he said, that is the biggest mistake I could have made.

Because what he was realizing was the reason why his first company was so successful, even though it still was a brand, is he was backing it up with himself with his own stories and his entrepreneurial journey.

And it took off and then he realized like a lot of entrepreneurs, like, I don’t want to be the dancing monkey anymore, I want to remove myself. But honestly it was doing a disservice.

And now he’s starting to show up again as the face behind this new company. And I say this a lot t people in my community, whether they’re new business owners and they want to launch a brand like Copy Posse for example. They see that I kind of am leading with a brand name and they think, oh, in order to be taken seriously, and this happens with copywriters too.

I mean, I’ll have someone who starts a copywriting business and rather than just be their name, they come up with some, you know, fancy copywriting brand and they try to a logo and they try to spend all this time.

Like, which we can, you know, again, I can go on a rant about this, all this time trying to create a brand that looks very important and very corporate and like I can help you.

And the number one thing I always say is like, forget all of that. Like just be you show up as you build your personal brand. And then of course, you know, there’s a lot that you can do to pivot into more of a larger brand. But even you, I mean you have a company Rivyl brands and everyone knows that it’s you behind that brand.

And so I’m so glad to hear you say that because I think sometimes when, when business owners are new, they don’t think that they themselves are valuable enough to show up as themselves and actually be taken seriously. So I’m curious if you have any thoughts on that or if you’ve seen similar, similar stories happen.

Dain:?

No, I would agree with you. I think, you know, there are cases where companies can blow up and do enormous things, but I, right in particular in the creative space, if we go okay, in the creative space, copywriters, graphic designers, freelancers, what have you, I think that the chasm between, you know, freelancer and agency is pretty, pretty freaking wide. You know, I think I’m an anomaly.

We built Rivyl from nothing to 30 employees in four years, which is, which is crazy. The reason it happened is not because of Rivyl’s branding, it happened because of my branding.

Yes. So 90% of the leads even today that are generated and you know, onboarded with Rivyl are coming on ’cause they’re like, I know Dain, I follow his content, I just know he happens to run an agency.

If that’s the road I have to take, I’ll take that road. If Rivyl didn’t exist and it was just Dain Walker, I’d be just as successful.

I think, you know, for me, I wanted to build the feeling that the team we’re in this together versus it all being under my name. So yeah, I think, you know, only now at year four, because we’re spending a lot of money on advertising, is Rivyl getting its own reputation.

It’s starting to win its own rewards. It’s starting to become an industry name, it’s starting to become a threat to our competitors. They’re like, who the hell are these Rivyl guys?

So only now after four years of like insane amounts of work and, you know, a million, a million dollars plus in ad spend, is it established. So I think if you’re in the position where you’re naught to 30, it’s, it’s really not going to help you. If anything, it’s just going to be a distraction.

And I think if you’re a freelancer and you’re, you know, you get a small part of two or three people that you’re working with or contracting with or whatever, lean into your name because I think a business owner wants to work with an individual more than they want to work with a corporation.

Alex:

100%. I tell my students all the time, like, you guys don’t pretend you’re a one-person agency because unless you’re a bigger organization and have the spend, if you’re a small business owner, you want a thought partner like we talked about earlier, and you want to hire a person.

And so I love that you shared that because I think it takes the pressure off.

And really the lesson here for everybody is whether you’re selling services or you’re launching a course or you’re launching your program or, you know, unless you’re doing maybe an e-commerce brand or something that’s very product-centric, you are valuable. Like you as you are.

And really lean into that because it is so much easier to show up as yourself than to try to like front as you know, an agency or an organization or something that you’re not.

And then it also allows you room to pivot. Like I was alexcattoni.com working with all of my clients and I didn’t want to pigeonhole myself necessarily into one particular type of business that allowed me to really build my authority as a person, as a copywriter, as a marketer. And then I started the Copy Posse.

And so I think it’s easy to look at people like what you’re doing Dain or what I’m doing, and go, oh, I need to build a brand in order to be successful. But what you don’t know is that it all started by us just showing up as ourselves.

Dain:?

You’re right on the money there. ’cause I think, you know, oftentimes we think?that we get pigeonholed and you know, my first year I was a content creator for hire.

And here’s the interesting thing is I had more inquiries and the, the first two years of business that I’ve had in the last three, and I believe it’s because when you’re starting and you’re producing amazing content, but your page isn’t huge, people think you’re accessible.

Yes. When they look at my page now and they see 700,000 followers, there’s like, no way this guy’s in my DM right? So actually I would use it to your advantage if you’re like, oh, I don’t want to, you know, I don’t have any followers.

I don’t want to be looked at as a small, tiny person in the scheme of things. But if you’re producing stellar content and it’s amazing and people land on your page and go, they’ve only got 2000 followers.

What the hell? This is ridiculous. This person’s so good. They’re going to DM you and be like, I can’t believe I found this hidden gem. I’m going to hire them. I hope that I can afford them.

And I think that you can use that to your advantage. So whatever your position is, use it. I think, you know, if I could go back and get the same amount of volume of inquiring leads out in the first two years, I sign me up. I think, you know, having a huge page isn’t all out that it’s cut out to be.

Alex:

I miss the days of like a solid 10,000 followers. And you know, you mentioned content creation is what you look for when you’re like, or what business owners look for when they’re looking to hire. I was the same. I mean if I have a copywriter who messages me saying, “Hey, I can write for you!” and their page is just sort of faceless with a bunch of like repurposed tips or content, I’m kind of like, ugh. Nope.?

But if they’re just a regular person and I can see on their Instagram that, oh look, they’re a mom and oh look, they like to go hiking, or oh look, there’s a picture of their dog and then I read the captions and they’re beautifully written, I’m like, ah, there’s the hidden gem. And so I think sometimes we try too hard to be something we’re not, because we just assume we know what our clients are looking for and it’s quite often the opposite.

So I love that you shared that.

And I have one sort of final question to wrap up. Because we’ve kind of been talking about content creation. I’m curious how you plan your content and, and if you do a mix of like educational type of content, entertainment, entertainment type of content, what’s the sort of the difference and how do you find that balance to really show up, you know, on let’s just say on Instagram as an example??

Dain:?

Yeah, so I think one thing I try to get people to focus on, so I still have clients that we help with their personal branding. So we work with a lot of, you know, celebrities and musicians and you know, different artists like in the acting space or in the comedic space with their content. And I think entertainment is a little different.

I think entertainment, you really have to be like building out your thing, right? If you’re a rap artist, it’s all that. If you’re a standup comic, it’s all that, right?

But I think if you’re educating, I try to get people to educate within what I call the five key themes. So, and, and we write about this in, in in the book and we’re trying to get people to focus. Okay. Those things can change. So like for example, on my social media page, I teach, you know, brand design, brand strategy.

I also teach like marketing, you know, I also teach like, like psychology, like how brands psychologically can persuade and influence you. And it’s something, something we’re diving into at the moment is the Q&A live sessions. So it’s like, okay, these are the five kind of things we’re doing.

What you want to do is you want to rinse and repeat those five things enough until you’re like, okay, out of these five things, this one’s not performing very well.

And then we swap that out. So like I try to always have five things that we’re trying to test. And then when something gets old, you know, it might be a good theme and it might last you six months, but then people are tired of hearing about it.

So then you swap it out. So for me, I’m always testing and experimenting new things. ’cause I think what can happen on social media is the algorithm changes. Your audience gets tired of hearing the same thing.

Seeing you shop the same way so many times it’s like, how many times can you skin a cat, right? So then you always have to go, okay, let me swap that theme out, bring a new one and deploy that for a while and then bring this other one back. So for me, I would encourage people to experiment but try to stick to five topics, five talking points.

Because if you take, let’s just say, okay, marketing copywriting, maybe you’ve got a hundred pieces of content about that before you run out of ideas or start to recycle old ideas. So yeah, for me, content at the moment, one thing we’re testing heavily is this live Q&A stuff where we’re actually on stage, we’re in front of an audience, people are asking questions, we’re giving feedback on it.

We’re then also simultaneously testing like 90-second lessons where we’re in a stage where we’re tinkering. Because the algorithm seems to be in disarray. So we’re just trying to keep up with finding the new, the new wave at the moment. I don’t know if you caught the carousel wave four years ago, but we’re kind of waiting like what’s the next thing that could take off.

Alex:

Something that we do, which is similar, we have the content pillars that we talk about. We also do a big, a mix of just pure education and then also really showing people who I am, because we might do a post that is, you know, me talking about a trip I did or a lesson I learned.

And often those will get the highest engagement, whereas sort of the educational posts we find get the most saves and shares. And then we’ll do some longer form content.

And I’m curious if you’re going to see this too, is some of the longer form content or maybe these live Q&As the viewership is lower, but because it’s the people who are watching are so committed, you’re getting a lot more, you know, engagement in the chats, you’re starting conversations in the dms and we really try to kind of like, like you experiment and just say, okay, what’s working?

And also knowing that different types of content have different goals. And so I love hearing, I love hearing you talk about that. And that could be a whole other, a whole other topic at some point.

Dain:

I think you said something important in there, which is the re-shares. I think that okay, depending on what your objective is, right? Like if you’re trying to get sales, it depends on how you want to look at that. And I think sales usually comes down to engagement.

Like how many people are actually commenting, how many people are actually like touching that piece of content. The higher that is, the, the, the more engagement.

One metric that I really like to focus on most is the shareability, right?

So if I post a piece of content and it gets 15,000 re-shares, I’m like, we hit the money. Like that’s, that’s where the real money is. Because if we get 15,000 people to get a DM ping, or I was featured on a story where I got seen, the eyeballs and the value of that attention is enormous for us, right?

Because the way I see it on social media, so many people produce media purely with the intent to make money.

The reason I don’t like that is it, it kills creativity.

If you produce media purely like I really want to blow people’s minds and give them an aha moment.

And I want to be a dealer of dopamine. I want to get people fired up about branding. Yeah. If that’s your focus more than the money, what happens is you actually end up getting the money anyway because you’re producing content that hits that dopamine in people and gets them hooked on watching more of your content.

Because what gets a reshare there’s only seven things that will get someone to share something. You see it and you go, that’s familiar. I just had that conversation with my girlfriend or with my business partner and I’m going to ping him up. The familiarity piece is big.

And this is why memes are huge. This is why like, you know, skits are huge. Because it’s like you want to tag your friend and send it to someone else to make him laugh.

The second one is and the reason that someone would share something is it’s prolific. It gave them goosebumps. It was like, whoa, why have I never heard that before? I’d never thought about it from that perspective. It’s like Simon Sinek talking about, you know, the golden circle.

Yeah, right. Start with why you’re like, wow. The way he says it is just like, whoa.? It’s just drawn circles on a, on a, and like for us branders were like, yeah, we knew this, but it is just how he delivered it was like so, so powerful.

So we’re going to think about like what’s humorous, what’s dangerous, what’s sexy? Like we’ve got to strike an emotional chord. And if you can do that. Yeah, yeah. Controversy, right? If you can strike these emotional threads, people will send it. Even if they hate you, they’ll still send it.

So some of my most viral posts. It happened to me on LinkedIn. I think one of my most viral LinkedIn posts I had, you know, people are marketing like attacking me and it was great ’cause I had all this attention.

So I think when it comes down to it, producing media should come from a place of I want to help people and I want to inspire people and I want ’em to feel good. But you have to get that reshare. I think if you can get the reshare, your page will grow.

Alex:?

Absolutely. Oh my gosh, so good. Dain, I cannot wait to go deeper into all this stuff with you next month inside the Reign clubhouse, we’re going to wrap up this interview. It was freaking amazing.

Before we go, I would love to just ask you about your book because you mentioned it and I know it’s full of wisdom, just like this interview was. So yeah, tell us a little bit about your book and where people can go find it.

Dain:

Yeah, so we put up a post, I think this is going back maybe a year and a bit ago, where I just said, look, I’m going to write a book about personal branding.

What are the biggest issues that you have? And we had over 800 and or 900 comments of people sharing their problems. We sat down, we, we reverse engineered all of these problems, right? Just a total nerd here. And we found out there was really five things said 900 different ways.

It was, I’m scared, where do I start? You know, how do I find my niche, my thing? How do I make, make money out of this stuff? And is it really all worth it?

So then we’re all, okay, these are the, the five big things that we need to tackle with the book.

So in the book we just, I tried to approach it from a very human perspective. So I opened the book up talking about where we are now. Okay. We worked with Culture Kings, we worked with these grandiose big international brands.

Look at me, go. Then chapter two, I rip him back down to earth and I’m like, this is how it started.

I was in debt, I was sleeping, you know, on a mattress on the floor and we could barely afford fuel.

And how I went from that to the latter using personal brands. So we unpack every stage of building a personal brand. What it took me from the beginning to where it is now. I deploy my numbers, how much I charge for things, I really go into the details. And each chapter has an exercise that someone can go and do as well as a QR code where they can go download other stuff.

But the 90 Day Brand Plan, it’s all about how to get outta your funk in 90 days and produce content that generates income and how to do it quickly.

Alex:?

Amazing, amazing. I will be reading that. Absolutely. ’cause like I said, I love everything you do.

Dain, thank you so freaking much. I know we could have talked for another hour. I love your work and everything that, that you teach, so thank you so much for being here to share it with the Posse.

Dain:?

Thank you so much. I had a blast.

Hope you found that helpful. Thanks for reading and subscribing.

Alex

P.S. You can also watch the interview here

Alex Cattoni is the Founder of the Copy Posse Agency and Academy. Since 2011, she has launched several successful brands and has proudly partnered with many of the hottest transformational brands and businesses on the planet, writing high-converting sales copy, scaling multi-million dollar brands, and crafting iconic promotional campaigns.

Today, she’s on a mission to mobilize the raddest, baddest crew of authentic copywriters with a passion for creating community, credibility and conversions with nothing but powerful and precise wording.

Through her weekly YouTube videos, Alex helps copywriters, aspiring copywriters and entrepreneurs learn, write and ignite their businesses with words that work.