Personal & Business branding 101 from an Award winning Agency: Social Media, Recruitment, Design, .

1. 1.1 What is brand identity Introduction Course: What is brand identity and why is it important before you begin to determine your company's marketing strategy that is very important to understand your business very, very well. What I mean by that is not only how your company generates revenue and maintains customers, but also how your company thinks and breeds. Think of your company's brand as a person. You as a person hold a certain amount of values that are important to you. Perhaps you like helping others, you value people's time, you have respect for the environment. Think of something that is truly essential to you. Now try to think of you can translate these good values in your business. This is extremely important as it will add personality in whatever service or product you are creating. I hear from startups all the time that they are struggling with leveling up, scaling as you will, their offers. And that's what they're missing a personality, not just doing the motions or copying from people know in order to level up and become your own business, your own person, you really need that personality. People will automatically feel that, and those with matching values might even show interest. Ultimately, a strong business brand helps create a strong and deep connection with your customers. Now with that being said, let's look at the anatomy of a leading brand. Oftentimes people confuse the product with a brand, but these two are distinct in the way that the product is which your company makes and the brand is what your customers think about it. Remember, the customer tells you what your brand means to them. You can say what your brand means, but you cannot make them believe it. It is crucial that you invest time in sending the right message which are brand. For some products, the message can be straight forward, but for other products and services, not really. If you want to increase your company's brand value, you need to understand what customers think about your current brand at the moment, customer data retention buying habits are indicators of what your brand stands for. After you've analyzed your current brand situation, it is time to look at your brand's design components. There are a few design components that every brand must have. 2. 2 Tagline + design principles: Let's look at the first one, tagline. A tagline is one of the most straightforward ways to send the message of your current brand. To think of a tagline that sends the right message. But remember, it has to be concise, clear and to the points. Number two, design, it's often overlooked and it's crucial to your brand as it can also communicate your brand's values. Perhaps a practical design, easy-to-use or something modern or playful. These are all values that you can express in the design of your brand. And this is usually where a lot of young companies go wrong. It took me as well for years to figure out how much designed plays a role in branding nowadays, just kick clients because of the branding efforts that we did five years ago. So really don't dismiss design as one of the crucial things you have to do in the beginning. Of course, this is not part of your MVP and getting a product out there, but it is very much about maturing as accompany creating your own brand design so that people can align to you. 3. 3 Logo Design Principles: Number 3, logo. The logo is crucial because it is visual, so it stays in your customers visual memory a long time. It is also easy to recognize among many other products, your logo does not have to be complex. Oftentimes, in simple logo is actually better because it sticks better to the memory with logos, I always recommend that it has to look good in black and white. You can add colors, of course, to add personality, as long as it looks great in black and whites. One of my mentors once said that at the end of the day, which you want to achieve with your logo, is that people want to tattooed on their own bodies if it's too complex or too out there and has nothing to do with your company's values. There's a likelihood that people will not be invested in your logo as much that they would actually want to tattooed on their body. Of course, you shouldn't add to it if you don't want to, but it's just an indication of what type of logo is good or bad. If you feel like that could be tattoo, that is potentially a very good logo. 4. 4.1 Visual Content + Font: Then the next one, visual contents. These could be pictures or graphics. Make sure to match your visual content to the message of your brand and to the design. Customers prefer visual overwritten contents, so make sure your visual content is professional. Of course, in some cases you might write a lot. You might be a ghost writer or just a writer who writes blogs. Writing could be essential to that. However, don't dismiss the fact that images play a big role. Infographics play a big role when you're writing. And that's where you really want to stand out and show that this is your blog posts or your written content. Now let's talk about fonts. Fonts are like the design in the sense that they can also show your company's personality. Think about what font would present your brand the best, playful, serious, maybe modern or vintage, whatever you do with font, be aware that people need to be able to read it. So ask your family or friends to read a page in the font that you're thinking of associating with. Because if it's not very readable, you might lose a ton of conversions and potential clients and might be interested, but don't wanna go through the effort of breathing a heart font. 5. 4.2 Creating a brand name: Hi there and welcome. In this video we are going to be talking about the eight ways of creating a brand product or business name. Now turning to another language and making up your own words are just two of them. An essential part of your journey will also be deciding on your brand name. One of the most common challenges, many startups or any employee that are in a tech sector or startup faces are the beginnings of how to create a brand product or maybe a business name that stands out. We live in such a competitive world. So you might think that all the good names have been taken. But don't worry, if you're still trying to figure out the name, let's think of some ways we can come up with one together. Here are some ideas you can use to brainstorm. First, use your own name. Customers like to know that there's a real person behind the business. It immediately offers personal credibility. It's a common practice among businesses in the fashion industry. I've also noticed that many firms use their own names as well. Here are some reasons why it's a good idea to use your own name. First of all, it leverages your reputation. It establishes trust and credibility with potential clients as well as existing clients. Your own name is very unique and different from others and as well in demonstrates passion and commitment, you're not going to place a name on a business or a product that you don't own and belief in. If you think your name sounds nice, go ahead and try it. You could use your family name on its own, your full name or even a nickname. And if you have partners in the business, you can combine the names of the owners. A lot of law firms do this. Just make sure that the name isn't too long. Keep it simple at one or two words. Some notable examples are Versace and fashion, Kate Spade and fashion or Deloitte, which is an accounting firm. Now another one, Number two is form acronyms. Now, short, simple and easy to remember, those are acronyms. But the question is, should you abbreviate your brand name or not? There are so many famous brands around us that have taken this path. It's easy to pronounce and it's usually only two or three letters. You form the acronym by taking the first letter of each word. Some notable examples are H&M, Hannah's and merits, IBM, International Business Machines, CNN, Cable News Network. Although it sounds like an uncomplicated way to come up with a name. You should stay away from forming a long abbreviation. For example, TIAA-CREF stands for Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association College retirement equities fund. It's way too long. Tried to say it out loud. Does it sound nice? It honestly doesn't even sound like you're speaking English at that point. Other things to note are some pitfalls of using an acronym as your brand name. Usually it's not unique. There are a lot of SEO challenges because you people won't type an acronym like that in. And another obvious one is it doesn't actually explained what you do. Now number 3, self-explanatory names. The best thing about this type of name is that one similar reads it. They instantly know what the business is about. These names have been around for ages. They are effective in terms of brand positioning. Customers don't have to think twice to identify the products or services to form this type of name for your brand. Think about the main products or services of the company. What are the interesting highlights? And don't forget, the rule of thumb is to always avoid long names. Self-explanatory names are great because of what is being communicated. However, there are also some disadvantages to take note of. First of all, lacks creativity and it does post limitations. Depending on the industry you're in. Such a name could sound quite boring and generic. Besides, there may be limitations on what your company is all about. For example, let's take a look at Burger King. It has the word burger in its name, so anyone who reads it knows Would it serves. The focus is on burgers, and therefore their brand identity and product offerings might only be limited to this item. Whenever someone says Burger King, burgers automatically pop up in one's head. In the future, if they would like to branch out to other areas, they may face challenges and difficulties. It won't be easy to change the perception that has been strongly tied to their name. Some notable self-explanatory names are, of course, start funding event, elite X, mentor, Booking.com, PayPal, General Motors. Now another way to shape your brand name is to take a word from the dictionary, browse through the dictionary and choose a word that is relevant to your business is quite similar to self-explanatory names, but it comes with a twist. When customers read the brand name, they will understand the meaning of the word, but it doesn't give the answer away. Often companies chooses direction to illustrate an interesting connection or to be symbolic. According to Wikipedia, Tinder is adduced social networking and online dating application that allows users to anonymously swipe to like or dislike other profiles based on their photos. Maybe a small bio and common interests wants to, users have matched, they can exchange messages. But what does the word Tinder actually mean? Well. The Merriam Webster Dictionary states had tinder can be defined as a very flammable substance adaptable for use as kindling. Originally Tinder was named match box. But to founder's decided to go down a different lane. The reason being that this dating app starts the sparks. The app is used to metaphorically start a fire when it comes to romantic relationships. Some notable brand names are taken from the dictionary, polo, Slack, or Telegram. Now another one to shape your brand product or business is to combine words. Spice it up by using more than one word, create some sort of pun. The dictionary can come into handy once again, this time you can take two words, join both, work together, and make sure to remove the space between them. There will be a stronger emphasis on the first word. And another thing I often notice is that some brands capitalize the second word as well, like YouTube, but it doesn't mean that you have two. Another thing that you can also try is to take parts of words and join them together. For example, Microsoft microcomputer software. Some notable combination names are Facebook, WordPress, Airbnb, and many, many others. The next one that you can use is to invent your own name. If you want to be original and create something unheard of, just makes sure that it's catchy and might prove to be very challenging to find the perfect name. So why not just invent one? Perhaps the most unique of all names? These fabrications often sound very distinctive. It's highly advantageous that Pease named stand out. Trademarking will not be an issue. However, let's also take note of the downfalls. One of the challenges is that there is no definition assigned to the word. The marketing department might have to spend a lot of bucks and time to develop meaning around the brand name. In many cases, the brand becomes a hit and a dictionary and Duxiu invented word into its vocabulary. For example, you will see that Skype is now a word in the dictionary. According to the Cambridge English Dictionary, skype is a brand name for an application for communicating with other people over the Internet using voice or video calls. Examples would be Skype, xerox, Kodak, and so on. Now the next way to shape your brand name, product or business name, is to use an animal. Don't want to be so straightforward with the name. Use an animal to symbolize certain qualities of the brand. Animals symbolism has long existed. Idioms have often been associated with animals to describe similarities. I'm sure you've heard of strong as an ox, tall as a giraffe, and quick as a fox. To this day, the Native American people believe that every individual has their very own spirit animal. The same can be applied to brand names, attributing animal-like characteristics your products is also another way to go. A common practice for car companies is the use of animals such as horses and fast cats. These animals illustrates speed. It is a very simple approach that can be seen in the world's top brands, often accompanying the name would be the animal used in the design of the logo. So for examples, things like Jaguar, dove, Puma, and many, many others. So you can probably think of like a Ford Mustang, which is Ford, as well as the product name being the Mustang. Now, the next one is, take a word from another language. They have foreign languages always sound exotic. It's not something you typically hear. The strategy of using a foreign word is to create a foreign perception in the mind of its customers. Just imagine when a person hears the name, there won't be any meaning attached to it. Let's zoom in on Hulu, an American subscription video on demand service. The name derives from the Mandarin language. According to the Hulu blog in Mandarin, Hulu has two interesting meanings, each highly relevant to our mission. The primary meaning interested us because it is used in an ancient Chinese proverb that describes the WHO as the holder of precious things. The secondary meaning is interactive recording. We saw both definitions as appropriate bookends and highly relevant to the mission of Hulu. And that's what Who said about that? After going through a long list of names, the team finally settled on Hulu, who has short fun, easy to pronounce, and then have a meaning in the English language. Other examples could be something like Haagen-Dazs, Hulu, Alibaba, and so on. It's always a good idea to have a few names to choose from. Here are some key factors that should be taken into consideration before you finally settle on that one name. First of all, it has to be easy to pronounce, easy to remember, it's going to be a big second to that. Obviously domain availability, we use providers like name cheap where you go and you just type in the domain and see if it's available and how much it would cost. Obviously, you don't want to pay $10 thousand for a domain. If by changing one letter in the word, you could suddenly opened it up to a $7 a year type of domain. So another thing that's very important, it's obviously trademark availability. The way you check those things as you go to the Chamber of Commerce or you go to some European Registry of businesses if you're in Europe, same for America, and so on, depending on which region you're in. And then just check those, you can Google for these registries. Another thing that's very important is it has to stand out from the competition. And it should have no negative connotations, including when translated into the language of a foreign market, because sometimes international scale happens faster than you might think. Now another thing is no limitations. It should allow you to add new services and or products in the future. Once you've chosen your name, make sure that it can be trademark or copyright is. And always remember to keep it simple. And those were the eight ways that you can create a brand product or business day. I hope it helped you. And with that being said, I'm gonna see you in the next video. 6. 5 Case studies Headspace, Airbnb, Chobani, Thinx, Starbucks: Now let's talk about great examples of branding. If you need some inspiration in developing your brand, we have selected a number of companies that have successful branding strategy. The first company we're going to cover is Headspace, a well-known meditation app that has attracted millions of people with its original design, the charming animation, the soothing color palette, the happy and funny characters all create the impression of joy and calm, which goes hand in hand with their mission statement, less stress, more joy. On top of that, the app goes beyond offering meditation sessions. It is a platform that provides daily tips, quotes, stories, music, playlist, workouts and more. So it's definitely a company that you want to look into if those are some of the values that you're looking into associating yourself. Airbnb, another example of creative branding. Airbnb, just like Headspace, inspires a new and original lifestyle. What is remarkable about Airbnb is branding, is that their storytelling is great. There are not only a platform that allows finding an accommodation through their storytelling, they encourage an active lifestyle by traveling, discovering new places and meeting new people, especially locals. They're storytelling was proved to be useful in building a sense of community between hosts and travelers, which is something that hotels and hostels lacked before their message and mission were well communicated through the visual content on Airbnb social accounts featuring people being friendly, happy, and helpful to each other. Airbnb is in this way a great example of branding because they use written and visual content strategically in order to communicate their values and mission and inspire lifestyles. Chobani, not many people like yogurt for some, it is considered a very boring product. Giovanni, however, found a very intelligent way to promote natural Greek yogurt. They're trick consisted of showing creative ideas of using this product by posting recipes on their website. Now many people know how many meals you can make with yogurt. Giovanni, its purpose was to make food porn like videos showing how to make a cake, donuts, pies, or anything else using this yogurt, of course, thinks things had another original idea. It is a brand for period proof panties. Their branding secret is to have a very open and bold storytelling, especially in times on products about menstruation or still a topic of taboo. Their mission is to end the stigma and make people comfortable talking about topics such as menstruation and sexuality. To do so things owns a blog in which people can find personal essays, gynecologists, tips, and articles that are accessible to anyone willing to know more about this topic and understand their bodies better. Starbucks, a more mainstream company, but definitely worth mentioning their branding strategy. Starbucks is branding ideologies about excellent customer experience around the act of drinking coffee, the large amount of choices, the friendly personnel, your name on your cup. All these meant to inspire connectivity and special attention to every customer. If you observe Starbucks is interior design, the roundtables to cozy chairs and the classy, the core. All of these are meant to make you feel more like at home unless lonely in case you've come alone. So Starbucks is emphasis on customer service and design or its best ways to communicate its mission and values. 7. 6 Branding vs Marketing: Branding versus marketing. What is the difference? Branding and marketing? These two concepts tend to be quite confusing sometimes, however, if you want your business to be successful, it is important to understand the difference between these two. Firstly, let's define these concepts separately. Marketing is all the tools and strategies of business uses in order to promote its product or service. The purpose of marketing is to connect potential customers to your business. You do that by using various marketing strategies such as advertisements on social media for example. Branding on the other hand, is what shapes your company. What your company is as a brand means which your company values, their mission, the uniqueness and vision that you might have within the company, the company's key branding features or its logo tagline, mission statement than bore, through which the company shows who they are and how they think. Marketing helps the company gain new customers while branding makes the customers come back. Now let's dig even more into the differences about these two. There are a few things that are important to remember. Branding comes first, marketing comes second. Make sure that you want to attract customers that will stay and love your company. For dad, you need to work on your branding first. You cannot attract customers when you don't have a solid brand identity, branding is long-term while marketing is temporary, the brand identity of your business will always evolve and prosper as you build stronger and deeper relationships with the customers. Marketing strategies, however, are temporary solutions to attract customers. Preferably your marketing strategies should have a clear plan when they begin and when they end. 8. 7 Must know branding terms: Now let's cover some branding terms that you definitely must know. A brand. A brand is a mixture of attributes, tangible and intangible, that creates value and influence in distinguishing symbol, mark, logo, name, a word or a sentence, or even a combination of these items that companies use to distinguish their products from others and the market. And that definition comes from Investopedia, brand equity. The definition of brand equity is a brand's power derived from the goodwill and name recognition that it has earned over time, which translates into higher sales volume and higher profit margins against competing brands. And that comes from the business dictionary. Companies can create brand equity for their products by making them memorable, easily recognizable, and superior in quality and reliability. Brand experience. A brand experience is the action of how the person perceives the brand. Every interaction between an individual and a tangible or intangible brand artifact can be seen as a brand experience. Brand experience is conceptualized as sensations, feelings, cognitions, and behavioral responses evoked by brand related stimuli. Brand extension, common method of launching a new product by using an existing brand name on a new product in a different category, a company using brand extension hopes to leverage its existing customer base and brand loyalty to increase its profits with a new product offering. A great example of that is a Ford Mustang, the new electric one. They're using the Mustang platform to go into the electric branding Would an established brand like the Mustang car brand identity. Brand identity is often confused with image. Brand identity is how a business wants a brand's name, communication style, logo, and other visual elements to be perceived by consumers. Brand image, on the other hand, is what consumers actually think. Brand image, the customer's perception and ideas about the product. Brand licensing. A licensing agreement that grants a manufacturer derived to develop, market and sell approved products, typically leveraging a company's brand name, logo marks, and or licensable assets to approved retailers in return for payments, brand personality, a plan for the systematic development of a brand to meet agreed objectives. Brand strategy is the how, what, when, and to whom you plan on communicating your product or service. Co-branding, a marketing partnership between at least two different brands of goods or services. Rebranding. Rebranding occurs when a business or organization decides to change a significant element of the brand. Such a change could be glaringly obvious like a new brand name or logo. Or it might be more subtle, such as a slight shift in messaging to better communicate a more relevant brand promise, repositioning user communications activities to give an existing product in a new position in customers minds. So expanding or otherwise altering its potential markets, visual identity, what a brand looks like, including, among other things, its logo, typography, funds, packaging, and so on. 9. 8 Part 1 Creating brand identity: In this section, we'll go deeper into creating your brand identity. For that, Let's start with what is your brand purpose first? Because at the end of the day, in order to start with your brand identity, you really need to start from within and why you do what you do. So what is brand purpose when creating your brand, you really need to think why you want to create this particular brand. There must be a reason for this brand to exist beyond making money, ask yourself, what is the purpose of this brand and why people needed so much in their lives. A strong brand purpose makes your business unique and special from other competitors on top of that, and the brand purpose helps build a stronger bond with the customers. A bond that is based on friendship, loyalty, and trust. And that way your company will create potentially more sales. When thinking about brand purpose, you must ask the following questions. What is the purpose? Think about, what is the real purpose you're trying to achieve with this brand. The purpose has to be more social and impactful rather than just making lots of money. Usually when the goal is to make money deep down inside, there is a reason why you want to make that money. I mean, at the end of the day, if you have millions in your account, Is it really just going to be about making money? I hope not. I hope that there is a deeper reason. Try to think about them. Reason right now, perhaps you want to help children in need. You want to save the environment, or you want to help your community in some kind of way. Think about what really motivates you to open this business and why it's important. The next question you need to ask yourself, how does it relate? Think about how the brand purpose relates to your brand and company. Makes sure that the connection between these two as strong and justifiable. Other important points to think about when setting up the brand purpose is to establish how your business will realize its brand purpose and what its ultimate goals are. 10. 9 Part 2 Purpose driven brands and corporate social responsibility: Let's talk about purpose-driven brands and corporate social responsibility. Pla is an example of a purpose-driven brand organization. They are an eco-friendly, plastic free company that makes phone cases from bio-degradable material. What makes this company truly purpose-driven is the fact that they established a way to turn waste products into moldable plastic, biodegradable in 10 years compared to plastic, which takes 10 thousand years. They're working towards a real ecological problem and their mission is focused on making a plastic free world. In contrast, many people confuse purpose-driven brands with corporate social responsibility. Corporate social responsibility is a business model that makes a company be more socially responsible for the impact they are creating. The impact can be social, ecological, economical, cultural, and so on. There are different ways in which companies can engage in corporate social responsibility, including donations, volunteering, various projects and campaigns. While corporate social responsibility can be Nobel for many companies and their customers, it is not always the same as having a purpose-driven brand. The example given earlier shows that the company has a strategic mission to fight a problem with corporate social responsibility, your accompany does not always have a social mission at its core of its product or service. Starbucks is an example of a company would a corporate social responsibility. Surely they have done a lot in order to improve the coffee chain production starting from its farmers and finishing with reducing the impact for their coffee cups, mainly through CSR programs and donations that have definitely been involved. But involvement and social causes does not equal purpose-driven organization. The idea of a purpose-driven organization is having the direct goal of fighting and problem. We actually have an interview with a chocolate company, Tony shock baloney, based in the Netherlands. But they've grown internationally and become one of the most successful stories in the chocolate industry. And they are very purpose-driven. And the chief evangelist in that interview actually goes deeper and explains how they started the whole company and how it actually influences all of their decision as well as product making. He also shapes a good difference between what it takes to be a purpose-driven organization and just a corporate social responsibility that we've discussed here. Hello. 11. 10 Brand purpose vs mission: Brand purpose versus business mission and vision. The brand purpose should not be confused with a brand's mission or vision. The purpose is not about business strategies and goals. Goals and strategies might be achieved in a determined time while the purpose is more of an ideal, it inspires you and drives you, but it is very difficult to attain. The purpose is the philosophy behind your business. It should be the guiding factor in inspiring good change and progress. Now, to better understand the difference between purpose, mission, and vision, consider the following. The mission asks the question, How? So that means how are you going to achieve what you want to achieve? The vision asks, what's, what is that the you want to achieve? And lastly, the purpose asks, why, why is it that important and why should it matter? 12. 11 How to develop your brand mission and brand vision: How to develop your brand mission and brand vision. These are two important elements that you will need to create your brand. These two are so closely connected that you make think they are the same thing. And it's true that both reflect the purpose and the goals of your business, but they serve completely different purposes themselves. Your mission statement should tell your audience where your company is focusing today to achieve your vision statement. The vision statement, on the other hand, should tell your audience where you are going to be in the future. This is a guiding light for the aspirations of your business. Now let's take a closer look at each of them and how you develop that statements. First, the brand mission. The brand mission focuses on what you're doing right now. So it is a simple, action oriented statement that explains what your brand aims to achieve and how you will do that. These following questions can help in the process of building your brand mission statement. First, how does your brand add value to your audience? Which larger impact you have in mind with your brand? Do you think this is doable and realistic? Can the mission be embodied in every aspect of your business? Of course, you want to set up the perfect brand mission, but keep in mind that you can always adjusted as you grow. Second, the brand vision. The brand vision focuses on where you want your achievements to lead in the future. And you will keep this vision until it is outdated or you have reached your goal. It can be as simple sentence or a short paragraph which defines your core ideals that give your business directions. So first start to ask yourself, where do you see your business in the next 10, 20, or even 30 years? This is a partner you should think BIG. Do not hesitate to have huge plans for your business that inspire employees and customers at the same time, also think about your values and your responsibility to your customers. As a next step, you should define your hopes and aspirations, which should be the most important reason why your business exists when formulating your vision, keep in mind that it should be short, clear, and easy to understand that it is designed to inspire your employees and customers. And in really tough times, even yourself. Address. 13. 12 Designing visual assets: Designing your visual assets. Visual assets are the cornerstone to engage in form or influence a specific action or reaction from your audience. So visual assets are digital elements, such as, for example, videos, diagrams, info-graphics screenshots or images. And an early development of your visual assets will help you to ensure brand consistency from the early days on, throughout the growth period and beyond. Which means that this will prevent you from rebranding. In the middle of the growth period, we started startup funding event. We created all of these visual assets and none of them changed throughout time as we started growing internationally and started creating bigger events. This was a lifesaver because you don't want to start building massive visual assets. When suddenly you're massively scaling to design your visual assets, you should take care of the following. 14. 13 Logo & Brand Colors: Hey, logo, the characteristics of your business should be visible in your logo. It must be simple and create an impression. Logo files have different logo files ready for different purposes. Definitely when you have a designer that you've hired, you should be asking for the Illustrator files, which are AI. And then if you can also EPS, PDF, PNG, and JPEG, the minimum amount is definitely the AI, which is an Illustrator file, the PNG, which should be a logo with a transparent background and a JPEG, which is an image without transparent background, brand colors. This is a fundamental element to set you apart from competitors, and it is part of your brand identity. You should keep your color codes consistent across different mediums. So for example, for digital and print mediums, make sure to not exceed three colors if you can get away with to definitely go for less. But our experience as we have branded many startups scale-ups and have helped with the branding of corporate. We advise to not exceed three, this row, overly complicated. Anything you will be doing in future from video to infographics and make it that the price actually goes up when you're hiring designers, keep it to three because then you have enough variety and sub tones to create great and consistent branding design elements. 15. 14 Fonts: Typography, it is important that you define a specific set of fonts that you use throughout your branding. This one is a large asset as it is present in almost everything you present on your website, Prince materials, social media, and so on, it is definitely recommended to choose one primary font that is used in titles and headings, and one secondary font that is used in body texts. Be aware that you have to specify if your font as license. My main recommendation here for young companies is gets the normal Google Fonts do not get licensed fonts. These are extremely expensive later on when you're scaling, when you're hiring new designers, you need to buy that license every time for, if they are outside freelancers that are inside your company is different of course, but just stay with Google. Another issue you might encounter is if you're doing presentations, let's say a PowerPoint presentation, normal events or investors want the presentation to be sent over to be seen on their own laptops. If you're using licensed fonts, that means that all other laptops do not have this font, which means that your entire presentation will look terrible unless you have exported it into PDF. But in order to just keep it easy and good for growth, keep it to all the Google fonts. And if you want to make it even easier, just chooses one font with different strengths. You can get a bolt for titles and a light for just normal text. 16. 15 Images & Brand guidelines: Imagery and photography. Imagery you use on your website and other content has to be consistent. The imagery and photography you choose should reflect your brand content and message and appeal to your target audience the same as the topography. Make sure that you have the rights to use the images and also that they are stored in a safe place. You can get images from royalty free websites like Pexels and Pixabay, or you can get licensed ones from things like Shutterstock. But again, just like the font and typography, we do not recommend to go for licensed in the beginning of your career. As you start growing, you should probably consider a licensed images or just creating your own ones like we did. We have photographers on staff and videographers, and that really sets us apart brand guidelines. These guidelines clearly define all the things mentioned before and clarifies the do's and don'ts. You can create these branding guidelines in a PowerPoint or a PDF and page by page, just go through everything that we've mentioned in the steps before. If you have everything that we've mentioned in this course within your branding guidelines, you're gonna make it really easy for everybody you are going to hire down the line to create things like videos and images. Hi. 17. 16 Position your brand: How do you want to position your brand? As soon as people see your website, your ads, your social media post, or even your office, they form an opinion about your business and there comes positioning into play. Positioning your brand means to differentiate it from your competitors and to decide how customers should think of it. This step is very important as positioning is directly linked to the customer's willingness to purchase your products when your business is seen as favorable, different, and credible in the consumer's mind, your brand positioning can be seen as effective. Now let's talk about the process of positioning, which consists of three simple steps. First, you have to analyze your customers, competitors, and your capabilities. Find out why your customers are attracted to you and not to forget also would almost prevented them from buying. Is it the price or the quality or the reputation? With these answers, you can directly compare how customers see your business with how you would like them to see your business. And compare this with the promises that your competitors make to their customers. To visualize this a bit more, you can draw a positioning map which shows, for example, the level of price, expensive or cheap, and the level of quality after placing your competitors into that map, you should be able to identify possible market gaps and to position your brand in a way that gets the customer's attention. As soon as you have identified the reasons why customers should buy your product, make sure that your business is capable of actually delivering these reasons. Second, create a positioning statement that resonates with your customers, is different from your competitors and can be delivered by your business. Never forget to make it authentic. Positioning is something that you want people to think of when they see your company. And easy way to define your positioning statement can be to frame it in three words, which can be, for example, vegan, traditional and feminine. Lastly, reflect your positioning in everything that you do. Brand personality, packaging, design, product, service, visual identity design, communications, and so much more. 18. 17 Choose your brand personality: Choose your brand personality. Let's talk about your brand personality and how you should choose it. When you hear personality, it may remind you more of a human than a brand, but that is exactly the point here. You should imagine your business as a person that your customers are meeting for the first time, what should be their first impression? And usually you don't want it took Peter cold and lifeless. So you give it a personality that consists of emotional traits and behaviors and you might know it from yourself. The most personalities they you remember are the ones that stand out when you create the brand personality. Just as with the brand positioning, analyze your competitors and your targeted audience to find the perfect personality fit for yourself and the market. By doing that, be realistic, by finding traits that really fit your brand and that you're actually able to deliver. Also, don't choose traits that you have to earn first. For example, trustworthiness. You cannot establish this from day one as you have first have to earn this from your relationships with your audience. And the most important thing to remember is to be authentic and everything you do, not what you think your company should do. Because if you're the founder or one of the co-founders, then you should be making sure that whatever your values are, are also portrayed in your company. If you're a brand manager or you're doing a workshop with something, makes sure that the senior management is available there because a company will never be authentic. If the senior management doesn't push through their values within the company, you should be competitive and of course, you should stand out with your brand, but you should not sacrifice your authenticity by doing so. 19. 18 Putting your branding to work Intro: Let's talk about putting your branding to work first, the website. Nowadays you are how you look online, your brand is what the outside world thinks of you. It's a collection of impressions you build up over time these days, your first impression is often made online. In fact, perspective, customers would check out your website before meeting with you. And it highly, highly affects whether or not the choose your service. Also it might rescue that they left a website because it was poorly designed or difficult to use. Sometimes it just loads too slow or something doesn't load because it's too complicated. Clearly, a website has an important impact on your business when your client search for you online, you need to be there, but you can't just be there in a bland, unprofessional way, we need to look the part here are the six rules of a branded websites. 20. 19 Rule #1 Define yourself and Create your logo Step by Step Manual: Number one, define who you are and what you look like. This is branding one-to-one, know who you are, your customers can begin to understand your unique sales position. If you yourself don't start by writing down five words to describe yourself, then narrow it down to one. Keep this word in mind as your mantra when you are building your website. For example, no one word mantra for a Nordstrom type practice might be quality, a Nike type practice might be leading. Then figure out what this looks like. Look at some companies you admire what colors and fonts and they used to convey their brand. What images do they use? What illustrations? Put all of these details into a document together and call it your brand guide, share it with your staff and select clients for feedback. Number two, create a logo, keep your logo symbol. Some of the world's leading brands stick with stylized type. If you do add a symbol, it does not have to mimic what you do. Mercedes doesn't have a car, Amazon doesn't have a book. Your logo does have to convey the spirit of your brand and speak to your target customer. If you need a logo and know just what you want, contact a freelancer to complete it if you need help and have a big budget, contact a branding agency. If you need inspiration and affordability, check out the online logo builder at presto box, Squarespace or vista prints. And then. 21. 20 Choosing great images and how to make it simple and mobile: Number 3, choose great images and photos. Images convey emotions, so choose the right ones for your brand. Ideally, these are images that you have professionally taken of your company, your products, and your happy customers. There are also several free and affordable online resources for stock photos. We like Unsplash, I stock and morgue file, Pexels and Pixabay and Shutterstock. And this should go without saying, but don't use any clip art on your website. Number 4, keep your website's simple. Make it easy for your clients to find what they are looking for using a lot of whitespace and not a lot of words. Took me a really long to figure out. A lot of white-space can look very designer friendly, so don't clutter things. Simpler sites with small splashes of color and great photos look more sophisticated and visitors are more satisfied because they can find what they want. The more color and light variations on the page equals more complexity and more work for your eyes to send information to your brain. Take your inspiration from Google, our favorite example of effective online simplicity. Number five, make it mobile. Your branded website needs to be mobile. Your clients are increasingly attached to their phones. Most adults have their films. We didn't reach 24, 7 when your client's search on their phones, they're more likely to take action within one hour. Another clincher, Google announced this year that non-mobile responsive websites would rank lower in search results. So if there was any time to make your website mobile, and now is the time. 22. 21 Use SEO Strategies: Finally, use SEO strategies to help people find you when your client search for you, you need to be there, identify your key search terms. These will probably be your business name, location services, and names of your key staff members. Set up your website would tags for these phrases and use them in content throughout your website and social media, most small firms are found by searching for the primary accountants name. If your name is Robert Smith, for example, use your full name and content on the site using abbreviations like Robert or Mr. Smith won't be as effective to get into the search results if you're interested in more SEO practices, we have an entire course that goes deeper into all the details of SEO gets quite technical, but this is what we do for clients. So if you want to know what an agency actually does within SEO or how you can offer it as a freelancer or just do it yourself. Definitely check it out on our profile. And with that being said, that's all for the start, a branded website will instantly build your credibility. Your clients will be more likely to choose you and trust you when your website reflects your best self. Okay. 23. 22 Branding for social media Intro: Hello, Let's talk social media. Even though we have a very deep course that goes into every single social media with interviews from people from all the major social media platforms. We want to cover the necessities in this course as much as possible. That way you don't need any additional content to start your journey within branding. So let's cover social media. Social media is really great news for you, for businesses as well as brands. And the best part is both big and small brands can benefit. Nowadays, consumers are more likely to validate solutions from the brands they follow on social channels, brand awareness is cited as the priority for marketers. And social media channels are a one-to-many solution for getting the word out about your products and services by creating a strong brand presence on social media, you can reach a broader audience. So where to begin? First, let's talk about basic rules of social media branding. Then we'll get into five easy ways you can build and enhance your brands. 24. 23 Rules of social media branding: Rules of social media branding. You don't need to be on every channel. It's better to choose one and do it right? If you can do three, great, but don't water down your reach because you're spread too thin. You don't need thousands of followers. Ten followers who buy your product is better than a 1000 who don't buy your product. So don't get caught up. And follower figures, we've had multiple accounts with ten thousand, twenty thousand plus followers. And engagement is going to be key when you're playing that game. Boast frequently. If you're not posting, you're not visible. So focus on the frequency, but also check out each social media to double-check if posting without engagement can actually affect your rates of viewership. I'm thinking about social media platforms like Instagram or YouTube. So definitely look at all the rules that are relevant to the time that your posting and whatever you do, keep your posting schedule consistent. That's the number one thing you want to achieve. Engagement and consistency. 25. 24 5 easy ways to build and enhance your brand through social media : Now let's go deeper into the five easy ways I want to share with you that you can use to build and enhance your brand through social media. Number one, as mentioned before, be consistent across social media platforms, building a brand does not happen overnight. It takes time and dedication. Your brand's profile across Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, maybe you're accompanying blog and anywhere else it appears should be unified and inline, which are brand identity, be consistent with graphics, color, style, and language, and even post frequency. Number two, know your tone of voice and brand, writing style, your product or service, plus the demographics of the target audience will determine the voice and style of a brand on social media. Imagine the brand as a person and consider what type of language you would use. Try and describe this person in terms of age, gender, interests, and personality as it will help you imagine how they would speak tone, be clear to followers about what and how the brand will communicate online. Is your brand cheeky and irreverent, or serious and formal language? What type of language will your brand use online? A young and hip brands might get away with more slang or a niche brand may use more acronyms and industry specific language purpose, identify the main reason the brand is on social media is your goal to educate or entertain. Finally, put together a social media style guide that outlines your tone of voice will be a useful reference document for anyone in the company who speaks on behalf of a brand. Number 3, talk like a human being. This is the number one issue I find with all companies, especially those that did not receive PR training. Or even worse, when they receive bad PR training. Almost sound like a politician and it's terrible. You're not representing a government. You are presenting a company that you're a part of and have some influence over. So talk like a human being when it comes to social media, the method that has proved successful over time is to talk like a human being ditched the corporate speak and take a conversational approach, respond to inquiries on a first-name basis, and don't be afraid to use really friendly dialogue. Don't solely plugged products or services. Genuine two-way communication is key because at the end of the day, people need to trust that a brand values them. Talking like a human being would personality will make a brand more relatable. And if it's really clever, genuine and entertaining, and may even go viral. Number for post relevant content, visual or written. Always has to be relevant. Don't post for the sake of posting, keep social media posts relevant, meaningful and simple. Boring content is one of the main reasons people will unfollow. And unlike brands, users engage with post that include images more than with posts that don't include images, involve customers in a brand story and they will engage infographics, photographs, and other visual images, taking advantage of Pinterest and Tumblr, which can be used to store and share visual content. Again, we dive really deep into all of these social medias in other courses, but this is the essentials that you will need for this section number 5, considered the best time to post on social media. Most of the social media nowadays come with the feature of social media algorithms. It's important to get engagement within the first few hours of posting so that the algorithms will show your posts to more of your audience. And finding the right times to post for your brand can help with that. The right items here, it can include the particular days of the week, even to a smaller detail as the hours of the day. To provide a personalized experience to your brand's followers, you need to post according to your audiences social media usage behavior. When done right, there's a higher chance of them seeing an engaging with your social media posts, more reach and more engagement. So always double-check your analytics and the people you're targeting. If people you are targeting are in New York, you'll be posting around their schedules and check your analytics when they're actually viewing your content. If you are taking on a new social media profile, don't worry, you can start with a few informed guesses. Think logically about when your audience might be online and interacting with your social media posts. For instance, mornings and evenings during commute time, maybe a lunch or a tea break, and so on. Once you have a handful of informed guesses, it's time to test them, set up our regular posting schedule to maintain the consistency of your social media engagement. There are many platforms that you can use to plan a scheduled social media posts even for the upcoming weeks or months at once, we recommend a free one like HootSuite. Afterall. Be sure to not only use social media as a branding tool, but to effectively stand out and keep customers engaged and interested. 26. 25 Product Packaging: Let's talk about packaging. So what is product packaging for dose that aren't going to do physical products but only services or digital products. This might be a little bit less relevant, although I would still like you to go through this because you can still brand your packaging digitally for either services or digital products. So then back to what is product packaging. Product packaging design refers to the creation of the exterior of a product that includes choices in material and form, as well as graphics colors and fonts that are used on wrapping a box, a can, a bottle or any kind of container. It's a practical tool, but it's also more than that. Like any good design. Packaging tells a story as a visual representation of a brand's and the packaging is a primary mental image that leaves its mark on consumers minds. When people look at your packaging, it should appeal to a specific instinct, memory, or a motion. So the objectives of determining the product packaging or to connect with consumers and separate itself from competitors. To do that, it has to create a balance between looking unique enough to the point where comparisons and similarities with other packaging wouldn't be made and familiar enough for the audience to easily make sense of. And remember before designing the packaging for your product, there are three basic questions for you to answer as a guideline to start, number one, what is the product? This should be easy. What are you selling? How big is it? What materials is it made of? Delicate, this question is going to help you determine if there are any logistical must for your product packaging. For example, a delicate product will require more secure packaging, something that is large or would odd dimensions, on the other hand, may require a custom packaging solution instead of an out of the box, box number two, who's buying the product? Is a product supposed to be used by men, women, or both? Is it for children or adults? Is it geared towards people who are environmentally conscious to those on a budget or with lots of disposable income, it product's packaging should appeal to its ideal consumer. It's important to know who that consumer is before you start the design process. Products for older adults may need larger texts. Alternatively, items geared towards an affluent customer will need to consider materials. They create a feeling of luxury. A couple of years ago, I was invited for the American Express Black centurion card and I did a full unboxing on this. If you want to experience what a luxury car feels like unboxing and how American Express treats their top tier customers. Definitely check out my unboxing of the American Express centurion card number three, how are people buying the product or a purchasing it in a supermarket, small boutique, online, you're going to want to think about packaging differently. If the product is going to be sold online and shipped, then if it's going to need a stand out from the competition on a big box store shelf, items that will be sold online probably shouldn't have a lot of extra space that could cause the product to rattle around or the package to bend. And those that will be on a boutique shelf will need to catch the eye of a buyer surrounded by cutesy items in cutesy packages. 27. 26 6 Basic Principles Branding your Ad building: Let's talk advertising. Again. We have a fully deep cores that goes into this. But in this section we will cover the bare essentials that you will need to get started. But like all videos, this starts with a question. Have you ever wondered how advertising could help your business? Maybe you have friends like I do, who literally just get so much return on investment. In short, it helps your business grow. We all notice, have to do it right? Benefits of small business advertising include attracting new customers and helping you sell more products and services to existing customers. It can increase profitability to by helping increase order size. Although you may not have a large or formal marketing or advertising department, and you may not be able to afford a big ad agency. That doesn't mean you can't create successful advertising. Here are six basic principles to help you on your way building an ad that can drive business. Number one, and this one we keep covering because it's really important and even more important in advertising, the fine your customer. Successful advertising begins with acute knowledge of your marketplace and your target customer. I've invested in many startups and the number one problem, and it's the same problem I was dealing with the first three years of my business. I did not know exactly who my customer was. Who are your customers and what do they need? What do they want? They you can provide. Those are very important questions. It's important that you create a profile of your core customer, then focus your message to that profile. Otherwise, you risk creating an ineffective message with an unclear focus that strikes at the heart of no-one. Be specific in your profile because it defines what you say, how and where you say it's number to craft a single message, the USP or Unique Selling Proposition. It's the most important piece of copy to be written in one or two sentence statement that articulates the single central idea that your ad must convey. It is what will differentiate you from your competitors. Every creative ideas should track back to the USBE. If you've ever heard and add criticized for being brand or off strategy, the reference is to add creative that does not align with the USP. In short, developing a USB ensures the your ad will see exactly the right thing to exactly the right customer. Number 3, create intriguing advertising after you have defined your target customers and what you need to say to them, the strategic left-brain work is done, is now time to unleash the right brain and create intriguing advertising. And that's where agencies like my agency or any other big agency gets paid for producing intriguing advertising usually begins with creating an overarching concept or theme that reflects your companies or products unique identity. It also may showcase key benefits of your company or product. Open your mind, unleash your imagination, and let your inner creativity free. Number 4, maker claims credible, It's human nature to be skeptical of advertising. So it is your responsibility to be sure that what you say is true, unbelievable. Many advertisers have learned the hard way. Unsupported claims erode customer trust and once lost, it's nearly impossible to regain. Consumers will not do business with a company they don't trust. So while you can go overboard with your creativity, never go beyond the truth with the actual claims you make in your ad. And this also applies to one-on-one or group sales. Just stay authentic like we've been saying this entire section number 5, put contact information visibly in your ad. Placing contact information in your ad is so basic, it's a wonder any small business forgets it. Be sure to include your phone number, website, social media, our contact information in your ads, but make sure to not overwhelm your audience only the relevant contact information that you think will be necessary for a client to have as little as friction as possible to get the sale done. In fact, include your contact info on anything and everything. The public sees packaging, vehicles, T-Shirt, other office clothes, and so on. Make sure it's prominent and easy to read, especially in quick view media such as vehicles and billboards. We've done one in our city, a huge billboard in front of the central station where thousands of people pass by. The number one thing you wanna do there, clear contact information, number 6, test and test. Again, there's no such thing as perfect advertising. It can always be improved businesses to regularly conducts testing in a continuing effort to improve their return on their advertising money. So the message is keep testing and observing the data because at the end of the day, you will know what's best for your business. 28. 27 6 secrets to great branding in Customer Service: Let's talk about a branding thing that nobody talks about in other courses. Customer service, customers form the lifeblood of every business and interaction with them is inevitable. As a matter of fact, in today's global marketplace, how you handle this interaction can make all the difference for the success of your business. It can either increase the reputation of your brand and boosts future sales, create a serious damage on all levels. Providing high-quality service and support is what drives customers to return to a business in the future, it directly influences how people perceive the company and will affect their overall opinion. If their experience as positive, it is very likely they will also influence the decisions of others to purchase products or services from you. A good strategy centered around consumers can contribute greatly to strengthening the brand's reputation. The following steps are practical methods in which virtually any business can become more customer friendly and improve their brand. Number 1, clearly defined brand values and goals. Start off by defining and writing your company's culture coat. Culture code should serve as the foundation of all the brands actions and define how your company will approach everything you do. Culture code needs to practically answer questions like, what is the company's purpose and which values does it nurture? In which ways did accompanies customer support standards to reflect its values? How does customer support reinforce the company's purpose? This vision defined in culture code should be carried through every job role top to bottom. It should guide all the decisions employees make and all the actions they undertake number to take advantage of the digital aspect, most consumers will interact with a business online before committing to purchase. Websites should be designed in such a way that it supports the purchase funnel. It should have easily accessible contact information, especially call center numbers. Remember, customers want transparency and most of all they want to know there are real people behind your brand. So if something goes wrong, they will actually be able to reach a real person. I've had many people, including myself when I would accompany not wanting to buy. If they're not sure that there's a real person at the end of a chat or a phone number by people just using chat robots. When you're using robots, they are always in addition to showing that you are a personalized and customer focused company when it comes to online interaction, there are a number of methods that need to be analyzed, all of which can play into building trust between the company and its consumers. Things like blogs, social media engagement, and how fast you respond and responses to reviews are some of them. Number three, establish and outstanding call center. Good communication is key in any relationship and phones are still one of the best branding devices out there. It gives you access to your customers undivided attention. And if customers are impressed with their phone experience, you will be remembered. Actually not only remembered, but it will most likely inspire action. Outstanding experience usually plays a major role in your customer's word of mouth, especially advertising to friends, family, social contacts, and others. Number 4, allow customers to contribute. A common hallmark of the majority of successful companies is that they allow their customers to speak out about their experience with the company, regardless of whether the experience was good or bad, the business should address as many of their customers concerns as possible in order to build on trust and instill into them feeling. I acknowledged, this process can also help accompany understand when and why they fail to meet their customer's expectations. And dad is almost as important as a positive review. Number 5, make customer service everyone's job, taking good care of each and every customer should be a priority of the entire company from sales clerks to C-suite. Seeing management take the reins and help on the front line should create a positive impression that everyone is truly contributing to customer satisfaction. It is also pivotal importance to hire the right customer service representatives. Give them appropriate training about the company's products or services. Educate them about the consistency in providing quality service and the importance of reflecting the values of your brand. At last, brand-building is a lot about connecting with customers through what a brand does, not just through what they say. In this regard, customer service is a great channel for creating positive experiences and emotional associations which are brand. If done right, it should increase the lifetime value of customers and become a brand's distinctive competitive advantage. I hope you enjoyed this section and I'll see you in the next one. Thank you. 29. 28 Brand Strategy: Welcome to the branding tips for entrepreneurs section. In this video, we will be going deeper into creating a brand strategy. If you are an entrepreneur in a brand strategy, you basically bring all the puzzle pieces that we discussed before together. It's a long-term plan for the development of a successful brand to achieve your specific goals, the brand strategy should affect all aspects of your business and it's connected to consumer needs, emotions, and competitive environments. And to clear up the biggest misunderstanding, the brand is not your product or your name or your logo. Your brand is about your purpose or your personality. Have in mind the following mission, vision and purpose and values in order to better understand your business and how to put it to work, you should know precisely who you are, which you want to achieve, what the reason is for your business and its existence, and what your values and beliefs are for this, establish the brand vision, mission, and purpose. Make sure you have a good foundation of shared values and beliefs. Because only in this way you can build a strong community which will stay with you naturally. Make sure to have a powerful message after you've established who you are, you must learn to communicate with a powerful message. It is up to you how you communicate your message or your story, but make sure that it aligns with the brand, mission, vision, and purpose, values, logo, colors, and so on and come up with the value proposition, the key stories, maybe it's two or three and tagline, additionally, you can about the brand promise, the brand story and elevator page, an origin story to make your message brand even more powerful, identified the brand personality by looking at its voice, tone and language, which again, have to go hand in hand with the other brand elements through tone and language, your brand exhibits its personality, brand design, create the brand's visual identity to design its logo, colors, imagery. We've already covered this before, but this is really important as an entrepreneur, keep in mind, it should reflect the brand's personality and be comprehensible to designers who will work for your brand design. Also make sure that these elements are flexible in terms of change, because it might change as your brand grows or as you grow as a person. And maybe as an entrepreneur, you'll be buying multiple businesses that somehow need to align. So you want to create a flexible brand design that applies to multiple potential businesses that you might acquire in the future. With that being said, thank you for listening and I'll see you in the next video. 30. 29 How to Be Personal: Welcome to this video where we're going to be discussing on how to be personal. But it is important to note that customers are not rational with your brand. You should convey a personality that is unique and authentic in order to stick to your audience, the emotional, and build strong relationships with your customers. In the beginning, especially when you're first 100 clients, you will have to do whatever it takes to get to know them. Have a cup of coffee, follow up with them, call with them, really get to know every single one as you started growing and you start hitting a thousand customers, interaction will slowly start fading away with you as the founder. It will go towards your management and the people who are managing customers. But you will forever remember those first 100 and they will steer your decisions and where your company's values and brand and mission are going throughout time. So with the first 100 clients, just do whatever it takes to be personal and be there for them and find out who they are and who their families are. Trust me, this is only for the first 100. Afterwards you will be able to scale hypergrowth and do all of those fancy things that entrepreneurs want to do. But do not forget the personal aspect and be there with your customers. Okay. 31. 30 Copying Others: Let's talk about copying others. First, do not copy others. There are literally laws around this. Uniqueness is an important factor in developing their brand. Do your research before you work on your brand strategy to see what is already on the market, I have some stories of people literally not even doing a Google search and later on having to completely rebrand everything because it was there on the first page. So just do your research and do not copy anyone in an obvious way because in court haven't Googled a FirstPage competitor. That's just not going to hold up. Take the time, couple of days to properly do your research. If you borrow elements from other brands sooner or later, this will be discovered by others and you would not want to be in that position. Listen, if you're taking a couple of colors here and there for inspiration, that's one thing. But if you're blatantly copying, That's going to turn out wrong. So just don't do it and just be unique. Find yourself, what are your values? What do you want to achieve? And then go from there and create a branding guideline that is authentic to you. Okay? 32. 31 Consistency: Let's talk about being consistent in your brand. Consistency is important because it inspires trust and clarity. To achieve that, you definitely need to work hard on developing a strong brand strategy whose elements are aligned very well with each other. Do not talk about things or upload pictures to your social media that don't relate to or even help your brand by being consistent you can achieve to be among your top competitors. This is what people mean with entrepreneurship, is a marathon, not a sprint. Keep your branding guideline close to you. Then be consistent by posting relevant content to your brand, your customers will follow and be attracted to those values. And those are also the customers that you want to have. 33. 32 Branding for recruiting employees: This video is very important for entrepreneurs. We're gonna be using branding to recruit talented employees, but to attract and retain employees can be a challenge. As you're in the beginning of your career, you think this one is easy. I'm now almost a decade into my business and this one is one of the biggest problems. It's very hard to find loyal, smart employees, and then it's even harder to keep them. Because if you have great employees, other accompanies want them as well. Poaching is definitely a thing. That's where branding comes in. A cohesive brand image is the definition of your organization which can lead to successful recruitment. Because next, two reasons why employees choose an employer such as career development and progression and location. The company image is a considerable variable for future candidates. In addition to that which have to do is call the employer branding. This type of branding should carry the identity of your business, the working culture, and why future employees should choose your business to work for. This not only helps to find the fitting talent, but also existing employees to identify and create loyalty with the business. And this is very important with promoting your company characteristics. You project your brand and are able to attract people who share the same values. Employer branding can help you face the following problems. Things like a shortage of skilled employees when you're growing like crazy, you definitely don't want to deal with that and then say no to certain sales. For example, within all this competition about skilled people, employer branding will definitely help you attract the right person to your business. Another problem is profit. A well-planned recruitment process helps you to hire the perfect fit your business will profit from employees who are passionate and enthusiastic. On top of that, I have to add that, for instance, if you go to and big recruiting agency, they usually charged multiple months of salary up-front, just so that they can go and search potential candidates. So if you have a great employer branding, you don't even need to hire these agencies. You can have your own recruitment inside the company, which can save you so many costs. Another problem is power. Branding helps to create a desirability among candidates. And attractive brand can put you into a position of power in a bargaining because of the high amount of applications. And one of the biggest problems is loyalty. And this is why we're making this video for you in this course. As a business, you should understand the needs of your employees and develop a platform to address them. I'll give you a couple of examples before I close off because this is extremely crucial and important if you're an entrepreneur looking to do branding, everything we've covered so far has been outer branding. And this is about inner branding. A lot of people tend to not approach it the same way. But as I told many companies before, when you're doing branding outside or towards employees, it's the same thing. You'll just have different sales funnels and different purchasing funnels on the one side, clients, they buy something from you and employees get recruited by you. So treated very similarly, have great design, enough white-space on your page, great fond, great colors. And a lot of storytelling. Storytelling is what breeds loyalty, makes people understand what your vision and mission and makes them understand your brand. One of the things that we do as well as we have video testimonials from our employees on the application page, people see our events as well. The after movies of all the international events we've done the get-togethers with all employees through retreats and so on. Just like you're going to invest into a pitch deck and all these sales tools for your sales people. You're going to have to invest into these branding tools for your HR people and recruitment people without great branding assets in the recruitment funnel, the chances lower you'll be recruiting great talent. And with that being said, thank you for listening and I hope you enjoyed this. The left. 34. 0 Bonus Section: How do we discover our passion: Hi there and welcome to the next video where we will be covering on how you can discover your passions. This is a foundational video that will set out the entire course for you as well as your career. Because if you are schooling yourself or educating yourself in the wrong thing, you will not last and we'll make it. However, if you do discover your passion, you might last quite long in your industry. And eventually if you do less long enough in your industry, you might become quite successful. Now this video is all about how we discover our passions. Now you might have heard of the saying, money makes the world go around, money, money, money. Unfortunately, statistics show that this is still probably the main motivation of many entrepreneurs. A lot of people go into business for one reason to make money. However, according to British business magnets or Richard Branson, it isn't actually a good idea. This is your main reason. Your business or your job career is likely to fail. On the other hand, if you are dedicated and passionate about a particular fields, that energy can be highly influential. Not only does it inspire the people who work for you, but your audience also catches onto it. When you believe in something, the force of your convictions will spark other people's interests and motivate them to help you achieve your goals. So are you still interested in establishing your own startup or entering into the tech sector? Well, if you are, you'll have to figure out what makes you tick. You're going to travel through time, revisit your past to reflect on the present and zoom into the future. Here are some brainstorming ideas. First, reconnect with your inner child. Kids are always running around with tons of energy and I feel a little envious when I see how excited and Jaipur they can get. But I remind myself that I was once a kid to try to embrace that inner child within you and release it. The objective here is to rediscover your passion and feel super psyched again, reminisced to your childhood days. What were your childhood aspirations when you were 10 years old? What did you tell everyone you're going to be what were your favorite activities and hobbies? What did you spend most of your time doing? Remind yourself about who you were as a child and that you are actually the same person. Now, you're still curious, playful, and spontaneous. Grab a pen and a paper, write down all these memories from your childhood will give you plenty of ideas. For example, when I was young, my aspirations change them every month. In January, I wanted to be a doctor in February, I want it to be an engineer. In March, I wanted to be an interior designer. When I look back at these memories, I sort of understand why I didn't only have one aspiration because I liked so many things. And to this day I still like all these things. I regularly read about health and technical stuff. My friends like to tease me and call me the Google doctor, or in my spare time you'll see me pinning nice interiors on Pinterest. I have an entire collection of living rooms and game rooms and how to set up my own studios. Even some childhood dreams on how to set up my bedroom that I simply love to look at. And although I didn't end up becoming a doctor or interior designer, I'm still very much interested in the subjects. Who knows, So I'll start a business in that industry one day. The first step is to brainstorm all these areas of interest. Brainstorm all the things you've liked since you are a young up until now, and then slowly dig deeper. Now the next way to brainstorm is to focus on your skills. Everyone is equipped with skills. You may have picked them up over the years, from school or your job, or even from Hobbes. These skills can be divided into two categories, professional skills and personal skills. These are some examples of professional skills. Leadership and management, project management presentations, team-building, critical thinking, research, languages and softwares. And some examples of personal skills. Car maintenance, gardening, first aid and CPR, sports games, arts, cooking, plumbing. We have a list of 8800 business niches that you can check out within this course. Look into the skills that you have honed, something that you have good knowledge about. You wouldn't want to step into unknown territory. Choosing an industry where your skills lie will be beneficial if you are skillful in certain areas, it will be easier and more enjoyable to carry out tasks. Keep in mind that you'll be using these skills to be productive. Think about what you're good at and see if you can apply it to a certain expertise. This will give you a rough picture of what you'll be doing on a daily basis. It also shows you which skills are lacking and the type of team you will need to put together. Along the way, you can also pick up new skills that you think will be helpful. There are loads of books and video tutorials available, set aside some time for learning and growth. What brings out your emotions in order to be passionate about something you need to care about it. There must be particular issues that bring out your emotions. Whether that emotion is happiness, sadness, or anger. You need to figure out why you feel a certain way about certain topics. For instance, when you watch TV or read the news considered times when you felt all of these emotions, perhaps digesting the latest gadgets brings a smile to your face, or hearing about refugees hits a sensitive spot in you. Look back at all those times when these emotions converted into actions, or almost did. Did you tell your friends and family about it? Did you start a Facebook group for it? It would be a good idea to make a collection of these feelings and scale up, be innovative, and have a wild imagination. Maybe you figured out a quicker way to get the latest updates on sports. Or it could be that you want to support a cause. Whatever it is has to be something that ignites your fire. That fire will give you direction and purpose. Now another way to brainstorm is to envision the future. You're not the only one. There are a lot of people out there that don't know where to begin, where to draw inspiration from. Let's take advice from Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX. He's an incredibly brilliant individuals, some column and genius. Now, according to mask, you don't have to change the world. It's good to dream big, but keep it simple thing about something that will be useful to society, that itself is already good enough. Your idea could be as simple game or improvement in photo-sharing, whatever it is, it must be good for the people. It could either have a high impact on the small number of people or low impact, but on a large group of the population, fast forward 51020 years. And imagine what life will be like. What problems would need solving. Focus on how you could solve these problems. For example, when musculus, 22 years old, he thought about problems in these five areas and he felt the urge to solve them. Multi-planetary life was one of them. Sustainable energy, genetics, artificial intelligence, and internet. While studying and Stanford, he did not expect to run a company like Tesla or SpaceX. He simply wanted to be useful to civilization. Today has main objective is to continuously improve technology to make sure they gets better year after year. And he acknowledges the fact that it might take a really long time to materialize. But what matters to him is that he's able to make developments and pass it on to the next generation to continue to be useful. Tried to repeat these two words in your head when going through ideas and problems that need to be solved be useful. You can also check out the interview carried out by Y Combinator with Elon Musk. You can go on YouTube and find it. It's called How to build the future and it's free. Now, you're closing in on your passion. What's next? You've gone through a ton of ideas and now you're feeling super optimistic about it. The next step is to take some precautions. Do your homework first, you need to study the market before jumping into it. Try to minimize risks and potential issues. And yes, we're talking here from a startup perspective. But if you're looking to just get a job at a startup, you have to go through the same motions and just align yourself and then get a job at a startup that it really does your idea. So as I said before and I'm repeating, try to minimize those risks and potential issues when you find companies like that. Here are several factors to consider before embarking on an entrepreneurial career or joining some type of tech startup. Marketing. The Internet offers a wide range of tools and services. You could also hire professionals for the lunch and phase of course, or you can join a startup that is after the launch phase. You will need to think of the channels you're interested in, find good opportunities to introduce your product to the market. A good place to start is by browsing events are relevant to your industry. You can mark your calendar at these events, you'll be able to meet the right people, maybe also to find potential jobs. Another thing is audience. Identify a group of people who will benefit from using your product or using the company's products. Knowing your audience will also help you to communicate at a higher level with them. Another one is competition. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. You can learn a lot from your competition. If you are new in the fields, you can pick up a few tricks from those that have been there and done it tried to figure out their successes and failures. If you notice the things they've done well, you can also run things in a similar way. Another one is identify risks. Risks appear in various forms. It could be financial, legal, or even pandemics drop several scenarios that may likely occur if it is a risky business, you might want to stop here and think twice. Once you've figured out your business idea and done your research, you are ready to proceed to the next phase. It's time to pour everything into a business plan. And if you are looking for a job at a tech startup, and it's time to look over the About section and read everything you can about them so that you can again minimize risks and hopefully have a very good career. I'll see you in the next video. 35. 1 Intro - 4 Biggest Marketing Nightmares Case studies: Hi there and welcome to this section where I'll be covering the four biggest global brand marketing nightmares and what we can learn from them. I am really excited about this section. It took us months to prepare, go really into detail as to what you can learn from this. Granted, it is not completely educational, it is more fun education. But I find, if you know the foundation, if you followed all the steps that I told you, then having these ideas, more advanced things where people can shed a light on things you definitely should not be doing, as you know, when you start out learning. Sometimes you don't know what you don't know. And that's why we wanted to cover these four biggest brand marketing nightmare so that you can learn what you definitely should not be doing in your branding journey. 36. 2 Intro content 4 BMN S: Now let's start with leading brands have usually great marketing. They need to, because it's how they stand out from their competitors with massive budgets allocated to marketing companies expect us the parliament to be revenue drivers, strategies and campaigns are crucial to the success of a business. It is such a wide process that involves advertising, public relations, promotions, and sales without marketing, how would people ever know of your existence? According to de Lloyd's CMO survey, marketing budgets on average take up to 11 percent of the total company's budget. The biggest spenders are those into consumer packaged goods industry. This industry forks had more than doubled the average budget, 24%. To be exact, consumer behavior is extremely diverse. Every individual is unique and brands need to diversify to reach their target audience. Most big brands make use of all the channels out there and focus on the ones with the most returns with huge sums of money being spent unless perfection is expected, however, you can expect to hit a home run every single time, even with the best of the best working in your teams, there will be mistakes, the meat turn into disasters. We are humans. After all, It happens to the best of us and that's why we've compiled this section today. You don't get intimidated with all of this information. Here we'll take a look at for globally recognized brands from different industries. We go over their marketing efforts as well as the marketing nightmares they faced over recent years. So without further ado, let's jump into the first one. 37. 3 History & Context 4 BMN S: Marketing nightmare number 1. Let's zoom in on Dove and its marketing practices. In 2017 at launched a campaign that became known as bottle gates. But before we go deeper into the campaign, let's take a look at doves background owned by Unilever. Dove is a personal care brand sold in over a 150 countries. Brand finance estimated the Unilever own company to be worth 4.1 billion, making it the tenth most valuable beauty brand in the world. It offers products such as deodorants, body washes, lotions, hair care, and facial care. Over the years, Dove has established a brand image through its marketing efforts in the minds of its customers, it has established itself as a purpose-driven brand, its supports and celebrates women. When you visit the dove website, it refers to itself as the home of real beauty. As you scroll down, you'll read, beauty is not defined by shape, size, or color. It's feeling like the best version of yourself, authentic, unique, real with its marketing team, this personal care brand took a very intelligent approach. It conducted a study to explore the thoughts and emotions of its consumers and potential consumers. And the approach was spot on. The Real Beauty campaign kicked off in 2004. It was the result of a study conducted on 3200 women all around the world aged 18 to 64, dove was on a mission to understand would women felt and thought about living in this era. Very interesting numbers from the study though that I want to share with you, our 31 percent of women viewed themselves as natural. 29% of women viewed themselves as average. Only 2% saw themselves as beautiful. The numbers were obvious. Most women did not see that they were beautiful. The majority of women thought of themselves as your regular Jane Doe. Moreover, 1 third lean towards being natural. These results, dove moved on to the next step, the study change the beauty industry. Dove started using digital experiences to emotionally connect with its audience. The strategy was to help women feel comfortable with who they were. That normal people also matter to the world, and they definitely succeeded for more than 15 years, Dove brand successful campaigns associated with a positive body image. One very effective campaign was there billboard ads when other brands focused on only using professional models, dove hired what they called ordinary women to Grace their billboards. The public loved this campaign because it showed that normal women could also be model's success after success, the Real Beauty campaigns continue to roll out. However, in 2017, Dove caught everyone by surprise. The launch of the limited edition bottles into communicate that every body type is beautiful, but it failed to do just that. The campaign received some heavy blows on the Internet and proved to be a complete disaster. You can see in the image of the advertisement here. Okay. 38. 4 Bottlegate Analyzed 4 BMN S: Let's talk about the campaign. Dove manufactured six different types of bottles. What was the difference? The shower gel inside was the same, but each bottle resembled a woman's body type. The campaign was the brainchild of globally recognized Ogilvy London. And this is the message they were trying to convey. Beauty comes in a million different shapes and sizes are six exclusive bottled design celebrate this diversity. Just like women, we wanted to show that our iconic bottle can come in all shapes and sizes too. That's what the dove website says. There are different body shapes and bottles for presented that from voluptuous to slim, tall to petite. In this image, you can see the six bottles of the limited edition bottles and the original bottle on the far left, there's an hour glass bottle, a tall thin bottle with smaller curves, a pear shaped bottle and even squatter pear-shaped bottle and so on. The concept here was whether you are tall and skinny, potato round, curvaceous. It didn't matter. The bottles were supposed to remind everyone to celebrate this diversity. What went wrong? The idea sounded great, just like many ideas around the table may sound great. It was all about respecting everyone's beauty, different body shapes and sizes. Public thought about it and decided to give it a big thumbs down. Instead, it backfired and things turn bidder for Dove. How did a brand that always got it right? All of a sudden get it wrong. Their entire mission vision had been completely misunderstood. Weren't they trying to communicate the importance of real beauty? Why were they now reminding their consumers about their body shape? The women that bought dove felt confused about the bottles. Which ones were they supposed to buy? The ones that resembled their body shape, they started comparing themselves to other women as well. They even wondered if they could buy a bottle that didn't represent their physical appearance. Now let's talk about the reaction. Dove had good intentions, but the message just didn't seem to hit a target these days. People will take it to social media and share it with the world. Social media can be very influential in society, as well as damaging for a brand's image. In this case, posts mocking the dove limited edition bottles were shared and seen by thousands. The reactions on Twitter, we're crazy. A swarm of Twitter users made fun of the brand. Some of the posts received thousands of likes and were retweeted many times, most users expressed the dove was supposed to be inspiring body positivity, not self-consciousness. The Real Beauty campaign became a laughing stock all over social media. Memes popped up here and there the verdict was in the public feud, the campaign as ridiculous. It wasn't only social media. Critics also had something to say about the campaign. Here are some examples. Doves attempt to create a product experience that liberates the user from self-doubt accidentally stirs up that very thing, that one came from the Atlantic. Many journalists also referred to the whole ordeal as bottled gates. They noted that the beauty giant had gone from empowering to patronizing its consumers, crossed the line with these bottles. According to an article by The Guardian, Real Beauty clearly was not a bottle of shower gel. If a woman wanted to feel at peace with herself, real beauty would be our own type of body without being compared to a product. The fact that Dove compared beauty two bottles was why everyone just didn't get it. However, let's dive deeper into what Dove did next, because that's what matters when things like this happen. 39. 5 Key Takeaways & Conclusion 4 BMN S: To deal with this crisis, Sophie Galvani, the global brand Vice President, addressed the public. She explained that Dove celebrates all women. The limited edition bottles were designed to celebrate the diversity of all women and that they were not available for sale. In an official statement, she focused more heavily on their positive impact rather than the slip up. She said, We take women's beauty confidence very seriously through the dove Self-esteem Project, we have reached more than when he million young people with body confidence education. And we aim to reach 20 million more by 2020. Let's talk about the key takeaways for us as branding students for over a decade, dove had stood out from its competitors. It had the kind of brand personality everyone wanted to be acquainted with. The company had invested a lot of money into research, creativity and brand promise, and it proved to be worth it. Millions of women felt connected to the Real Beauty campaigns they could relate. And this generated a ton of sales for Unilever. So where did it all go wrong? Was it a message with good intentions gone wrong? Perhaps communication from eight to be somewhat distorted, possibly, according to Andrew Wayland, the founder and CEO of the body image Therapy Center in the nation's capital, it's simply missed the mark. If you present objects instead of using real people, you're giving the public something to tease you about. He says, the more we be humanized, the experience of having different body types, the easier it is to say there's something wrong with you as it became the laughing stock of the Internet dove and it's reps gave very few comments and let the whole thing passed by. The bottles were not for sale, but until today you can still read about the limited edition bottles, the archives campaign section on the dove websites. So very interesting read, after spending some weeks as a subject of ridicule, everyone moved on. Although it was a marketing nightmare, many still love the brand. According to a survey by morning console, the product continued to be rated above competitors such as Olay and knee. Via Out of curiosity, the market research company conducted a poll to see which bottle women would buy if they were put on shelves, most women still preferred the original bottle, followed by the one that looked like a voluptuous woman. I guess the last question is, Which bottle would you choose? Share it with me in the question section, and I'll see you in the next video. 40. 6 Pepsi Intro 4 BMN S: Let's talk about the next marketing nightmare. I'm sure you've heard of Kendall Jenner with over a 130 million followers on Instagram. She's a well-known model and media personality, born in 1995, which makes me quite old. She rose to fame in the reality TV show keeping up with the Kardashians, which also featured her famous family. I'm sure you've also consumed Pepsi before, originally created way back in the 18 nineties, Pepsi is a carbonated drink for those that don't know, that's over a century of sales and marketing experience, widely considered to be a long-time rival of Coca-Cola. This is what their market share in the US looks like. Pepsico has 30.8%, Coca-Cola, 42.7. Coca Cola leads to weight in the US, would Pepsi not far behind, but in other parts of the world, Pepsi out sells its rivals, such as in Oman, India, Dominican Republic, and Guatemala. As you can see, these two are the leading brands and the carbonated drinks industry for these huge brands, celebrity advertisements are not unheard of over the years, Pepsi has shot commercials starting Britney Spears, pink, Beyonce and Enrique and glaciers. All of them are household names, leveraging on gender. Star power Pepsi decided to team up with her in its 2017 commercial. This is a classic example of celebrity branding, which is the use of a famous person to generate buzz around a brand. Having a celebrity as the subject of your advertisement can be a powerful marketing tool. And Pepsi did just that for three years from 2001 to 2004, Speer says collaboration with Pepsi was perfection. On the other hand, generous experience was short-lived, proving to be quite different. In April 2017, Pepsi aired a two-minute commercial which led to controversy. It was a major misstep and execs at Pepsi ended up pulling the ad. Let's talk about that commercial. 41. 7 The commercial & Problem in detail S: The live for now commercial, also known as live for now moments anthem, was the title of that commercial that was pulled one day after the beauty of it received so much criticism on social media and media outlets to make matters worse, many also use it to entertain their audiences according to Wikipedia as description, the ADD kicks off with a hand opening a can of Pepsi, and then shows a young man playing the cello on a rooftop. The music soundtrack begins and new view switches to a protest. Would people showing gestures of peace and carrying signs and read join the conversation and peace symbols. The view dense switches to a young woman who appears to be a professional photographer going through her print photographs, then have used switches, too generous character who's in the middle of a photoshoot as she models, she becomes aware of the protesters outside. The cellist also notices the protests and then takes a sip of PepsiCo while watching the protesters from a balcony. The view then switches to the photographer. She also notices the protest outside. She grabs our camera and heads towards the protesters, the cellist and gestures to gender to join them. And she responds by removing her blonde wig. She hands to wake her assistant and walks towards the marchers, the cameras and focuses on police officers who are monitoring the protest. Jenner walks up to the officers and hence a can of Pepsi to one of them. As she does this, the photographers snaps if few shots of this interaction. The police officer drugs from the can and you can hear the crowd cheering. The photographer puts aside her camera and hugs a protester. The commercial ends this plane. The phrases, live, Boulder, live louder and live. For now, you can see the full add on YouTube. Obviously for copyright reasons, we're not going to be featuring it here. Just type in Pepsi's ad or something Jenner Pepsi ad. You'll probably see it again. The title is live for now. The problem was that the ad resembled the protests and the Black Lives Matter movement. The shot of Jenner walking up to the officers was almost identical to taking a stand in Baton Rouge. Comparisons were made to the July 2016 event when a woman named Alisha evidence. I might be butchering that name here, but I'm trying my best. She approached the police on her own and was subsequently arrested. The memories of these events were still fresh and real. Many condemned Pepsi for not being sensitive to this issue. And whenever well-known companies make a mistake in the eyes of the public, they get punished for it. And that's what Twitter users did. Not only was it the center of attention on Twitter, but the advertisement was also the subject of a YouTube parody video. Comedian veto guess wildly took advantage of the opportunity by attending an anti-trust protests in Berkeley, California. He recorded himself walking through a group of violent protest service where he tried offering them a can of Pepsi in the commercial as gender hands to Canton officer, the crowd of protesters respond with cheers and everything calms down. But in real life, as good quality was trying to do this, it did not work and the protesters ignore them and remained hostile. His video went viral and it was titled Berkeley protesters take the Pepsi challenge. The video has close to millions of US today. So you can watch it again on YouTube. You can watch it again on YouTube by typing in protesters take Pepsi Challenge. Pepsi has been ridiculed on Twitter and YouTube over this. But if things did not stop there, what was even worse was Saturday night life also referred to the commercial in one of their sketches. In this sketch, beg Bennett place the guy behind the vision of the protest, add as he's on the phone, he tries to explain this brilliant storyline he came up with. He's heard saying, okay, so well, It's an homage to the resistance. There's this huge protests and the street reminiscent of Black Lives Matter. Everybody's marching, right? And then they get to these police officers and you think it's going to go back because there's a standoff. And then Kendall Jenner walks in and walks up to one of the police officers and she hands him a Pepsi and Pepsi brings everyone together. Isn't that like the best ad ever? He says, then generous character played by Cecily's strong enters the scene. She's also on the phone with one of our famous sisters going over her latest gig. And he says something along the lines of, I stop police from shooting black people by giving them a Pepsi. She says, I know it's cute, right? So that led to a public apology. So let's dive deeper into that public apology. Okay. 42. 8 The Reaction & Public Apology analyzed S: So as you can hear, there was a lot of fun made of it, and that obviously led to a public apology. So let's cover that public apology from an educational point of view. When a company as big as Pepsi makes a mistake of this magnitude, it is forced to act quickly. A spokesman for the soft drinks company originally said, this is a global attitude reflects people from different walks of life coming together in the spirit of harmony. And we think that's an important message to convey, but trying to justify its actions didn't work. One day after the whole ordeal, the commercial was taken down and Pepsi released a public apology through a press statement. There apology read, Pepsi was trying to project a global message of unity, peace, and understanding. Clearly we missed the mark and we apologize, we did not intend to make light of any serious issue. We are removing the content and halting any further rollout. We also apologize for putting Kendall Jenner in this position. Then in October 2017, a few months after the commercial aired, Kendall Jenner finally addressed the issue. No one knows why she remain silent or what Tucker this long to finally speak up. In the season 14 premiere of keeping up with the Kardashians, she broke down in tears and show remorse for her participation in the campaign. In the confessional interview, she's seen talking about how excited she was when she got the gig. She said something along the lines of when I first got this offer. I mean, it's a huge company. The people I was following were so iconic and amazing. Kendall said, Michael Jackson has done it. Britney Spears has done it beyond, say has done it. Pink list goes on. So to get something like that was just exciting, she continues to interview, trying to explain that she made these work decisions together with our team and she trusted everyone after I saw the reaction and a red, what people had to say about it, I most definitely saw what went wrong. I was so stuck in a really didn't know what to do and I completely shut down. I found it important to include here both sides from every single perspective. So you can really learn from those mistakes. But let's dive deeper into the key takeaways. 43. 9 Key Takeaways (Outro) S: With real protests dominating headlines, the Pepsi ad was tasteless. After facing so much criticism, the Cola brand had to halt the commercial and apologize to the public. Here is what we can learn from Pepsi's epic fail. First, be selective with trending topics. Trending topics helped to garner attention. However, do not choose sensitive ones. Stay away from shooting and add related to diseases, or in this case, protests next, make an impact by investing in corporate social responsibility projects. If you're a company wants to genuinely make an impact and generate publicity, do it through a commercial. Instead, opt for CSR activities such as starting a good cause or making a donation through CSR, you can convey your intentions and positive messages. It's the old saying of show it by your actions rather than your words. Next, take responsibility for your mistakes to be fair on Pepsi, they did act quickly after facing a lot of criticism. Pepsi made an official apology to the public and to Kendall Jenner through a press statement and several social media accounts, they realized their mistake and make the effort to soften the blow, although damage was already done, don't play with politics. If you're in charge of Company Branding, do not ever play with politics unless it is really something that you are standing IE, 100 percent behind. Listen to truth, this controversy does sell, but in this case it will just lead to a negative perception of your company and a lot of hassle trying to fix it. So if you decide to take it on, be aware that that's the downside, at least now you know what not to do and maybe how you could fix it better if you find yourself in that situation. 44. 10 Intro Adidas 4 BMN S: The vast world of marketing can be broken down into many segments. Email marketing is one of them. Alongside Ted growth, we've also seen a boom in this form of marketing. It's all about sending a message to a group of people via e-mail. Many companies employ email marketing strategies with the following objectives to build loyalty, trust, or brand awareness with so many advantages, it is clear why this form of marketing is so popular and widely used. It is significantly cheaper and faster than snail mail. In a matter of seconds, you send a high volume of messages. From these messages, you can also gain insights into consumer behavior. It's one of the most measurable marketing strategies ever. You can track things such as who opened your emails and which links they clicked on. Not to mention, most people check their inboxes on a daily basis. It is without a doubt that a company as big as added US has been using e-mail marketing for ages, infamous for its three stripes logo. This sportswear brand originated in Germany. The company was founded in hertz, so good now RA by adult Dassler in 1924, together with his elder brother Rudolf, they operated under the name Dassler Brothers shoe factory, focusing on enhancing the quality of spiked footwear for athletes. He started using Canvas and rubber instead of heavy metal pipes. In 1936, Dassler managed to persuade us printer Jesse Owens to use his spikes at the Summer Olympics. This proved to be a successful collaboration for both ones back four gold medals and the Dassler shoes became known to the whole world. In 1947, relations between the brothers turned sour and they split up. Rudolph went on to start his own company, ru dot, derived from his name and adults started, added does also an abbreviation of his name after decades of experience in the sportswear industry and a few changes in ownership today, added US is the largest sports where a manufacturer in Europe, keeping up with times to sportswear giant decided to stop advertising on television and shifted its focus to digital media. Here is an example of their welcome email. As you visit their online store and sign up for their newsletter, you'll receive this e-mail based on email analytics, the average open rates for welcome e-mails are often above 80 percent. So it might be one of the most important emails your company will ever send out. The objective of a welcome e-mail is to remind people of your brand and your online existence. You want people to be exploring and clicking on your website with this e-mail added us doesn't forget to thank you. At the same time it offers you a discount code as well as links to their top sellers. Here's a classic example of making your new subscribers happy and trying to convert them into paying customers. Email marketing is a department were added as has really excelled in the past few years. However, we all make mistakes. It's what makes us humans. 45. 11 The Problem 4 BMN S: In 2017, added as blasted out an email to all Boston Marathon finishers and the subject line red congrats, You survived. The Boston Marathon, clearly added as had good intentions. They wanted to congratulate everyone for achieving such a feat. But what they didn't take into account was the events from four years before and how the public would perceive it during the 2013 Boston Marathon, there was a bombing which killed three people and injured more than 26017 people lost their limbs, motivated by extremist beliefs some brothers planted to home-made bombs near the finish line of the race. Both bombs went off within 14 seconds of each other, not associated with any terrorist groups. No one knew why they would commit such a horrific act. One of the brothers later admitted that they also had plans to detonate a bomb in Times Square, New York. There was so much chaos and strategy. A sporting event that was supposed to be about health and competition was now the subject of a bombing attack. Concerns over security began to mount then four years down the road. Just imagine receiving an e-mail with this subject line. Just imagine you've completed the prestigious Boston Marathon, a very historic race that many runners across the world would love to participate in. For some, it's a lifetime achievement. You open your e-mail and get congratulated for surviving. Of course, all these memories of the bombing come rushing back. It's no surprise that the email was met with negative reactions. How did the company failed to make this connection? Who came up with the wording added as his blunder became the talk of the town, it spread like fire all over social media and popular news outlets. Twitter of course, blew up like crazy. We've all sent out messages that we later on regrets, but we can just apologize and move on. For a brand as big as added as such, an insensitive subject line would only lead to catastrophe. You would think that they're marketers would have the expertise and experience to select better word choices. What added does did next was the best and only thing they could do. 46. 12 The Solution 4 BMN S: Following this mistake, added as did the right thing. They admitted their mistake and took responsibility just three to four hours after the e-mail was sent out, a public apology was issued on their social media accounts at it as apologized for his careless mistake and only had good words for the Boston marathon, the sportswear giant was swift to respond, preventing matters from escalating, but the damage was done and it will go down as one of the worst subject lines and email marketing history fast forward a year after the email mess up and added as bounced back even stronger, the official apparel partner and to celebrate 30 years of partnership with the Boston Marathon, they came up with a brilliant idea, added us in partnership with digital agency growth, came up with a here to create legend campaign, drew the CEO of grow announced, we are thrilled to create a first of its kind experience for added ES at the Boston Marathon, we wanted to harness the power of 30 thousand runners, generating data from the very race bibs that sport the Adidas logo and transform the entire race into a creation engine. The result is an epic personal highlight film for every single runner who becomes part of the legend of this incredible event, cameras had been installed in certain spots of the race course to capture individual videos after the event, runners didn't receive an insensitive e-mail. Instead, they were in for a treat delivered within hours after the race ended, Oliver unearths received an e-mail were added as shared access to all the videos, 30 thousand runners, 30000 unique videos. You can see that video on YouTube if you type in here to create added S campaign. 47. 13 Key Takeaways 4 BMN S: Let's go deeper into the key takeaways because email is something that all of us who will be managing in our branding and marketing careers. Crisis management is an important skill that companies should have at any given time, a small issue could snowball into a big one, causing long-lasting damage, could be anything, because you never know how the public will react with that in mind, organizations need to have a strategy to handle the crisis, and they need to do it as quickly as possible. Here are three tips to handle a crisis like that. First, act quickly. During a crisis, it is crucial to respond as soon as you can. The Boston Marathon e-mail was sent out on Tuesday morning and by Tuesday afternoon at it as had already issued an apology, it took them only a few hours to do so. The longer you wait, the more damage there may be issues statement showing that you acknowledge that crisis, but also be sure to check that all your information is accurate. Second, take responsibility. Mistakes happen, and the best way to deal with them is by owning up to it. That's exactly what added as did in a matter of hours, the sportswear brand issued as sincere apology and praise to the Boston Marathon, although it's probably only one individual or department responsible for the wording as an organization, it didn't try to deny it or shift the blame on others. Number 3, be Cuban. During a crisis, we need to keep in mind that people have emotions. That is why the crisis happened in the first place. So when we're dealing with a crisis, tried to express empathy and concern, in this case added as used very strong words such as incredibly sorry and deeply apologize. Another focus of the apology was on the runners. Every year we're reminded of the hope and resiliency of the running community. Hopefully you're able to learn from this experience as well. And of course, I do hope that this never happens to you in the future. But if it does, maybe this video will help you then. But with that being said, let's go to the next one. 48. 14 Intro HnM 4 BMN S: The e-commerce industry is booming and there are no signs of it's slowing down. During the pre COVID era, shoppers had already been attracted to the advantages of online shopping. It's more convenient to shop for certain items. Online items get delivered to your doorstep, you waste less time commuting and so on. Given the recent circumstances, more and more consumers took their shopping online and many have said that they're never going back in March 2020, Statista and.com recorded that global retail website traffic hit 14.3 million visits, up 1.53 billion from two months earlier, with the masses thing at home to curb the spread, consumers turn to the Internet to make their purchases. If this is now the most popular channel for shopping, brands will have to closely monitor their campaigns and content. What exactly is e-commerce? According to Wikipedia, e-commerce is the activity of electronically buying or selling products on online services or over the internet. And electronic commerce draws on technologies such as mobile commerce, electronic fund transfers, Supply Chain Management, Internet marketing, online transaction processing, electronic data interchange, EDI, inventory management systems and automated data collection systems. Over the years, brands have migrated from brick and mortar to online shops. Not only are their products offered in physical retail stores, but there are also readily available on websites with so many advantages, There's no doubt that more and more retailers are headed in this direction. Let's take a look at fast fashion clothing giant H and M, the second largest global clothing retailer, just behind in the texts, H&M operates in 74 countries with over 5000 stores. Ten years ago, Swedish retailer H&M virtually opened its doors after seeing the success of online stores such as ASS, H&M followed suit, the retailer was slow to see the opportunity in e-commerce in the early days, the design of the website was not very appealing. There were many flaws and the whole shopping experience wasn't user-friendly. However, fast-forward to today. And the clothing giant has an online presence available in 33 countries and plants to open more online stores. Let's talk about the online store website. Online shopping growing rapidly in popularity. Marketers have to shift their focus to all things digital discovers, social media management, marketing campaigns as well as content creation. If your website is now your store friend, you need to create great content as well as chick, everything that gets published for a brand like H&M, which has been killing it in the past decade, no one expected a slip up, you never do from such amazing brands. That's why when it happens, it becomes such a big deal. 49. 15 The Problem HnM 4 BMN S: To many, the retailer committed one of the most infamous marketing disasters in fashion history. What online stores like to do is have models wearing the articles of clothing for sale. It gives the customer a better sense of imagination. So H&M UK was promoting a green hoodie for kids. It was a nice and simple hoodie would a boy of African heritage as the model, everything looked fine as usual. However, as you paid more attention to the text on the hoodie, you'd soon realized that it red, coolest monkey in the jungle. This text was in plain white block letters. The text itself didn't refer to anything. But when paired together with a five-year-old African boy, the Swedish retailers made an enormous mistake. The picture sparked outrage and many accused H&M for being racist throughout history, racist use the word monkey or ape to refer to African people. This racist comparison is still very apparent in today's society and it's horrible. It's something that should be eradicated, but yet we still see it in modern politics, fashion, as well as sport. In sport, it is common to hear and see monkey noises and gestures when there are African athletes on the field, it happens so often in the UK, Europe, as well as the US. During euro 2012, a banana was thrown at Mario ballad tele by Croatian fans. It's a 21st century and it is unacceptable to make racist remarks or to even have the notion the whole ordeal raised some questions as to how H&M gave the green light to this photoshoot? Who approved the texts on the sweater where they're not any internal monitoring guidelines. Everyone had something to say about it. From athletes to celebrities, all the way to the general public. Lebron James, one of the most famous NBA players, ticket to Instagram. He covered the text on the hoodie with a crown and placed a crown on the head of the African model, the weekend, the singer of hits single star boys stated that he would never work with H&M ever again, having partnered with them for 2017 spring icons campaign in 2017 fall collection, the singer shared his thoughts on Twitter. Twitter users express their opinions as well as they always do. And a reactions were Razi in addition to the criticism H&M face on social media, there was physical violence in South Africa. Protesters trashed H&M outlets in Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Pretoria, due to the monkey advert, hundreds of angered activists gathered and started smashing store property. This three days, giant was forced to close it stores after video footage showed protestors violently knocking down mannequins are ripping clothes off the rails. How did H&M deal with the crisis? 50. 16 The Apology HnM 4 BMN S: No apology could turn the tide for H&M. That's why we're covering it here as well. However, a sincere apology is always much needed. The Swedish retailer May 2 rounds of apologies in response to the shocking and embarrassing content, H&M issued a swift apology and the apology read, we sincerely apologize for offending people with this image of a printed hooded top. The image has been removed from all online channels and the product will not be for sale in the United States, many people were not happy with topology. The product was removed from the US store, but it was still for sale in the UK, as we've learned in the past videos, the choice of words also didn't express sincerity. H&m was not fully taking the blame. Instead of apologizing for promoting such an offensive product, they were apologizing for offending people with this image. You should be making an apology for your actions, not about how people feel. The UK online store proceeded. We were moving the item and then came the second round of apologies. It was a long one and H&M released it to its media list. The full apology read to all customers, staff, media, stakeholders, partners, suppliers, friends, and critics. We would like to put on record our position in relation to the image and promotion of a children's sweater and the ensuing response and criticism. Our position is simple and unequivocal. We have got this wrong and we are deeply sorry, H&M is fully committed to playing its part in addressing society's issues and problems, whether it's diversity, working conditions or environmental protection and many others are Sanders are high and we feel that we have made real progress over the years in playing our part in promoting diversity and inclusion. But we clearly haven't come far enough, agree with all the criticism that this has generated. We've got this wrong and we agreed that even if unintentional, passive, or casual racism needs to be eradicated wherever it exists. We appreciate the support of those have seen that our product and promotion are not intended to cause offense, but as a global brand, we have a responsibility to be aware of an attuned to all racial and cultural sensitivities, and we have not lived up to this responsibility this time. This incident is accidental in nature, but this doesn't mean we don't take it extremely seriously or understand the upset and discomfort it has caused. We have taken down the image and we have removed the garment in question from sale, who will be recycled? We will now be doing everything we possibly can to prevent this from happening again in the future, racism and bias in any shape or form conscious or unconscious, deliberate, or accidental or simply unacceptable and need to be eradicated from society. In this instance, we have not been sensitive enough to this agenda. Please accept our humble apologies. On top of the two apologies to Swedish brand has also put more effort into diversity, equity and inclusion. A few months after the whole ordeal, the company hired as Xen theory as the North America head of inclusion and diversity, she launched a program called layers could be already explained. Layers is an interactive learning workshop. Were the teams come together and we talk about a bunch of different biases and identifying gaps amongst their teams or even them as an individual that may be hindering of business decision. The concept of it is peeling the layers for people to have more of a reflective experience as to what their contribution may be to fostering diversity and inclusion. So what are the key takeaways of this? Well, let's dive deeper into them so that we can learn from this case. 51. 17 Key Takeaway HnM 4 BMN S: First of all, key takeaways, get it right the first time. It doesn't look good for your company. If you have to apologize 2 times, the first time should have hit the spot. Show to your sincere and understand what you did was wrong, never blame others. Next, test any campaign on the variety of audiences before launching a new campaign, test it out on different groups of people, but sounds good to you and your team might not have the same reaction from your audience. Everyone is unique and we all think differently, which brings me to include a diverse group on your creative team. A few months after the outbreak, H&M offered a program to its employees focused on diversity. Education is important and so is having a diverse team with various backgrounds and experiences. Your creative team can produce work that can be globally accepted. Putting different cultures together in one room will have your team standing. United's next. Listen and learn from other controversies. That's why we're doing this educational section. Observe and monitor what other brands are doing wrong. Stay away from politics and controversial topics. You don't want to get caught in this mess. Okay. 52. 18 Outro All 4 BMN S: With the global population growing every year alongside advances in technology, marketing has also expanded the creative minds of marketers come up with new ways to introduce him, promote products and services. Campaigns and strategies are tailored according to different target groups. This is why so many channels have surface over the past few years these days, marketers like to use an array of methods. Although there are many new techniques, there are still some conventional methods that have prevailed. Marketers can opt to focus on the product itself or in promoting through TV commercials. They can also choose to communicate through e-mail or sell items through online stores. There are so many options in a marketer's playbook based on these four marketing nightmares, whichever channel or platform is being used, marketers must always be careful when you are promoting or selling your product to a huge audience. There is no room for error. Such mistakes would only prove to be costly for the company, time-consuming as well. Double-check or even triple check your latest campaigns, run it by several focus groups to see if they will be accepted. Try to avoid being associated with controversial topics. I hope that all of these tips and these case studies have given you a better view on how social media works, branding and marketing, and given you some insights on definitely what not to do, and maybe some insights on what you can do as well. Hopefully you enjoyed it and I'll see you soon. 53. Introduction to QnA Workshops: Hi there and welcome to this workshop. Now, today we're going to sit down together, just like I do with my coaching clients, or when I do workshops at company retreats, or when companies hire me to go inside and turnover like a marketing department or something within their business. I thought that this was probably going to be the best way that you can learn with stories and case studies when I sit down with my coaching clients, one of the things that they mentioned is that even though the courses are super scripted, well edited into the point, what they learn from the most during the coaching talks is my stories, the hardships and failures that I've done, but also the successes and maybe fully fleshing it out from how I've experienced it. Now, I always thought how could I bring this over to you? Because at the end of the day you're sitting there and learning all of this well scripted content, but it's pretty basic. It doesn't really show you the whole gist of it, how I've really applied it and how I've learned those skills. Together with my team, I start thinking. And one of the ideas that got brought up is, what if we just literally do an unscripted workshop? And we take the most common questions of each of our courses and we'd have like a ton now and we'll try to, again like the podcasts that we have as well, which is free content, completely unscripted, unedited, and I just share everything. Now of course the downside is it is unscripted and edited and so you'll have garnet, have a lot of other extra stories, other things that are not as scripted. But because there's a high demand for it, we decided to just release these type of workshop type of contents that you can learn from. So without further ado, I'd like to invite you to enjoy this workshop that we have together and imagine that you and I are sitting in a room together and I'm just explaining things to you as you would with asking me questions. If you have any questions, of course, make sure to ask them. There are within the platform options to do so. Then I will try and take those questions and make a workshop style video around it so that you and maybe others can benefit from it. I'll see you in the next video. 54. How to book more public speaking opportunities: Hi there and welcome to New Q&A workshop. Today I want to cover how to book more public speaking opportunities. Because the other day I was talking to a client of mine who booked a 167 speaking opportunities for last year. And I remember four years ago when I was doing a lot of public speaking, especially after I hit my first ten x speech. And then I started getting invited by Google. A lot of opportunity started showing up. And I want to cover a couple of things that I did. They'd landed me a couple of public speaking opportunities. And then how that gets scaled by my client and how we created a content marketing strategy. Pretty much open to door for people to approach him. Two totally different campaigns. One that could potentially help you because it's a bit simpler and that's how I started my public speaking journey and one that will make you a professional and hopefully full-time job. There's a huge disclaimer that I want to give before I dive into these two roads. And that is that in the beginning, you won't get paid a lot for public speaking opportunities. Your sales funnel is going to matter so much if you want to make money. So what am I trying to say here? What I'm trying to say is that if you see public speakers, they either make money somewhere else, retired and they're starting a new career. Wherever you see they already have money. It's really tough to be a public speaker professionally and do it a 167 times if you don't have money. So be aware of that when you start this journey because in the beginning when you have no name recognition, that's probably what's going to happen. But without further ado, I want to share my story first and how it helped my business and how it grew my business. So I did make money somewhere else. But these opportunities with public speaking gave me new opportunities in business. And then I want to cover how a professional public speaker does it day in and day out. My story. Again, we have to go more than four years back. At this point, we have to go almost ten years back when I was training for my first train the trainers, learning how to become a trainer, learning how to facilitate conferences, how to do the entire agenda flow, how to make sure that I speak in a manner that people listened to me and so on. As I was building the skill, I was meeting people. And what I realized is that in order to get on stage, you need a lot of public speaking opportunities because then a person knows a person and they recommend you, then above all, if you want new opportunities, you're going to need the same people to give you testimonials. In the beginning, what you need to do is book at least three speaking opportunities for free, if you can do it for free wherever possible. And when you get those opportunities, don't just go and give a speech. Get a camera, record yourself, record the whole speech and put it on YouTube. Many of my early speeches you can actually find on YouTube. The reason they're on YouTube publicly available is very simple because when I'm approaching somebody who wants me on their stage, they are requesting if I've spoken before, obviously you see Ted X pictures, but it's a whole different experience. When you actually see the FedEx speech. You see the Google logo, but it's a whole different experience when you see how I did a fireside chat in the Zurich office. So those are very important and I do see quite some mistakes with early beginners or coaches that don't bring a camera and just expect other speaking opportunities to pop by in order for word of mouth spread, you need time and quantity. So don't wait only for that. Get a camera, get testimonials and record your full speech. So that's what I did. I started getting, like I said, these big names. And when those big names, I started opening up specific opportunities that were relevant to me. In the beginning, I literally spoke at everything that I could lay my hands on. And I realized one thing, I was losing time. And because I was losing time while I was speaking, prepping the speeches, I couldn't work. So is literally making less money. It took me literally, I think, a year to realize that public speaking affected my business. Don't know why I didn't realize it sooner. And so this is a warning for you. Don't let it affect your business. What I did afterwards, however, I recommend you do, which is start picking specific spots or places that you can speak ad that are extremely relevant to your sales funnel or your business. I was running a video tech agency, which was literally a tech startup. We gotten nominated, we started getting awards. And so I made sure to apply for specific competitions that could recognize our startup further. That way I could stand on stage and have relevant people from corporates because those were my clients. See what I'm talking about and see what our company was all about. Those specific opportunity started leading to maybe two or three extra clients. But because we were corporate, those were big contracts until my speaking, opportunities lead to actual sales. So that's how I started using public speaking as actually making sales for my company. But that's not a public speaking career. So that's why I wanted to make this video because a lot of you maybe are thinking about becoming a professional public speaker. And as I was talking the other day with this client that booked a 167 speaking opportunities lies here, who is telling the story that he pretty much did what I did. But then he booked like 12 gigs or the year before that or something like that. And he's talking to his mentor. And this mentor pretty much said you only did a 12th. How many people did you reach out to? Apparently was like 15 or something and he got like 12 speaking gigs. He obviously had a great story to tell. So you got a great conversion rate, but he was also very targeted at who he was approaching. That gave them an idea as we were speaking about it, he started thinking about what could be a great content strategy that we were already doing for him that he could utilize into his own career. So one of the things that we started working on is making sure that the speaker reel was good, making sure that there were testimonials, and that the landing page was good. So again, a landing page, literally when you buy a course, that's a landing page or you can click the Buy Now button. Have a promotional video by your speaking career there and some testimonials. I would recommend three testimonials. You're literally good to go. You don't have testimonials yet. Try to get one speaking opportunity with friends or family, or just a local bar or a local Toastmasters. And ask some people there while you're recording with your iPhone to say what they thought about you speaking, that's literally a testimonial. So now that you have these assets, a landing page, speaker reel and a couple of testimonials. You can now start looking into scaling a lead generation campaign because again, you're going to be a professional speaker, right? This is where he took over with his assistant. He led his assistant do a LinkedIn campaign. They would go on Eventbrite target pretty much all the conferences that were relevant all over the world. Because again, remember, virtual is also a conference and there's also a ton of public speaking opportunities now with virtual and so on Eventbrite, they would find the organizers and through the name of the organizer, the organization, they would literally go on LinkedIn, scatter these people, click, Invite, connect and add a note. And then in there put a simple message like, Hey, my name is blah, blah, blah. I speak about these things. People seem to respond really well. Here we can find some testimonials would love to speak about. And then a title that converts really well, which you will only find after you approach a ton of people. You'll get potential speaking opportunities. So a title that converts really well could be something relevant to your industry. Let's say you're a professional public speaker. You need to find your niche. We cover how to find an avatar, right? You need to speak to this avatar specifically, let's say you're a tech entrepreneur. One of the things that you could do is you could have a speech like I had that was named how he became a top 30 startup internationally and got an award or another for corporates, which is very relevant. How we create a video workflow for our corporate clients that create videos in one day instead of four weeks. These are super relevant things that if you have a conference with multiple workshops going on, when people see that especially marketing people, they might join in for a one-day turnaround video workshop instead of a four week turnaround workshop, you need to test out all these different headlines and experiment by messaging like a 100 people and seeing which one converts the best. And that's why a LinkedIn campaign is so relevant because you're gonna get the quantity. And so every ten people that you message, if you've seen, you're not getting any responses, you should be tweaking that message. And as you tweak that message, you're gonna get to 50 or a 100 messages and you're going to start seeing responses. Your goal is to get to 20 to 40% response rate. From those 20 to 40%, you're going to need to convert one to 4% to get you to conferences. Those are standard average kind of conversion numbers. If you're able to convert more, you're doing really well. That means you maybe have more social proof, more expertise. People are really responding to the title of your talk. But whatever you do, if you want to get a 167 speaking opportunities, you need to message to the limit of LinkedIn. And currently I think the limit of LinkedIn when we do lead gen campaigns for our clients is per account. If you have, I think LinkedIn premium, maybe it's different with Sales Navigator, but we tend to not exceed ten to 13. Invite connects. And then you can do with messages, I think 50 a day. Again, that's not a lot. You are personalizing this message, but you have very few characters when you're messaging people. So you really want to keep it to max one or two paragraphs. I would literally just do one paragraph could be really short and simple. The landing page due to talking in the title of your talk. Because when you do a great lead gen campaign and LinkedIn is flowing and you're sending, let's say, ten new potential invite connections and you have 50 messages. As you grow your network, probably you're not gonna get 50 messages in the beginning, but as you grow your network, you will hit those numbers. You're going to be messaging thousands of people over a span of months. And as you have thousands of people and you have a conversion rate of one to 4%. We're now talking about some serious numbers of amount of conferences that you're doing for people who are wondering how you're gonna become a professional public speaker. In the beginning, you're not going to have a lot of money with this. But as you start hitting the numbers that I just mentioned, you hit 3040 conferences, you're actually going to start getting numbers to give you an example. The first time I actually got paid, it was literally just cost price. They flew me out. I paid my hotel for me and my assistance and made sure that I had all transport and food covered in a different country in Europe. It's not fancy, but it was definitely enough for me because for me the funnel that I had, which was a corporate sales funnel, the conversions were much bigger for me there, and so I didn't mind that my costs were paid. Of course, as you progress and you have good talk and you have something to share with big audiences. You're gonna get in touch with people who are making five thousand, ten thousand. This person is making between 1020 thousand per talk. Then you can start getting prices. The best line that will give you. And it's the one that I learned from him actually is always just when you did a speaking opportunity, just ask a simple question, like, do you have any speakers fees? Usually those are budgeted in. So just asking that question will allow you to get an idea of whether there is a speaker's fee and what that speaker's fee is. Because usually speakers are talking in the speaker's room when all these things are happening, they sometimes don't network. They sit in the speaker's lounge in the network with each other. And so everybody kinda speaks. They might not mentioned always numbers, but in some opportunities they do mention numbers. And so you don't want to be the odd one out that didn't get paid in some conferences. They actually do just have speakers fees and you're asking will get you one. And then as you progress, you'll get more connected, a better reputation, and you'll be able to just say, Hey, I'd love to speak at your thing. This is my speakers fee and so on and so on. But again, that's not for now. If you get to that level, you will need proper campaigns, proper set-ups, proper everything. But again, word of mouth is probably going to be the most important part. The lesson that I wanted to mention before we close this type of workshop is because that's where my video agency becomes quite important. What I noticed with the most successful public speakers is that they're not solo public speakers. They have a huge social media presence. So on the one way you can do what we did, which is we go out create regeneration campaign specifically around public speaking. But there's a better way that I found. It's a bit slower. It'll take a couple of years, but that's when you will actually get those $50 thousand speaking opportunities and growth and invited to super exclusive conferences. And that's secret is actually just growing on social media. Pick one social media that you're really good at, or maybe one social media that you want to get really good at and try to grow on that channel. Had one person that I met that just picked Instagram and start growing on Instagram? Yep. Still in this day and age, Instagram was the go-to, not TikTok or YouTube, Instagram and they grew and started working. Same thing with some TikToks. I literally met a person that a year ago didn't have TikTok. And then within a year is just blew up and started getting speaking opportunities, flying to Dubai and all these crazy places. And then YouTube, my personal favorite is another one that you can do, which if you grow and you explode on that, you technically just need one viral video. You'll also just get all these invites in your inbox. And the moment you get invites, you again, just use this one line, which is what is your speakers fee? And then that could lead to potential opportunities at our 10, $50 thousand. And hopefully that helped you with that being said, I'm going to close this video. If you have any questions, please let me know and I'll try to cover them in next videos. 55. Lead Gen with zero budget: Hi there and welcome to a new QnA workshop. Today we will be talking about a question that pops up quite often when I'm talking to new entrepreneurs and startups, which is how to do lead gen or sales when you have no budget. Unfortunately, this is most of the people's journey when they're starting in new business. And so I want to dedicate an entire workshop telling some stories of how I started and when I've invested in young entrepreneurs, diversified entrepreneurs, diverse entrepreneurs, and how they do it as well. So not only have I gone through it myself, I've also seen other people do it and hopefully would a couple of stories today, you'll be able to do it too. So again, on my iPad, I have here the question is how to do lead gen or sales when you have 0 budgets. So in order to understand that, we have to go back to how I started. This was almost a decade ago and at the time I was studying and I was doing multiple jobs at the same time. Now, it's very important that you probably realize that you can just jump into it. I remember at the time I joined a business masterminds, a little chorus just like you hear, joined and had somebody that was talking about how to set up a business, just like I am right now here with you. So it was literally as if I was sitting in his workshop and explaining everything. One of the things that I noticed with my kind of other people in that mastermind, business mastermind who were listening to that mentor as well. Some of them started saying, you need to throw the backpack over the fence. You really just need to dive straight into it. And I remember there were like 500 people who signed up. And then three years later somehow like 90% of those people or even more, just, just kinda vanish. You didn't hear from them anymore. I think there's a handful still that's still talk together. A handful that actually made it. And this is their job now and they work on their laptop. But almost all of them that I met on the first year at an event who are literally telling me, just throw the backpack over the fence, you gotta be dedicated and motivated. I mean, none of them have made it. And sometimes the ones that didn't make it, they were the ones that they did throw the backpack over the fence, but then didn't have enough funds and had to move in with their parents. Then as they were living with their parents, they eventually figured it out. So what I'm trying to say is when you have no budget, you need to be super risk averse. There's, there's somehow a saying or a profile associated with entrepreneurship that if you want to be successful, that somehow you need to take a lot of risk. And it's like gambling in a casino. Yet most of the successful entrepreneurs and I follow and then I've kind of seen make it our quiet incredibly risk averse. And what they tend to do is, of course they tend to risk the ones that take the biggest risks tend to pay off. And those are the ones that are the multimillionaires. But they are very calculated and these are really not stupid people that just throw backpacks over fences. These are people that have either a consultancy background or they have some type of economics or business or Accountancy. I have a law background. So they very much look at a problem, dissect it, cluster it, and just make sure to really see almost all angles that are available. But at the same time they realized that flexibility is necessary and not every angle can be accounted for. So while they do analyze the risk, and they really tried to calculate the risk as well as possible and cover themselves with backups. At the end of the day, it is quite important to mention that everybody who starts out and the ones that make it eventually do take calculated risks. So be aware of that. When you're starting out with no budget. What I'm trying to tell you is don't listen to all of these outliers, these people that make a lot of money overnight almost. And it's somehow seem to make it and keep telling you you have to have this mindset. You really don't have to have any mindset. You need to be incredibly risk averse, be super calculated about which risks you take, minimize your budget. One of the, one of the advices that I follow that I love, and these are the people you should be following on YouTube. Are all those finance YouTubers that keeps saying, save your money, makes sure to have no debts and all those things. Because it's much easier to take calculated risks and you have a higher percentage of succeeding when you don't have multiple chains weighing you down, the biggest chain is going to be monthly fixed costs that you have. Which is why a lot of two-year-olds and teenagers seem to perform much better when they're doing entrepreneurship because they're able to take incredible risks and nothing will happen to them because they are just going to end up living where they live, which is with their parents. They don't have any taxes, monthly costs. There's nothing big going on. So if you're in your 20s, That's good news because again, very low risks. There's nothing weighing you down there, no costs and your fixed costs should be incredibly low. This is also the part where physically you can get away with a lot of things, especially if you're under 25, you can just get away with bad food, almost no exercise and still somehow push through. The moment you start hitting 25 plus those things start fading away, becomes much harder. But yet, the average. Age. If you go online and you look for the average age for an entrepreneur who starts a business that eventually hires at least one employee is 43 years old. So we're seeing a trend. Risks need to be mitigated. You're either in your 20s and you have nothing weighing you down or you're in your forties and you already have some type of backup money and probably like half of your mortgage or something is paid off, you're already saving some of your pension is buildup, so there's almost no debt. So these are incredibly important things to realize. Even though I'm talking about things that have nothing to do with Legion, this is incredibly important because when you are doing regeneration and you're going out and doing sales marketing, whatever topic I might be covering, the fundamentals are going to be crucial to the mindset that you're going to be approaching all of these strategies. Width, if you have a car payment and a mortgage and something broke and you need to get somehow $2 thousand and your savings is like $5 thousand. You're gonna go into sales incredibly desperate. And you notice saying the rich get richer, the poor get poorer in sales. That is even more so the people who are desperate and you can always kind of sniff it out, they seem to convert less sales than the ones who are in abundance. You always want to go into a restaurant that is full and has a line outside. And if you can get a reservation, you'd be stoked getting their reservation and getting there. Rather than going to a restaurant that never has people around. Every time I walk around in a big city when I travel. And then with friends, the number one thing we're looking for is a place that is busy during lunch. Because if a restaurant is busy during lunch, that's usually a good sign. Same thing here with lead generation sales when you're reaching out to people, the first thing you want to fix is your scarcity mindset. And so I'm very much emphasizing the fact that you should not throw the bag back over the fence. You should not take incredible the risks that are going to sacrifice everything. I do think you should be taking risks that are calculated, that every time you have more backing, more fundamentals in place, more savings in place, that you can take bigger and bigger risks and eventually gain more because you're doing those bigger risks. Listening. If you have 10 million in your bank account and you take a risk that is 5 million, which is half of your income that you have in your bank account, then it's much easier to take that risk and possibly make a 100 x, let's say you sell and make 100 million from this 5 million investment, that risks is much easier to take because if everything is paid off and you already have 5 million in the bank, then you just doesn't matter if you have another 5 million. If you have, let's say $5 thousand, like the example before. And you're taking risks based on bad money while you have children and in mortgage and then the heater broke, that. You're just you're literally just increasing the odds of failure. And so that's, that's the first thing you want to mitigate. Look at your situation currently. How is that situation? Are you able to go for three to six months without any sales? I would say that's the first thing you should do. Get an emergency fund three to six months, and then make sure that then you're in a good place. But now you're hearing 0 budget. And obviously I've done my best already. Most of my costs are down. I live in a cheap apartment. I eat cheap food. I make sure that everything is cheap, which is exactly what I did at my budget for the week was $20 for food. That means that I would go into canteens, get myself. It was like a $1 plate that was refillable with salad and potatoes. And that's what I was eating in the beginning of 20 bucks. I literally have the still, the sheets, my budget sheet that I still use to this day. And I can literally go back to those times and I was like 13 bucks a week. So it is incredibly important that you mitigate risks there. But again, you've mitigate risk. Their phone bows down, your rent is down, your your cost of living is down. You now have three to six months so you can survive. No matter what happens. You now are not going to stress out whenever somebody gives you a rejection, that is possibly not even a rejection that you can still somehow change. Which again, we've learned in the sales course. There's a difference between a hard no and then maybe I need to talk to somebody. So again, if you're in an abundance mindset, it's much easier to have those conversations and the chill mindset. And again, convert people over a span of longer. Now, why do you need to convert people over a longer span? There are a couple of things when you're doing lead generation that is important to look out for first, you don't want to do lead generation and getting a cold or converting cold leads to warm leads and inducing buyer's remorse. If you are converting cold leads into warm lead. So you're getting them on the phone, you're getting them excited, but you're pushing too much instead of spreading it out over a longer time, creating familiarity and trust that you might create buyer's remorse. We want to counter act buyer's remorse if we're building a big business. If you're building a business over the long term, you want to counteract that because you want to create loyalty and trust with clients that feel you're in abundance. In my case, my wonky fan, the person that I was focusing on in the beginning of which corporate corporates work over a timespan of six to 18 months. And if I'm lucky, maybe the pilot project would end up starting two to three months in. And then from there we could prove ourselves and start to real project six months. And it would corporates, I needed to have the fundamentals in place to not worry. And again, you don't have to be rich to our fundamentals in place. Eat very low budget, have very low cost, and then you're able to take those risks. And so when I was negotiating with them, even though of course I wanted them to convert within a couple of weeks, I could never push those things whenever I would reach out on LinkedIn to potential procurement managers, I needed to slowly weighed, weighted and sometimes I would reach out to them, have a conversation. They didn't want to talk on the phone. They wanted to, for instance, get a cup of coffee, but they were busy that week. So they need to have a cup of coffee next week. Because again, lead generation is much more than just collecting e-mails and numbers. It's really converting them into these warm leads that potentially could either refer you or become sales. And so as you're building trust, having conversations with them, you are an abundance so you don't have to close that week, even close next week. You're now building a network. And then over a span of several weeks, you can now call with them and be like, hey, we just dropped this offer. A lot of clients who are going crazy for it. Maybe you're interested in trying it out during the pilot project, stuff like that. So obviously that's very B2B corporate type style lead generation. But it's just to say that when you're doing the duration with 0 budget, be aware that the first thing you're doing is creating a good, healthy mindset. Then you're reaching out and realizing that it's not an overnight conversion. Now, obviously the juice and the reason why I get this question, which is, how do you actually do lead generation? In which platforms do you choose when you're doing lead generation and you have 0 budget, so you can just go and buy a camera or do crazy paid ads or something like that. Well, so far, whichever business that we did, we always go where our client is. So before again, you go on the platforms. You have to know who your wonky fairness. And we've covered this in multiple videos already. But pretty much you need to be aware of which platforms your clients hang out with. You. If you don't know where your clients clients hang out, then you have to create testimonial sales, which means you will go on LinkedIn or on Google, and you will call up some businesses, email some businesses, or reach out to people from some businesses. And then it's up to you. You either offer cost price something or you offered to do something for free in return for a video testimonial. Once you have three video testimonials, maybe five video testimonials between that number. You then start looking, Well, you're asking them questions, especially during the video testimonial. One of the things you'll be asking them as, where did you find us or obviously if you called out to them, that's not going to work. But if you go and you let's say you're building a website agency. So you'd ask them in that video, does ammonia will, obviously this isn't going individualism. Well, it's just a recording that you're going to keep for your own research. But in that interview you can just ask them if you normally look for designing websites like we designed for you during this testimonial sale, where would you go? What do you do when you isn't Google? What do you type in on Google or do you go on LinkedIn and you type in a website design agency and then you look for some founders. What are the exact steps that you do? You're gonna get specific answers most of the time in that case, from my experience and I've had thousands of those types of interviews at this point. Most of the time, people, Google's specific services that they are looking for. Other times it's word of mouth through LinkedIn. They somehow stumbled on someone and then their headline read website builder or something like that. And then they just reached out to people. But again, most of the time it's Google and there's a specific key phrase or keywords that they're using and they are typing in. So now that you have this data, you are now aware which platforms you are choosing. So if you're aware which platforms you are choosing, you're aware where most of 80% of your time is going to be on. If people are mostly on Google, then there's a point for you to start building up SCO parallel to creating testimonial sales or maybe cost price sales. Asking people that you just did a cost price or a free website for whatever service or product you're selling. To refer you word of mouth can be incredibly important. And then from there on, building up more of a network networking events. So there are places like Meetup and Eventbrite that you can go to weekly events. We organized networking events all the time. These are all places where for free you can pretty much gain attention, gain word of mouth, and gain a network that will refer you. In the beginning, when I did every single day, I would reach out on LinkedIn to specific types of profiles that fit my business. And I would ask them in a personalized invites. So when you go on a profile, you can hit the arrow next to connect or befriending someone. Next to the Connect, there's a personalized invites, wants the arrow goes down per slice inviting, you can type in a note, so you can have a couple of a 100 or something characters that you can type in and say, Hey, this is me, this one I'm doing. Most of the time, people never answer, but they might be friends you. And so as the connection exists, you get a notification from LinkedIn and your message is still in there. And the beautiful part is that you don't have to copy paste the message. You can just add, Hey, did you get my message? It's above. It's above here. Right? Now you have a connection with them and you start chatting and you're like, Hey, can we go for a cup of coffee? Because remember your costs are down so you don't mind waiting a couple of days and fitting their schedule. Instead of just having a call building familiarity. That familiarity can lead to a testimonial sale at cost sale. If you're out of your testimony, it can lead to real sales. But also during the conversation you can say, Hey, we're looking for these type of specific people. Is there any way that you can connect me? Another smart way that you can do this is as you're planning those meetings, it could be also a Zoom call meetings. You can look through their LinkedIn, people that are irrelevant from their own business. If it's a corporate or other businesses, then you can make a list, a top five list, or the top ten would be too much, but top three to five lists. And as the conversation goes well, and you're charismatic and there's a connection and their stress. You can say, Hey, I'm building this new business. I'm looking to expand. Is there any way that you could help me connect with some relevant people on your LinkedIn. I saw this one guy that could be interesting if you find that too weird because the trust is not built on the first connection or that first coffee date that you have just asked. Is there any way that you could connect me with some people? If the answer is yes, then you just say, Hey, I'll just go through your LinkedIn tonight and send you a list of people that it would be nice you could connect me with. So suddenly you're building an exponential network, let's say planning in ten meetings a day? No. So you're reaching out to ten to 15 people because you don't want to go over the limits of LinkedIn. So 1015 people a day. So that's 70 to 90 people every week that you're reaching out to. If you have a conversion rate for Zoom calls should be easily between 1020 per cent. I've literally done this myself. And then when they invested into one of my first businesses, the female founder literally did exactly the same thing and her conversion rate was a bit higher than mine, it was above 20 per cent. So this thing literally works. And as you're converting them to the Zoom calls, you can do this listing. You can pretty much expand your network pretty quickly. And suddenly you're 10, 20% conversion rate, which is like nine to ten meetings a week, I can turn into quite a large network that you're building. And again, 1015 messages on LinkedIn a day and ten meetings a week. We're talking about less than 1.5 hour of work a day or something like that. Of course, sorry, ten meetings. So that's two a day if it's a Monday to Friday workday. So you're doing two hours in meetings and you're doing half an hour or something and sending out messages and research in people. Of course, if this is new to you, it might be an hour. So now we're working three out of the eight hours because work-life balance, I guess, even know in the beginning I would work much more than that. But so you have your five hours still left open to do other things. But remember, you're building your network exponentially because with every meeting that you're doing, you're asking a connection to three to five other people. 1, you're gonna get an, a very privileged position where you suddenly can choose who you meet with strategically and as your progress, I would say around week two or three-year already going to see who fits and who doesn't fit. So as you pick and choose, you're going to get better at it. And so sales will slowly start coming in from that angle. And so while you're doing that angle, which is again the basic lead generation, converting coal to warm leads. And then eventually sales will take over and you take all of these leads that are all now Warm have called, which you have had LinkedIn interactions with, you have referred to, to other people. And eventually you can turn this into, again, this is how we started our events. Because think about it. If you're doing this process at 1, you can't meet with everybody and do business. So we started I started doing dinners and then after dinner she became way too big. And now it's getting a little bit too fat because that was doing like three dinners a week and inviting like six to ten people. And so eventually we started doing events. And then when you're doing events, of course you're bringing all these people together, social proof. You're connecting the ecosystem and you are becoming an in person within that niche. So this is again, high level lead generation over a span of, I would say two years or something like that. But while you're working that angle, which is a 23 hour angle a day that you should be spending on. Then you have five hours now left to work. Other angles. Again, we're talking 0 budget, so we're talking, you can spend any paid ads. You need to work all the angles that you can. So I would say most of the people, if if you are, let's say again, a website agency, some type of service agency, or maybe you're selling lawnmowers or I don't know what. Then most of the time when you're doing your video testimonials, let's say you sold a lawnmower and somebody looks over the product and you gave them a 50% discount in return for a testimonial, you would Where did you find or how did you find lawnmowers? And then most of the time they'd say, Oh, I'd go to the shop or oh, I'd go to Google. And so now we're no, we are aware of which keywords are being targeted. While you're building this angle, you're now going to start building search engine optimization, which is incredibly important when you're selling products and services. There are multiple ways to build SCO very well for your website. But one of the ways is time. You need a lot of time and it takes at least six months to see results. So as you're building engagement, content, blogs, videos, making sure that the retention is high, click-through rates are high. We then all of your content of the website, but also making sure that people go to your website and have a way to convert, call you, email you all these things. You are becoming slowly by the time you're hitting the level that I told you with the other parts of legion where you're actually building now events instead of just meetings. By the time that happens, people are gonna be googling you and guess what happens? Because you've been working on this other angle of SEO, suddenly you're popping up on the first page and they're clicking on you. And the more they click on your Google loves that stuff. So you're coming on the top. Without doing any paid ads, you're slowly building up a network while at the same time becoming an Internet. Number one pager. There are other way I'll give some. So again, we have a course on search engine optimization. But in short, if you don't know anything about search engine optimization, first thing you need to do is make sure your website run smoothly, doesn't have any annoying pop-up banners and works fast. So dive deeper into how to make it a mobile friendly. Don't overload it with heavy images and make sure that you have a clear blog. The reason you want blogs, the reason you want videos, all these things is you want to keep people on your website. The more engagement there's on your website, the longer people stay on your website, the more user-friendly website is. Of course, these are not all things that are relevant to Google, but these are very big things that are relevant to Google. So that's one thing that you should be working on, blogs, videos, all that stuff. But the other thing that gets neglected quite a lot is just the simplest thing. And that's Google my business, just set up a simple Google My Business page. And every single time you have that coffee date with somebody, you ask them, hey, I'm starting a new business. I have this Google My Business page. Is there any way that you could help me out by giving me two sentence review of what you thought of me and if you would ever work with me because that could help me a lot, you'd be surprised how much of a difference that's going to make for anything that you do in business. Not only will you have legitimate reviews from people who actually met you, have the best intention for you, which you will be able to show to potential new sales. You're also going to create investment in your business. They're going to feel like they were building it with you together. So you're going to have real people commenting on it. And the more reviews you have, the more Google recommends you. These things feed into each other. And so SEO is a big thing that my business, it's exponentially started growing when the SEO kicked in, I was always so dismissive of it because I was so focused on that first part, I reach out to people on LinkedIn, setup coffee dates, Zoom calls, all that stuff and completely ignored for, I would say the first two years, the whole SEO thing. And then we slowly started doing it very skeptical. And then it just, it just started working. I started getting some of my biggest deals, people googling me. And so suddenly I start realizing those two need to be working in parallel. The passive lead generation where people come to you in parallel with this actively generation where you reach out on, you call people on Google, you reach out on LinkedIn. You tried to set up coffee date. You go to people or in their offices, you ask for reviews. If they've done a testimonial sale with you, or if they are just genuinely interested in things and they just want to share how they are, how they found that the conversation to be with you, and that they referred people. I mean, if you're in the beginning and you have nothing, can you imagine seeing a business page with a review that says, even though I didn't buy anything at the end because I'm in a totally different industry. I referred this person to three other people because I really believe in what they do and definitely in the future. Once this becomes relevant to us, we'll buy it. I mean, that's still an amazing review, right? And eventually if you still have a personal touch to your business, it's gonna be incredibly important when again, you're meeting these people that they're referring you to, and then you're showing this Google review page. And they see, oh, but this client didn't buy anything yet. They posted a review and then you can say, yeah, but you just met me. You see that clearly these people also met me and they loved me. So then clearly something is good and we're not going to run away with your money and we're gonna do our best to deliver the best product that we can have. Because in this review, the person just mentioned that the moment that becomes relevant to them, they will buy it as well. Any social proof that you can get in the beginning is going to be so incredibly important as you move on. And of course, if you're actually an established business and you're building it up, please build up actual review Sonata, these types of views. But we're talking about again, beginner 0 budget. You don't know how to do paid ads and you just want to make sales. So this is how I did it from both angles. I went and I went a little bit crazy. But the first angle that I did is obviously not SEO because that takes time, again six months to a year before he started seeing any results, at least from my experience. And then with the whole reaching out on LinkedIn, I would go on Google and call businesses are set up meetings, coffee dates, Zoom calls. Except at the time when I did it. I don't know if Zoom existed already, but doing vehicles is definitely not a thing. So there's just a ton of meetups, a ton of meetups, and just making sure that it's spread out over my week doesn't dominate my days. I tested it all out. You can have a couple of meetings a day. That's that's one way to do it. One way that I did it eventually is I had meeting days. My Thursday and Friday we're meeting days and Monday to Wednesday, we're completely locked away for pure work. So then Thursday to Friday I would have meetings and then if I'm really honest, Like Saturdays, I would still work a catch-up on most of my work. And in the evenings I would catch up on work and that's Sundays was my rest day, even did an entire TEDx speech around the rest day, which is super important. Nowadays. Things are much simpler. I still take a day off, but I have way more leisure time and I actually don't do at 1 that you don't actually have to do the meetings anymore. Your team handles the meetings because they are building now their own business development network out. So you have this deaf people. But I'm mostly focused on the whole SEO thing. We get organically couple of clients a month, which is more than enough for what we need. And then obviously we have things like a 150 plus 170 plus corporate clients and silver mostly handling that part. While the machine keeps running and I'm keep making it more efficient from all angles. And then for the events side, which obviously we're still doing, as you can see on all of our YouTube, as we keep doing our events, we're mostly focusing on online. But yeah, that's kind of insured a summary of how I would handle it. It's maybe not as detailed as possible, but this is all about the story parts, how I used to handle it, how I did it. It definitely will get you to your first, I would say six figures. A 100 K's definitely plausible. 50 K for sure, by just building this massive network should definitely get you to 50 K If you're in the Western world. But again, if you're not in the Western world, you can do all of this that I just mentioned and have online Zoom calls and stuff like that. Just make sure that everything looks professional and you'll get the same type of trust and interaction with people. And so that should definitely get you to between 5050 K and six figures. And then from there on you can always start expanding, working more on SEO, working more on different types of content. Figuring out that word of mouth can be more important nowadays, again, I'm not that focused on new people that I'm meeting. A more focused on existing clients and word of mouth through there. One corporate has like, I don't like tens or dozens or hundreds of departments and divisions and other countries. My time is more invested in kind of going through the corporate's Internet work and meeting people that are irrelevant there because we're ready preferred suppliers. We just kinda need to get on the radar with a lot of people. With that being said, thank you so much for listening to this part. If you have any questions, please let me know and I'll see you hopefully in another question video. 56. Event Marketing to 1000 people: Hi there and welcome to this Q&A workshop. Today we will be dealing with a question that we get a lot from our event courses and just people in general who are event planners starting event businesses, stuff like that. Or actually surprisingly a lot from public speakers who want to create our own events and that they can have all the social proof and assets for courses and landing pages and stuff like that. The main question again, on my iPad, how to market an event to attract thousands of people, like you did would start funding events. So again, this is a normal, unscripted Q&A workshop. If you want scripted, proper video is very theoretical and to the point, then obviously we have the courses for that. But this is as if you and I are talking, having a cup of coffee and I'm literally just explaining to you, like I do in my coaching clients, how we do it, how we actually make money and how we apply theory to the point where people actually pay us. And so you'll get fleshed out details and just a little bit more storytelling. So without further ado, let's kinda jump straight into the question which is again, how to market and event attract thousands of people like we did with surfing. So in order to understand that, and we've kinda covered it in different workshops, you have to understand where we started with startup funding events. At the time, I gathered a couple of people from my team, not everybody who wanted to learn how to build a business. And I wanted to do something to give back within the ecosystem and kind of bring together all my clients that I already had, which was a 100 plus corporate clients. So you have to understand that they started from somewhere or ready. So you're gonna have to look at your own network and decide whether you are starting from 0 or you're starting from somewhere. Now, most people, I would say in their 30s and 40s who've had some type of corporate job are definitely not starting from 0. So be aware of that a lot of people tend to have imposter syndrome and think they're starting from 0, but they do not. We're going to cover during this workshop both the 20-year-old still in college and wants to start something big, get social proof, as well as people transitioning away after their 30s and have some corporate experience. But for the sake of the story, We'll start with people who have some type of network already because that's where we found ourselves in. And so what I maybe don't like when I'm looking at some of these YouTube videos, is you don't really get all the background story. You don't really understand that there is already something there before they started these massive event. When I started lightening, I was a 20-year-old who really didn't understand anything, moved pretty much into a new city, didn't know anything. Three years later we scaled to a new country, really again, 0 connections and from there scale. So lightning was a business, an agency that I built from 0 with 0 network and networking was a huge part of it. But startup funding event was definitely not that. And so don't kid yourself when you're looking at this massive scale, how we went from a 100 something people to a thousand people in one year. That doesn't happen. Just like that. Coming out of college and right away starting successful businesses, that it really doesn't work like that. A fundament was, at that point, my third or fourth business and it was a culmination of, I think four or five years entrepreneurship and actually having some successful transactions. Big corporate clients being on the preferred supplier list. Again from the beginning. So we started, started funding event. The idea was just built a business, get an ecosystem built, get everybody together and connect existing clients. And then the question was, well, for doing that already, Let's do something good with it. Let's invite startups that are doing something more than just videos, because that was mostly what we were doing. Video content marketing's the social media stuff. And so we'd invite people who are helping refugees, people who are helping with the climate, people who are helping with the energy transition. Things that honestly my brain doesn't really wrap around because I'm not an engineer, so I don't really understand it. The only thing I do understand is how to take some scientific super complicated words and make them into really easy stories that people can digest and then maybe could go viral. So the idea was, there's a lot of startups in the first six months, maybe first-year, they have so many obstacles were about five years into the business for years into the business will probably be able because everything is so fresh for us, we'll probably be able to get them quicker through those obstacles, will be able to help them with the branding, with the social media, connecting them with all of our clients and kind of go from there. We were filling a need that was kind of in the markets. A lot of these startups don't have money, can pay tickets and just want connections with somebody who can grow them. And most of the events were costing about 200 bucks, 300 bucks. Like if you go to Web Summit, if you go to the next web, there's our great events, but they're extremely expensive for a startup, especially in the first six months. We pretty much did it for free. And how we funded it is in the beginning, we didn't. The first event was completely free. It was such a good concept that when I called up some of my clients. Ask them if they want it to be a judge. I remember 11 of my client actually asking me if she could sponsor a little bit because she knows that it's going to cost us money. And so the first sponsors handed me money with nothing in return because they loved the concept. And so once we had the first event, this is what I did that allowed this to scale to a thousand people with on the one-year anniversary. On the first event, I kept everything free and invited everybody I could within my network. So the way that went as I went through all my clients, every meeting that I had, I would close at the end with, Hey, do you have an extra five minutes? I want to talk about this event that we're doing and you want to maybe become a judge at it. I was recruiting really high-end people with a lot of network to come to my event and become this type of judge or ambassador. And that's how we got a lot of corporates involved. Once we had them at the event, I had a team of about two or three people and their only job was pretty much to get testimonials. So one of the big investments that I did is I bought a medial wall. It was literally a medial wall is pretty much you go to a print shop, you put a bunch of logos on it. And then you have this massive a five meter wall where people stand in front of and you can record them. And so I bought this medial wall and I got all the judges and all the speakers and pretty much everybody that I could startups in front of that media wall. And they asked them for two-minute testimonial and that team of 23 people because I was involved in the other stuff. Their only job was to get as many testimonials as we could. Then at the end of that events, the word started spreading because again, we had a ton of high networking individuals that loved our events, couldn't believe that we got such high-quality startups, except the only thing we did is we opened floodgates to demand that it was already there and people who couldn't afford expensive events. So they came to the only event they could go to, which is ours. And so we got a couple of super cool start-ups that became successful. But honestly, these startups would have been successful anyways, we just caught them at the right time when they couldn't afford it. But because of that, they always remembered us. That means we got word of mouth. That's something that Martin marketing isn't emphasize so much. You can do all these Facebook campaigns are so many courses on YouTube ads, PPC, Facebook ads. There aren't that many courses on word of mouth, but yet word of mouth is going to be the most important marketing tactic that you can employ. The first event was the most amazing product that we could afford. I think it cost us. You'd think this would cause this like tens of thousands of dollars. It did not. It was literally, I think maybe a couple of thousand bucks. And then this one sponsor gave half of the money or something, I think like 23 thousand bucks and we got quite far. Of course, we did have cameras already and we did have people who wanted to help, but actually we didn't have that many people under date from the team. What we did is we asked pretty much friends and family to volunteer and help. And so the actual organization of the event was done by people and volunteers and friends and family. But then the actual filming and marketing and content pieces that was done by my team. We had somebody on after movie, somebody on a live streaming, somebody on the video testimonials. These were pretty much the most essential content pieces that you could create. Whatever you're gonna do during the events. Don't kid yourself. The only thing you should be doing is video content. You obviously I'm biased because this is my agency, but I've seen it time and time again and I've done it now in my own event. And then I've had governments come to me to create their events. I can tell you that the thing that gets you sponsors on the next event and gets you more people and more visitors is going to be the video content and pictures are helpful as well. But the video content and the testimonials and the after movie, that's where people are like, whoa, this is worth 500 bucks or something. We haven't actually asked 500 bucks, but we've had some paid events. In the meantime, more exclusive events. I like to keep funding vendor as a charity so the tickets are free and stuff like that. But we'd had exclusive networking events, exclusive like behind the scenes events for partners and stuff like that. And those were all paid. And I would say the most expensive paid event that we did was thousand Euros per accompany entry and the company could send, I think maximum like two or three people. So you can go pretty high end with these exclusive networking events just to give you a picture. But so once we had all the video content, we started outside of the fact that we had the network and suddenly we were spreading around. People started finding us, and that's how Amsterdam capital week found us. One of the judges knew about us. We had actually invited the city of Amsterdam to come as well. We had a ton of video content, a ton of testimonials. And so it's undeniable that we were doing something good. The second event, we were part of a major week event, Amsterdam capitals. We were to closing of that. And so a lot of the visitors are visitors came but also a lot of bare visitors came to the point where the capacity of we had a collaboration with WeWork. They gave us their venue for free. They were a sponsor. And so the capacity of that venue was 200 people and it was like 255 people signed up. It was people couldn't sit or stand. It was crazy. There was no space in that in that room. Again, the first thing that I did was I made sure we had all the video content, pictures, everything of this super full room. Because I knew that if I could prove that in two cities, we packed up a room, we'd get way more sponsors for the next event. Alison wrong because on the next event, the city of Helsinki, we got in touch and they absolutely loved the concept to the point where they offer to make us a side event of sludge, which is 25 thousand people in Helsinki. And so now as we're negotiating, I was very strict in that negotiation because I honestly did not want to pull my team on an international events. This event is free. So one of the things I said at the time is it has to be an irresistible offer. We need to make sure that we have a venue that you guys provide. We need to make sure that we don't know anybody, so we need access to sponsors. You need to introduce us to your network, but also introduces to your startup network. Because otherwise we will have to spend so much money on all of this stuff. And so they arranged the venue. They arranged a little bit of financial sponsorship for us as well. They arrange startups, they arranged introductions to some big corporates. We had one of the largest startup incubators. One of the guys come speak. And it was just, it was a pretty good event. Our first international event, I could not be happier, I would say when we came back, I think that was from April till December. So not even a year we came back and we started thinking, ok, So we had in April, our first event, in the summer, we had our second event and then suddenly our third event, when international. How do you go up from here? The actual question that was brought up was, well, we're growing pretty well. Most of our startups, all the winners got an investment within six months. All of them started growing and becoming these multimillion startups. Some of the top three also got investments. And then we had a top 30 which we didn't expect we're going to do, but we did. And like I would say, out of all the 30, maybe like ten or 15 would get pretty far with our clients or investments. So it's pretty impressive, especially because we only had focused on one startup. That was our whole thing, right? We just get a couple of our clients together focused on one startup, and that's it. We started monetizing in different ways, not specifically the startups, but the sponsors, making sure that they are involved as well. And we leveraged all of the video content that we did beforehand and all of the testimonials from all the people there. Because if you can get two or three corporate's, you will get ten more corporates for the next event. And sponsorships or judges. And that's by the way, how we got the big for consulting agencies to be somehow a part of our event. Either they were a sponsor or they were part of the judges, or they were part of the ambassadors. And so we came back and just for fun, I said, What if this would go ten? How would that look like? Would our impact grow? Would we be able to help more than the one winner startup would we may be guaranteed at all three startups that are in the top three and are on stage or top five would all get investments. Maybe the top 30, I started getting really excited just by the exposure or could go all over the news and viral and stuff like that. But how would that look like was the question? I remember at the time, I had volunteered at ten x like six years prior to that or something like that. And I remember the organizer and knowing her because I had spoken at the event and then I decided to volunteer there because I was building up my network. I was new in the city. They had invited me to speak and I loved the team, so I asked to volunteer. I need to organize her quite well. And I called her up and I said, Hey, you organize these massive TED X events. How do you do that? Where do you start? What venue would you recommend me speaking to? And so we kinda continued from there. So as I was talking with the Tedx organizer about concert, about just the rooms and venues that she was using and who I should be talking to. She referred me to two venues. One of them I wasn't too sure about, and one of them I really liked. This was the reason why I really liked it. It was not even like ten steps from the Central Station. It was so close to the central station. The other one was a nice venue, but it required people to take a bus for like five-minutes. And so what I've learned is that location is going to be so important because. In the previous events when we had locations that were outside of the city, it was much harder to attract people. We had always been fooled, but it was just much harder. And so I went for one of the venues. I explain them the story of what we had in mind and how we want it to do, impact and all the millennial stuff. I guess they just absolutely loved it. And then the key was, we showed them all the video contents from previous events and they got extremely excited about how packed it all was and how sold out it all was. They gave us a really great offer, like a huge discount, pretty much something we couldn't refuse. And then the whole story started. We had about eight months or nine months, like 76 months to prepare for this massive, massive event. One thing I can tell you, when you're doing marketing campaigns, when you're taking a product and trying to scale it from ten sales to a 100, sales. Dynamics change at certain numbers and with events, the dynamics change after 2300 people the moment you start organizing conferences like proper 500 plus people, kinda these massive conferences versus like little events under 400 people. It just everything changes. You need to become more organized. You have department heads, you have team leaders. There are focuses, sprints that you need to do. One of the mistakes that we had done is we did not realize that it would be handled that way. But one of the good things that we had going for us is that we were in business for five years and we had built up visitors who are coming regularly to our events and sponsors who are sponsoring regularly, and ambassadors and judges from big companies. Now that we had all of that, we will be somehow scaling these 200 people events to like thousand plus. One of the first things that we did is we started looking at paid ads. And we realized that if you're throwing a free event, or I would even argue an event that caused less than $10 per ticket. You're pretty much screwed going the traditional route of marketing. And that's something nobody tells you. If you're ever in a position where a client is like an event client or a public speaker who wants to throw an event. And it needs to be this massive thing. Be aware that you can probably guarantees stuff up until like 200 people. I would say 300 is pushing it. But the moment you start going above three hundred, four hundred people that they want at their event or you want that their event, it is going to be so much different as a dynamic and it's gonna be so much harder to execute on. So as we started taking our department, this is where we actually started cannibalizing my agency because we had to pull team leaders from certain projects because I trusted them so much to pretty much handle the chaos of what was happening with the event. And I had to pull some of my salespeople, put them on sponsorships. Some of my design people made sure that the design assets, we're good. We started collaborating with the city's. They gave us access to TV spots like these massive, huge TV screens at the Central Station. Commercials needed to be made for that. And so suddenly when you're promoting so much, everything matters. We started looking and then there was an entire workshop that I explain about this sort of looking at offline versus online media. How could we leverage offline media like this massive screen at the Central Station in order to emphasize our online media, because our paid ads were becoming quite expensive, or cost per clicks or becoming expensive. And so we thought that one of the issues was our social proof was not big enough. Yeah, even the testimonials weren't good enough. So in order to promote this massive event and get a thousand people, it's not enough to just have testimonials. So we started looking at social proof. We asked the city officials if they could connect us to all these prints that we could do on Trump's on screens. We start asking all of our corporate sponsors If we could get on their email list and newsletters and promote the fact that we had these commercials. We started, we started to make like a commercial at least every month. We started doing guerilla campaigns where we would go on the street and actually sell tickets as a team by selling tickets, engaging those people to sell more tickets. So it's just a pretty intense experience. And I would say, because again, if I look back at the question, the question is how to market and event attract thousands of people. First realized, nobody starts with a thousand people. You have to build it up. You have to have the infrastructure in place. You have to have your team leaders in place. You have to have your sales in place. You have to have your commercials and place your assets, your visual assets, your testimonials. You need to have the connections that we had built up with the city officials over three events so that they can connect you. You have to have that trust with them so that they can get you discounts or just free things. You need to make sure that you have, I would say at least 20 to 30 sponsors before you start going on this craziness. Because if you have 20 to 30 corporate sponsors and each of them brings like I would say, ten people. You're ready as 1 third capacity. So now suddenly you need to bring like the other 600, but maybe you get more sponsors in that event. Maybe you get 20 more sponsors. And so now you're at half of the event capacity. And so you're gonna be more dependent on word of mouth and people. And that's why I highly recommend doing that first before you go crazy. But one, how do you then fill up the other batch? Word of mouth can be so important. You're going to have one of the team leaders, by the way, was an ambassador management. The other team leader was a judge's management and then I was doing speaker management. And so when you're building up judges and ambassadors, that's equivalent and marketing affiliates, or maybe even influencer marketing. These are people who have a network who can potentially bring ten people plus n. If you have like 50 ambassadors, that's 500 people, you need to find incentives to convert normal people into these ambassadors. Or the equivalent in marketing would be an affiliates. Maybe there's a financial incentive. We found that because we were doing an impact event, financial incentive was the least weekly, it was the worst thing we could propose, even people who were just not accepting it and they were just making too much money into even accept like five bucks or something like that. So for us, a financial incentive wasn't going to do it. But one of the incentives that we could do was little. We had these Photoshop template designs that we created specifically for an ambassador that they could post on their LinkedIn. Stuff like that we really kinda played on, on making them feel more important and part of the whole thing. Because we really just try to, the team leaders there, try to get the word of mouth going. On the other side, we had the actual marketing marketing team. But I can tell you that our main focus and the way we filled it up was the word of mouth thing and scaling that whatever business you're doing, whether it's events or something else, trust me that that first bit is gonna be so crucial and important. But within the marketing thing, we were leveraging things. We start realizing or paid ads, we're just not going to cut it. And so we needed to somehow bring down the cost of the paid ads. Initially, what we are doing is we were creating these high-end commercials. Thinking, well if we invest like these commercials that are worth like ten K plus. But again, we were doing them in-house, it wasn't necessary. We thought that would pull in a ton of people. What we didn't realize is that nobody cares. I mean, look at the really big events. How many of them actually use there after movie or commercial as the thing that they promote on Facebook or YouTube ads. Well, they don't. What they usually do is they localize and adjust the videos with clear call to actions towards people. And so one of the things that we started doing is again, we got some footage of our commercial plane on the big screen. Next is Central Station. We combine it with some of our previous after movies, super cool footage that showed like filled up rooms and stuff like that. We had clear call to actions. Get when a free ticket or get this or a sign up here before it's sold out, that type of thing. Are you from this city then maybe you're interested in blah, blah, blah. This speaker is showing up. Are you interested at this? Many startups have gotten funding. So super, super relevant to our avatar wonky fan. I call that always relevant things that actually convert people into a commercial. And so that's the realization like converting people from a commercial is more important than having a high-end commercial. And those were mistakes that we were realizing that we were doing. We were very much leveraging offline and then using campaigns around the offline like those big screens, like I said, into online platforms that we realized was more relevant to us was LinkedIn. And another thing that we realized is that our cost per manual outreach was cheaper than our cost per paid at outreach. Now what does that mean exactly? So when we were running ads, it costs us more per-click. Then if we would message people or connect with them with a personalized message, or if we would create posts with hashtags. And so when we realize those metrics, we made every single person from our team go in front of the screen and take a picture and then go on LinkedIn and pretty much tag like 1020 people with the hashtag, startup funding events. So we started doing these manual campaigns. And so again, long story short. That's how we started growing together these two kind of multiple marketing campaigns, and you're starting to realize one person probably can't run it very easily. That's how we started growing to a thousand plus people. One of the things that I do recommend if you're interested in doing this yourself is makes sure to have a ticket price that is above ten bucks. I would even recommend above 20 or $30 because Facebook tends to get more expensive depending on the season. Once you have a ticket price that is worth the conversions that you're going to achieve, like your cost per acquisition if you're running these marketing campaigns, that's one potentially you can do everything I just told you with way less money, way less people and money as well. I think you have to like really good Facebook ad and then Google ad and YouTube ads, people, LinkedIn ads as well to three, could probably achieve similar results. If your cost per acquisition is lower than your ticket price. Well, outside cost price as well because you have venue costs and stuff like that. But so please be aware of that when throwing these bigger and bigger events. And also be aware that you really should not be throwing thousand plus events until you have thrown a hundred, two hundred people events multiple times, worked out all the kinks, made sure that you know which pricing is gonna sell. Make sure you have testimonials and connections and ambassadors and stuff like that. And only Dan scale starts really happening. One of the things that we're doing currently as we're going more digital, is we're doing networking events, these online little networking events that started with ten people, then grow to 20304050 in one year, our projection is that dose 50 people per networking event would eventually become like five to 700 people were using exactly the same model that I just explained. Just with way less chaos. Because we're focused on one thing. We're exactly aware of which person we're attracting and where to find them. And instead of focusing on the drama, on chaos of all the marketing, knowing all your metrics, known, all your data, and just kinda shotgun maneuvering it, which means like all these different bullets are being fired so that you kind of figure out which one works best. We figured out that the word of mouth is way better. And so instead of going straight away and leveraging all of our network and paid ads, we're starting again small and going local, national, international. And we're doing a small buildup, which is based on word of mouth, reaching out to people asking them to do more, involving them as ambassadors, involving them as judges and building it up from there. You'd be surprised, as you've seen with our events in one year, we got from pretty much 0 thousand. You'd be surprised how fast and how easy it goes if you're patient and you do a little bit every day and with each monthly events, you'd like ads, like 50 or 60% more people. I'm actually, I actually showed this to one of the CEOs that I hire for our events very into finance. And obviously doing all of that in the last years. One of my favorite websites to visit is a compound calculator. You can just google compound calculator. There are free tools and you can add to that. Obviously currency and then you add like how much money you have, how much percentage is you get monthly, yearly, whatever, and then you get results. And so the reason I say that is if you replace the currency into just the amount of people that you have per networking events. And then in the compounds calculator, you add the percentage that you expect to increase with every event. Then you could calculate how much effort you need to do to start with ten people per event and then eventually end up with a thousand people per event. We actually did this calculation. We took ten people per event. We added 60% of effort and we ended up with around a thousand people by the end of the year. And so instead of having this crazy intimidating imposter syndrome feeling that we're just not going to make a thousand people, which you should be doing is just realizing that it's not about getting to a thousand people. It's about small little increments and increments of improvement with each monthly events, which eventually build up to 1000 people. Ten people in 60% increase would mean like 17 ish people or 16 people at the next event, and then a 60% increase after that. I think we were somewhere at 30 people. When you think about those types of numbers, it becomes so much easier to improve. Like to go from ten to 16 people. You send a couple of LinkedIn messages to go from 16 to 30 people that's maybe a little bit more intense. So you would send a couple of LinkedIn messages and maybe call up a couple of people. Let's say you go from 30 to 45 people, okay? Now a couple of messages, maybe you need some help. You call up some people, you call up some past people and you ask them if they know somebody. With every single monthly events, you are improving 60% a little bit better, a little bit better, 60% improvement. If you take let's say you work an hour-and-a-half. Let's say it's like a 100 minutes. That's round about an hour-and-a-half. Ninety minutes, half. An hour, half. But so ten minutes, extra, 100 minutes you work. If you increase that by 60%, we're talking about a 160 minutes. So now you're working 2.5 hours. So that's something you can do on a Saturday. And instead of in five events working like a 120 hours, which you could be doing, is that the next event? You could get a volunteer and suddenly both of your working 2.5 hours. So now you've doubled your capacity, but you only needed to increase, like you've gone a 100% more, but you only needed to increase 60%. So always think about the small things in the beginning and using time and patience for you instead of against you. And so having the quantity can sometimes help you. We skipped a step, we did three events and then pretty much ran ten extra events in between those eight. Well, we didn't run ten extra events, but we should have run ten extra events in-between because we went from like three hundred, ten hundred plus. So technically we should have run at least seven more events to scale from there. But it's just to tell you like slow and steady wins the race. And the more quantity of events you have, the easier it is to get to thousands. And then if you don't, then you still have two ways to go. Word of mouth, which is so underappreciated in marketing, especially people who are super good at pay debts, they really don't understand that this costs less and achieve some more. And if you're looking at the long term, it will get you more over the long term. Word of mouth acquisition means that your next events can be way more exponentially more successful. Whereas paid ads and cold acquisition doesn't always translate to an exponential growth for the next event. The metrics for us at least seem a little bit smaller and lower, which is why when we run events nowadays, we very much leverage word of mouth. That's kind of a very long story. I tried to keep things as, you know, as detailed as possible, but as short as I can. If I'm all over the place, I apologize for that, but definitely message me if you need some more elaboration, some more details. But that's kind of in short, how we did our event. And then I would add to that, we actually replicate it this after the success of our event, we got a reach out for two companies. One was actually from the city itself. They were organizing something similar like Amsterdam capital week and they wanted to do something in their city, something similar. And we were the biggest event there and so we weren't the only one that actually knew the biggest conference room. We were aware how those work. We knew how to build the visuals, we knew everything. And so we started actually getting hired to build out their campaigns as well. The funny thing is they initially wanted to do the marketing themselves and started realizing how tough it was. And so they had to book. Within the conference hall, there are multiple rooms, so we had the large room and they have two smaller rooms. So one was like 500 people under one was 300 people. So actually they went for the 500 people one, meaning that they couldn't fill up the space because they decided to do the marketing themselves and completely underestimated it. And then at the end, we helped them a little bit as well. But it's just the realization that it doesn't matter how big the organization is. It is extremely tough. The moment you start going above 300 people and even a city official can have trouble with that. So just be aware of that. If you have a large network, that's going to be much easier for you because you're going to be leveraging word of mouth. But if you do not, then be aware that dynamics change depending on the numbers at your events. And that's kind of in short, how I want it to wrap this up. If you have any more questions, please let me know. I definitely am enjoying answering these questions. I'm getting some people messaging me that really happy that I went into so much detail about their question. But if you have any questions, let me know and I'll see you in the next video. 57. How to choose platforms for marketing campaigns: Hi there and welcome to a new QnA workshop style video. This, again is not a scripted workshop. This is literally me and you're sitting down together having a cup of coffee and just answering a question the way I would with my coaching clients were full of stories, full of fleshed out details, and not just a scripted point-to-point bullet list with all these theoretical things. I think partially what people enjoy is that there's actual practical experience. And I do do sales the whole time and am involved in some of the daily operations of my business. Sometimes I pick and choose the teams that I want to be involved in, but sometimes I choose to do some hard things so that my skills can stay up-to-date. And that's why when I do these calls, I enjoy being with pe