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The Primal Branding framework
How we're re-branding TalentHQ
Read time: 3 min, 24 secs
Want to sell using socials? Read this.
If not? See you next Thurs.
Hey there - it's Brian š
85,000 followers.
Thatās INSANE.
I never would have imagined Iād have 85k people deciding āI want to hear Brianās ideas.ā
Butā¦
I also imagined 85k followers would want to buy my stuff.
Itās HARD to sell to your social audience.
So this week Iām building the social strategy for TalentHQ.
And this time with lessons I learned from the first 2 years of building my personal audience (in a way that actually sells).
Iāll share my favorite actionable brand framework.
If youāre frustrated that people arenāt buying from your socials, this issue is for you.
Focused on other channels? See you next Thurs.
Letās make your business an outlier: š
Huge week.
We launched a MAJOR upgrade to our site (check it out).
Closed an agreement with LinkedIn.
TLDR: We get 5 - 10% better gross margins. Our clients get MORE qualified candidates.
Everyone wins.
Weāre also experimenting with Cold Email as a new client acquisition channel.
(Reply if you have a cold email agency you recommend. Weāre evaluating vendors this week.)
And of courseā¦ building a new brand strategy.
So letās get into the brand strategy: š
Could you sell 36 T-shirts?
Hereās your wake up call.
Imagine you have 2.8 MILLION followersā¦
(More than the population of Chicago!)
Could you sell 36 T-shirts?
I thought that would be a joke.
Ariana Renee thought that was a joke.
She had 2,800,000 followers and assumed at least 0.0013% of her audience would buy her shirtsā¦ right?
Nope!
So when youāre not intentional about how you build your following on social mediaā¦ you canāt sell ANYTHING.
Hereās the actionable brand framework you can use to build an online tribe (that actually buys):
She thought her 2.8 MILLION followers made her mega-rich.
Until she couldnāt sell 36 T-shirtsā¦
Here's the story (& how not to build a business):
ā Brian O'Connor | Fractional CMO (@BrianFOConnor)
1:48 PM ā¢ Jan 8, 2023
Connect your business positioning to online branding
This issue is about branding so we wonāt cover positioning in depth.
But you CANNOT sell anything on the internet without positioning.
Your business needs to have 3 things clear:
1) Whoās your customer?
2) Whatās their pain?
3) How do you solve that pain better than anyone
Positioning is the foundation.
Sales & marketing is the housing built on top.
Positioning was my specialty at Deloitte so I write about it a lot (hereās the basics).
Anyway. Now we connect your positioning to your online branding.
How?
![](https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/cdfe1258-22f2-41de-8fbf-174324b7359a/image.png?t=1721921624)
3 parts to positioning
Steal this Primal Branding framework
You write down these 7 things, then make sure ~3 are included in each piece of content.
Sharing these parts builds your tribe over time.
1) Creation Story
What moment convinced you to build your solution?
Everyone remembers a good creation story.
Alex Hormozi slept on his gym floor and showered at his clientās.
I told my origin before (hereās the moment I went from corporate consultant to backpacking CMO), but TLDR:
I spent 6 years in board rooms advising corporate executives on how to grow their business.
Friend asked me to speak to a business owner friend of his. Who had (what seemed to me) a problem that the problem was a common solution in consulting.
He cried.
In that moment I realized how powerful the frameworks we had were in those board rooms. I took them for granted.
Today, Iām on a mission to share boardroom lessons with small business owners.
2) Creed
What do you believe?
I believe every business owner deserves to get the help they need. Especially when they canāt afford an $80k marketer.
Iāve met incredible Latin American marketing talent who is ecstatic to work for a US company.
I met a remote digital marketer in Ecuador (whoās one of my closest friends today), and she told me the story about how she got her first remote marketing job.
She said:
āI DOUBLED my pay, I finally got paid in a stable currency, and donāt have to go into the office every day? This is INCREDIBLE.ā
Latin American marketers working with US business owners is 1,000x better for everyone involved.
3) Icons
What you look like online.
What people see and think of you.
Wonāt get into this one much since itās straight forward.
We hired a brand designer to sculpt our typography, colors, logo etc:
![](https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/27c4aa5c-4b1f-4f83-8eed-8278d01b87f3/image.png?t=1721916824)
TalentHQ Branding
4) Rituals
What do people repeat doing when they engage with you?
I havenāt cracked this our ourselves so Iāll skip this one.
5) Sacred Words
Think of these as inside jokes/phrases with your audience.
Example:š§š»āāļø Nerdy Brian side rants
It makes your audience feel like theyāre part of your inner circle.
6) Pagans
I call these āenemies.ā
People who believe the opposite of what you believe.
You want to rally your tribe to fight against these pagans. When you rally against a common enemy, you feel more united with your tribe.
Enemies for my consulting business:
Consultants who make clients do fluffy academic strategy too early.
Early on? Test and iterate.
7) Leader
Who is the leader?
Whatās the leaderās story? The leaderās personality?
In my case, the āleader storyā (me) is the same as the brand story (also me).
But for TalentHQ, the brand story and leader story are different.
So build your tribe online
But do it with a purpose.
If you just post viral things youāll never sell anything.
Instead, carve out your Primal Branding and build your tribe overtime.
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See you next Thursday š
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