Read time: 3 min, 24 secs
Want to sell using socials? Read this.
If not? See you next Thurs.

Hey there - it's Brian 👋

85,000 followers.

That’s INSANE.

I never would have imagined I’d have 85k people deciding “I want to hear Brian’s ideas.”

But…

I also imagined 85k followers would want to buy my stuff.

It’s HARD to sell to your social audience.

So this week I’m 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).

I’ll share my favorite actionable brand framework.

If you’re frustrated that people aren’t buying from your socials, this issue is for you.

Focused on other channels? See you next Thurs.

Let’s make your business an outlier: 👇

What’s going on with Brian?

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.

We’re also experimenting with Cold Email as a new client acquisition channel.

(Reply if you have a cold email agency you recommend. We’re evaluating vendors this week.)

And of course… building a new brand strategy.

So let’s get into the brand strategy: 👇

Could you sell 36 T-shirts?

Here’s your wake up call.

Imagine you have 2.8 MILLION followers…

(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 shirts… right?

Nope!

So when you’re not intentional about how you build your following on social media… you can’t sell ANYTHING.

Here’s the actionable brand framework you can use to build an online tribe (that actually buys):

Connect your business positioning to online branding

This issue is about branding so we won’t cover positioning in depth.

But you CANNOT sell anything on the internet without positioning.

Your business needs to have 3 things clear:

1) Who’s your customer?
2) What’s 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 (here’s the basics).

Anyway. Now we connect your positioning to your online branding.

How?

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 client’s.

I told my origin before (here’s 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, I’m 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 can’t afford an $80k marketer.

I’ve met incredible Latin American marketing talent who is ecstatic to work for a US company.

I met a remote digital marketer in Ecuador (who’s one of my closest friends today), and she told me the story about how she got her first remote marketing job.

She said:

“I DOUBLED my pay, I finally got paid in a stable currency, and don’t have to go into the office every day? This is INCREDIBLE.”

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.

Won’t get into this one much since it’s straight forward.

We hired a brand designer to sculpt our typography, colors, logo etc:

4) Rituals
What do people repeat doing when they engage with you?

I haven’t cracked this our ourselves so I’ll skip this one.

5) Sacred Words
Think of these as inside jokes/phrases with your audience.

Example:🧔🏻‍♂️ Nerdy Brian side rants

It makes your audience feel like they’re part of your inner circle.

6) Pagans
I call these “enemies.”

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?

What’s the leader’s story? The leader’s personality?

In my case, the “leader story” (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 you’ll never sell anything.

Instead, carve out your Primal Branding and build your tribe overtime.

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See you next Thursday 👋

Brian
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