Episode 262 with Rachel Gogos: Leveraging Brand Identity for Business Expansion

On this episode of the Ready Yet?! podcast I am taking a dive deep into the complexities of brand evolution with Rachel Gogos of Brand ID. 

Join us as we explore the challenges businesses face as they grow, transitioning from personal to business brands and vice versa. Rachel shares invaluable strategies on maintaining a dynamic online presence, including website development, content marketing, and podcast production. We discuss setting long-term goals, the importance of consistent messaging, and how to effectively utilize social media to connect with your audience. Whether you're looking to refresh your brand or differentiate yourself in a crowded market, you will definitely want to check this out! 

GUEST RESOURCES

Rachel Gogos is the founder and CEO of brandiD–a web and content marketing agency that helps you build your brand and business by aligning your profession with your soul’s work. Before launching the brandiD, Rachel was an editor at The Wall Street Journal and a communications specialist at the United Nations. Most recently, she authored Build Your Brand: The Soul-Based Guide to Digital Marketing and is the host of the Business of You Podcast.    

https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachelgogos

https://thebrandid.com 

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-business-of-you-with-rachel-gogos/id1605697913

Forge Your Path. Unlock Your Power. Unleash Your Potential.

Learn more about Erin Marcus
Join us on Facebook
LinkedIn
Instagram
YouTube

Are you ready to let go of living in reaction mode, filled with “have-to’s” and “should’s” and move into what you want to intentionally create more for yourself?

🌱 Join us in the Untamed Success community as we embrace the messy middle of embracing what is possible. Let’s do it together! 🌱

Transcript

Episode 262 with Rachel Gogos: Leveraging Brand Identity for Business Expansion

Transcribed by Descript

Erin Marcus: All right, welcome, welcome to this episode of the ready app podcast and I'm excited because I think I'm just gonna approach this as a client. We were already doing, we were already doing this but I'm excited about this conversation because I think a lot of people find themselves stuck. As their business grows and they're trying they feel like they've outgrown their brand, but they don't know what to do or they're moving from a personal brand to a business brand or a business brand to a personal brand, right?

Erin Marcus: We're always changing. We're always iterating. The world's always changing. The market is changing. So And I try to say niche for now and these aren't forever decisions and yet you can feel trapped by the brand that you've established. So before we get into all that why don't you tell everybody a little bit about who you are and what you do.

Rachel Gogos: Erin, so good to be with you today. My name is Rachel Gogos and I own an agency called Brand ID. Brand ID, we help people build their personal and their business brands. It's actually the exact same methodology and strategies used to do both, right? And in doing so, one of the most common things that we implement are websites.

Rachel Gogos: So we build a lot of websites in WordPress. We work on that platform primarily. And we do membership sites and courses and just thought leader websites, book websites, you name it. Any type of WordPress website we can build. We do custom design and we also have themes that really help enhance your personal brand.

Rachel Gogos: Transcribed And we also then for our clients that we establish their brand foundation and start building an online presence for, we also do content marketing for them. So we go straight for them for their social posts or blogs, newsletters, that type of content. And we also have about a year ago started podcast production.

Rachel Gogos: So another great way to build a personal brand and a following or a business brand, right? It is a podcast host. I have my own podcast called The Business of You, but it's just another great way to put your thought leadership out there and build your business. 

Erin Marcus: Love it, because I know it gets hard.

Erin Marcus: I think people, they go first of all, I think too many people have the wrong definition of a brand, right? It's not just colors, even though colors play into it. But what do let's use me as an example, because, I don't think this is unique to me. My business is five years old. This is the second or third iteration of my website, but it truthfully is no longer serving where I want to go.

Erin Marcus: The feel of the brand no longer is serving where I want to go. And yet it feels like if I just did hard stop, hard start that I'm starting over, right? Which is not. Doesn't feel good, right? It makes you a little nervous. So what do you tell people to do when they're ready for their next 

Rachel Gogos: iteration?

Rachel Gogos: First we take a deep dive strategically, right? What is your next iteration? What are your goals three to five years from now? Where do you want to be? In your case, you're working on a book. That's going to be a new offer. You're already a speaker, but once the book comes out, then you have You know, a whole new calling card in a way to express your brand and your content.

Rachel Gogos: And that's going to be a great opportunity to land new speaking gigs or even go back to old, old speaking clients and share the new content with them. But again, first you really got to, I call it setting your GPS, right? Where do you want to go? And then we look at where you are and where you have been and find a way to mesh things together.

Rachel Gogos: Because whenever we're creating a website for We really want it to last three to five years, right? Unless you're a design agency of some sort, then you might need to change things up a little bit more frequently, but anybody else there's really no reason as long, again, as long as what you're offering stays pretty consistent needs to change any more frequently than three to five years.

Rachel Gogos: But at the same time, to me, 

Erin Marcus: Even if what you're doing hasn't changed, the market has changed, the world has changed, vocabulary has changed. So even if for those people out there who haven't, aren't changing what they're doing, refreshing your language of how you talk about what you're doing, I think It always reminds me, you can tell when you look at a website and it hasn't been updated, it's like driving around and you see the sign for houses for sale, and there's a picture of the realtor, and you're like, I know her, and she doesn't look like that anymore, like by 30 years.

Rachel Gogos: Totally. No, refreshes are great here and there. And that's what I love about websites is it's so easy to change your copy. It doesn't, it can be any time or, when you create, when you get a new result for a client, or if a client expresses what you've done for them in a way that you haven't heard it before.

Rachel Gogos: Great to get that testimonial up or again, like tweak your language. So there's no hard and fast rule against that. I'm notorious for always tweaking our web copy. Me too. I play with it all the time. 

Erin Marcus: So I love the, going back to what we were talking about, like your next iteration, I love one of the things you said and why it's so aligned with what I, Talk about is number one.

Erin Marcus: It's strategy first and number two. It's reverse engineered. 

Rachel Gogos: So true. It has to be right because otherwise you're going to it's like trying to hit a dartboard. If you don't have that established. There's not a dartboard hanging there. If you don't have it established. You're just throwing crap 

Erin Marcus: at the wall.

Rachel Gogos: Literally. Exactly. And I'm also a big fan of assessing your competition, but not from a place of, oh, that's my competition and I'm worried about it, but more from a place to help you differentiate again, like using your own language. Yeah. Or putting things in your own genuine language, you're putting your personal interests in.

Rachel Gogos: Those are all things that differentiate you and help you stand out. And I personally believe there's plenty of business for everybody in the world. So again I use the word competition loosely, but. Just taking a getting a sense of what else is out there and off, who else is out there offering similar services to what you are can also help you dial into your own target audience back to the reverse engineering piece there, right?

Erin Marcus: And I also think it's easier to edit than create. So sometimes there, it's helpful to go look at what else is out there, whether it's in, even if it's in other industries. Okay. Thanks. So that you can see this is what I like and this is what I don't like. This is what resonates, this is what doesn't resonate.

Erin Marcus: And it's easier to find your path that way, than staring, for those of us who are not artistic by nature, staring at a blank page. Yes. I will have zero 

Rachel Gogos: ideas. Yeah, definitely. In fact, just today I was talking to a mentor of mine. I was telling him about this new coffee e commerce brand that we're really shaking up.

Rachel Gogos: They're, they've been around for over a hundred years or websites over 10 years old and it's still family owned and operated their fourth generation. And this friend of mine who's always also like very active in the personal brand world said, you got to check out this website. They're in the West village.

Rachel Gogos: It. They're the oldest apothecary in the United States, similar story, family owned and they redid their e commerce site some years back and now they're like this global brand. So really check them out and again, like comparing to other industries is super helpful because e commerce is e commerce, right?

Rachel Gogos: If you're talking about how to help companies grow and scale, there's lots of people talking about that, or there's other industries that can be applicable to, right? Growth and scale could be software, could be a number of things. It 

Erin Marcus: also helps you. Not look the same as everybody else at that when I was in corporate when I was a department of one for a very long time in my corporate role and when we grew and I was hiring an assistant, I remember the CEO kept sending people my way to consider hiring for my brand new department that I was growing and I kept saying no and he was willing to give me enough rope to hang myself with, as he used to like to say, but I don't want somebody else's old problems.

Rachel Gogos: Yeah. 

Erin Marcus: I didn't want to hire someone who had been in our industry for so long that they ever came to me with that's just how this works as an answer. And you can get such great ideas from other 

Rachel Gogos: industries. Absolutely. Absolutely. One thing you and I were talking about before we hit record, something I think you wanted to touch on a little bit in this discussion is like personal brand or business brand and how to match the two.

Rachel Gogos: And in your case, you have both, right? You have conquer your business, but you're also really well known as Aaron Marcus out there. So I'm a big fan of having as few web properties as you need to own, because they require maintenance, just like a real house. But ideally, if you can own both domains, your vanity URL like erinmarcus.

Rachel Gogos: com, and your business brand, if you want a business brand, own both of those and have them point to the same website. You can have your vanity URL point to your about page. If you're projecting a business brand, if you're at a place where you're projecting your personal brand, and I think those are more thought leadership brands that you're not necessarily growing to sell ever, a company under your vanity URL under a business brand, if you, if your aspiration is to grow a company and eventually sell it then I would highly recommend doing that under a business brand.

Rachel Gogos: But you can still use your personal brand to grow and scale that because ultimately, when you're marketing, people want to hear from people they don't want to hear from a business. And I've seen that even in my own business, because I have a business brand. But most people aren't responding to brand IDs, Facebook comments, but they are responding to Rachel go says Facebook comments, so no matter how big your business, I also go. Really recommend building your social and doing a lot of your marketing as the human that you are, if you're the face of your brand, your business brand, build it under your personal brand, at least be the voice of it, even if it's a company page.

Erin Marcus: I totally agree with you, and one of the things you said that I didn't even realize, I didn't even think of this, because to me, not knowing a lot of the tech stuff, one website can point to another website, I got that covered, but it just didn't even occur to me that I could take a personal URL and have it point to the about page, or in my case, to a speaker page, so I didn't even realize that I could take a personal URL and have it point to the about page.

Erin Marcus: Exactly. I might, people, once they're there, they'll search around. People know how to do that right now. It makes a lot more sense when I'm sure if someone's searching for me to land on the about page 

Rachel Gogos: or to your right or the speaker or whatever. Yeah, you have to think about again, going back to that strategy.

Rachel Gogos: 1st piece, right? Like, how do you want to make your money? Do you want to make it as a speaker? Do you want to make it as a course seller? Do you want to make it as a service provider? And that though, that's what you should market the most then that's what you should speak about the most publicly and point people directly to where they need to be on your website to learn more about that thing.

Rachel Gogos: Again, the thing you want to monetize most To make it easy for them, right? People have a very short attention span today. Content is coming at them a million miles a minute, and so you want to be Considering how user friendly you can be and everything you share and make it very easy for people to find what they need to take the next step towards transacting with you.

Erin Marcus: So going to this idea of, content coming at us a million miles an hour, every direction, let's get into that piece of what you do for a little bit. So personally, I did, I killed my business pages. I put them on. Archives or whatever they're just off for right now because to your point, I was, I'm now growing my personal brand more and that's where people wanted to interact with me anyway.

Erin Marcus: How do you differentiate, like one of the things I know in my world is we can, I can do videos and we can be really good about turning it in newsletters and that turns into curated content and we use the pictures and everything and nobody cares. Nobody cares. But I can post a picture of me cleaning up the cages at Wings and Talons and the owl giving me dirty looks while I'm doing it.

Erin Marcus: Like, how do you help somebody navigate? What do they need to know about combining the business outcome they're trying to create and the fact that social media's first word is social, right? 

Rachel Gogos: It's connecting the dots, right? And the posts that you make. So you mentioned earlier. Again, before we were recording about some posts you've made about a woodpecker and food and tying it into a business lesson for your ideal audience, right?

Rachel Gogos: Again, like that picture is going to get the most attraction. It's going to get the most, because it's, I think, honestly, I hate the word authenticity because it's so overused, but that really is what attracts people. It really gets them to pause and also it's just. A showstopper in the sense it's oh, nature and Aaron and what's she doing and what she's saying or and so they'll pause for a second, but you have to connect the dots for clients in terms of what you're trying to communicate in the lesson.

Rachel Gogos: You're trying to share with them. So you don't want to make people work too hard because their brains onto the next thing before they even finish reading what you've written in a post. And I'm also a big fan of just, keeping things very simple and keeping things tight. I see these long posts on social and I even find myself, I'll read through a couple paragraphs or kind of and then I'm on to the next thing.

Rachel Gogos: Just, but, bite sized content, enough to get your story out or the lesson you want to share, keeping things simple, and trying to get engagement, so getting people to comment, if you end with a question mark, that also triggers the brain that a response is warranted here, so just a few little tips there.

Erin Marcus: And it's interesting to me, one of the things somebody pointed out to me. And it turned out to be so true. People will like your posts, but if you don't give them a next step to take, they won't do anything except like your posts. You, we think that if you loved what I had to say, you would reach out to me about how I could help you, but that's not actually true.

Erin Marcus: We all just, we would love to believe we're all smarter than that, but that's not the way our habits are in the moment. 

Rachel Gogos: Yeah. 

Erin Marcus: People follow the direction you give. 

Rachel Gogos: Yeah. It's so true, Erin. I'm glad you brought that up because you do need to give that step by step direction. Tell people the next step.

Rachel Gogos: Again, keep it very simple and very easy for them to take that next step and just walk them. Up to the door of , and invite them in. This is the next step. Yeah. People wanna be invited. They wanna feel welcomed in. And the more you can do that too. 

Erin Marcus: That's a really good point. People want to feel welcomed in.

Erin Marcus: They want to feel invited. What they don't wanna feel is chaste and pitched to . And. I get it. It can be hard because I'm not a natural on social media. I grew up in the seventies and eighties, a complete juvenile delinquent in the city of Chicago. I spent 20 years making sure nobody knew what I was doing.

Erin Marcus: Okay. It's very weird to me to tell the world what I'm doing. It, That's not it used to be when there was a family funeral, one person always had to stay back at the house because the funeral, the obituaries were always on paper and it was basically announced that everyone would be gone. So I grew up in a world with a Chicago cop as a father where somebody had to stay at the house to make sure nobody broke in while the rest of the family was at the, event.

Erin Marcus: So it's very weird to me to put my whole life out there. And and yet, so what the, one of the things I did wrong in the beginning was thinking that everyone just wanted to know about my business. So when I had something to offer, that was the only time I showed up. And what I've since learned is if the only time you show up is to pitch, no, nobody's connecting with you.

Erin Marcus: Fastest way to get ignored. 

Rachel Gogos: Yeah. I you and I have a mentor in common, right? Which is kelly roach and I love her conviction marketing methodology, which is so Simple and straightforward It's putting educational content out there putting inspirational content out there and conviction based content, right?

Rachel Gogos: Like your beliefs your things that you're passionate about, you know in your case It's the animals in the wild the birds in the wild, right? And mixing that content up. So it's not always like pitch, in you've been around long enough to know that you really got to put your best content out there.

Rachel Gogos: That's what attracts people. And what people pay for is the organization of content. If you're putting a course out there or paying for implementation, cause they don't want to do implementation, their skills are in other areas or they don't have the time. That's what people pay for. So that was one of the first 

Erin Marcus: things I learned when I entered this world through a different mentor.

Erin Marcus: And she just said, don't be scared to give away your best stuff. And it's 

Rachel Gogos: so true. Absolutely. Because people will pay for the, for the services. piece of it. 

Erin Marcus: Like I know it doesn't matter how much great stuff I put out there. The secret sauce is when I'm able to work with you to implement on those teachings.

Rachel Gogos: Yeah. 

Erin Marcus: It's a great as opposed to watching a video. So I can put my best content out there and not worry about it. Yep. We have 

Rachel Gogos: farming 

Erin Marcus: sales. 

Rachel Gogos: No, not at all. We have a one of our taglines. It's you're the biggest differentiator to your business. And so the more you put yourself out there, the more you're, people want to hire you to work with you to do the thing that you say you do when people get to know and trust you.

Rachel Gogos: And that's the other thing to be mindful of is like the content that you're putting out there is really getting, giving. People, exposure to who you really are, building a relationship with them, and then establishing trust through being consistent. That consistency piece is also extremely important.

Rachel Gogos: You have to show up and be saying the same things over and over. That was hard for me to, I have a journalism degree. 

Erin Marcus: I was literally trained that once you said it, it was no longer relevant. Same. 

Rachel Gogos: That 

Erin Marcus: was a hard lesson for me to learn. I would, I, originally I was freaking out, like, how am I supposed to keep coming up with new stuff?

Erin Marcus: And then I was freaking out, going, how can I keep saying the same stuff? How it works. Because nobody's, here's the other thing, nobody's paying attention until they need to pay attention. That 

Rachel Gogos: and again back to the whole too much coming at them and the overwhelm. People need to see things seven or eight times before it actually sticks.

Erin Marcus: And so while we're all worried, we're bothering people and repeating ourselves. They don't even aren't even aware of us. Yeah, correct. Correct. Amazing. Any of us get anywhere. Truthfully, I really cut. I see. We're so up. I have so much empathy for people in this playing in this space and trying to do things because we are so up against neuroscience.

Erin Marcus: We are so up against everything, putting ourselves out there and the way that our brains work and what we want to have happen versus what we have to do to get it there. And I just think it's absolutely invaluable to have people who can pave the way for you a little bit, make it a little bit easier, shorten your learning curve, right?

Erin Marcus: Oh, through mentors and mentors, but even like the services, like what you offer versus the services, like other specialists out there, don't bang your head against the wall. There's people who don't know how to do this. 

Rachel Gogos: Yeah. And ultimately can save you a lot of money in the long run. Sometimes you feel like, Ooh, that's a big investment, but the key word is investment, right?

Rachel Gogos: Like you're not throwing your money away. You're investing in giving yourself time and having things. Done at an expert level, 

Erin Marcus: 100 

Rachel Gogos: percent 

Erin Marcus: 100%. You can't. I used to tell when I used to train financial advisors, if you're going to help people make more money, you have to act like it look like you have at least a little bit of it.

Erin Marcus: So if you're trying to scale and grow your business and all of your stuff looks DIY patchwork together. It doesn't matter what you say, people's brains are going to think there's something wrong. 

Rachel Gogos: Yeah, that's, and that's part of building a brand, to come full circle. That was your first point.

Rachel Gogos: Branding is not just colors and fonts, but it's actually creating the experience before they hire you to be. A customer or a client and, our case, I'm always preaching about these websites, but they're so important. They're not just these transactional things are things that people go to learn more about you when you're referred, even by a third party, or if you come up on a Google search, but you want to be thinking that customer experience.

Rachel Gogos: That you offer, wealth manager, dentist, whatever you are, it starts on the website. 

Erin Marcus: And I, done properly, marketing makes sales conversations really easy. So true. Especially when you're reacting to them, right? By the time You're talking to somebody it's what allows it to be a, just a confirmation conversation.

Erin Marcus: Absolutely. So if people want to dive into this deeper with you, what is the best way for them to find you? 

Rachel Gogos: You can find me on LinkedIn, just under Rachel Gogos. And if you're interested in our services, check out thebrandid. com. And there's a contact form on there. You can fill that out. That comes to me and a few other people on my team and would be happy to hop on a discovery call with you.

Rachel Gogos: Awesome. 

Erin Marcus: Thank you for hanging out with me today. I love chatting with you. I know we could go on for an hour and hour. More marketing nerds. Yay, marketing nerds. So thank you so much for your time and your energy and your insights. And I know people got some really good nuggets out of this. So thank you.

Rachel Gogos: Thank you, Erin. Great to see you.