Branding for Podcasting ft. Brian Orr

In today’s episode, Steve sits down with Brian Orr, a branding expert and founder of BrandingLab.co, to discuss the critical role of branding in podcasting and business growth. They explore the differences between branding and marketing, the importance of consistency, and how to effectively position yourself or your business in the minds of your audience. Whether you're a podcaster, entrepreneur, or interested in personal branding, this episode offers valuable insights into building a strong brand identity.

Key Takeaways:

1. Understanding Brand vs. Marketing:
   • Branding is about how your audience perceives and talks about you; it's their interpretation of your message.
   • Marketing is the method by which people find you; it's about visibility and outreach.
2. Consistency is Crucial:
   • Maintaining consistent messaging, content, and promises is essential for building trust and a strong brand identity.
   • Inconsistencies can lead to audience disengagement and dilute your brand's impact.
3. Define Your Audience and Goals:
   • Before starting a podcast or any marketing effort, clarify who you're trying to reach and what action you want them to take.
   • Tailor your content to meet the needs and interests of your target audience.
4. The Power of Personal Branding:
   • People prefer to do business with people, not faceless companies.
   • Developing a personal brand helps individuals connect authentically with clients and customers.
5. Leverage Your Strengths and Delegate:
   • Focus on what you do best and consider outsourcing tasks that don't align with your skills, such as podcast production.
   • Collaborating with others who excel in areas where you don't can enhance your overall effectiveness.
6. Storytelling as a Tool:
   • Sharing stories of challenges and successes can position you as an expert and provide value to your audience.
   • Decide whether you or your guests are the "hero" of your podcast to effectively connect with listeners.

What's Next?

Visit BrandingLab.co to learn more about Brian Orr's branding services, including corporate training and personal coaching. If you're looking to strengthen your brand identity, connect with Brian for expert guidance.

Stay Tuned:

Keep listening to Podcasting Badass for more expert insights on podcasting, branding, and business growth. Don't forget to subscribe and leave a review!

Transcript

Steve: 0:00

Hey there and welcome to another episode of podcasting. Bad-ass it's your host sober Steve, the podcast sky. And today we are having a great conversation with Brian or about branding. Brian is a branding mastermind. And I can't wait to share this amazing conversation that we had talking about how to turn a branding as a concept into a podcast, as well as how important branding is for podcasters. And what is your brand, how to define what your brand is. Versus managing that versus your social media appearance, or your episode structures and format and style, and figuring out where you stand in the grand scheme of the podcasting world. So enjoy this episode and make sure you are following wherever you listen. So you can get these new episodes when they come out every single Monday. Enjoy. Hey there, it's Sober Steve here today with the branding master, Brian Orr. Hey Brian, how are you? Hey Steve, what's going on buddy? Not much. I had gotten the pleasure to meet you recently at a local networking event, but for my listeners, why don't you introduce yourself?

Brian: 1:04

Sure, my name is Brian Orr. It was a long way to get to where we are now. But for, 20 some odd years, I was a professional DJ and I built my personal brand before I knew what that was back when I was around 15 years old. So that took me on a journey and it actually created a lot of opportunities for me. I had worked in a bunch of different countries with some major brands and some media. And over here recently, what I've been realizing is there's a lot of need. For people and businesses to focus on their brand. The opportunities that branding created for me put me on this track to become an investor and a consultant for business development and really what happened, why I just started seeing more and more of that need for branding. So I said, maybe I can make a bigger impact. Maybe I can make a bigger splash if I could. Help people in this area. What I did so well for so many years. So that's where we're at right now.

Steve: 2:03

Yeah. And I definitely, when I heard what you did, my ears perked up because branding is huge for podcasters. I know when I started podcasting, I had a huge advantage doing sales and marketing because you need to be able to sales and market your podcast to be able to help it grow efficiently. But I didn't have branding experience. Cause I worked for these big companies that took care of their branding. I was just like, The puppet that was really good at repeating things back. So this was my first time really like doing my brand when I started podcasting. And so having to figure out what that was, took me over a hundred episodes before I had to pay someone to help me figure it out for me or with me as to what it is and how to achieve it. But that's when things started really taking off for me. So what would you say your relationship with like podcasts have been in terms of listening? Tell me about your podcasting.

Brian: 2:47

Yeah, I'm a big fan of podcasting. I'm a big fan of it as a, as an influence builder for a personal brand or a corporate brand. Really. I liked the idea of the delivery mechanism. I like everything about podcasting. I don't like producing my own podcast that I don't like. So I did right before COVID. I started building a podcast for business development. It was called, what was it called? I don't even remember what it's called, man. It was five years ago. I, whatever it's called, it might still be, it might still exist somewhere on iTunes or something. I can't remember what it was. Yeah, it's probably out there in the podcasting graveyard. It's out there. Yes. So it was right before COVID and I was interviewing business leaders and we were talking about these challenges that they had in their business challenges that they had in their personal life and how they broke through these challenges. That's essentially the premise of what it was. And I recorded something like, I recorded like 30 episodes and I aired about eight of them and COVID hit and then everything went haywire. Plus there were like 7, 000 new podcasts every day. And for me, it just didn't, the ROI wasn't there for me to continue to do it alone, the development alone. It was extremely hard back then, it might be easier now, but it was extremely hard back then. So I have a lot of aired episodes, and I also have a lot of dead episodes that are just sitting on a file on my drive somewhere. That maybe I'll bring them back to life at some point. But as far as podcasting as a medium, I love it. And I think it's super opportunistic for people who either host or appear on podcasts to develop their brand.

Steve: 4:33

Yeah. Certainly, since I made a profession of it would have to agree now with what you do, how do you feel branding plays into podcasting? Because as a podcast listener and fan of podcast, have you listened to podcasts where you liked the podcast content or topic but struggled with listening to it or staying because they were having brand or identity issues?

Brian: 4:55

Yeah, I guess if we're talking podcast specifically, there are some that have come across where it's like, They brand themselves as a particular thing, but the content does not always stay consistent with what they told you that they were going to bring to you. And when you're listening to it it's off the cup and it's not necessarily delivering the value that you anticipated when read or, clicked on it too. To listen. So that's one of the challenges with everything with branding, right? Is the consistency. So if you brand yourself, if you brand yourself as a Rogan where you just talk to a bunch of different people about a bunch of different things, then people tune in because they want to hear different people talk about different things. But if you brand yourself as, let's say a marketing podcast, but then you spend, hours and hours talking about, I don't know, anything that's not marketing you you're not likely to sustain an audience. And you're not likely to communicate and certainly not convert if you're trying to either sell through your podcast or allow your guests to sell through their podcast. So I think that branding is extremely crucial and it must stay consistent with what you're promising to your audience. From your thumbnail.

Steve: 6:12

Yeah, I definitely agree. Making sure that the title, the art and the topic all match. And so oftentimes I find people were one of those threes out of date, not intentionally, but because they made some sort of update or change. Yeah. So things can happen with that. And I definitely can see that being a deterrent. So when someone comes to you to start working with you, what are some of the common issues that they're facing?

Brian: 6:34

So I work with people, individuals as a personal brand, and I work with corporations, helping them build their corporate brand. Also, within a corporation, I do training as well. For example, I've trained a recent one was a broker. She had about 12 real estate agents that work for her, and she brought me in to teach them about personal branding. So How they can brand themselves personally as a subset of the organization. But, as people are starting to realize nobody wants to do business with a company, people want to do business with people. So they're actually putting people forward ahead of the corporation with the corporation sort of guidelines and backbone there. But putting the person forward. So there's the personal brand. Could be a variety of things. Influencers entrepreneurs or solopreneurs or, small business owners who want to create more of a demand tension by putting themselves out front, which is what they should do. Yeah. And then there's the corporate where it's okay. What are we going to do here? I don't do design. So that's where I've stopped. I do thought work. I do analysis. I do strategy. I don't do design when it gets to design They have their brand guidelines so they could take that to their design team. They could take that to their marketing team I don't do any of that I do all of that stuff that should be done first that foundational stuff the mindset stuff the thought stuff Of the analysis the strategy and that's on a corporate level or a personal level as well

Steve: 8:04

Yeah, and I know that especially since so many of my clients and listeners are people that are doing this for businesses, whether it be their personal businesses or their franchises, they're podcasting for business. So it is oftentimes figuring out how you can be a unique host as well as stick to the corporate or the company brand. And so what would you say if someone. What are signs and symptoms of someone having an issue or identity crisis with their brand and they might not realize it? Oh, man. Oh. Cause I, I was having an issue for years. I like the question. Yeah. Cause I'll say like when I had my podcast for over a year and a half with a hundred episodes called Gay A, I thought I was so clever because it was a play on AA and they were for gay people. I didn't think about the SEO of gay a not being friendly or having any sort of extra words to add on to it. So no one could find me unless I was like making them find me. And even then it was very difficult because they couldn't just search those words. So it's do things like add a title extension. But like I, I was wondering why I was having these issues with branding and why people can find me and why. my social media content, which like one week is about the episodes and another week about my dog, why that wasn't flying off or taking off. And so I had to have someone like you come and help that out. So for someone who might be going around life, blissfully ignorant of their need for rebranding, what are some of those signs and symptoms?

Brian: 9:29

Yeah, it's an excellent question. And you just ran through a laundry list of signs and symptoms, but let me clarify something that may help this perspective. Brand has nothing to do with people finding you online. Okay. Brand has to do with people telling other people about you. Okay. That's where brand is. So let me explain that a little bit more. People talk often about building a brand. You can't actually build a brand. What a brand is the audience, the recipient, their interpretation of the messages that you're communicating. So you're trying to communicate yourself as the gay a play on words, the talk about my dog, whatever it is that you're putting out there, what would define your brand is the way that the listeners, the people who have received the information interpret that how they position you in their brain. Do they position you as somebody who's fun and engaging, who's interesting, who comes off with a variety of topics that they want to tune into every week, or do you appear as someone who is a little bit discombobulated? You're not really sure what you're going to get. And it's not quite appealing. The same message can register two different ways or more, a multitude of different ways. In effect, what you're trying to do when people talk about building their brand is develop this consistent type of position in someone else's mind so they can categorize you. Our brains like to categorize our brains, like to put things in its place. So our brain needs to know where to put you. You as you, Steve, and you, anyone that's listening to this. In their brain, where do we position you? Do we position you as the person we can go to if we need help moving a refrigerator? Do we position you as the person we can go to if we want to talk about our feelings, right? Where do we position you? And that's for you as an individual or whatever your service or product you're providing. So that's what brand actually is. And then when you get into SEO, when you get into how people find you, that's marketing, right? That's not branding. Branding is how you define yourself and the type of influence that you want to have to audience and the way that audience essentially defines you and positions you. That's where brand stops and everything else beyond that. Is marketing.

Steve: 11:48

Yeah, that definitely makes sense because I do like with my clients, I don't have it all planned out or thought out as you, but we do start with more of just what, who are you, what are you doing? What do you want from your podcast? What are your goals and how are we going to get there in terms of delivering information? And then we figure out like the house and the marketing and all of that kind of stuff. So what would you say if someone was to start a podcast would be things to, to really think about, to reflect on their, If they were making a podcast for their business, what would it be? Things to reflect on before hitting record? Yeah.

Brian: 12:20

The first question is the podcast, the business, or is the business something else?

Steve: 12:26

Generally, a lot of my clients, they already have a business that exists and they're looking for the podcast as a way to grow it in a unique way to stand out as unique and interesting in their industry.

Brian: 12:35

So the podcast is a marketing tool. Yes. So the podcast itself should have its own brand identity. All right. That's when you're talking about how it's displayed to the world, the thumbnails and the mission statement or whatever it is that you're communicating outwardly. It should have consistency. Of course, with whatever it is, it could be a variety of things, or it could be one very specific thing. Let's use a fitness example because those are pretty easy to use, if it's a gym owner or gym franchise owner who wants to start communicating through podcast medium to attract attention to their gym, there's a lot there. It's so deep. I, every time I want to say something out loud, I think I should say something else there you, because. Who are they trying to reach with their podcast and how are they trying to convert them to customers? Are they just trying to become well known as individuals so that they can go out and do speaking engagements as professional trainers? Are they trying to bring people into their gym? Then you're doing very local kind of stuff, right? You wouldn't be having this global kind of communication scale, even though the podcast can reach globally. It doesn't do you any good if you're in Florida and people are in Minnesota and your conversion is to try to get them to come into your gym. So there's many levels as far as. Like you mentioned who you are, who you're trying to reach, what you're trying to get them to do. And you have to go through that from not only your corporation or business, but yourself as an individual, and then your marketing tool, which is your podcast. And they all have to work in unison to get to the ultimate result of what you. Want the person who's listening to the action that you want them to take.

Steve: 14:18

Yeah, that definitely makes sense. And how might it be different if it was someone doing a hobby podcast about a passion of theirs versus if it was a corporate company that you were working with and consulting with,

Brian: 14:31

I think the same question holds true. It's what do you want the audience to do? Do you just want them to listen to you? Are you just trying to get people to listen to you? Then you, that's what the news is, right? Then you would do shock and awe and fear and panic because people will listen to that stuff. Will it get them to buy anything? Probably not unless you're selling emergency kits or doomsday. Bunkers or something, right? All the gross stuff. Yeah. What? Yeah, but it just depends on what you want the audience to do. What is the action that you want them to take? So if you want them to buy something from you, even if it's just your presence, if you want them to hire you to speak somewhere, or if you want them to hire you as a coach, then all of the content from the podcast, even though it's a hobby podcast or we could call it a personal branding kind of podcast. If what you're selling is you or your business, your service or your small products, right? Then all of the communication outbound should be That chess match to try to position yourself in their brain. So you become the person that they think of when that problem comes about. And even if we go back to the guy said, I don't know why I said moving a refrigerator but it came out. So let's say you were a muscle guy and you charged people a fee to be manual labor. You could do a podcast talking about all of the benefits of not doing it yourself, right? The hazards of doing it yourself. You can hurt yourself, insurance, this, all these kinds of things. And all the benefits of being able to dial, five, five, five muscle and have the guy come over and do the thing for you. And there's a variety of different ways that you can communicate that message, but ultimately all of it is designed to have the audience take some particular action.

Steve: 16:23

Yeah, no, that definitely makes sense. So if you wanted to start a podcast that you didn't have to produce, what would the action you would want your listeners in this podcast to do?

Brian: 16:33

Me personally?

Steve: 16:34

Yeah.

Brian: 16:36

If I was to start a podcast again, I think I would want my audience, I'm a teacher. I like to educate. I'm not an actual teacher. I just, as a personality, I like to teach and I like to educate. I would probably use a podcast for myself as a way to educate people on a lot of the psychological elements behind branding, a lot of the reasons to and the pitfalls of not having a brand, right? So ultimately, does the action for that have them hire me as a coach? Potentially, does it have them hire me in some way? Does it have them hire my company to come in and do some corporate training? Potentially, but I would have to then continue to think about. What type of audience am I actually building? Am I building listeners or am I building some kind of a funnel that I want to convert, and they're not mutually exclusive. They could be the same thing where you start with a top of funnel thing where you're providing education and value and information through content, and then. ultimately positioning yourself as the person of influence for that particular topic. And then if somebody chooses to want to move further in a personal brand or in a corporate training perspective, then they would look to you to be the person to do that. So that's the map that I think that I would go through and it would start with education. And I would probably do, More often me personally, I would probably do people like you, like that example that you had, where you realized. What could have been and like wasted time, wasted money, wasted energy. It had you just taking a different action sooner. I would probably do a whole, if I was to do it, it would be all stories like that. It would just be all failures. That's what I'm thinking. It would be all failures that then there's a recovery element and a success element. And then position myself as the person or my company, as the people to be able to facilitate that transformation for you before you fail.

Steve: 18:37

Yeah, for sure. I definitely think that's a great way of doing it. That's three of the main ways that I recommend my audience do podcasts. Cause oftentimes people come to me and they're like, I'm going to do an interview podcast and just ask questions and go around acting like I don't know the answers to anything. And I try and explain like for a business, that's not always the best way to come up. With expert positioning. So I love what you're talking about, like giving the advice and the direct content. But then also I feel like you've been doing this long enough that I'm sure you have some clients that can come on that you've worked with that can do kind of client journey episodes where you talk about the problems came to you with and what it's been like as their business has grown or as their brand has grown, once they figure it out with you, as well as if you're doing consultations or doing freebies like that, where you can meet someone with a problem and brainstorm together, like what we're doing right now. A potential client could be another way to do episode formats where you're always the one in the expert chair, because that will definitely be the way where people are listening to you. They can listen to a mix of tips and tricks and hints, as well as you finding someone who's in help and starting the fixing process, and then also getting to hear stories of you fix them already, but I can imagine it with a good mix of that people will be signing up for your coaching and help and branding left and right.

Brian: 19:47

Yeah, I think so. I think there's kind of two ways you can go about it, right? You can go about it where you position yourself as the expert and that's one strategy. And that's very effective for a lot of people in a lot of ways, especially on a solopreneur or a very lean team. And you're trying to funnel business through your podcast. I think that's a very successful way, but I think if you're trying to build your podcast as the product, if that's the product, then I would position it where the stories are the hero and that's why more people will want to tune in to listen to the podcast. But again, this goes back to what is the action that we want them to take. And then all of that psychology and strategy and positioning. Would align based on that. So do I want to be the hero where I get them into my ecosystem? So that way I'm positioned as the expert and the go to for this thing, or do I want to position my podcast as the hero where essentially the podcast is a product, but the audience would be the hero or the guests would be the hero through their storytelling. Does that make sense? What I'm thinking you're the expert in this. I'm not the expert in this.

Steve: 20:56

I'm just, you're right. It's the two podcasts that I have. I have my business one for this business that we're like doing right now. Basically that is very much what I explained and recommended for you. And then I have my gay, which I still keep going. Just now I call it the queer sober hero show because it's about having heroes and queer sobriety on every single week and it's their story. And they are the hero in the podcast is the brand, not me. So it is I. I'm using both approaches because it has different things. This is part of my business and profession, while the other one is something that I do for service as a hobby and while helping keep me sober. It is at the end of the day the intention as well of what you're looking to do with your podcast.

Brian: 21:36

Yeah. Hey, at least I know I've know what I'm talking about a little bit.

Steve: 21:40

Validated. Steve. Yes. You are definitely validated. I was like, if we work together, you don't have to take my orientation course. You pass already.

Brian: 21:51

So what's next,

Steve: 21:52

buddy? I was going to say, do you have any other, you said producing was a big obstacle for you with podcasting. What did you mean by that?

Brian: 22:00

Yeah. There's two things about me. One is I am, if you're familiar with the terms from the book traction, EOS, a rocket fuel visionary. And if you want to think about it, some people that you might know or stories that you might know, there's like the Walt Disney and the Roy Disney Walt Disney, drew the mouse and Roy Disney built theme park, right? Like that kind of thing. So I am the visionary. I've taken these assessments. I'm 98 percent visionary. A lot of people are balanced, right? They have some elements of, yeah, I can think of the stuff to do, and then I can do this stuff I am all about thinking of the stuff to do and very little about doing the stuff. So that's obstacle. Number one obstacle. Number two is. When I feel a congestion of traffic, I don't work well in that capacity, meaning the podcast for me at the time was worth it in 2019, and it was worth me putting that extra effort into the production side and into the marketing side and all of this because I thought that I could do it on my own and manage all of the things, but when the world happened and the market just started getting so flooded. Not to say that it's not the way now it is the way it's just for me, that's the challenge is when all of that flooding started to come in with so many different people at home talking to each other on the computer. Now, I said, is this really the way that I believe that I can continue to carve a unique niche for me based on my skill set and my abilities? And the answer was no. It's the, all of the production, the management, the marketing, all of that stuff is not my kind of forte, but should you start a podcast if you could, and if you had the capacity and if you had the team and all of that, would that be a good, yes, absolutely. For me, personally, it's a little tough. It's a little tough to wrap my head around doing it all over again.

Steve: 24:10

No, and I especially remember what it was like when I first started podcasting four or five years ago. I say that's when my grays started. They started beforehand, but I say that's what happened because those first few programs that I was using and I was trying all the free ones. Or different ones that were like the cheaper ones. And even then, even when I finally got the nicer programs, it was a lot more complicated. And then they added more updates and more updates as AI becomes more of a thing. And so the editing process has gotten so much easier that's when I've always been like a mix of the creative as well as the back end producing side of things. But yeah. It's gotten to the point where the producing side has been so easy for me that when I started coaching someone and they were like, all right great. Now I need to just talk to my website guy who will then talk to my graphic artist who will then talk to my uploader who will talk to like my editor, and she had five or six different people that were helping her make her show. I was like, I can do all of that. And what I love is these conversations are what light me up or make me happy. But I can be cool and chill in the studio as well, listening to some music in the background, doing editing and producing all day long. So I like that, I'm able to offer my clients, I'll help and take that off of your plate. So you can be just the visionary. That's fantastic helpful.

Brian: 25:19

The balance is hard, man, because I don't even have a balance. It's so imbalanced. Really? There's a test. It's called rocket fuel It's an extraction from the book and it talks about the two types of people that you need to have, like the major business development, major companies, right? Yeah. It's the Steve Jobs and the Steve Wozniak, like the thinker and the doer and I am all the way thinker and there's a test on Rocket fuel, dot, whatever. I don't know what the thing is, but anyway. I encourage people to do it because it's part of branding too. The more you learn about yourself, self awareness is, the first thing that I work on identity, and that's the first step that I work on because you have to know who really you are, not who you think you are, right? There's tools that you can. I have one of my domains, it's called the influence quiz. com and you can go there and check how influential you are. Some people I know scored really well on it. Some people not so much. I got an 84%.

Steve: 26:14

I was happy. My coach would be very proud of me.

Brian: 26:20

I love it. Yeah, I saw your score. I was like, it's sometimes you meet people and then they take the test and then you get to know them and you're like, Oh, yeah, it feels obvious. I could have guessed what your score would have been. But yeah, what I'm getting at with all that was personally, I don't even have a balance. So when I fill my team in any way, it's with the people who are there. The ones who love doing the thing, and that's for anybody in whatever capacity you have things that you hate things that are like the bane of your existence. It could be spreadsheets, or it could be ideas, or it could be communication, or it could be whatever. Someone else out there absolutely loves it. They do it. They live, eat, breathe, and sleep it. And the best advice that I can give is to find that person who does that, who loves that, who wants to, and then put them right in that place and let them do it for you. And then you just be the genius at whatever it is that you are in whichever role it is. And it's make a happy life. I almost said happy wife. She's back there, but happy. Happy life for sure.

Steve: 27:25

Yeah, exactly. Excellent. I think that's a great place to end on. So how would people find you if they wanted to connect Brian,

Brian: 27:31

go to branding lab. co and that's where I'm building everything out right now. The new, the newer company where we do corporate training, individual coaching. I have a bunch of other coaches that I work with and a lot of happy clients. So go there, branding lab. co and all my connecting info is on there.

Steve: 27:52

All right. Excellent. I'll add that to the show notes as well. So thank you so much.

Brian: 27:55

Thanks, Steve. This was awesome. Great conversation, bud.

Steve: 27:59

Yeah. Thank you. And thank you listeners for tuning in.