How Entrepreneur Podcasters Shine Using EPIC Branding and Authenticity with Jaci Russo

Welcome to Profits Through Podcasting, the show for entrepreneurs with podcasts who want to monetize by generating leads and profits for their business from podcasting. I’m your host, Joel Oliver, ceo of East Coast Studio. Whether you know it or not, you have a brand and chances are, if you haven’t thought about it or intentionally developed that brand, you’re leaving a lot on the table when it comes to your podcast and business. Make no mistake branding is not something just for big companies. If you worry about blending into a sea of sameness, feel like nobody knows who you are and are just throwing money at advertising, wondering why it’s not working, then you’re definitely going to want to pay attention.

We have a great conversation today with Jackie Russo, who has over 25 years of business and marketing experience, with much of that being at her very own agency, brand Russo. She co-authored a book with her husband, who is also the co-host of their podcast. He Said she Said Razor Branding. Jackie shares how to build a strong emotional connection with your audience using branding and storytelling, including some crucial questions that all podcasters should ask themselves. We also learn the differences between good storytelling and bad storytelling, how to actually be authentic when behind the mic or on camera, and how you can take the right steps to start developing your brand right now, even if you’re not ready to hire an agency. You are a podcaster, so first I would love to hear a bit of background on your podcast. He said she said razor branding. You’re up to over 200 episodes now. Is that correct?

It is. It’s hard to believe that time has just flown by Thinking back.

I know that maybe it’s quite a while ago. You’re this far in now. Is that correct? It is. It’s hard to believe that time has just flown by Thinking back. I know that maybe it’s quite a while ago. You’re this far in, but did you have any specific goals in mind when you started the podcast? Like, what were you thinking when you launched that?

So we’re on, I’m going to say seventh or eighth year and it’s gone through what I would consider three specific variations. The first variety was New World right, it’s like 2017. Podcasts are really kind of starting to be a thing. We always test drive stuff on ourselves and so if that taste test goes well, then we can help our clients through our own experience and we’re not wasting their time and money while we try to figure it all out. And so the early version of the podcast was me reading the blog literally. So I had a radio show that I was doing for a local talk radio station where they had me go in once a week and talk about a topic for a couple of minutes, and really it was a lot of what social media apps are the hot new things and what should we be worrying about from a business perspective as times change. And so then I would write a blog on that, so it would give us direction in the radio show. And then I would read the blog and the podcast. I am shocked that anyone listened to it. It really. So we did that for a while and it was okay. We just started to get some people who actually really would say hey, will you cover this topic? Or I’m fascinated by this thing or I love subscribing. I’m thinking, okay, it’s not that good, but okay, we’re working on making it better.

And then the pandemic happened and we knew we needed to serve a better purpose and so it became a full hour live every week. And it was literally. This company has figured out how to do this thing, to adjust to pivot, to stay in business, and so I’m going to interview them and talk to them about what they’re going through and how they are getting by. How have they managed to avoid layoffs? How do you turn a four-hour fine dining restaurant experience into curbside pickup? So all of those pandemic pivots that were happening around us, we started to do and that’s when I think we really kind of took off because people needed that, they wanted the connection. They were working from home and it was a great opportunity to spend time with other people and they could ask live questions and they would get live answers.

And then that moved into Michael and I wrote Michael, my husband, who’s the co-founder of the agency, who’s the chief creative officer, while I’m the CEO we wrote a book together that was published in 21, called he Said, she Said Branding and that was way more well-received than we expected. I mean, I figured, you know, like a few people that are really good friends would buy a copy and that’d be the end of it. But like we sold and people cared and people read and people reviewed and it was kind of nice and so we thought, well, we’re onto something here, and so we took the two of us together and evolved the podcast for the third and, I think, final time into the two of us now running the podcast together. Instead of he’s producing in the background and I’m talking, we co-host it, co-interview. It’s basically just our guests are in marriage counseling with us. I think is what it sounds like sometimes.

Okay. So I’d like to hear this from anybody who’s done a podcast for that long, because if you look at the statistics, many people don’t get anywhere close to 200 episodes or to do it for seven or eight years. So for someone like yourself in this situation, what would you say has helped you hang in there for that long? Because there can be a variety of benefits to podcasting, even if you just want to say it’s fun. I think people like us in business are trying to get some sort of ROI from it. At the end of the day, it doesn’t have to be solely for that, but what has kept you motivated to do it this long? And, in terms of how it’s helping you, what is that like? Is it more of a trust building tool or are you directly associating business leads with it? How does that look?

All of the above. So to me, it’s a vital part of thought leadership If you’re going to have a business and you’re going to be a thought leader in that business for you to be able to share your knowledge and your expertise through books, podcasts, webinars, whatever it might be. I think that is the role we serve. We should share our knowledge, serve our community, and then we wouldn’t have to worry about selling, because that’s going to happen just naturally. The second thing, after really being a thought leader and putting your ideas out there, is the awareness that comes from people starting to find us through SEO, having more content on our website, really being able to kind of say hey, we’re over here, this is what we’re doing, this is how we do it differently.

The third thing for me is I have to prep for the sessions.

I’m doing research, I’m looking things up, I’ve got to talk about something new, so it’s forcing me to do something I really like doing anyway, but now it’s in a structured standpoint, which is being a lifelong learner. I am compelled to gain new knowledge, to have new things to talk about every episode and, last but not least, I feel like it’s really a big piece of we can directly track. When someone we’re having a discovery call with a potential client at the agency and they’re saying I took this because I listened to your podcast, or I reached out to you because someone recommended you and I went and listened to the podcast, because someone recommended you and I went and listened to the podcast, or they’ll ask for information on this one topic. Maybe we’re talking about some sort of rebranding initiative Well then I can send them a podcast episode where we talked about rebranding and so now it’s that you know we have a proven process, we’ve got some validation, we’ve got some social proof, and so they feel more comfortable trusting us.

Yeah, absolutely. I love to hear that, and obviously that’s something that takes a little while. You don’t just start a podcast and a few episodes later you’re going to see a huge bunch of benefits. It’s like anything, it takes time to build up. So clearly in the initial stages especially you you stuck in there and now you’re seeing in a big way the fruits of that labor.

Right, absolutely, and we enjoy it. It’s fun for us meeting new people, talking to new people, getting new perspectives. I would tell you, sometimes we’re agreeing, but sometimes we’re disagreeing, and I think that’s. Both sides are important.

Yeah, for sure. I’ve noticed that even as well, just kind of keeping your finger on the pulse of what’s going on, and you said that as well. You know that lifelong learning, so I hadn’t even thought about that as a benefit before, because that’s one of the things that you specialize in. You know branding I hear that word and that’s for big companies right, it costs a lot of money. I just I got my little website, I got an Instagram and I have a podcast. That’s my brand. But is that true, or can you kind of give us some insight? So what exactly is branding and how it relates to people in these situations, like those entrepreneur types?

So the brand is the emotional connection people have with you. It’s why they think about you, how they feel about you, whether or not they’re going to choose you. So it’s reputation, it’s trust, it’s expertise, it’s your brand identity, which is your logo, it is your website, it is your social media channels, it’s your customer service, it’s your timelines, it’s how well you communicate with people, it’s whether or not you’re doing a job to ensure satisfaction. All of that fits under the umbrella of branding. Each of those little bitty pieces are a place to build or break the brand, because the brand is the amalgamation of all of those things.

So what happens is when we intentionally know who we are, know who we’re trying to serve a specific target audience segment, know what our point of differentiation is because if you don’t differentiate, you can’t dominate. You’re gonna blend into a sea of sameness. Know what message that target audience needs to hear from us, to know that we hear them, we see them, we understand them and we can help them, and then knows where to put those messages, you’re building a brand. Everybody else is, instead of being proactive, is being reactive, and that means you don’t really care what people think of you and maybe it’s gonna be great and maybe it’s not, but you haven’t put the time and effort in to intentionally develop this as a strategic process. You’re just letting the wind take you.

Right. So, if I’m getting you correctly, you always have a brand. Something is there that is your brand, but if you’re not actually taking charge and developing it into something that’s useful, it could actually be a problem for you. But it’s always something there and you should be harnessing that and being intentional with it.

Correct Most people. When they don’t take the intentional approach, they’re not being the intentional approach, they’re not being strategic about it, they’re not being proactive. Then they just are disappointed and say things like nobody knows who we are. We know half our advertising is wasted. We don’t know why. We don’t understand why people don’t realize that we can do this for them or that we’re the right answer. We don’t realize why they’re choosing another entity, another solution instead of us. That’s what typically happens. When you are intentional and strategic with it, then you know where all your money is going and you have a good ROI. You know why people are coming to you and what you need to say and do to pull them through the buyer’s journey to select you. You know how to turn your experience with them into advocacy, which is another word for word of mouth marketing. They are then helping you with spreading more awareness.

That’s not a small business, big business thing. That’s a. Am I a strategic planner and really purposeful, or am I just going to let the wind take me? If you look at building a house, if the contractor says, okay, so you want a house, great, I’m going to have some materials delivered tomorrow, you would say, whoa, hold on. We are about to waste time and money because you don’t know what kind of house I want. You don’t know what it should look like, you don’t know how big it’s going to be, you don’t know how many rooms there are. You haven’t mapped out the land. How are you just delivering materials? But yet that’s what people predominantly smaller businesses do, because they’re busy and they’re stressed and they have a lot going on. They don’t know the steps to follow to do it right. They don’t know that there are even steps they should be following. They think they just do marketing and that’s what happens Waste.

Okay, if someone’s wondering is this for me what I’m listening to right now, pretty safe to say that, yes, if you haven’t thought about it at all, there’s room for improvement, to say the least.

Yes, you know, here’s the thing no-transcript agency that you help people with this type of thing. At what level should someone explore working with a professional here? Because, as you said, you know, a lot of entrepreneurs were stressed. There maybe is not a big budget, so they’re thinking, well, I can’t afford that help, so I have to just be stuck where I am. But do you need to make a big leap into a big professional solution right away, or are there lower cost things? Go ahead around that.

I think that not every business can afford an agency. I mean by no means they’re expensive. I run one. I know how expensive they are and some people have natural talent, good taste, access to a lot of tools, know how to use them properly, and so they don’t need to go spend additional money. So if we’re looking at do it yourself and do it really well, because that’s your natural talent great rock on All the way to hiring an expensive agency, that’s a very large line with a lot of little points along the spectrum, and so it might be that you are not quite comfortable trusting yourself.

You want a little bit of direction. Then there are some do it with you models where you go through training and education to get better at it and then you can go do it. There are some inexpensive freelancers, small agencies, but experienced, and they know what they’re doing, so they can do some things for you, because there’s some things you just shouldn’t DIY. If I am worried about my health, I can definitely eat better, I can exercise more, but I’m not going to perform my own EKG, right, you know I’m going to go to a trusted professional for that. I’m not going to perform my own EKG, right, you know I’m going to go to a trusted professional for that. I’m not going to draw my own blood and do my own lab work in my kitchen to know what my levels are. I’m going to go to a trusted professional. So I think there’s a point where DIY ends and you really have to hire somebody who knows what they’re doing.

Yeah, okay, great answer. So let’s say whether we’ve done a bit of DIY or we’re paying an agency such as yours to help us develop a brand. We’ve got a beautiful website now, some really compelling copy, great marketing material. Our we’re either doing a podcast or we’re doing some video content. We’ve got the mic, we’ve got the camera. Now you’re faced with okay, how do I live up to this brand? Because I’m like, let’s say, this agency helped me develop a beautiful thing and it’s on the internet, but I’m kind of hiding behind it. Now that I’m out here and it’s me, how do I live up to this brand? Is there anything specific to know in that realm like of putting yourself your face out there in this content?

There is, and I think it starts with the understanding that brand identity your name, your logo, your colors, your fonts, your layout is just that. It’s your brand identity. It tells people hey, this, this thing is behind me, just want you to know this is what’s happening. But it’s not your whole brand, it’s one piece of it. So when you do it yourself or hire an agency, you should have more than just a logo in your brand Bible or your brand guidelines. You should have messaging. You should have a path forward for how to execute and implement a good social media strategy, whatever.

So when it comes to starting a podcast or restarting one, I would imagine one of the first questions you’re going to ask yourself is what am I going to talk about? And then immediately followed up by who’s going to listen to this. So, knowing who you are that authenticity first step to a brand. Knowing who you’re trying to talk to or connect with or reach that target audience second step to building a brand. So when we are thinking about that target audience, everything you do has to be understanding that it’s not just a one size fits all. Everybody gets grouped together, it’s a target audience segment, and so the more you know about that segment or those segments, the better you’re going to be able to connect directly with them.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And, side note, a lot of people don’t even have an ideal target audience in mind. They don’t even know it’s like one of the biggest mistakes is I don’t even know who I’m talking to. Then, once you establish that and start considering that you should have all of your content for those people, then you start to remind yourself oh yeah, they wouldn’t care about that or they would really care about this. And let me get into that. So one thing quite common to hear about these days, when we’re making this content and kind of to go back to what you were just touching on there, no-transcript.

When I am representing the agency, we have something we created called razor branding, and we talk about it in our book, we talk about it on our podcast, on our website. Razor branding is the process that we use to do the work we do for our clients. You can download it. You can learn exactly how to do it. I’ll hold your hand and walk you through it, because either you’re going to do it yourself, and so I want you to do it the right way, or you’re going to have the resources to hire somebody, and so I want you to know what you’re getting. The thing that’s so interesting to me is, I feel like we only have so much time, talent and treasure, and so whichever one you have the most of is how you’re going to end up making these decisions. If you have a ton of time, a little bit of talent, no treasure, you’re going to do it yourself. If you have no time and sometimes no talent, but more treasure, you’re going to hire experts. So that’s kind of how I think we make our decisions. So when we look at messaging, we think of that, or at least I think of that as the third step in Razor branding. The first is focus. Who are you talking to? Who are you focused on? The second is promise. Why should they choose you? The third is connection what are you going to say to them? And the fourth is where are you going to say it is? Where are you going to say it? So when we talk about messaging, we talk about two different sets of answers to that question. One is the message of who I am, why you should listen, and the second is what’s actually happening in the episodes, the message you’re putting out there, the reason why somebody’s going to listen to this episode. So you have to really start with the first of who am I? Who am I talking to? Why should anybody even care that I exist? What mental real estate is mine to own? Then get into the individual episodic messages that are going to tie in quite nicely. So there are a number of different theories around storytelling. A guy named Park Howell has written a couple of books, has a podcast and a company all about how to tell your story. Donald Miller wrote a book called Story Brand Excellent. Really holds the hand of somebody who’s not a naturally gifted copywriter and teaches them how to tell stories.

If people are going to go research, those great I’m not going to ruin the ending of those, but, at the end of the day, the way that I think of it as a guide is to say bad storytelling is this is who I am, this is what I do. Let me tell you all about me. Aren’t I great? That is bad. That is what 99% of people do, but that is bad. Good storytelling is to say I know who you are. I understand the challenges that you have. I appreciate how tough this is. I know what’s going to happen if you don’t solve your problem and, by the way, here’s something that can help. So I am a guide that gets you to a solution.

Two very different approaches. The human species believes that they are their own favorite topic. So if you are talking to me about me, I’m going to listen. If you are talking to me about you, I am checking emails. We should talk with people when we’re not in front of them the same way we talk with them when we are in front of them. It should be a dialogue, not a monologue, and I think too many people talk at instead of with.

Right. Yes, that brings me to an interesting point, because this is a personal observation I’ve had. Maybe you see things differently, but over the years what I saw, it seemed like we kind of got into an era of inauthenticity to some degree, like, especially when it came to a lot of marketing and content creation. Like there was a lot of people talking at you, like commercials are talking at you a lot of old school marketing copy. Then the pendulum swung the other way, where it’s like people became tired of that and then authenticity became the new thing, which is great. I like that.

But the impression that I got was a lot of people in brands and maybe they’re just trying to figure out how to move forward here, but it was like they were trying to be authentic, which to me came off as very inauthentic. It’s like once the message was to be authentic, we had a bit of fake authenticity out there. Companies may be throwing money at it and just saying, like here, go be authentic, produce us something that’s authentic. So that said, even with the best intentions, even if you’re aware of this possibility, when you actually jump behind a mic or on a camera for your first podcast episode, it can be a challenge, even if you know, even if you genuinely desire to be yourself and be authentic in front of an audience. It doesn’t just come overnight, or does it Right? I’ll throw it to you on this. But so owning an agency that’s kind of tasked with this, like how do we really go about presenting that true, authentic self that we really want to put out there?

You know, I think that’s a great question. What ends up happening, I think, is yes, hi, I want you to go create something to make me look authentic. That’s the purpose.

Yeah, but it happens all the time, especially the bigger the company, the more they are not willing to just say we’re a big company and we don’t really care about the environment or our people or whatever. Instead they say, oh no, we’re green and we’re a family, and everybody knows that’s a lie. And so then their glass doors, reviews, suffer and nobody wants to work there, and you know it’s a whole thing. So I think it really has to start with knowing who you are. I was interviewed on a podcast. It’s been a couple of months now and the person who interviewed me has a very clear interest in investing real estate, investing specifically, and I’m like, okay, I get called for those things a lot because that requires a lot of marketing and some branding know-how.

But then the next paragraph in the Please Be my Guest was a little turn. Specifically, the target audience that listens to this podcast are doctors with successful practices who want to invest in real estate. And I thought, oh, now, all of a sudden, I see it. I know exactly who’s going to be listening. I know exactly who I’m going to be talking to. It’s so clear. That is going to be so much easier for this person to name their podcast to write a description of their podcast, because they know they’re talking to Medical Mike.

And so Medical Mike is a doctor, he’s very successful, he’s got a thriving practice. He doesn’t know what to do with the money that he’s making and he’s looking for some safe ways to invest so that he can get a good ROI as he looks towards his retirement in the next 10 or 20 years. You know exactly what to say. So now this podcast host knows who to book as guests, knows what problems he’s trying to solve, knows what questions Medical Mike has, knows how to go ask the Medical Mikes out there. If he runs out of things that he knows, he can go get more. So it’s a never-ending supply of content and questions and problems to solve and episodes to talk about. That is what I mean when I say know who you are and know who you’re talking to.

Would this be the biggest key here, when we’re considering how do we really stand out? Like is it knowing those people and just doing everything you can to appeal to them, because there’s virtually an unlimited amount of content out there and choices in businesses to work with? It can feel like nobody’s listening, which you kind of alluded to earlier. Right, it can feel impossible to make an impact, whether it’s our own podcast or being a guest on another podcast or any kind of content creation Like we think of. Where do we even start in terms of capturing attention and building a connection? Is that the root of it there? What you just said?

Well, you know, I think it’s interesting. I actually thought we were oversaturated. I just felt like, oh my gosh, there’s so many podcasts out there Like we’re done right. And then every year I look at the research and it talks about how podcast listenership is up, podcast launches are up, more and more people listen to podcasts and I think, okay, we’re not saturated yet and so we all just keep going.

I think that we have to accept some science and I am not a scientist, I’m not a researcher by nature, but these are things that I have read and I’m sharing what I think is kind of common sense that humans are a herd species. We travel together and pack animals. It’s wired into our DNA. We have done it since the beginning of time and we used to do it for safety. Just like the reason why animals are travel in a pack is so that from a distance, the predator doesn’t know that it’s one or 100. Humans work the same way. Look at any high school, any gaggle of girls inside that high school, and you will see they dress alike, they talk alike. You know it’s that herd mentality, it’s safety.

So in business we can’t be part of the herd, we can’t blend in. That’s not safe. That’s going out of business In our lives. Absolutely Be safe, be with your community, be with your people. In our business you have to be different. You have to differentiate, to dominate, and you can’t be different if you don’t know what else your target audience is looking at.

Who’s in that herd when they’re looking at it? What podcasts are they listening to? What thought leaders do they follow? What resources do they subscribe to? When you know enough about your target audience, you will know where the gap is. Because there’s a lot of overlap. You’ll find I mean, my gosh, there’s so many marketing and branding podcasts, there’s a ton. We, even after we kind of went through our adjustment, realized three or four other podcasts had also gone with a, he said she said podcast name and I was like gosh, dog it. But you know we’re here now and so we’ve already written the book on it. We got to keep going. But what ends up happening is you have to find a way to stand out in that clutter. So you have to know the competitive landscape. You have to know what you offer, where’s the overlap, where’s the gap. Then you’ll know what mental real estate is yours to own and you can go claim it.

Very good advice. We’ve got some insight now on, say, brand building and how to be authentic and tell your story. So, to start to wrap up, do you have clients who are using podcasts I assume that you do who are using podcasts to grow or improve their brand, and how are they doing that? Like what tips would you have for podcasters that are doing this type of thing?

trying to use their podcast to compliment their business and grow their leads and revenue.

So we work primarily in the B2B space. So we don’t have cool, fun, sexy clients that everybody knows their name and so it’s very, you know, professional services, industrial manufacturing driven services. Industrial manufacturing driven, which means to get 100 listeners, is a huge win because it’s such a small target audience. It’s a very narrow target audience segment, but that also means we know exactly who they are and so to use that as a chance for them to share their thought leadership, to stay on top of their game as lifelong learners, to form a community, to use this to meet other people in their space for interview guests, and what I think is most importantly is to leverage their guests to share and get the word out about our clients. So we manage I’m going to say, four or five different client podcasts and we see each one of them, the listenership growing, the engagement growing, the quality of guests growing and, most importantly, their bottom line growing. Now the podcast is one piece of an overall plan, but every one of those tactics is formulated to work together to make sure that it’s in harmony.

Okay, great, so it’s BrandRussocom. That’s the agency for anybody that’s probably at that level where they’re looking for some professional help and you have it’s BrandStateU correct. Could you tell us a bit about what that does and who that’s for?

Sure. So as the agency BrandRusso grew over time, we got bigger, we got more expensive, but we still had those smaller companies coming to us asking for help, and I didn’t like not being able to serve them. It felt very off brand to not have something we had planned, and so I recorded all those classes and put them online and turn them into a DIY but with help model. So it’s do it yourself, but with, but not on your own. Do it yourself with guidance, so you’re not out there trying to go through Google and figure it out. I’m holding your hand, I’m taking you through. It’s me on camera, my decks, my worksheets, all my stuff.

And so Brand State U started like that, and now it has grown. So we’ve got members, I’ve now brought in additional people to do professional development, and so the five of us kind of really provide this full circle approach. And so that’s all through Brand State U. And then we’re doing a women’s summit at sea in September. It was a lot of fun last year. Everybody signed up to do it again this year, and so we do those kinds of things at Brand State U.

Excellent. Yeah, I think what you described there, that content will be very useful to type of person who would be listening to this podcast, and even myself. I got to go check that out now. So we’ll have that link the agency, of course, your podcast. You’ve got the book as well. Great insight, Jackie. Appreciate your time. Thank you so much, my pleasure. Join us again next time on Profits Through Podcasting for more tips on how to turn your podcast into a lead and revenue generation machine for your business. And if you’re ready to let a team of professionals handle your entire podcast production workflow so you can focus on the most important tasks in your business, visit eastcoaststudiocom. Slash apply.