 So, yeah, welcome, welcome, and let's welcome out to Savannah. She's 15 years into experience with strategic marketing. She's gonna show us how to be inclined by being yourself. Savannah, thanks so much. Thanks for everyone joining us today here. I know that the giraffes are probably more interesting than a lot of us here even on the stage, but I'll try to keep this as valuable for you as possible. So, first, just to introduce myself real quick, the short version is Vasci. My full name is used only by my mom when I've done something wrong, or by a Bulgarian native speaker, so that's completely fine. If you wanna find me on social media, you can, and I'll share a bit more about my website in a second. So, this is actually where I'm gonna start, and believe me, this has a connection to branding that we'll just get to in a second. I started blogging in 2017 under Wordpress, pretty quickly. So, this is my English speaking site. I had a Bulgarian version before that. It's all about marketing and branding. I get around 8,000 visits per month. It's targeted traffic, so people see marketing in general. And let's play a quick game. So, if you know this amount of info about my website, would you buy that? And let's start something small, like 20 euro or something like that. One person, thank you. Thank you guys in the back. You get a beer on me later. Let's see if someone raises to 50. I didn't understand the question. If you would buy a blog with 8,000 targeted visitors who are interested in marketing. Okay, a few going there. So, I'm not gonna push my luck. I'm not gonna go further, but you see that with as little information as possible, we're already getting somewhere. And actually brands in general can be much more expensive. There's an international study by a consulting group called Interbrand. So they have this methodology where they're trying to figure out how much a brand is worth. At the top of the list, we have Apple at $408 billion, that's billion with a B. So we can imagine like, okay, there's something there, brands are important, but why does it cost so much? Like what's the value of a brand and why should I care specifically? And a brand can be a wonderful thing if people know about you or it can be completely useless if done the wrong way. And I'm gonna try to show you how to do your brand well, how to create a brand that's worth it for you as a business, for you as a professional and for your clients to recognize and be interested in. But even if we talk about the value of a brand, what is it really? So if we take Starbucks as an example, is it just the logo, the mermaid that we've all seen? Probably not. Actually, if we want to get deeper into the brand, we can look at what Starbucks claims they stand for. They say they sent to inspire and nurture the human spirit. This is their mission and this may be something you find interesting or believing or you may just think it's BS. But that's up to you. How well of a job the marketers at Starbucks do depends on what percentage of people are gonna say, yes, this is inspiring versus how many people are gonna say, yeah, that doesn't really do it for me. But we can go even on a bigger scale. The Starbucks brand is about the products they sell, the story you get about where and how they source their coffee or even the imaginative way every Barista and Starbucks can write down your name with like at least three different spelling mistakes. All of that is part of the brand. All of that is part of what you think of when you think about Starbucks. And actually, Jeff Bezos put it really well. A brand is what other people say about you when you're not in the room. So what we wanna do is create a brand that inspires people, inspires your clients, inspires the people you meet at work camps, inspires the people you work with on an everyday basis to talk about you, to talk about you well, to say nice things, to recommend you to others, and to give that special personal recommendation that's gonna win you business over the long run. So if we're talking about brand building, there is a very simple formula that is gonna help you really differentiate yourself from others. And the reason we need to differentiate is that if we don't differentiate, if we don't show that there's something else there that we're standing for something, we'll have to compete on price, we'll quickly become a commodity, and we're probably at one point gonna have to drive ourselves in the ground through cutting costs, lowering prices, getting projects we're not really passionate about. And you can, on an intuitive level, know what's the difference between a really good, let's say web consultant or a web developer, and someone you can get four or five bucks on our own fiber. But the difference between the two is kinda hard to pin down, and even harder to develop. So how do we develop that? What's stand behind brand building? It's three main components, and as always, simplifying something down to just three things is gonna make it sound a bit too simple to be true, and it is, but I'll have to use a formula, otherwise we can stand here for a couple of more hours, and I don't think anyone who's looking forward to lunch will want that, so I'll have to play around here. So first off, to build a good brand, you need others to know you, then you need them to like you, to like what they hear about you, to be interested in what you have to say, and quite crucially, you need them to trust you. So my aim here today is to tell you how to achieve each of these three components and do that well. So let's first think about the first one, so knowing, or awareness, as we say in marketing jargon. What sounds different from that? Well, the reason you need others to know you is that the more they know, the more they're gonna care. For the people in the back, I'm gonna read a few lines of this, and I hate when speakers do that, but it's gonna help me drive my point home, so I'm gonna allow it this on time. This really grumpy gentleman says, I don't know who you are, I don't know your company, I don't know your company's product, I don't know what your company stands for, so on and so forth. Now, what was it you wanted to sell me? If they don't know us, they're not gonna be interested in what we can do for them, simple as that. So any new client that comes by, they first need to learn a bit about you, to be really interested in what you have to sell. And to get there, we need to share a bit about us. We need to show who we are as people and as professionals. I'm gonna get into it in a few minutes, but it's really important to show both these sides, because this is what we're gonna build trust. Of course, we need to show what we can do, the products or services that we're selling. We need to show our trust record, we need to show what we can do for them. Case studies are a particularly important point here, but I'm not gonna delve deeper into that. If you're interested, we can talk about it after our clinician's talk. But more importantly, we need to give them an idea of what we stand for and what our personalities like. So what we value. When it comes to value, people in the WordPress community have a very strong point to talk about. And that's open source. So talking about why open source is important, sharing what you know, giving them an idea of the volunteer work you do in maintaining WordPress. These can all be important things to bring home in order to show that you're not just there about the money, you're there to do work you're proud of. And this can be worked on together with a client. So this is all well and good, but how do we get there? And how can we do that? There's a few simple things I'm gonna talk about here. And of course, if we dive deeper, there's always a lot more. But if we can look at the three most important things to me, it's meeting up with people first and foremost. So being visible in the space you're in. This can be joining a work camp. It can be going to a meetup. But it can also be a virtual meeting place. It can be a Slack community or an online group of sorts or an online community where your particular type of clients gather and gather and mass. Being there and being visible is the first step to draw curiosity. I know that there's probably been a bunch of people here that we've seen each other at previous event at the previous work camp and maybe I'm just a face in the crowd. Next time we meet, it's gonna be more than that. Next time we meet, we might talk more about what work each of us does. Next time we meet, we might already start discussing a potential partnership. And that's how this connection can be built during a longer period of time. But it's not just about meeting, it's also about sharing what you know. So my particular way of doing that is creating a blog about marketing where I share some insights about the work I do and how a company can do it on their own. It can be anything really from a simple how-to to a more in-depth guide. But sharing what you know is gonna show people that you're more than a price tag with a specific service list. You're a person who's passionate about sharing them. And the third component that I think all of these are super applicable to the WordPress community, the third one is helping out. Helping others out with any information you can be answering a simple question, be helping a marketer like myself fix something they broke on their site because they're just a marketer and have a zilch understanding of code whatsoever. It can be helping someone who's just trying to fix a simple bug. This time it might be helping them out with a few lines of comment or a few lines of code. Next time it can be helping them out with a more substantial project if you wanna work on. Often when it comes to this point, especially when I talk about sharing and helping others out and so on, there comes a question of okay, like this is all well and good. But if I'm sharing a lot, will they really wanna work with me or are they just gonna do the job themselves? And from my experience at least, this isn't really the case. The step from knowing someone to hiring them to do work for you can be very small if you show that you're going into that relationship with an open mind and being there with the position of wanting to help someone else do a good job. So this is an example from my own blog. I share a lot about different ways you can conduct marketing research or conduct different marketing strategy tasks. And this is a super lengthy guide about a specific technique for customer research known their jobs to be done. This is like according to the plugin I use for reading time, it's a 25 minute read. It has a bunch of templates. It has a ton of information and the step by step process I use, the tools I use and literally anything you need in order to go on and start doing that on your own. In theory, a person will be very easily swayed to just read that, get the templates, jump on and do the work themselves. But what happens often is something a bit different. It's getting emails like this where people say, hey, this was an amazing extensive article. I really liked what you had to say. Can you do the job for me? Because now that I understand it better, I understand just how much work is involved in that. And I can assume that you having the experience to outline that really clearly, even for a novice like myself, you'll be the right professional to do the job for me. Because more often than not, if people want to have a job done right, they're gonna hire someone to know about it. They're just not gonna do it themselves. So let's get that out of the way and really like continue on sharing and helping others. Because I think that's the most useful marketing tactic you can take from the talk today. The second category is like. And this means not just showing the person who you are, but getting them to care. Getting there to be interested in what you have to say and getting them to start thinking about, okay, is this a person I wanna know more about and know more of? This is the marketers' whole real engagement. This is where you get to build a proper relationship. And when it comes to getting to like, I think the way we can do that in the most direct, most efficient and most substantial way is by, as Albert Einstein says, becoming a person of value. So sharing information that's useful and giving them an understanding that you'll be satisfying their needs and you'll be helping them not get value. Even at first contact, but more importantly once you start working on a project together. And the reason I like to talk about value and the reason that whenever I talk about marketing I always end up talking about value is that it works like a flywheel. It looks like a self propeller that's gonna get you more awareness. It's gonna get you more engagement and it's gonna get you more eyeballs and more potential needs. So the way this works is pretty simple and we understand it on like an intuitive level but once laid down it's much easier to grasp. So the first bit is obviously bringing more value to more people. So write what you know, share what you know. And when I say write, that's my preferred mode of operating. You might be doing a podcast or you might be doing vlogs or you might be doing how to recording of a particular function and so on and so forth. But it's about bringing the value to others. Once that happens, once people see valuable content they engage with it. And when I say engage it's not just about like the likes, comments and shares on social media. It's about getting people to really read through what you have to say or listen through a video that you've recorded. It's about getting them to really ask questions at the end which is why speakers always love getting questions at the end of the talk. It shows that it has been relevant that it has been valuable and everyone's been paying attention. It's about getting them to share that information with people who might benefit from it as well. Cause whenever I find an article that's interesting to me I'll share it with a bunch of colleagues because I know it will be interesting for them as well. You probably do that too. And this is how content gets shared and how it starts reaching more people and how that content becomes more visible and with it you become more visible yourself as a professional. And this works like a flywheel because once this content gets more visible it reaches more people, we engage with it more, et cetera, et cetera. So to me this is the only real way marketing can be built on. It's built on value. It's not built on gimmicks. I can give you a bunch of different growth hacks that are gonna work today and probably not gonna work tomorrow. But if we need to distill it down to something it's gonna be value and it's gonna be this. But value is a very broad word. So if we need to look at it in more detail like what actually is it? There's three different types of value we can talk about. So first one it's informational value. It's, for example, this talk is more of an informational talk. It's giving you information about what the brand is. It's giving you information about what branding is in general and how you can achieve it. Then the second type of value is functional. So this is essentially teaching someone to do something. Every how to guide, every decent stack overflow answer brings functional value in some shape or form. And then there's emotional value. And in business we often focus only on the first two but the third one is just as important. On good WordCamp talk is not just about being very informative it's about being interesting to listen to and easy to follow and something that you're gonna remember because it's being curious to hear. So some examples here on each of these three my favorite example for informational value is the SEO website, Backlinko. They, he got acquired by SCM Rush a while back but that doesn't really matter. So what you need to know in terms of this talk is that every piece on Backlinko's website is a very thorough, very detailed information tax article that you're gonna read through today and you're probably gonna save to read again tomorrow because it's just so dense with the information. One of the trademarks almost type of quote that he has are definitive guides like this one. This one's on landing pages but he has a number one. And the reason this works, the reason this is a piece is twofold. First off, Brandeen, the author of the website knows what questions his audience asks, what information are they interested in. And then comes the second component which is answering this in a high quality, interesting, informative, remarkable, unique kind of way. So it's about knowing what to talk about and knowing how to talk about it. And you would often see people focusing on the second component of this which is finding the best design for a piece or talking about formatting or talking about how can you make your videos look good and so on. But to me, the first question is even more important and it's about knowing what to talk about. It's about really understanding where your audience is coming from and what you need to tell them that's going to be valuable for them. So a different example that really shows that function is more important than the form of the piece is the success of this guy. He's called Mark to share them. He is the owner of a business in the US that focuses on designing, building and installing fiberglass pools in the US. They did what all different fiberglass companies would do. They had a huge showroom that showed their different products. They got people in, they had their sales team show them around the showroom and say how amazing their products are. And then 2008 hit and the crisis hit and everyone knows how that went for getting new property and beautifying this property. For example, with a fiberglass pool. So they were in a tight pickle and they needed to figure out a new way of marketing that didn't rely on getting people to a showroom or even having a showroom to begin with. So what Mark has did was tell every one of his salespeople, when you go out and you get a question from a customer, any question that's related to fiberglass pools, write it down and when you come back, you're gonna share that with the marketing team and we're gonna create a piece on our blog about it. He wanted to create what he said was the Wikipedia of fiberglass pools and he was quite successful with that. His business started growing again and then again he transferred from being the owner of a fiberglass pool company to being one of the most successful content marketers out there. He has a book that's called They Ask You Answer which is talking about that particular way of doing marketing and it's all about answering customers' questions. So if you can get there, if you can get super curious about what your customers or potential customers want to know, you'll be doing good marketing. You'll be on the way to getting to that like. And as I said, emotion is still big in business. I can give you a lot of examples. This is one of my favorite ones and although it's for products rather than personal brands, it's pretty applicable here as well. This is the owner of Dollar Shave Club which was one of the first D2C brands. They started way back in 2012 and what they're selling is subscription service for razors. I'm sure quite a few of you have probably heard about them. If you haven't, go online, go to YouTube and look for Dollar Shave Club and you see this commercial where this is still from their first commercial which aired in 2012. So what they did was a very simple video that they put online on March 6th, 2012, just a random day that wasn't like a big holiday or anything like that. And what happened afterwards was super interesting. They got 12,000 sign ups just by launching the video in $48. They didn't have a huge budget. They had about $4,500 that was mainly used for the production of the video itself. And since this was in 2012, I'm pretty sure that the same quality video you can now do for probably like 1,000 bucks or something like that because technology is getting cheaper and more accessible. And up to when I first did that research, the video had 25 million views. Currently it has something like 27, which isn't really important. The important thing is that they succeeded in using emotion to sell a product that no one considered buying before because subscription for razors wasn't really something you did. No one knew the brand because it was like a completely new thing out there but they still got the ball rolling. And in 2016 they got acquired by Unilever for like $1 billion in cash. So that's a good example of building up a brand. And here I'm cautious that this is a D2C example. It's talking about end users and most of you are doing business with other businesses but in the end of the day we're all humans so we all react to emotion. You wouldn't stand at an event if you didn't feel positive about it. So it goes to show emotion is everywhere. And the final third component here is trust. And I think this is one of the most important things when it comes to our particular line of being more digital professionals and so on. Because it isn't really a product you're selling. There isn't like a specification that you need every time you work with a client. You really need to show them and instill in them that trust that you're gonna do a good job. And this is frankly the only way we can build business. And Ziggler, one of the most famous salesmen in the world, he brings on the same point. You only do business with someone you trust. You might listen to others too but you only do business when you exchange value and money with someone that you trust. And here the most important bit about building that trust that I wanna bring to you today is being an authentic expert. So what do I mean by that? Well first let me show you some stats. So this is a survey that gets done every year. It's called the Edelman Trust Barometer and it explores a bunch of different dimensions of trust and one of the most curious ones is who do people deem credible or extremely credible? And there's two bits here that are relevant to mine and yours work here. One is technical experts, the other is a person like myself. These are two of the top three most credible spoke people. So we are all in a sense technical experts. We have the expertise and we have the skills and we have the knowledge and we need to show that through the value of the code. We need to show that through different case studies that can express how we help companies and how can we build this value for the clients we work with. But at the same time, we need to show that we're a human too. And so there's this intersection of trust that we need to focus on. So it's not just about the professional, it's about the personal element as well. And we're not just all business-y like, we're humans and to get there, to become trustworthy, we need to show that side too. And this is I think all about vulnerability and showing what you're really made of. So one would be admitting mistakes. This is an example from a company I used to work for. It's a startup that creates a resume building app. But that doesn't really matter that much. What matters is that whenever we were writing content and creating content, we were very open about stuff that we didn't get right. Stuff that customers were not happy with or stuff that didn't quite make sense or stuff that didn't really work the way it was supposed to. And whenever you admit mistakes and you get there from a point of humility, you're showing that you really know what's going on. You're showing that you can really be better and get better and focus on becoming better for your customers. Another example, this time more on the personal brand note, this is probably one of the articles they got the most response from in the last few years or something like that. Or I was talking about the issue of burnout and how that affects the work of a freelance marketer. And this isn't something that, especially in my part of the world in Eastern Europe, this isn't really something people talk about. You're not talking about mental health that much. But when you can get out there and you can share what you've been through, you become more relatable by being vulnerable. And of course, one thing I started with almost gonna end with is time for something. Showing what you value, showing that you're treating bigger trends and bigger issues from the point of view of an expert but also from the point of view of a human being and that you're in the same boat as your customers. So this is an example from a GHH who's the founder of Basecamp and who created a service, an email service called HAY, that really got into a proper David versus the live fight with Apple when Apple told them that they're not gonna let them have their app on the App Store if they're not funneling all payments through the App Store ecosystem. And this got all the way to Congress hearings and it had huge impact, but it's also the reason why a lot of people heard about HAY, a lot of people who didn't know about Basecamp before heard about it and why the GHH became sort of like a household name for everyone fighting against them. And you can stand up for something in less of like a direct confrontational way, but if you're talking about the stuff you know and the stuff you care about, you're gonna become more trustworthy because you're not afraid of going into topics that might be controversial. So I asked you at the beginning if you would buy my blog or not and the point I was trying to make was about the value of a brand. It's been something I've been building up for quite a long time and I wanted to sort of give a back of a napkin calculation, obviously Interbrand is gonna never be interested in evaluating my personal brand, but I can do it pretty easily because I know how much money is coming in from projects and I know how much time I'm investing in developing new content which is the main way I'm doing marketing doing brand building curve. So this is a very simple graph that I've come up with purpose about putting the bank for my company and what I can tell you is that with a simple blog that doesn't get updated as often as I want to, I'm still getting a very high ROI on building a brand with the tools and approaches that I talked about today. So this is what I'm doing. It has been working for me and I think it can work for you as well. So yeah, that's it from me and if you have any questions I'll be happy to answer. For example, I'm from Serbia and I wouldn't get any brand if I didn't hike. If I didn't, well let's say give some free exchange of things and free this and that and got a client from USA and then we build value through the years. So it's kind of, I think, different from country to country how they see you. Yeah, they think you're good but they just, you have to create something online to share for example, they start for free and I think that this Amazon and these, they're kind of monopolies so they're like a big, big company that I don't think that they are, you cannot compare them like, okay, I want to be in Amazon, I cannot ever. But that's not necessarily a question. It's just different from country to country in Serbia, it's like that. In USA it's maybe not better to create a brand but it's not in Serbia so you have to really give for free things and you say you're giving for free then maybe they don't want to work with you but you have to. In this sense, that's how you're creating through the years brand. So it's not easy, you know. I appreciate that you said that but it's so different from country to country to get the USA clients. Well, I'm a neighbor, I'm from Bulgaria. So I know what you mean. If we have like, without being like a native English speaker or a person who's like, even like looking at the name, it sounds weird to some English speakers. So that's a barrier we need to go over. But I think that's still the example I gave with the jobs to be done in depth guide. This is what I'm trying to do and this is what I think can work for most digital professionals as well. Because as I said, I give a lot but people one day understand how much works goes into that work. They are gonna be more inclined to hire you because they've already seen that you know your stuff, you know how it gets done. So in that sense, it can be a free version of a theme, it can be a free version of a plugin or even a description of like a common issue. Like I've actually hired developers to do very basic stuff, like help me do better email marketing automation just because I stumbled across an article of how to connect my specific plugin with my particular email system. And I was like, I'm not gonna do that myself. I'm just gonna like, you know, work with that guy because he knows what he's talking about. Thank you. Thank you. That's not a question, but I want to confirm that the three points are shared, you know, and trust it. Yeah. No, like. I'm a world media, a world press media organizer in Hamburg, Germany. If someone has a meetup to, it is a great idea to know each other. So if you say your name and what you do in your meetup groups, you will know the other people and know what they're doing. Then maybe they will do a talk on this meetup. Then I know, oh, he's an expert in this area. And then maybe I will trust him or her. And I know he's sharing, she's sharing area and expertise. Yeah, expertise. And then the high amount is just the normal role of things that happen here because I know exactly what they do. I know I can trust them in their expertise area and then I will hide them. Exactly. Yeah. That's one of the great things I think the world press community has gotten right is that you guys, like I'm part of that, but one of the outside looking and being more technical is that we know what other people do. We know who we can talk to if we have a problem. And this becomes sort of like an exchange of value that's built on personal relationships, which is great. At least then you have a question. How did you calculate that ROI for your brand because I'm a personal brand myself and it's quite challenging to calculate that. So what are the costs that you have went into that? Yeah. As I said, it's more of a back of an napkin calculation. I keep track of my time, so I know how much time I invest in writing, speaking at events, giving presentations and so on, so I can calculate that if I was, like what's the opportunity cost there? If I was spending that on working with a client, how much would that bring in? And then on the other hand, the graph I showed, it's actual money in the bank for my company. So that's sort of, this shows like the development over time and then if I divide the cost of my work against the money that I'm getting, the revenue that I'm getting, it's sort of how that was done. Is there a program on the website yourself that you can apply for? Yeah. Yeah. Okay.