Marketing 101: building a personal brand

- what does personal brand mean
- why should you care
- how to distinguish it against the company you work for
- how to do it w/ support from your boss
- how to build yours

A thread 🧵

1. “Why Would This Ad Appear On The Front Page Of The Irish Times On January 23rd 2020” ? 🧵1/18 🕵️🔎

Just looks like a regular ad, doesn’t it. Well it isn’t 👇

2. If I was looking at this ad for the first time I wouldn’t pay much attention to it unless I wanted to test drive a Ford. Something then jumped out at me. 201 Event. Swap it round and you get Event 201. A test drive for Event 201 🤔

3. Just in case you don’t know what Event 201 is and when it took place. Event 201 took place on October 18th 2019 in New York. It was attended by the WHO, WEF, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation & John Hopkins Center for Health

4. The John Hopkins Center for Health Security who ran the event receives funding from WHO, BMGF, FDA, Homeland Security and The Rockefeller Foundation to name but a few.

5. Please read this (Part 1) to understand what happened at Event 201

Why promoting yourself/your business/your ideas feels uncomfortable:

You must repeat things that are obvious to you until they become obvious to others.

This is why most people hire marketers or outsource the amplification of their message.

The problem with that is no one is an invested as you are, and no one knows your message like you do.

And why those who break through their discomfort reach an escape velocity that eludes most.

This is a difficult and unnatural process, hence the upside on the other side.

Another way to think about it is the famous shelf analogy:

No one wants a drill they want a hole, no one wants a hole they want a shelf, no one wants a shelf they want to a place to put books to look smart, etc.

People care about the 2nd, 3rd, 4th order effects of your work.

If I had to give a lecture series on marketing, here's 11 points I'd include:

1. Data is like protein:

It’s valuable - but it shouldn’t be your *only* input.

If all your decisions are guided by A/B tests, you’ll eventually end up with a porn site.

2. The infinite ROI skill stack:

A. Understand how people work - Lindy.

B. Understand platforms + culture - Ever-changing.

Live in the barbell.

3. The best marketers are open source for the *first time ever*

• You can visit ad libraries
• You can sign up to newsletters
• You can see the copy on their website

There's no centralised database like Github - but it's there for the resourceful

4. Copy or reverse-engineer

A. If you want to do good marketing, just copy the greats.

B. If you want to do great marketing, reverse engineer the principles behind great marketing.

Warning: You will then be copied.

5. Think with headlines first

Mr. Beast has full time staff who's sole job is to write headlines for YouTube videos.

If the headline is good, they then make the video.

This is the inverse of making the headline fit the story.

Think of distribution before creation.

We've used "seller financing" on two self storage deals in the past year.

And it raised our cash on cash return by 20%+.

And lowered the amount of capital we needed by $500k.

Here's a THREAD about a deal of mine and how this magical debt structure can work.

👇👇

My method is simple. In the late stages of negotiation I submit two offers:

One at a lower price.

And one at the exact price the seller wants but with him holding back 10-20% of the purchase price in the form of a 2nd mortgage (with a second position to your bank loan).

Contrary to popular belief seller financing rarely includes the seller holding back 70-80% and acting as your bank.

Two reasons:

#1 most have some debt on the property.

#2 most want most of their money now.

Have you heard the saying:

"you name the price and i'll name the terms?"

This is a case of that situation exactly.

Lets paint a picture here:

Last week I was negotiating with a seller on a property in a small western PA town.

Not many interested buyers so I knew I had some leverage.

His asking price was $4.5MM. I wanted to pay $4.2M.

After a week or two and a lot of back and forth I found his lowest number.

I promised threads about recruiting for the next week. Here's the first one on referrals. In growth/marketing speak: referrals are your organic growth, inbound is your brand, and outbound/sourcing is your ad spend. You want to growth-hack your referrals. Here's how. 1/n

2/ Referrals (people on your team referring candidates into your recruiting pipeline) is great because it scales with your org size. They also convert higher since one of their friends is trying to convince them to join, plus they are generally not interviewing at many companies.

3/ The main disadvantage is that they tend to re-enforce your current team makeup. So if you have a diverse team, referrals will continue that diversity, but if you do not, you'll be entrenching your existing makeups which can have some real cons.

4/ A common tool for incentivizing referrals is the referral bonus (the coolest version of which is in equity IMO, although $ works well too), but I think you can do a lot more by leveraging process (referral parties) and culture (creating real pride about your referral culture).

5/ Referral parties are about making a game out of referrals by (virtually) locking 2+ teams in a room for 60 minutes and asking them them to go all out putting together a referral list. Here's how to do it.