🛠️ Building An Obsession-Worthy Brand With Shannon Lavenia🎨

Creating a beautiful design is just one aspect of marketing your business. But there is so much more that goes into building an obsession-worthy brand. Joining Adrienne Hill for today’s episode is Shannon Lavenia. Shannon is the Founder and CEO of Brand Builder Design Studios. She helps new and established entrepreneurs launch obsession-worthy brands that position them as experts in their niche and bring in top-dollar clients. In this episode, she shares the secrets to effectively building your brand and growing your business. So take note of Shannon’s tips and start thinking about how to position your brand by tuning in!

#impactfulentrepreneurshow #guestinterview #obsessionworthybrand

---

Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here


🛠️ Building An Obsession-Worthy Brand With Shannon Lavenia🎨

Impactful Entrepreneur Show Guest Interview

We all know the importance of building a personal brand on social media if you're an entrepreneur. However, do you know not only how to build that brand but make it memorable, recognizable and obsession-worthy? That is a whole other level. In this episode, we're going to talk about how to build such a rock-solid personal brand that you become obsession-worthy and your clients refer you like crazy. You get this massive referral network that feeds your client and customer base. Let's do this.

---

In this episode, I'm here with Shannon Lavenia. I'm super excited to bring her to you because she is the Founder of Brand Builder Design Studios and an expert in all things branding, which is hugely important when you're putting yourself out there on social. Welcome, Shannon. I'm excited that you're here with us.

I'm excited to be here too. Thank you for inviting me to the summit. It's such an honor.

For the readers who haven't met you yet, I would love to know a little bit about your story and what has brought you here with us.

I have been an entrepreneur since 2002. Back before then, I was a high school teacher of all things. I taught high school Biology, worked in a hospital and did a bunch of other things. I knew that I wanted a lot more freedom in my life and started a home-based business. I was successful in that business where we sold another company's products. I did that for seven years until that company went out of business. It was pretty shocking. During that time, we had personally earned about $7 million and we went from that to $0.

One of the big lessons I learned was that I had not spent time developing my own brand or growing my own audience because I had been doing everything for this company that we were working with. After all that time, I didn't have authentically anything that I had built for myself. That was right around 2009 to 2010. I had my beautiful daughter and we were in a difficult position. My husband and I were facing bankruptcy. We were new parents. We were losing our beautiful $1 million-plus home. It was quite an accomplishment for me because I had grown up so poor. Here we were, going back in that cycle. My husband and I pretty much vowed we would never be in that situation again.

When I started to do a lot of studies, one of the fundamental things that I realized was the foundation of any business is developing a brand that other people know, love and trust. A lot of people talk about know, like and trust. Know, love and trust build that loyalty that people will continue to follow you over the years and decades. They will buy whatever products you put out. More than that, they will refer you to others.

My Shannon Lavenia brand was the first brand that I developed and it took off rapidly. I started a podcast called the Booming Business Podcast. I had some incredible guests on there like Grant Cardone, Amy Porterfield and Chris Ducker. I attracted these A-list guests and that grew my brand and business. After we made it through bankruptcy to the other side, we were able to build our business back up. I have an audience that has followed me for over ten years through every evolution of my brand.

During that process, a lot of people started to come to me and say, "How did you develop your brand? How did you get these A-lister guests?" I said, "I did it myself. I did a lot of studies. I invested in a lot of study about branding and marketing. I did a lot of testing. I made a lot of mistakes along the way and pretty much dialed in the process." Since then, we have launched many successful brands through Brand Builder Design Studios. We have launched incredible courses through our Brand Builder Collective. We're relaunching the Booming Business Podcast and have had an incredible ride on this journey.

It's a painful story but at the same time, the learning that you got from it was huge. If you're the face, the talking head for some other brand or company and you're not developing your own, you can find yourself in hot water. It's nice that you got that lesson and built your own brand. Now, any company or product you're working with could go out of business and you'll be fine.

Part of our business that we did, we still have a sales consultancy part of our business where companies contract with us to do their higher-level sales but they do that now because of our brand, which is pretty cool.

One thing that I'm curious about for our readers, they might love to know the difference between branding and design because they are very close and integrated but they are different. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

This is fundamentally one of those things that we sort through when we have new clients that come on board. A lot of times, when we're onboarding a new client, they have already spent thousands of dollars on design. The design comes from somebody who is a graphic designer. They know how to utilize the tools like Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop and they can create a beautiful design but that doesn't mean that it is a brand.

They can create beautiful designs, but that doesn’t mean that that is a brand. 

  

A brand is the sum total of all of the assets that you have that communicate who you are to your audience in a way that compels them to want to buy from you. If we take it a step further, it communicates with them in such a way that they get excited and obsessed with your brand in such a way that they don't just want to buy from you but they want to share you and tell others about you.

There are some great examples out there in the world that a lot of us can communicate about. One of them is TOMS Shoes. TOMS Shoes are not the most amazing-looking and incredibly comfortable shoes. There are shoes that are more comfortable and aesthetic than their shoes. When they first came out with their mission of, "Buy our shoes which are comfortable. We made them be ecologically savvy. We have this incredible mission.” They came out with that brand and they took off like crazy because people shared them like crazy.

People felt proud to buy TOMS Shoes and because of that, they shared it. That's what you would consider to be an obsession-worthy brand. It wasn't their logo and shoe design that did it. It was the actual mission statement, branding statement and how they launched that branding statement. It was the exact targeting and the messaging to that ideal customer that had that brand take off.

A brand is a culmination of a collection of your design but making sure that that design communicates to your ideal customers. It's knowing and identifying who that ideal customer is. It's knowing where that ideal customer is, why they buy, who they like to buy from and what triggers that buying decision. Also, it's the communication assets that you have that go along with your brand and the consistency of that communication that digs into the heart and soul of your customer that has them become such passionate, loyal followers and customers of the brand. That's branding. Design is the look and feel. Unfortunately, a lot of people do invest a significant amount of money or they try to shortcut it by going to Fiverr and getting a logo or a business card. They get something that looks pretty to them but it doesn't necessarily communicate to their audience.

That helps a lot. It sounds like the brand is all-encompassing. It's everything. It's who you are, what you stand for, your mission, values, personality and offerings.

Obsession-Worthy Brand: The foundation of any business is developing a brand that other people know, love, and trust.


It's the essence of what your business is, what it does and who it does it for.

How important is branding then to the growth of a business, specifically in social media? What role does that play?

Now, this is such a critical question because everybody has turned to online marketing. Given the situation we're in with COVID, the lockdowns and shutdowns, there are millions of new entrepreneurs that are launching their businesses online because a lot of people have realized like, "I need a plan B," or now is the time to pursue this passion that they have had locked up inside. They might have more time and resources now. It's important now because of how unbelievably competitive it's getting online.

I love using analogies. The best way that I can relate to this is if you go on a first date and you show up in your gardening clothes, it's going to have a different perception and outcome of that first date than if you show up ready to make the best impression. Some people might be like, "I don't care. They should like me for who I am." People aren't even going to be interested in who you are online unless visually you captivate them because that's what drives that initial decision to keep looking and stop to scroll. It's the visual aspects of your brand. It's the consistency of which you're in front of the people, which also has them stop to scroll and pay attention.

If you're showing up all the time in their Instagram feed, Facebook feed or LinkedIn, if you're there consistently and your look is consistent where they can now recognize it as a pattern then you're going to get their attention. If you're using one look one time and one look another time, you look like a brand-new person to them over and over again and there's no triggered recall of like, "I have seen this before. I have seen it again."

Having that dialed in and also having your message be consistent where you can get some analytics on whether people are liking, loving or becoming obsessed with your messaging, that allows you to tweak it. What I see a lot of people do is it's like a smorgasbord. It's like, "Let's have a picnic and we're going to put out every type of food and see what people like."

Instead, what you want to do is you want to put out the potato salad and see how people like the potato salad. If nobody is going for the potato salad, this isn't the correct message. We put out the macaroni salad. Everybody loves the macaroni salad. Now, we know that we have hit a sweet spot and we build off of that consistent messaging. If you're all over the place with your messaging, you will lose your audience because there's not something that they are getting glued to that is resonating with them.

At the end of the day, they can't be like, "I know this girl. She is the macaroni salad girl." They have to associate you with something. Ideally, it's your brand, not from another company's brand.

That brings up a whole other point which is about sharing content that takes people off of your brand onto their brand, which is also a critical mistake. When we're onboarding clients, one of the things we do right off the bat is we give them a social media cleanup checklist. We have them delete anything that they have shared on their wall that doesn't link to their specific content. Sometimes people are like, "Why am I doing that?" They also don't realize that a lot of the social networks will penalize you for sharing other people's content because they consider you to be a consumer of content and not a producer of content.

They will favor the actual producers or the creators of content because that's what's going to feed their platform.

That's what's going to feed their ads. The bottom line of every social media network is that they are looking to be a profitable company and they are profitable through their ad consumption. If you're sharing other people's content, you're not going to bring enough interest to your particular wall for their ads to get enough draw. They are not going to share your content in the feed.

If you're producing your own interesting content that gets shared a lot and its original content, they are going to share your content a lot in the feed. For example, some of my posts have been shared over 100 times each. The reason for that is the post has gone viral. They are showing it a lot in public feeds to people who are not my friends and then I ended up getting a ton of friend requests.

I love this because, at this point now in the interview, we probably have some readers who are realizing like, "I thought I had a brand but I just have a logo and some colors." If they are at that moment of realization, let's help them model that. What other branding elements should they be giving attention to if they are at that point where they have the logo and the colors but that's it?

The first thing that everybody should do and a lot of people avoid this exercise is to identify their ideal customer avatar. If I could give anybody any advice, I'm going to put it this way again using an analogy, "Not doing that deep-dive exercise into your business is like building a house with no foundation." It's like putting sticks on the ground that aren't nailed down that are easily going to blow over, which brings up the Three Little Pigs analogy. It's like, "We want to build the brick house, not the straw house."

The very first thing that everybody should do is identify their ideal customer avatar. Not doing that deep dive into your business is like building a house with no foundation. 


A lot of people avoid this exercise. Sometimes we have to do it with our clients because they avoid it intently because there's this mindset that, "If I identify my ideal customer avatar then I'm narrowing my business. What about all these other people that could buy my products or don't?" What I'll tell you is that they are never going to buy your products because they are going to be so general that you'll be so boring and disinteresting to everybody that your sales will tank.

You want to be exciting about your niche and to those people that are going to be passionate about who you are. My brand is bold and I'm out there with opinions and stuff. I tend to attract other clients that are the same way. That has built an incredible brand because we get to be a bit bold and vivacious with our branding. It attracts these dynamic people. Other brands are more flowy and flowery. Some brands are more conservative. We develop the brand based on the ICA.

You want to be very exciting to your niche and to those people that are going to be very passionate about who you are. 

When people go and they get a logo and do the colors, they typically do that to a mirror, which is like, "I like this logo and these colors," but what does your audience resonate with? Is your audience going to resonate with orange or blue? We pretty much have that dialed in. There's an entire psychology of color choices. It has to do with age, sex, marital status and general income. You can google the psychology of color and branding. There's a lot of research that's done on what people respond to. You can test it on websites with heat maps and how long somebody sticks to a page. You can change color and see if the stick rate changes.

Picking colors is an art. It's not like, "Let me go and find a color palette I like on Pinterest." The very first thing is the ICA. The next thing is to dial in what your mission and purpose are in your business and what aligns with you and your ideal customer. Sometimes people are a little scared of this because they don't want to alienate people. They want to serve a lot of people.

We all have our own internal values as companies and we want to serve the people that we align within our values. In our company policy, we do go through an onboarding process. We do turn down clients that we feel either were not a fit for or we don't feel very empowered, empowering them if we don't align with their messaging or my team doesn't feel good about it.

Obsession-Worthy Brand: It is knowing where that ideal customer is—why they buy, who they like to buy from, what triggers that buying decision—, the communication assets you have along with your brand, and the consistency of that communication. 

You want to enjoy the work and that means you enjoy who you're working with.

You can still do that and make bucket loads of money. You will make bucket loads of money and be way more profitable than if you're working with clients that you don't want to. I'll give you an example of this. We don't advertise our prices. Sometimes we have people that are adamant in communicating with us and they are like, "Why don't you advertise your pricing? Give me the prices and then I'll set up the consult." We don't work that way because we don't work with price shoppers.

We know that if somebody's fundamental decision-making is on the price then we're not the design team for that because they can go to Fiverr and do that. We provide so much value. One of the things I was communicating to you is we do unlimited revisions. You're not going to get that for a logo that costs $150. We are thorough in checking our font licenses. We don't use any clip art. Our logo is our original art. We customize our contracts with people based on what they need.

It's not a cookie-cutter situation. I do see in Facebook groups there are design teams. When someone is like, "I need a logo," people are like, "I can do it for $49 or $129. I can do it for this." That can be appealing to a business but you do get what you pay for. We never advertise our prices. We always do a consult. The reason we do that is that we did the work on who our ICA is.

Plus, someone might come to you with a very different set of needs and if that set of needs isn't a match with your advertised price, then what do you do?

They might have a logo that they invested in and that is a great logo. We don't need to put that into our contract because we can use their assets. Some people come to us and they need coaching and strategy built into the contract. We put that in there as well. We serve our clients based on what they need. Not to sound like we're advertising ourselves or anything, boiling that back, we're able to do that because we did the ICA work.

How about that ideal customer avatar? Everyone needs to know it.

It will save you so much heartache.

I have heard you use the phrase a couple of times. I would love to dissect it a little bit. You talked about a brand being obsession-worthy. What makes a brand obsession-worthy? Who doesn't want someone obsessing over their brand? We all want that. Tell us, how do we do that?

It has to do with knowing your customer and serving them in an exceptional way. One of the things that we work with with our clients is if they have an existing customer base, we deep dive into those customers to find out what they love about the services that have been provided to them and then we find out where they feel something was missing. We add that little extra element in and that makes it truly obsession-worthy.

It's like the icing on the cake.

There are a couple of things that we do in our company that I'll share with everybody that makes a difference. When we're onboarding a client, we send a handwritten thank you card to them always. We will recognize them on social media oftentimes before they even sign with us. We'll say, "We met the most amazing person. This is their business. It's so dynamic. You guys should check it out." That's a wow factor to them that we're already invested in their business.

We do a couple of other things. We have a very thorough contract. In our onboarding process, people always are wowed by it. We onboarded a new client. He is a consultant and he was like, "Please teach me this onboarding process." We were like, "Sure. We have a coaching process for this. I'll send you the invoice for that." It was an immediate upsell. Now, we're putting that onboarding process to him and we use an automated system. They get a proposal. They agree to the proposal. The contract comes to them automatically.

Our contract is so thorough that it leaves people feeling like, "I know what I'm getting. I know exactly what it is." People are always amazed. We get paid 100% upfront. We don't take partial payments and we don't get paid at the end. A lot of people are like, "How do you do that because some of these contracts are big?" We're talking five figures close to six figures sometimes. We have companies and entrepreneurs that are willing to pay us. Some of our contracts are smaller for the smaller entrepreneurs. Everyone is willing to pay us upfront because of our contract.

They can see the quality before they have even paid a penny.

They feel so good about the contract and then we share testimonials with them like crazy. Once the contract is signed, an invoice comes to them automatically so they can pay with us. We send them a thank you gift once that's done. We make sure we know their birthday, the main person that we're dealing with. If it's a woman, we send an outrageous bouquet of flowers.

Whatever the highest FTD thing is, we send this incredible flower display with a card. At the end of it, we send a thank you gift and we ask for referrals. We always get referrals. We get these amazing testimonials from people as well and that's part of our process too. Our team will follow up and get a testimonial rate. As soon as the deliverables are there, the person is like, "This is amazing." We get that testimonial.

That's your orchestrated system at creating an obsession with your clients. It's a perfect example. For the readers, think through whatever it is your offer, service or product is. What are those little things that you could add in throughout the entire process to get that client to not just be happy with what you provide but obsessed? Those are a lot of great examples of little things that you guys do. A lot of those are going a little bit above and beyond what someone would expect.

In 2020, we brought in over six figures from one Facebook group where some of our clients saw posts, where other people are asking for branding and marketing help. Our clients wrote on those posts that they should check us out and we had consultations. That's obsession-worthy when your audience is now recommending you through no accord of their own. When someone in a Facebook group sees multiple people recommending one person or one company, they are bound to book with them.

Obsession-Worthy Brand: We want to serve the people that we align with in our values. You will be way more profitable than if you’re working with clients you don’t want.

They see twenty recommendations and then another twenty all of the same company. I could see that being super powerful. I'm sure everyone's creative wheels are turning and they are like, "How can I?" I do know that you have a free gift for our readers. I would love it if you could tell us a little bit about that.

I have a course called Brand Builder 101. It's a great introduction to developing an obsession-worthy brand. I take you through one of those critical exercises, which is focusing on your ICA. That's the tough work. I know it but trust me, doing it makes all the difference in everything that you do.

I can see that, especially after hearing how it all connects together. That's a super generous gift. I'm excited. For the readers, if you're trying to prepare for next quarter to make the most of it, get that foundation under your house. Know who your ideal customer is because then, you'll know how to speak to them, delight them and get them obsessed. It takes things to the next level. I would love for next-level success for all of you. Be sure to scoop up that free gift.

Join us in the Facebook group. We do dissect every expert speaker video and we talk through, "What are the actions we're going to take? What is something new we learned? How can we get into action right away?" If you're reading for entertainment purposes, you might be having a blast but we want you to action. We want you to get results coming out of this. Let us know how you're going to action this and what you learned. Let's start brainstorming how to all become a little bit more obsession-worthy as well. I'll see you in the group. Thank you so much Shannon for joining us.

Thank you to everybody who read this. I'm so excited about everything you're creating in your businesses.

We're rooting for you. We'll see you in the group.

Important Links:

About Shannon Lavenia

Shannon Lavenia is a high-energy, funny, and dynamic speaker, coach, and entrepreneur who transformed her life from bored, broke high school teacher to online business and branding expert. Her story is one of overcoming adversity to live an incredible life, having survived and thrived through being an orphan and beating Stage 3 breast cancer. She is the founder of Brand Builder Design Studios, voice of the Booming Business Podcast, and creator of the Brand Builder Course Collective. Shannon is family focused, operating her business with the philosophy of family fun first while still creating incredible results and serving her audience with results-driving expertise. Shannon uses her energy, experience, and expertise to create obsession-worthy brands for her clients and coaches her students in the creation of fun-fueled, passion-fulfilling, wildly profitable businesses. She’s an expert at business expansion/life balance and demonstrates how to implement systems and easy, results-producing marketing strategies that gets her clients the results they’ve yearned for while enjoying life to the fullest.

PodcastAdrienne Hillbranding, entrepreneurship, ideal customer avatar, social media, marketing, designComment