The Most Powerful Way to Build Your Brand | Ginna Tassanelli

Full video transcript

Hey, how’s it going, Jarvis Underground and Jarvis Nation? Darby Rollins here, and I am accompanied by Gina Tassanelli — who is going to be talking to us today about four powerful steps to sharing your story and energizing your audience. Gina recently published a book with a collection of 18 authors who were sharing their journey of overcoming mediocrity and taking hold of their life to become better. She helps empower high-achieving, heart-centered experts such as coaches and consultants to level up their brand, their style, their image, and their social media marketing presence — and we can tie all of that back to how a book can be the cornerstone for your brand, your marketing, and your platform. Gina, thank you so much for making it here today, I know it’s been a bit of a trip. Thanks for having me.

Tell me a little bit about the recent book you worked on, because I’ve always been interested in how a collection of authors puts together a book and leverages everyone’s audience for it. The publisher and I have become great business connections, and for a couple of years she had introduced the book to me and told me about it. I was like, I don’t have a special story to share — I help other business experts and entrepreneurs figure out what their story is so they can make that connection with their own business and brand, but when it came to me, I just couldn’t figure it out. Eventually I understood the purpose. We really dug into where my passion came from for what I do, and it started from my childhood. It’s a deep journey — there’s a lot of self-awareness that comes with writing a story about yourself.

So it developed, and I said yes, and here we are today. It launched last week. I wasn’t in it on my own — I had 17 other authors with me, and we met every week throughout the process to share our stories and help each other identify the pieces of our story that would really impact someone else. That’s really the whole point: you want to share your story in a way that resonates with others and lets them see you not just as an expert, but as a real human who also has challenges and struggles they can relate to. It took about five months, and we did a lot of collaborations together — I interviewed a few of the authors on Facebook, and vice versa, and I was on some podcasts with them. That was another great experience, connecting with women in the book who shared the same focus and purpose for their story.

That sounds like a cool experience, connecting with a lot of high-performing, like-minded people in your space. I’m curious — when you were going through the interview process and sharing your story, did you write it yourself, or did you put it into Jarvis and go from there for the actual writing portion? I’ll say Jarvis was very helpful, because personally I’m not a great writer — it’s just not my forte. I have lots of thoughts in my head, but when I go to put them down on paper, it doesn’t come out in a way that’s exciting and fun to keep people attentive to the story. So I did use Jarvis for certain things, like introduction paragraphs, and to rewrite my thoughts — that was super helpful when it came to writing my story, having Jarvis kind of in my back pocket too.

Yeah, it’s super helpful for getting the ball rolling. And then it comes to the real powerful stuff, which is sharing the story — the engagement you can create through your own personal experiences. That’s what we’re going to talk about today — you’ve got four steps you talk about, the pillar of your marketing. Do you have any specific steps you want to dive into? We’re just going to have a conversation, but if you want to take some notes, this would be the time — take out pen and paper or type it out.

The first thing I wanted to mention is that when you’re going through this process, it can be very awkward — putting yourself out there as a personal brand in general can be a very awkward process, and that’s really what led me to doing the work I do today. As a bit of background: I’ve been in marketing for over 13 years, running my own social media agency, and what I realized for myself, being on my own, was that I was leading with my website, my services, my logo — and I wasn’t putting myself in front of my business. I quickly realized the missing puzzle piece was myself, was how I was showing up. So when you’re writing your story, you want to write it in a way that gives people a good insight into who you are as a human being, because that is what your brand is when you’re an entrepreneur — your brand is you. It’s not the services, the logo, the colors, or the fonts — it’s actually you.

So when you talk about a problem, you agitate it, then give a solution — which, by the way, is one of the frameworks inside Jarvis. Number one, I first thought about what problem I wanted to solve for myself, going through my story and understanding how it led me to where I am today. The problem I wanted to solve was communicating that when you show up as a personal brand and a real human in your business, you can actually be really successful as an entrepreneur — you don’t have to give up.

Then I gave insight into what sparked the start of me figuring this out for myself. The insight was realizing that with my agency, I wasn’t getting new clients because they weren’t getting to know who I was. That was part of my story — letting people know that when I first started as an entrepreneur, I was pushing my website and services and not letting people get to know me. Number three is how you fix that problem — you learn and understand that the missing piece in your business is to show up as a personal brand. It takes less time creating content for your business when you’re being more authentic and genuine about who you are, your business, and the value you bring to people, rather than the features of what you offer — you want to lead with your benefits.

The last thing is your mission — think about what your mission is. For me, my mission is to share these foundational steps with other entrepreneurs so they can stop spinning their wheels, feeling like they have to be on social media 24/7 or feeling icky about marketing themselves. When you lead with value, people will want to buy from you because they’re getting to know you and what you can help them with, rather than the features of your product or services.

So those are the four main steps: number one, which problem do you solve; number two, which insight sparked the start of your business to solve that problem; number three, what are you doing now to fix the problem; and number four, what is your mission — and you tie your story into all of that to make it very personal. Those steps sound simple, but I wish I’d heard them four years ago when I was starting out selling products on Amazon and just saying “buy my product, buy my product.” It’s easy to focus on the features.

In your own experience, what transformations or practices have you engaged in that helped you put yourself out there, and helped your clients do the same, to be more authentic? One of the first things I did — I was a very private person when I started my business. Even my public Facebook business page was just the logo, and the cover never had images of me; you’d never even know who owned the agency. I switched that and put a picture of myself as my profile pic, turned my Instagram from private to public, and realized it’s okay to be public — it doesn’t mean you have to share everything, you can be selective about what you put out there. I started to notice a difference in how people were interacting with and reaching out to me, and the connections I was making, because I’d been in the online space for a long time but was still hiding behind everything. Having mentors really helps too — I coach other entrepreneurs on how to show up as a personal brand, but I have my own mentor, Molly, who introduced us, and working with people who are putting themselves out there in a way that aligns with you — not trying to be like other people, being yourself — helps. I also did a lot of journaling, turning little things that happened throughout the day into posts, which really helped me make more authentic connections. Your vibe attracts your tribe — you’re going to hang out with the people you want to hang out with, and they bring out the best in you.

What are some of your personal goals for using this book — your why behind it and sharing your story, specifically for growing your business? What are you planning to do from a marketing perspective to leverage the book? Right off the bat, I partnered with a nonprofit — proceeds from the book go to the Blue Ribbon Movement for nurses, which is something I wanted to do given how things are going in the world. I didn’t say yes to the story to make money off the book — my intention was to share my story along with the other stories in the book, and to tell more about who I am. I so often hear, especially within my own program, “but you’ve been doing this for so long” or “you have everything so perfect,” and I want people to know that everybody starts from somewhere. We weren’t born knowing how to do our business or market ourselves — we all go through challenges and struggles, and I wanted to give people real insight into the grind. I’m a wife, I’m a mom, I have a few businesses, I’m constantly wearing a lot of hats, and I barely made it here today. What you see in public isn’t always exactly how it is. As entrepreneurs, we follow high-level experts and think their lives are perfect, but we don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes — how many investors, how much help they have. My purpose is to share what it’s really like to start a business, and what you can do when you actually show up as your brand instead of hiding.

Are there assumptions people make about you that keep coming up? Yes — I’m a huge believer in planning, and because I work so much with the technical side of social media and content creation, I have a program with amazing women, mostly coaches, and I probably sound like a broken record telling them to batch content, because most people, like me when I first started, would just post in the moment without much thought. I try to teach a content creation process, and I often hear “well, you have a team behind you that can help with all this.” I only recently started with a team — up until about two years ago, after 13 years in business, I was doing everything myself, everything I teach. You can do it all on your own; you don’t need a huge team. Once you grow to a place where you can budget for it, that’s wonderful, but that’s a misconception — that we all have it together because we have people supporting us.

I love the authenticity — over the last few years there’s been a shift away from the picture-perfect Instagram aesthetic of five years ago toward more raw, real content, even though the aesthetic is still there for some. Even someone like Gary Vaynerchuk — a lot of his content looks like it was shot on an iPhone, even though he has a team behind it. What’s a simple way someone can approach batching content so they’re not scrambling in the moment? I love video — I believe you can take a 10-minute video, preferably live because you connect more with people, and repurpose it in different ways: chop it into 15-second clips, transcribe it into a blog post, and pull tips and quotes from that post for social graphics for the rest of the week. I believe in having one big piece of content and using it in many different ways throughout the week or month, which keeps your message cohesive. One quick tip: if you’re ever unsure what to post, write down 10 or 20 questions you get asked all the time about your product or service, or common objections, and answer those — that’s content meant to answer your ideal client’s questions and get them closer to understanding the value you provide. And Jarvis does that well too — I use Jarvis probably 15-20 times a day, it’s open all the time.

Have you customized any recipes yourself on the platform? There’s one I use every week to put together my live video plan — it was created by a good friend of mine, a live outline. I take that outline and create my email from it, my Facebook Live post, and the posts promoting the Facebook Live throughout the week, then turn it into a blog post too. Which recipe is your favorite? I’ve been working with Zachariah on developing a “hero’s journey” recipe — people using it say it brings a more creative story element to things.

What are a few big tips you’ve learned from being mentored by Molly? She’s a big fan of lives. A big one: when the pandemic happened, as an agency most of our clients were brick and mortar, and I was really scared — some clients had to close permanently, which was going to affect my income. Molly and I had been friends for some time, and she reached out and said, why don’t you teach what you do? I was already doing some consulting alongside the agency’s done-for-you services, and she said I was passionate about working with entrepreneurs and knew what I was doing. So I started taking on one-on-one clients, and when they asked for more, I created a program — the Splash Marketing Collective, which has been around for about a year now. Molly gave me the confidence to try and move forward and show up more, which is when I really started doing more Facebook Lives.

How has teaching over the past year crossed over to your done-for-you services? It allowed me to realize I needed extra support and to invest in a team — I started with one VA and now have a team of about 36. I could work so much more efficiently if I wasn’t doing it all myself. It opened my eyes to not assuming everyone works the same way, and to allowing myself to invest in support, which lets your business expand because you have more time to serve others. I was working 50-70-80 hour weeks and wasn’t as effective at the things I needed to show up for as a coach. I was getting burnt out, and it’s still a challenge to find that balance between work and personal life, and to let go of control. It’s okay to shut down at seven at night, though there are still nights I come back to my laptop at 11pm and have to remind myself it can wait until tomorrow. Journaling has really helped, and I’m learning to meditate — I use apps like Calm and Shine.

How long did you journal for, and how did you turn journal pieces into social posts? In the morning it’s giving gratitude and thanks, and setting intentions for the day. I also keep a note tab on my phone so that when something happens during the day — a conversation, something one of the kids did — I make a note and try to relate it back to my business for a post. I also don’t open my phone first thing in the morning anymore, and I turn it off by around eight at night, so if you try to reach me, you can’t. That’s something I had a hard time doing before, but it’s easier when it’s not around buzzing.

Thank you so much for sharing, Gina, it’s been a pleasure. Any last places you’d like people to send you, if they want to reach out and chat about your programs or services? Find me on Facebook and Instagram at Stylishly Branding — shoot me a DM or a message on the page, I love connecting with new people. Thank you so much, Gina.