How to Build a Personal Brand (Tips from Brand Strategist Olivia Omega)

In this interview with brand strategist Olivia Omega, we talk about how to build a personal brand. We talk about the importance of authenticity and bringing your personality into your work. We also discuss determining your core values and why people should take a stand for what they believe in when it comes to personal branding.

Olivia has 20 years of corporate branding, advertising, and digital marketing experience. She is the co-founder of Wallace Marketing Group, the author of Beautifully Branded: The Girl’s Guide to Understanding the Anatomy of Brand You, and the host of GOD is CEO Podcast. As a TEDx speaker and the Founder Track Chair for Denver Startup Week, she is also a passionate diversity and inclusion advocate who speaks on the topics of authenticity, belonging, and measuring the costs and benefits of bringing your whole self to homogeneous rooms.

MALLORY WHITFIELD:

Hi, Olivia! Thanks for joining us. So today we're going to talk about personal branding because I know that's something you're an expert in. You have more than 20 years of experience in all sorts of branding. So take us back to the beginning... How did you get interested in the world of branding? And how did you start building your own personal brand?

OLIVIA OMEGA:

I think I first got interested in marketing during high school. I was a part of a club called DECA. I don't know if you've heard of that club, but it's basically a marketing and business club. Right before that, I'd say my freshman year in high school, I wanted to be a pediatrician really badly. I don't know exactly why. I took biology and started taking science classes, which just didn't spark any emotion in me. But something that I loved was watching Superbowl commercials. I liked analyzing the commercials and stuff. So I went into this marketing business club in high school, and from that moment on, I was like, this is what I want to do from an advertising standpoint.

It wasn't until in college when I majored in marketing and started at an agency that was really focused on brand positioning. And so until then, like end of college, I didn't really know... We all know what a brand is, but I didn't know what brand positioning and brand strategy was. And so while I thought I wanted to go into this world of advertising and marketing, I always say I was kind of born and raised with this notion of brand strategy. So I started doing that at an agency just at the end of college and graduated and stayed there for almost 10 years, learning everything I could and just soaking in brand strategy. And then after about 10 years or so, I left there started my own consultancy.

At the time my kids were babies. I was working with mom and baby products and a lot of moms like myself who were wanting to start a business. That's when things kind of shifted to personal branding, where it's like taking the concepts that I learned on branding big consumer packaged goods, brands, and applying them to people and individuals.

That's awesome. And so your personal brand kind of started in this one place from you being a mom... What advice would you have for somebody who wants to start building their personal brand but doesn't really have any idea what brand strategy means or what brand positioning even means?

I would say to examine your core values, like your own personal values. So as people, especially if you're in the service industry, if you're a consultant or coach, you're bringing all your filters, your experiences. You're bringing the things you love and the things you don't to this experience with your clients. So I would start by examining your heart and looking at what are your own core personal values? What do you believe in? What excites you? How does that transfer into the products and services you offer? And so once you've got that kind of anchoring down, then everything that you say and do from a marketing and branding perspective (the language you have on your website, the photos that you have taken of you), all of these things can then tie back to who you are at your core.

Yeah, and I know you use the words "authenticity" and "authentic" a lot, which is something that I always use too whenever I'm talking about personal branding. I think it's really important in terms of your own personal brand. Can you give us examples of how that authenticity and your core values show up in your own personal brand?

Yeah, definitely. And then I'll say this too: just as we shift and change and evolve and grow as human beings, our personal brand (because it's so tied to who we are) will shift and change and grow throughout different stages and phases of life.

Back in the day when I was in that mom & baby world, my kids were babies and I was a stay at home mom for a super little small stint before I launched a company... so while at the core of who I am, my values haven't fully changed, but the way I express it as a brand and as my personal brand has shifted and changed over the years. A couple examples of that are simply when I was a mom with babies, the way I dressed and my hair and my makeup... all of that was different. Some of it had to do with a lack of time and the lack of priority and stuff like that, but I remember kind of shifting out of that a little bit.

As my kids were getting older, instead of being in the mom & baby product world, I started to shift a little bit more into coaching and consulting, and I had to do this photoshoot. It was the first photo shoot that I had personally ever done. This was seven or eight years ago. I brought a friend with me and I was like, I'm gonna bring this best friend because she will be honest. She will call me out and she will make me laugh and she'll push me to not shy away from fully expressing myself in the shoot. At one point, she whips out her makeup bag, and she's like, "Here put this on," and it was red lipstick. And I was like, "No, never!", because prior to that I just wore lip gloss and like, you know, very subdued tones and whatever. I was like, "No red lipstick is for like, fast women!" And you know, like, I don't know what I was thinking at the time... like, "I don't want to be a whore! I don't want to look like a whore in my photo shoot," and all this stuff. But we put the red lipstick on. And the pictures turned out really well.

And so from that point on (and I was also going through divorce and there was so many things happening... the shift and kind of metamorphosis of who I was...), that red lipstick started to become the staple and the thing that I could leverage, because I started to get comfortable with it. It made me feel powerful. I could stand out. And now it's my absolute go to, always. So things just shift and change. And that's very brand image centric, right? How we express ourselves outwardly, visually.

I know that you've talked a lot about this kind of personal growth and learning from failure. I remember the first time I ever met you, you were speaking at a conference called Alt Summit and talking about some of the business failures that you've experienced and what you've learned from it. From what people see on the forefront, versus what goes on behind the scenes. You shared an example of when you went on The Ellen Show…

As we grow, there's a lot of stuff behind the scenes that people don't know. Can you share more about that? Like, if people are feeling like they're becoming somebody different and their personal brand is shifting, how do you deal with that stuff?

You know, I think a lot of it is just you learn and deal by doing and by practicing. I always check myself and make sure that the people who are following me realize that I'm a human being. There's lots of perfectionism on social media platforms, especially Instagram and some others that are very visual. And so I will always make sure to do a step back and to let people into a little bit of that vulnerability of, "This is who I am," or "This is who I really am," just so that I can continue to be relatable.

I want people to realize there are other women out there who are trying to build a business and whose marriages are also falling apart at the same time, or who are trying to build a business and they are having issues raising their kids or they have a special needs child, or they're trying to build a business and they can barely feed their their family. Those are all real situations and scenarios that I've been through.

I would just encourage people to always take a step back and almost do an audit or evaluation. Am I really coming through as the person I want? Or am I portraying something that isn't authentic? Because it is so perfectly curated and primed and put together?

Yeah, and I think that sort of inauthenticity does crop up a lot of times in visual mediums like Instagram, right? But I know for you, you've done a lot of speaking as well. I saw you speak at Alt Summit, and I know you've done a TEDx talk, and you have a new podcast, right? How does public speaking play into this? Is public speaking something that people who really want to build a personal brand should consider? I think there's opportunity there to be more authentic in a different way.

Yeah, definitely. You know, public speaking goes back to like middle school and high school, you know? Where you have these challenges - we had to stand up in front of the class and actually present a thought out idea. And literally public speaking is the number one fear of people in general, it's like one of the top fears.

I think for two reasons, speaking is really great: to kind of overcome that a little bit so that whether you're up in front speaking at a conference or if you have to stand up in front of a boardroom and present an idea, or you're trying to sell your product into a store, whatever that might be... I think just the notion of being able to stand up confidently and project an idea and bring humor to that or whatever feels right for you is very important in building a brand that allows you to provide depth to who you are. This is why video is so cool and important as well.

We can become one dimensional if we're relying simply on pictures on our website or pictures on Instagram and Facebook and text. If that's the only way people can get to know us and who we are and what we have to offer, then we're really missing this whole depth of voice and personality. Something that you do really well is portraying your personality on stage. People can't really get to know us in the way that we would like to -- to like, know, and trust us -- and to hire us if we aren't leveraging speaking and video to the fullest.

Yeah, yeah. And can you tell us a little bit more about your new podcast? I know that's a really authentic expression of you and your personal brand, right?

Yeah, definitely. I've had it on my heart to start to podcast -- and it wasn't even a podcast, it really is just building my YouTube channel and really getting a message out that's aside from my business focus of personal branding, but also ties into my faith and what I believe in. Just encouraging entrepreneurs to just let go and trust God as we go through this journey.

What's interesting about YouTube is the way life can kind of work... I was finding it difficult to set aside the time to record videos like I needed to, and so I would batch (I'm sure you're working on this too), but like batch a bunch of videos. I was trying to get a bunch done in one day, so you can hype yourself up to be like, "Okay, go go go!" And so my thought in expanding to a podcast would be to have another medium, and to make it so that as things drop into my heart, (and this could be like 5 am, it could be midnight... it could be, you know, after a yoga class where you're getting all of the rush of emotions...), I can flip on my phone and quickly record an audio and turn that into a podcast. So that's what I did.

I started that in April, and it's called God is CEO. It's really taking God and putting him in the driver's seat of our business, allowing him to be chief executive officer and just really taking cues from that download, versus what I've done in the past. My business has gone from being kind of an afterthought or me telling God, "This is what I'm gonna do with my business," versus getting that advisement, direction and discernment.

Yeah, and I know for you, your faith is a big part of who you are, right? Like I am not necessarily that way, so that's not a part of my brand, but I know that for you it is. Yet sometimes we have these ideas about what “should” be part of business, but I think that's all getting shaken up a little bit right now, like people kind of expect from even big brands like Nike or Ben and Jerry's, where do they stand about something? Can you speak to that sort of thing? Are there things that we shouldn't be doing online as part of our personal brand? How do you feel?

Great question. It's a really good question. And I remember talking about this years ago, I'm sure eight years ago, whereas I feel like it's now, like you said things are being shaken up. It's now kind of settling in that, at the end of the day, especially for individuals (and we could talk about big corporations), but for individuals, our brand and our personal are melded together. And as much as we want to keep them separate, your values and what you do as a human being impacts the people that you serve.

When we release that notion of keeping them separate, and we bring them together to say, "This is me personally, this is me professionally, but this is how they work together," it actually builds a stronger brand and it sets you apart. If we were to all go out there and say, "I am a business coach. I'm a woman, I'm a mom," and we leave it at that, how many "business coach / women / mom" am I competing against? Whereas if I can bring in my own personality -- who I am, the sound of our voice, how we laugh, our humor, what we believe -- then we start to differentiate ourselves and now we're no longer competing, but we are able to hopefully build and add to and accentuate what other people are doing because we're different.

When it comes to the question of politics and religion... And that's like the thing, right? You never talk about politics or religion at the dinner table or on your podcast or whatever. I think those lines are blurring a lot. And I love that they're blurring because it's important that you as a person stand for something. I'm trying to keep my Hamilton references to a minimum as I'm speaking, it's hard, but if you look at, you know, Aaron Burr, he didn't stand for anything specific. From a political standpoint, he wanted to be liked by everyone and appeal to everyone and so he never stood his ground. And I think corporate brands, when we look at politics, when we look at the upcoming election, we look at Black Lives Matter, we look at LGBTQ rights... Companies who don't have a stance are going to start to fall by the wayside, and individuals and personal brands that don't have a stance on something are going to get lost in the noise.

It's up to you as a person on how frank and direct you are. Do you come at these issues with humor? Do you come at these issues with love? Do you slap people around with your words? However you do that is again part of your brand personality. It's something that individuals have to determine for themselves, but to remain silent and to keep things, "This is just business and my personal is over here..." It's not gonna work.

It seems like you and I are pretty similar in the way that we look at personal branding. It's a large part about authenticity, but also intentionality, right? Do you either in your own personal brand or with the clients that you work with, do you recommend or use any sort of brand guidelines or do any sort of check in about that? Because we were talking about this stuff shifts and grows, so is there a framework or anything like that, that you use to help stay on track about what you want to put out there online or in public?

Yeah, there's a couple. There's probably three different exercises that I use on a regular basis. And it's interesting because while I use them on clients, I don't take the time to use them on myself as much as I should, and recently I have gone through these exercises for my own personal brand.

One of them is looking at a brand umbrella. Underneath an umbrella you stay dry, right? If you come out of an umbrella when it's raining, you're going to get wet. If you look at your brand umbrella -- and I'll just draw an umbrella and put my name at the top, and then I'll put all the things that I'm working on, that I'm doing, that I love... My podcast is under there, my YouTube channel... I serve women entrepreneurs, but I also work with corporations.... And so you kind of throw it all under there. And then you have to distill and say, "What is still meaningful for me? What's still important? What is not benefiting my brand right now, or my clients? Maybe I could take that off... What's something new that I want?" If it's your YouTube channel, I'll put that because this is new. Really just organize it. So you create this very concise, consistent, neat looking package under your umbrella. Then, when something comes up -- because we all have these opportunities like, "Hey, Mallory, you should do this!" or "You should start this!" or you know, all of these ideas... "Let me go back to my brand umbrella." Is this something that's gonna get left out in the rain? Is it gonna get forgotten about? Do I have passion for this? Can I even fit this under my umbrella, and if I fit this do I have to take something off? That helps us just stay grounded.

The other thing, like I said at the beginning, is really starting with our heart and really setting our values. Big corporations have, for the most part, value statements or mission statements. (And then even mission and value statements being two different things.) But as individuals, write out your value statement. What do you value? And then when when life moves and shifts, and we talk about pivoting a lot these days, you go back to your values. Does this align?

Sometimes we have to have it written down. Otherwise, we get so jumbled up in our head, or we let our emotions drive us so much, so we get super elated and excited about a new possibility that all of our work that we've laid for our personal brand can go out the window, or even our values. Like, "What? Wait, I don't even I don't value this, and it doesn't fit with my values." Or because of the current climate, we could get super discouraged about something that we know is our path and our purpose and get down and depressed and frustrated. And so a lot of times we'll kick something to the curb because of how we feel in the moment. But if we go back to, "This is a value statement I wrote out," whether it's on my website or not, (I encourage it), but whether it's on your website or not, "This is the value statement I wrote out, and I need to remember this is part of my values. This is something that I really want to do and I might not feel like it right now. But I'm not going to throw this away because this aligns." You can look at it as kind of that litmus test.

Yeah. I love that idea, or that analogy of it being an umbrella. I hadn't thought about it that way where it's like, yeah, these things are gonna get left out in the rain.

But it's so true.

That's such a great resource. What's one resource that's really changed your life in some way? Could be a book, a movie, a person... What's something that you would advise somebody else to check out and why?

Oh, it's so hard to pick one. I probably have a list of 10 different things that have really changed my life in an incredible way, and things that I wish 10 years ago or even eight years ago when I had started my first company that I knew about, but, um, so these are random, but I'm going to give you two.

One is the book The Compound Effect. Oh, it's so good and I'm spacing the author. But if you if you look it up, you'll find it. It basically talks about the tiny itty bitty baby steps that we make that make a huge impact on our lives. How we manage our time, our health, our wealth, how we run our businesses, versus us trying to make these big grandiose changes. So anytime someone is like, "Hey, Olivia, I'm going to go vegan tomorrow." And I'm like, "Are you sure?" or like, "Why? Like, what are you doing?" Because we want to make these big changes, or "I'm cutting out sugar." If you've ever tried to, like just get rid of sugar or do a detox for a month, no sugar... It's so hard and we set ourselves up for failure a lot of times but if I were to do a tiny baby step and say I'm just gonna not eat dairy two days a week... That's in our minds, we're like, well, that's not going to make an impact. But it does, like that little thing if we could become consistent in it. It's the same thing with compounded interest: that tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny percentage, but because it's compounded over time, it makes a huge difference versus us being like, I'm going to try to save, you know, a million dollars for my kid's college tuition. I'm just going to save this much, and it'll have a great impact over time. So that's one thing.

And then the other thing is, that sounds really silly, but it's Fiverr. Fiverr has literally changed my life. I have a branding background, but I also have done graphics and do a lot of web design and graphic design as well. So when Fiverr first came out, many years ago, I was appalled that people would go on Fiverr and pay $5 for a logo. I was like, "What? You're going to get what you pay for!" I hated Fiverr. I thought it was the worst thing ever. But as I've gotten older and wiser, and as I've gotten busier, I leverage it, I want to say, at least 2-3 times a month to quickly and easily handle those things that I may know how to do, but take me too much time. An example of that is I was having some PHP issues on a WordPress site that I had built for a client years ago. And I don't even build websites for clients anymore, but this was a client years ago, and she was like, "I just don't know what's happening." And I was like, "Oh, I'll take a look." And I spent two hours in the back PHP, and I'm not as good at it anymore. It takes too much time, and I have other things I need to do. I went on Fiverr and I found someone for $10 who was able to tweak this code that I messed up from an update. They fixed everything in a matter of hours and that is amazing. For a lot of things, I use Fiverr.

That's awesome. I'm familiar with Fiverr, but I definitely haven't gone down that rabbit hole of using it much either. So that's a really good tool.

I love it. And someone said to me, too, this was a couple years ago, "How much is your time worth? And what is your hourly rate?" So if let's say your hourly rate is $100, how much is it worth for you to hire someone at $25 an hour to do something that they can easily do where it's costing you $100 an hour to do it and I've just never even thought about it that way. The one thing that I have not transferred that to is my home life and personal life of you know, hiring someone to come in and clean once a month, deep clean, or hiring someone to cook or anything like that. But again, that question goes, if I'm going to go grocery shopping, this is a good one, especially with quarantine and stuff, is finally leveraging all of the grocery delivery options that are out there because if it costs me an hour, if I'm $100 an hour, it's costing $100 to go grocery shopping, where I can hire someone to do that for me and it's costing me a $10 delivery fee, whatever.

Yeah, I have a friend who outsources all of that stuff. She hires people to come pick up the dog poop in the backyard and everything.

Amazing, and as long as you're making money in that timeframe, right, so you're like, "I'm gonna take this time and energy and actually turn it into income producing activities..." It makes it totally worth it.

Yeah. So what advice would you give to your 20 year old self?

Ah, my 20 year old self... I would say simply that nothing will go as planned and that's the plan.

That's it, nothing will go as planned. And it's not even just okay. I think one at one point, I would tell my younger self, "You'll be okay, it'll be okay. When things don't work out as planned, it will be okay." But I truly believe that things never work out as planned. And that's the whole plan, is that they don't work out that way. I thank God that situations in my life didn't go the way I wanted them to, because I wouldn't be who I am and where I am today.

Yeah, I would agree with that. Yeah, the stuff I've learned the most from was the stuff that felt the hardest in the moment. So Olivia, where can people find you and connect with you online? Obviously your podcast, right?

Yeah. I'm in a lot of places, but I would say go to OliviaOmega.com. That's where you can find information about my book, my podcast, my YouTube channel, all of the things are there.

Cool. Thank you so much, Olivia.