Branding and Messaging Strategy

[00:00:00] Calan Breckon: Today’s episode is sponsored by Kit, formally known as ConvertKit, the email marketing platform for creators. I’ve been using Kit for years because I found that it is the most efficient and easy to use out of all the email service providers. Kit simplifies your email marketing by combining powerful automations with an easy to use interface. I love the Visual Automations builder because I am a very visual person and it really helps me to organize all of my automations in a very simple and easy way to and let’s face it, Automations is a must have in order to succeed in any business Today. Kit also integrates with all of your favorite e commerce platforms, lead generation services, and much more. The best part about Kit is that it runs on a sliding scale for payment so that you can get started for free while you learn all about Kit systems and how to grow your email list. So to get started today for free, head on over to calanbreckon.com/kit or just click the link in the show notes. Now let’s get on to today’s episode.

Welcome to the business Gay podcast where we talk about all things business, marketing and entrepreneurship. I’m your host Calan Breckon and on today’s episode I have Jamie Engelhardt. Jamie is a coach, strategist and the founder of Wild& where she helps purpose driven entrepreneurs build brands that feel like home. Her approach blends emotional depth with practical insight grounded in the belief that most impactful businesses are built from the inside out. Jamie is passionate about helping people lead with authenticity, connect more deeply and create work that truly reflects who they are. I’m excited to talk branding and messaging strategy with Jamie today, so let’s jump in.

Welcome to the podcast. Jamie, how are you doing today?

[00:01:49] Jamie Engelhardt: Thank you, I’m doing well. I really wish the sun would come out though. We’ve had so much rain. I’m kind of over it.

[00:01:55] Calan Breckon: I know the the summer is getting a little slow start, although I will be fair up here in Canada there has been a lot of smoke because there’s been, at least at the time of recording this, there’s a lot of fires going on which is, I mean I’m used to it. Growing up in Vancouver, we did have a lot of wildfires on the west coast quite often and so I was kind of aware of that and it is seasonal and it does have its benefits to nature but they go a little too crazy and now they’re like, it’s like global warming amounts of it. So hopefully that can calm down for the rest of summer, we had some rain, so hopefully that’ll help everything and that, you know, we’ll have a nice, better summer. But we’re ready to rock and roll. I’m so excited to be chatting with you today and to dive into everything. So how about we just get right to it?

We’re talking about entrepreneurs and their stories and messaging. So where should entrepreneurs start? Start when it comes to their messaging.

[00:02:55] Jamie Engelhardt: Yeah, that’s.

I think I’ll say this. I’ll start with where they shouldn’t start.

They shouldn’t start with talking only about themselves.

What I. What I would love for every entrepreneur to do is to think about who their audience is and talk about them first. That’s where the messaging begins. But in order to do that, you have to go back to your brand. You have to go back to who you are.

You know, what you’re trying to do in the world, the people that you’re trying to talk to and really, really understand those people.

That’s how you’re going to start your messaging. That’s how you’re going to connect with them in a way that’s meaningful and actually draws them to want to work with your business.

[00:03:37] Calan Breckon: Definitely, 100% can agree with that. So you would definitely say that that’s one of the biggest mistakes that entrepreneurs make, is that they talk about themselves as opposed to their messaging or what they’re trying to solve. And I will say on podcasts, I. There’s a lot of people reach out to me to be guests on the podcast, and a lot of them I say no to. Because if you’re just going to talk about yourself or your book, I have no interest.

I want to know what you tangibly can give to my audience. That’s tips or action steps. Because when you help somebody and you serve, that is what really makes people remember you. Instead of talking about yourself, we all think, you know, my story’s great.

Is it?

[00:04:21] Jamie Engelhardt: No one really cares.

[00:04:22] Calan Breckon: Nobody really cares, right? I’m so glad we’re on the same page. Okay, so do not start off with just talking about yourself and how amazing you are. Nobody likes a narcissist. Focus on the message and focus on what you’re doing to help people. So where. Let’s go back to that first question then. So where then should entrepreneurs start? When it comes to crafting and thinking about that message, yeah, they.

[00:04:48] Jamie Engelhardt: And. And you know, it’s funny because I feel like every question I get asked about, where should an entrepreneur start? The answer is always the same. It’s your brand. You have to start with your brand. And for this particular portion of your brand, you have to start with understanding your audience. You need to know not only the problems that they have and they’re trying to get solved, but, like, emotionally, where are they at? Where are they at in society, what’s happening to them? Because what we’ve come to here in, you know, the year 2025 is that our audience is really, really smart.

People know and understand when you’re trying to sell to them. They know when you’re trying to market to them. And so our job as entrepreneurs is to connect with them in a way that is human and to connect with them in a way that really, truly seeks to understand them versus just trying to be understood all the time.

So starting with your. Starting with your brand and in particular, starting with understanding your audience is going to be really, really crucial to getting your messaging right.

[00:05:54] Calan Breckon: Definitely. And I will give this tip, as somebody who’s a seasoned entrepreneur, is that that messaging can and will evolve over time and that you should be serving the folks that you are just ahead of or that you know are at a beginning, or start with that kind of fresh beginning and let them grow with you. Because at some point it’ll change, but you’ll still have that backlog or that library of content for the new people to still also go back to and revisit. So don’t get too hung up on where do I start? I have. I have. I have clients from across the spectrum.

Probably start at the beginning and. And before you get to the finish line or wherever you think your majority of your people are going to be, Start there and then grow from there.

[00:06:43] Jamie Engelhardt: Yeah. And I would even say, like, think about, like, your three very favorite clients, the ones that, if you could clone them, you would talk to them. You know, when you’re writing your blogs, when you’re doing your podcast, all the things that you’re creating, talk to those people. Because in reality, you’re trying to draw more of those people in because those are the only kind of people that you want to work with. So think about, you know, you’ve probably. If they’re your favorite clients, you’ve probably been working with them for a while. Think about their families, think about what they like to do in their free time, how they like to interact with their clients, how they like to do business, and then start to talk to them and formulate your messages in a way that makes sense, that it would draw more of those types of clients in.

[00:07:25] Calan Breckon: That is perfect. So how can entrepreneurs make sure. That they’re using like the same tone across all of their platforms when they’re doing this, when they’re preparing all of this.

[00:07:35] Jamie Engelhardt: Yeah, that’s a great question and can be very tricky. And I think a lot, at least a lot of the people that I work with, that becomes a roadblock for them because they’re so worried about getting it wrong that they just don’t do anything at all. Right. They’re so worried about sounding salesy, sounding inauthentic, all of those things.

A lot of times what I like to do when I’m working with people is to go back to your values, go back to the reason that you started your company in the first place, really get a hold of what those things are and then those things start to flow into the way that you’re creating your tone and your voice and your messaging. Sometimes if you’re like more of an early stage entrepreneur, maybe it’s just you. The voice of the company is essentially the voice of you. Right. But as you grow and change and you bring more team members on, those are exercises that you’re going to want to walk through with your team to say, does this sound like us? Does this feel like us? If I were in a room with, you know, one of our clients, would they read this copy and be like, oh, that sounds just like you.

So in terms of like a practical step that you could take, one if you’re like a team of just you.

I am a huge fan of ChatGPT.

Talking to Chat GPT, giving it information. I do this all the time. I will have a conversation with it and say, you know, here’s everything that I’ve written so far. Feed it into it and then I’ll just like have it ask me questions back and forth and we, we literally have a conversation where it’s saying like, you know, I would say like I would like to write an article about how enneagram threes lead in the workplace. Ask me a few questions to help me flesh this out. So it’ll ask me questions and we’ll just go back and forth so I really get a concept and we’ve talked so much that they understand and know my tone of voice. Chat GBT is a they if you didn’t know and, and they really just help you in, in ways that are pretty, it’s, it’s pretty awesome how you can use ChatGPT.

I would say too, if, if you have a team, it’s worth sitting down with them and just kind of looking through the things that You’ve already created, trying to come up with some themes, starting to see how, how the. The company is speaking, decide together those types of things. Are we more formal? Are we more informal? You know, do we swear? Do we not swear? Like some of those, like if. Or questions or. And. Or questions. Again, ChatGPT is a great place to do that. Give me a list of questions that I can, you know, or give me a list of categories that I need to be thinking about in my tone of voice and then just kind of go through. And then when you’re writing content or your team is writing content, they can kind of go back to those things and be like, okay, yes, that fits.

And then one more thing that you could do is if you have some of those trusted clients that you really, really love, give some of the content to them and say, does this sound like us? Does this sound like me? Does this sound like our company? And just see what they say because they’ve worked with you long enough to know and be able to give some really good feedback there.

[00:10:49] Calan Breckon: Definitely, Definitely. And, and I want to add on to there some other tangible pieces is when you’re crafting all of this. I know for me, I kind of had to start with the visual. Visual and making sure I used the same, like, logo across all platforms, making sure I use the same color palette across all platforms when I was crafting, like a speaker sheet. Then making sure, like, okay, these are the questions that most often I get asked so that the interviewer knew kind of what was going on. Making sure I have my bio kind of ready. Drafting up those things that will grow and evolve and change. But whenever I put out a new podcast episode, everybody’s going to know because I have, you know, the orange and teal green, and it has a certain look and a certain feel. And people like that continuity, people like that familiarity. And the more you can do that and bake that into your messaging and have that consistent across all platforms, the more people can build that know like and trust factor with you instead of. Of having a mishmash of a bunch of different stuff all over the place.

[00:11:58] Jamie Engelhardt: Absolutely. Totally agree.

[00:12:00] Calan Breckon: Definitely. So you did start talking about AI a little bit and you started ask or chatting about how you know, you can ask it questions and getting to know your voice. Yeah, I do want to ask and maybe dance over here a little bit of. Are there any maybe dangers to doing that? Because that’s kind of like your IP or copyright and all that kind of stuff, right?

[00:12:22] Jamie Engelhardt: Yes. Okay, so there’s, there’s A whole host of questions and things that could be answered. There’s some ethical concerns around what, you know, the energy used to generate things on Chat GPT is doing to our environment.

We can go a lot of different ways in a lot of directions with it. I’ll take, I’ll take the direction of the danger in using AI to write all of your content is, again, goes back to the fact that our audience is smart.

We’ve all figured out by now that Chat GPT uses the EM dash. Like it’s, you know, like they’re gonna. I don’t even know. They use it all the time. It’s ridiculous.

[00:13:03] Calan Breckon: All the time.

[00:13:04] Jamie Engelhardt: All the time.

There’s. And if you’ve, you know, done enough of the type of work that we do, you start to see the trends of, of what it does. It’s not just a blank. It’s a blank. That’s a very Chat GBT thing to do. I have a client who, um, there was some word that they hated using, and he’s like, I told. I. I’ve told ChatGPT, you know, 8 million times not to use this word. And they still use this word. So they’re still, you know, like it’s, they’re still a robot, it’s still not a human.

And so I think that the biggest challenge that someone might face is that if you don’t know your voice as yourself, if you haven’t written enough of your content, if you don’t know yourself well enough, your voice is going to start sounding like Chat GPT versus Chat GPT sounding like you.

And that’s not what you want.

[00:13:56] Calan Breckon: Nope.

[00:13:56] Jamie Engelhardt: So again, it’s going back to your brand, to your messaging, to the heart of who you are and figuring out for yourself, this is who I am, this is how I sound, this is how my company sounds.

And then, you know, training the robot versus the robot, training you essentially, when it comes to IP and all of those things, I don’t know, like, if I’m writing a blog, it’s going to be out in the world anyway, so whatever. I kind of, you know, definitely, like, you’re not gonna. You maybe there’s probably things you don’t want to feed to ChatGPT, but also at the same time, I’m like, well, I don’t know. It’s.

[00:14:37] Calan Breckon: It’s kind of if that’s true.

[00:14:39] Jamie Engelhardt: If. When. I don’t know.

[00:14:42] Calan Breckon: A good practice for me that helped me find my voice is writing all of my own emails. So when I send out this podcast, it goes out every Wednesday in conjunction with a podcast episode coming out. Hey, everybody, this new episode’s out and what all that is. But I. It took me a long time to figure out what I liked and what I didn’t like. And I thought about, well, what do I like in email? And I’m like, well, I hate those long, obnoxious emails that go on forever because I’m like, I don’t have time for that. I like short, concise, to the point, tell me what’s in the episode. So I know going into it, oh, I want to listen to this because I know directly topics that are going to be talked about. And so baking that into that. And just by doing hundreds of those over the years, I now have, like, what I know I like. Sometimes I’ll go to ChatGPT and be like, completely brain dead. And I’ll upload the transcripts of an episode and be like, okay, based on these transcripts, write me a something something and like, make it short and sweet and to the point and put in a couple bullet points of what we talked about.

And it’ll draft something that’s like, pretty okay. But usually I’ll go in and like, doctor it up at least 50% and then it’ll be more in my voice. But it took me time to find out what that was before, so I knew, okay, this is not what I want this to sound like, but sometimes it comes up with gems for sure.

[00:16:06] Jamie Engelhardt: Yeah, well, and I think, too, that’s a. That’s a quarter too. We can all, especially if we’re. If you’re a marketer, you can tell. You can tell when someone’s just copied and pasted it straight from chat GPT.

But that reviewing piece, right, of making sure that you review every single thing it’s giving you to, you know, yes, this sounds like an email I would send. Yes, this sounds like my voice. No, I wouldn’t use that word ever in a million years. I’m deleting that, that kind of thing.

[00:16:31] Calan Breckon: Definitely.

Do you have any other tips or tricks when it comes to developing or growing your brand or your story or your message?

[00:16:42] Jamie Engelhardt: I think for me, a lot of. A lot of brand does come back to your values.

And I don’t know if you are. I’m a big Brene Brown fan.

She’s got her Dare to Lead book, which has an excellent exercise on values. Yes, there. There we go. Yes, yes, yes.

I always say the only way I would probably work for someone else is if I had the opportunity to work for Brene Brown, but because she’s just a legend.

But she’s got an excellent exercise on values that first helps you get to the core. Your own personal core values, which I think is huge.

Knowing yourself and the way that you operate in the world helps, you know, how you operate in business.

And, and that’s really core to, I mean, people don’t think about it. I think they’re like, oh, it’s, you know, you just talk about whatever you’re doing in your services, but really it does come down to the heart of who you are and the, what you’re doing in the world. Because that’s why we all build businesses. Right? We saw, we saw something that wasn’t existing in the world and created something so, so to fix that problem or so that it could exist. And so extending that practice into the values for your company really helps shape and mold everything that you’re doing in your messaging. Because if I have the value of, I don’t know, authenticity, that’s a pretty common one. But I show up in my messaging in a way that feels like just very not like me or not like my company, then you’re, then you’re, you know, negating that value. If you have a, if you have the value of being candid but you write in a very like kind of wishy washy way, there’s a misalignment there. And so I do, I do think that really paying attention and digging in to what those values could be if you’re, if you’re in a team, like doing that values practice as a team and figuring out what those are and letting that be an extension of everything that you’re creating. Because it doesn’t matter if it’s messaging on a blog or a website or you know, you’re trying to hire someone or you’re trying to get more clients, all of that comes back to your values. It really does.

[00:19:00] Calan Breckon: I 100 agree and I’ve actually done that values values exercise from Brene Brown and I have like my top 10 core values that I have and I update them every maybe couple of years I go back and check in, but they usually stay pretty consistent along, you know, things. Although things have shifted, the more I’ve settled in myself as a human being, the more other things have shifted a little bit in those values. But yeah, that’s a fantastic exercise to do is core values exercise.

This has been absolutely fantastic, great chit chat. Where can folks find out more or maybe work with you in terms of finding, you know, their voice or their branding?

[00:19:41] Jamie Engelhardt: Yeah, Absolutely. So always. My website, wildampersand spelled out dot com.

I’m also also, I put out a regular LinkedIn newsletter. If you just go to my LinkedIn profile, I’m sure we’ll link it in the notes. You can subscribe there and get lots of information around, branding, messaging, all of those things.

[00:20:00] Calan Breckon: Awesome. Fantastic. And yes, I will make sure to have all of these links in the show notes for everybody listening. Thank you, Jamie, so much for taking the time and joining us on the podcast today.

[00:20:09] Jamie Engelhardt: Thank you.

[00:20:10] Calan Breckon: Thanks for tuning in today. Don’t forget to hit that subscribe button. And if you really enjoyed today’s episode, I would love a star rating from you. The Business Gay Podcast is written, produced and edited by me, Calan Breckon. That’s it for today. Peace, love, rainbows.