Stop saying “like and subscribe”—Brand Closers are how you build something people actually care about. This simple identity + value formula makes you memorable and shareable.

Why Brand Closers Beat CTAs

The topic this week is Brand Closers. So what is a Brand Closer?

I mentioned CTAs at the top of the episode. A CTA is a call to action. So something like “click here for more info” or “call this number now for blah blah blah.” It’s asking someone to take an action.

But what most people do is they’ll in every video say “don’t forget to like and subscribe” and things that now we have all learned to ignore. We learn to ignore advertisements. That’s just something we can tune them out whether we’re listening to the radio or podcast, watching TV, any of the things.

The Key Difference

So today we’re talking Brand Closers. What a Brand Closer is—it’s different. A CTA is “what’s in it for me.” A call to action is “do this for me”—you as the performer or the person putting out the content. The person on camera, on microphone, whatever it is—”do this for me, like and subscribe.”

Where a Brand Closer is different. A Brand Closer starts to build awareness and build your brand, but it also is about them—the viewer, the listener, the watcher.

There’s two parts to a Brand Closer: Who I am and then what’s in it for you? For you, the audience? For you, the viewer, listener, watcher.

Identity + Value

Basically this is identity and value is what we’re talking about. And brand, if you’ve listened before, is what people think and say about you when you’re not around.

So the value of crafting this identity and sharing this identity with someone—that’s brand. You’re handing them an identity to understand who you are and put you in a little box. We’ve talked about boxes too in an earlier episode.

And when people sneeze you out to their—so it means that you have people who are so devoted to you and such a great fan base that they believe in you so much that they’ll literally—not literally—that they will figuratively sneeze you out to other people.

So they’ll spread your message, your idea, your who you are. Your idea virus to multiple different people. And that’s the sneeze. But why it’s a sneeze is because conceptually it’s a virus. They are spreading your virus for you.

The Pavlovian Effect

So whatever it is, that is what your Brand Closer is in a way because you are telling people who you are, what you have for them, and what it’ll do for them all in one.

So then when somebody’s like “Oh, have you seen this person who does the news or whatever, like we talked about last week with Scoops?” they’ll be like “Oh, this is—they’ll remember.” It’s a very Pavlovian sort of conditioning because you are conditioning somebody to associate your name with your occupation, but then also with what you provide to people.

So why they should trust you or why they should listen to you or why they should know you or watch you.

And it’s a little—I want to say manipulative but not manipulative bad. That’s what I mean. It’s very Pavlovian where you’re training people to have this.

Real Example

So like for example in one of mine—I will provide a small example—I have like 20 of them because I have so many different types of content. But in one of my Brand Closers I have “and I make videos just like this for local small businesses” and then I have a little extra afterward.

But now people know “oh, she makes video for local small businesses.” I’ve already had two people reach out and I’ve only been creating this type of content for probably like four weeks. Just thinking Miami was a month ago, which is crazy.

But now I’ve already had people reaching out because they’re like “Oh, she makes video content or whatever. She makes in your region.”

The Science Behind It

So telling people who you are and what you can provide to them and also what you do, it will have that—I wrote it down because for the Pavlov experiment, which if you have no idea what that is, you should check it out. It’s very interesting. It’s basically a dog and a bell, salivation, and food.

And it’s a positive conditioning, but basically you have a neutral stimulus, which in this experiment is the bell, but for a Brand Closer, it’s your name becoming associated with a meaningful stimulus. So in the experiment, it’s food, but in a Brand Closer, it’s being resourceful, being useful, helpful to people.

And the word I said “manipulative” or whatever I said, but it’s influence. You’re influencing them to remember this little thing and it’s consistent every time. So then it becomes like Walter Cronkite had “and that’s the way it is.” He didn’t say who he was because you’d already been watching or listening.

That was a brand—an audible brand that you just you would know from the repeated exposure.

Consistency Is Key

So should you change your Brand Closer often? Never. How often would you say?

Since we haven’t given an example yet, I think we need to have it consistent. Like for example, we both have long blonde hair and we always wear black.

I pay money to be blonde, not brown blonde.

Like we have a specific look that people recognize us anywhere we go. People know the name MAVEN.

I normally wear a shirt that says MAVEN or Amara wears a shirt that says MAVEN when we’re out and about and then people recognize the brand.

Or even I wear—this is so silly, but I wear checkerboard Vans all the time because they catch your eye and I love checkerboard. I love black and white. That’s like my favorite color combo. Even though people would argue it’s not colors, but whatever.

But I wear checkerboard Vans. When people that I know wear checkerboard Vans or they see them on me, they’re like “Oh, blah, blah, blah.” They’ll send me photos and be like “I’m wearing your shoes or whatever.” Which is so funny because that’s just become part of our brand.

Consistency with everything is so important. So consistency of the Brand Closer, finding one that conveys what you want to convey and sticking with it for a little bit. So people start to be like “Oh, remember that person? She always has the Scoops in the news for XYZ Town.”

What We’ve Been Up To

We are about to hit the road again. I am in the weeds building our product. Everything grows and changes as you evolve. So there’s two separate products that we’re building, but they might be evolving into one potentially, which is exciting.

But it’s been quite a process. I do wish we had documented everything so much more.

What do you mean like documenting what you do for people so they can follow along and feel invested and feel like they had a part in something?

Yeah. It’s almost like that helps build a business or something. But we’ve just been so busy this past year, these past two years, that I didn’t even think to be recording all of these moments where we’ve had so many pivots and changes and especially with the products that we’re building.

It’s unfortunate, but I’m starting to record little bits and pieces now because then maybe I can eventually put it out.

I mean, that’s the beauty of the podcast. The more we talk about things here, the better.

Service Business Challenges

If you are building a product, definitely make sure you are recording every part of it because that is very valuable.

It’s easy for us to do it for other people because what we do is service—not in a religious kind of way—but we run service businesses. We do the things other people need done for them at the peril of our own.

But our whole thing is doing the things that they otherwise don’t have the time and energy to do, which is something we try to use as well. We need an us. We need to clone ourselves. That’s it.

Reading Multiple Books

I finally finished my book “Hitmakers.” It was very good. That was by far one of the best books I’ve ever read. I’m still about 40% of the way through because I have three books I’m reading.

You read cyclically. That’s actually a very interesting way that we read because I hated having to do that in school where you would read three different books or four different books. I like to just sink into one and think in that mind space and then go to the next one.

But I think there’s value in it because then you’re taking all these ideas, all these disparate ideas and blending them into one.

So I’ll read multiple books in different areas at one time. And that’s why I like it because I don’t like to just stick with one idea. I like how it forms disparate things in the back of my mind.

The Power of Taking Breaks

Last week, three separate times, the importance of taking a break and letting your subconscious solve problems came up three separate times, which is really weird.

But that is what we’ve been doing now, too—we’ve been home for about a month, almost a month. It’s been very good. We’ve gotten so much—we’ve made so much forward progress on various things within MAVEN, for our products, for the actual what we’re offering for MAVEN even.

The subconscious letting that formulate all these ideas—reading straight through a book is very valuable too because you’re focused.

There is definitely a benefit to that because then you can take this little bit up here, apply it to this and then be like “Oh, okay.” It’s just like looking at history. You can see if you read various different things, it’s interesting to be like “Oh, Winston Churchill was up here,” and you read a whole book about Winston Churchill. Then you read a book about this chair and it was only made because Winston Churchill was so big he couldn’t fit.

And then you read about this hill and Churchill—anyway, but you read all these different things and you see how everything’s so tied together. So it’s more lifelike the way you read, whereas I read very—I find that I get the most out of it when I’m just focused on one book because then I can take all my ideas from that one.

I think there’s one more thing—because I sort of savor the book a little bit, but I think not moving on to the next chapter or section has the last thing I read linger more actually.

Yeah, it ferments in your brain. Because I haven’t shifted the thought of this concept because I have a philosophy book, sort of a business book, and then more like marketing—sort of the three things. It’s so weird because they’re interconnected but they’re really different topics.

Very different. So I think being able to do that—I might have subconsciously figured out a little hack for me to have my subconscious—whatever—but my non-active thinking problem-solving brain, I might innately do something that lets it function better. I don’t know.

I would say that they all though are very closely connected even though they’re very different. They’re a lot closer than you would think.

How to Create Your Brand Closer

How do you actually make a Brand Closer? How do you use it? Where do you put it?

How many parts are there to a Brand Closer? I would say it’s technically three, but I would say two.

So I would technically say three. But for me, it is starting with your name, what you do. So what your occupation is—just what your profession is, what sort of service you offer or whatever.

The thing that will actually benefit you to say—so not just like “I work at the mines.” This is like what your business is essentially. Just this is your tiny little advertisement that doesn’t feel like an ad because then the next part is what people should expect from your content.

So like to me I say two parts because it’s identity, value.

Real Examples from Our Top Bananas

For example, some Brand Closers we do with some of our Top Bananas, as well as for me, because I have 40 of them now.

One of them is for Mr. Kevin Goldman, Goldman in LA, Calabasas area, and he does “I’m Kevin Goldman, LA Chef Realtor, and I keep up with all things Calabasas so you don’t have to.” He varies on them sometimes because he’s Kevin—just because he’s hilarious.

So some of them—he has a gluten intolerance that he just learned and he eats all the gluten. So one of them was “My name is Kevin Goldman, LA chef realtor, and I eat all the gluten so you don’t have to.” It was just very funny. So that’s one of them.

And then another person: “I’m Amy realtor and fourth generation Lombardian and I know this area inside and out.” Lombard is a town near Chicago.

“And I know this area inside and out”—that’s an implied value. It’s not—because we actually were sort of playing with it like “do we say so you can learn more?” but that actually is already implied from saying “and I know this area inside and out.” It says “I’m a realtor who’s lived here forever, my whole life, and I know this area very well,” which then conveys “oh, I want to know the area better. Let me follow, let me like, let me do whatever you have to do on the platform to get more of it.”

And the fourth generation—her family has lived in that town for four generations. So she’s very connected to the community and then thereby knows way more about the area than most normal people would know.

My Personal Examples

Like I teased one of mine for a secret profile we have. If you find it, don’t follow it.

If you do—truly if you find this the Scoops account that Amara’s face is all over—don’t follow it because it really is only—the goal is to only have local people.

We actually did have somebody that we know from another thing follow. But that’s the thing—again, Useful Not Famous. We’d rather have 23 followers who are in the town than 223 or 2,023 who aren’t because the whole point of it is hyper local.

So then one of mine is “My name’s Amara and I make videos just like this for local small businesses and I keep up on all things town so you don’t have to.”

And then finally my final one: “My name is Amara and I fly all over the country to film with realtors in their market and I keep up on social media news so you don’t have to.”

Templates and Flexibility

“So you don’t have to” is very easy to replicate. But there’s other templates we can—if you have questions and want your own template that isn’t “so you don’t have to” kind of thing, we can always help. Just DM us on Instagram.

But we’re a lot more creative with our Top Bananas Brand Closers just because for mine it was “let’s just get this out there and just make it as easy and quick as possible.”

And don’t be afraid to try a couple and see which one feels the best for you. Your name, what you can personally benefit from—you as the person presenting this to someone—and then what people can expect from your content.

Try out a couple different ones. I’ve tried a few different—that is something to really—it’s not one and done.

I just don’t want people to have analysis paralysis like “this is it, this is the only thing I can do” because so many people get caught up in that for all manner of social media creation in both sides of that. Like not doing it because it’s not perfect but also not changing it when you feel like “oh wait, this isn’t quite right.”

So just try a couple. It has to feel right coming from you otherwise it’s just going to look kind of weird on video. You’re going to sound kind of weird. You’re not going to embody it and it’s not going to seem as confident.

Whereas when you find yours then it’s like “oh cool, this person knows what they’re doing” or “they know what they’re talking about.”

If you have any questions, please make sure to share them in your story and we will answer them on next week’s episode.