Hello, my friend, welcome to the Tralongo track. I'm your host, Giana, and this is your weekly dose of a little bit of mom life, a little bit of business strategy, and all the insanity that happens in between. I'm so excited that you're here. I also know that you're busy. You got life going on. So let's jump right into the episode.
It's almost Halloween. It's almost the end of spooky season, and if you're just finding me and you don't know me, Hi, I'm Giana and I love Halloween. My parents and I joked around with the entire family and told them that they were going to name me Halloweena, because I was due to be born right around Halloween and they probably should have because here I am at 37 years old just as obsessed with Halloween as I was when I was eight.
I still dress up every year. I'm obsessed. Why do you care? So, I made Halloween, I mean spooky season, a part of my October launch, and I want to tell you why. I want to give you a peek inside my brain so that you can understand why this was a very intentional choice. I don't know, have you ever seen the movie The Cell with Jennifer Lopez?
When she got hooked up to a machine to go inside the cell of the brain of a serial killer. If you haven't, super creepy, super weird. You should watch it. It's not scary, it's just creepy. But, basically, that's what we're gonna do. In this podcast, I am hooking you into my brain–though I'm not a serial killer–so that you can get a peek inside.
Is this an unhinged podcast already? Are you still with me? Okay, so, there's really two big reasons why I went this route with my branding for this launch. In October, this month, I essentially called it the magic cauldron month. It was all about different foundational offers, and they were all themed around Halloween.
I have the Potion Pass, which gives you access to all of the offers. My Charmed Content workbook, my Bewitching Blueprint, and my Witchy Workshop. My mom came over in mid-September and helped me do a very witchy themed photoshoot so that I could use it for everything, and I did it, because it was fun.
Right. It was fun for me. It might not be fun for everybody, but for me, it was really fun. So typically in the fall, mid-October through the end of the year, I typically slow down my business and it's just because it's my favorite time of year. I want to work less, but towards the end of the summer, it was clear that I was off on my financial goals, but tantalizingly close to them as well.
So, I made the business decision to not slow down my business until closer to Christmas and really push on this, and if I was going to push, I wanted to make it really extra fun for me to do and for me to market. So one, I chose offers that I love and that I'm so passionate about doing, and two, I made this really fun brand and it was very on brand for me to do it.
If you've followed me for a while and for the people on my social media who know me a little bit, they know that I love Halloween. Every year I've shown pictures of the craziness, I mean, for my 30th birthday, Jeff and I, this is pre-kids, we flew to Sleepy Hollow in New York, stayed there for a week or a long weekend.
He dressed up as Frankenstein, and I dressed up as a witch. I mean full, full-on. Both of us had green faces. So, it's very on brand for me to do. I wanted to shake it up. I didn't want to create the same crusty brand that everybody else has. It's so easy for our content, everybody's content, to just get lost in the ecosphere of Instagram.
I just wanted to do something to shake it up, to stand out, to be a little cheesy and fun. So I did it, because I wanted to. Ooh! Because I wanted to. Not because it was trendy or because other people were doing it. I did it because I wanted to do it. Which, like, hello, we should be doing more of this in our business.
That's really like a big takeaway that I've had this month, that my branding can always be this fun. Now, I'm not necessarily going to dress up as a witch every time, but I do. I love to dress up. I'm a Harry Potter lover, a Disney lover, I have all these fandom connections, and if that's what I want to base my brand around, I'm going to do it.
So, why does this matter? It's also very important in my opinion, that you don't want to get stagnant. You don't want to be boring and you don't want to get left behind doing the same thing you've done for three years and not making changes to keep people engaged. This isn't about keeping up necessarily with trends, or anything like that.
I mean, I'll be honest with you. I've always been the person who just did what I liked to do. My mom went to New York when we were in middle school and she brought back these beautiful beaded net plastic netted slipper clog things. They were so pretty. I wish I still had them. She brought back a pair for me and my sister and we loved them and we wore them to school.
People did not get it, but I didn't care because I thought they were so pretty, my mom bought them for me, and I loved them. There is an attraction to that when you talk about branding. When you just do things because you love it, people appreciate that. Think about if you're a reality TV watcher think about the people who you really love to watch, the ones who you choose to follow on Instagram over others.
They're the ones who do what they want to do. Another brand that I really like is Alex Cooper. She's the host of the Call Her Daddy podcast. She's gone through changes and had to pivot in her business, but she shows up so authentically as herself every episode. Sometimes she's a mess. Sometimes she asks outrageous questions, but she is true to herself always, and that's a really attractive thing to watch.
It, for me, keeps me coming back and listening to her, because she has guests that other podcasters have, but a lot of times, I choose listening to her podcasts over other ones, because she's so her weird self, and I love that. This is kind of your reminder, and like I said, I wanted you to get in my head, but this is your reminder that in 2024, it's so easy to get lost in the Instagram feed.
People are using ChatGPT and copying and pasting what it says. They're using Canva templates and not really changing them. And as a consumer from the outside looking in, it all just becomes muddled. It all just starts to look exactly the same. So, what are you doing to stand out? What are you doing to showcase your personality through your content?
I just did a post, I just created a post of my September recap, and I did it in a scrapbooking style. Literally, if you come to my house, I have real scrapbooks that I, in college, would sit home on a Sunday morning and scrapbook, and I loved it. So, it fits me to do something like that. So you know what?
There might be people who I lost this month, and didn't follow as closely, because they don't like Halloween, so they didn't get it, so they didn't like the marketing, and that's fine. I love Halloween, clearly, and the girlies that do, they'll find me and they'll appreciate it. So what is that for you?
Doesn't have to be Halloween. It could be Christmas. It could be New Year's. It could be that you're obsessed with 70s music. What is that for you? Because the truth is if you aren't loving your branding, if you don't love how you're marketing things, how your marketing looks, it's hard for you to get excited.
Your audience knows that. They can tell when you're just showing up and just putting stuff out there to put it out there. Honestly, if you're going to do that, if you're not going to have fun with it, if you're just going to put out content to put it out because you want to check a box on your list, then girl, you might as well do it.
People go get a random day job, go work at Target, go wear khakis and red shirts every single day, and that's fine. If you love your business and you're passionate about what you do, I know that it can be so hard, because you're like, “Giana, but I'm not a marketing major. I didn't go to school for this.”
This is a whole learning curve. I get that. What makes it easier is when you infuse yourself and just have fun with it.
One of the things I used to do–which I haven't done in a while–because the dishes are always done before the kids leave for school now. It used to be so different, but I used to do kitchen karaoke, where I would put on music that I loved, and while I was, literally while I was washing the dishes or emptying the dishwasher, I would do karaoke for two or three story slides.
It was fun for me, and people would DM me and say, “Oh my God, I forgot about this song.” Or, “Oh, this song makes me think of x, y, and z.” It was, and it was fun for me. I enjoyed it. So, how can you have fun in your stories? Maybe you're not going to do kitchen karaoke, that's fine, but do you love to just like shoot around a conversation, it would it be fun for you to go live with your coffee and just not chat about business, not show up with bullet points, but just invite your followers to ask you anything, or just talk about what's going on that week?
Would it be fun for you to be a you know, 22 year-old TikToker and learn a dance routine for your video? I had a client who was like, “Man, I really do miss dancing. I was on the dance team.” My girl dancing your videos, who cares? If other people think it's cheesy, that's fine, but if you love it, do it.
Maybe it's just doing a fun photoshoot, or creating some funky graphics that are just different from what other people are doing. Maybe it's blocking out one day a week on your stories talking about your favorite reality show, and instead of doing a mini training, you're just talking about the latest season of the Circle or the latest season of Love is Blind, but with your opinion, so that it gives people a more in depth understanding of who you are.
If you're showing up boring and vanilla and you're erasing your personality, because you think that's what you're supposed to be doing, your sales will reflect that. I'm here to tell you, nobody wants that. You do not need to show up and be boring. I was just thinking about this the other day, how there's people who I have chosen not to invest in as mentors, because even though they had the social proof to back it up, they had a program that I was interested in, I didn't feel connected to them.
I didn't feel like I would want to hang out with them in real life. At the end of the day, if I'm going to give you my money, I want to like you, and people find out how they like you through sharing these pieces of yourself. So that's what I have for you today. If you want to dive deeper on any of this stuff, I have two resources for you that are linked in the show notes.
I have my Charmed Content Workbook. It's only going to be available for a few more days, but it really helps you dig into the authority, authenticity, and connection pieces of your brand as you. Then, the other piece that I have is my Stranger to Standout training, which is all about establishing your authority based on what you do and who you are in the online space.
Like I said, both of those are linked in the show notes and I will be back next week in your ears again, with a very special birthday episode. So stay tuned for that and I hope you have a really great week. Bye.
