GARY VEE: THE ART OF PERSONAL BRANDING

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Gary Vaynerchuk.

An early investor in Coinbase, Venmo, Twitter & Facebook.

Chairman & CEO: of VaynerX, VaynerMedia, & VaynerTalent.

5X New York Times Best Selling Author.

Creator of VEEFRIENDS - NFT project with a floor price of $41k.

Founder of Resy and Empathy Wines.

If you don’t know Gary Vaynerchuk (Vee), just look at his achievements - you should.

Overview

Estimated Net Worth: $200 million. (Source)

Social Presence: 30+ million across all platforms.

Gary Vaynerchuk - popularly referred to as Gary Vee - is a Belarusian-American entrepreneur, author, speaker, and internet personality.

As you can see from the intro, Gary Vee is the definition of a jack of all trades - he truly does it all.

However, no title suits him the better than that of “Entrepreneur”. Vaynerchuk gained entrepreneurial experience as a child, starting with simple ventures like a lemonade stand and selling baseball cards. Those businesses gave way to his work with the family wine business, which he later grew in sales from $3 million to $60 million in his first five years out of college.

This was merely the start for Vaynerchuk. His career really began taking off when he combined his endless business knowledge with the world of social media.

Breaking Down The Strategy

Although Vaynerchuk has done more than just prove himself in the business world, it’s not what he is best known for.

Vaynerchuk is actually best known for his presence on social media - which was accidental at first.

His rise to fame all began with a 20-minute daily YouTube show. Gary launched it in early 2006, roughly a year after YouTube was founded. The show was called Wine Library TV. It gave Vaynerchuk a wide platform to share wine reviews and indirectly promote WineLibrary.com - wine e-commerce that he created.

Fast forward to today and Vaynerchuk is one of the most prominent business people on social media and has become a master of producing highly engaging and inspirational bite-sized content.

As one of the very first people who have realized the potential of online marketing and succeeded in possessing a strong online presence using social media, Gary has built his own Personal Brand all the way from scratch, which now amounts to as much as multimillion dollar’s value.

So, how did Vaynerchuk create a multi-million dollar brand around himself and leverage it so effectively?

Vee was very much ahead of the crowd when it comes to personal branding. This does not take anything away from how great he is at it.

How did he do it?

Luckily for us, Vaynerchuck is more than happy to explain to his audience exactly how he does what he does - in fact, that’s the basis of his content. In a recent interview with INC. Vaynerchuk broke down 3 key components of how he did it.

1. Focus on himself - You may be surprised to hear that Vaynerchuk doesn’t read other people's books or watch other branding experts' YouTube videos. He only focuses on his content and his audience. He regularly reviews user comments and analyzes important distribution metrics. He puts his time, focus and attention solely on himself and doesn’t waste it watching others peoples’ games. Instead, he plays his own.

2. Create more content - Gary Vee is well known for going back to his roots in his content and proving to his audience that he is still a killer at flipping things from garage sales and other activities which anyone could do. He does this to emphasize that he started at 0. People don’t begin with huge audiences and neither did Gary. You can only reach more people and distribute better content by practising. The only way to practice is to create more content.

3. Be authentic - If you’ve ever seen Vaynerchuk’s social media, you will see that he is the epitome of his authentic self. He uses raw passion and a blunt message to motivate and inspire his audience. In Gary’s own words, “This game is predicated on truth, you can’t just fake who you are".

It all seems well and good to say just “Be yourself” and you’ll grow a multi-million dollar personal brand. We all know that’s not the truth.

The 3 aspects above are vital when successfully moulding a personal brand. Gary isn’t stupid and he is one of the best to ever do it, so it’s probably best to take them on board. However, there are 2 other aspects that I feel Vaynerchuk left out: add value and stay consistent. Vaynerchuk is the king of these.

• Add value - In a world where social media is cluttered with ads and honestly, just a bunch of useless s**t, it is vital that your posts are adding something to your audience. Think about each follower the same as you would a relationship in the real world. You both have to add something to each other in order for it to come about and also thrive. They are giving you an increased audience size and better analytics, so what are you giving them? Like I said previously, Vaynerchuk, is the king of adding value. His social feeds are like a university course on their own. Every post is concise, to the point and leaves the reader coming away from it with something.

• Stay consistent - If you do something special once, people will say it’s an anomaly or a fluke. When you continue to do it on a frequent basis over a prolonged period of time, no one can question it. This is vital when building your personal brand because it represents you. You can’t show up for 3 months of the year and then disappear for the other 9. Your content must be consistent and consistently add value throughout. Again, Gary does this better than anyone else. His net worth is around $200 million, yet he still posts snippets of value on his socials on a DAILY basis.

Why does he do it? 

Well just take a look at these stats…

• 82% of customers trust a company when their senior management members are active on social media. (Source)

• Customers are willing to pay 13x more for those they consider to be elite experts. (Source)

• Global executives believe up to 45% of company market value is attributable to CEO reputation. (Source)

When you see the success Gary Vee has had pre and post-fame you can clearly see why he did it. As the saying goes, “You often can’t connect the dots going forwards, but you can always connect them going backwards.” Pre-fame Gary was simply a successful businessman within the wine industry. Post-fame Gary is worth $200 million and has founded various successful companies. Without his personal brand, many of these opportunities would never have come his way.

The Lesson

Personal branding works!

You’ve seen Gary Vee build a 9 figure empire with it. You’re even starting to see some of the biggest CEO’s in the world implement it - Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey.

Not to mention the current president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele who has heavily focused and grown his personal brand over the last 6-12 months. Just take a look at his Twitter, where he has amassed a whopping 3.1 million followers.

Personal branding is not just the future, it is the present.

How To Implement This

Personal branding experts Kurogo actually did a whole piece on personal branding recently.

Here are the key parts I took from it.

Personal branding is made up of 3 stages:

1. Positioning

2. Marketing (content)

3. Amplification

Positioning 

There are 3 key things you need to do in this phase: 

• Analyse your and your competitors’ existing presence.

• Define how you want to position yourself based on that research.

• Make that positioning clear to your audience. 

Marketing

When we say marketing, we’re largely referring to sharing content on social media. You’ve probably already asked yourself questions like:‘How often do I need to post?’ 

‘What should I talk about?’ 

‘How do I come up with ideas?’ 

‘How do I write a good post?’ 

‘What if I don’t have time?’ We’re about to answer all of those. Firstly, the most important thing: Focus on QUALITY first, then scale the quantity of content you’re putting out. 

1 or 2 high-quality posts per week beats 5 terrible ones, hands down. Always prioritise the quality of quantity. Of course, if you can then scale the number of quality posts you’re creating and share 5 per week, that’s even better. 

Amplification

Amplification is about magnifying the reputation you’ve built through your content by featuring in front of larger, pre-built, targeted audiences. 

It’s the best way to get in front of the right audience at scale without using paid advertising. 

It involves featuring in media outlets and publications that have already built a large - and relevant - audience.

Podcasts, blogs, news sites, etc. 

To read Kurogo’s whole article on personal branding CLICK HERE

This has been a breakdown of Gary Vee’s personal branding strategy. I hope you have learned something and are able to implement a similar strategy into your business.

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I’ll see you next Sunday!