Episode Transcript
Ashley Segura: All right. So when you are not branding for businesses and you find yourself in the kitchen, what is your go to dish to cook?
Katie Trant: I gotta say like my, I’m a carb lover. So probably something with pasta, a really simple I have a recipe for halloumi carbonara. I love making. So it replaces the. Whatever the ham, guanciale or whatever the ham is that’s supposed to be in a classic carbonara replaces it with halloumi.
So you’ve got that like salty fattiness with the egg yolk and the pecorino cheese and it’s just like glorious, carb perfection. Love it.
Ashley Segura: Sounds so good. That literally sounds like the best dish ever and probably my favorite. Yeah. I highly recommend. Can you kick us off by telling us a little bit about your journey from food blogger to branding expert and now the founder of Foodie Brand Lab?
Katie Trant: Yeah. Honestly, those stories are all really intertwined. My background in the blogging world, I started writing a food blog in 2010 that back then was called The Muffin Myth. It was pre hay nutrition lady. And I was in the middle of doing my first degree in nutrition at the time.
And then. We relocated to Sweden because my husband got recruited for a job here and we thought, okay we’ll give it a couple of years and see what happens and then it became apparent that we were gonna stay and I was like, what do I do? Do I try and get a job working in nutrition in Swedish?
Or do I rebrand myself as an English expert and try to get a job as a writer? This didn’t come out of completely nowhere, I did actually study creative writing before I studied nutrition. So I just have a collection of degrees of varying usefulness. So I knew some people that worked in the agency world, and I actually used my food blog as a portfolio.
When I applied to work at an agency as a copywriter, and that was how I started in that journey. And I got my job at a branding agency, first and foremost, where I worked, they brought me on board as a copywriter. And it turned out that my background in science was actually really useful because I knew how to interpret data, so I could go toe to toe with the strategists, I could work on these like really nerdy tech and B2B companies and had like a different angle to writing and content creation than some of the copywriters who came in who were classically trained in like advertising copy and so on.
And so I spent five years working at the first agency that I worked at in Stockholm, and then I took two years working as a freelancer, which was a really interesting period of time where I got to work on the client side a bit and worked for a bunch of different types of businesses.
And then I realized that I needed more stability in my life. So I went back and got a full time job at another agency where I started as a senior copywriter. And very quickly became promoted to head of the creative team. And then I have a role now, which is called agency director or culture and growth director, depending on which day of the week you ask me.
Driving the growth of the agency and the people within it. And. All through this journey, I’ve also been growing my food blog. Those, as I’ve learned more and more about content creation and building brands and brand strategy, that’s also influenced how I have worked on and grown my blog.
I’ve been doing the two things for almost the same amount of time. I started my food blog in 2010 and I started in the agency world in 2012. Both were a long stretch of time. And then now it’s become like a very full circle moment starting from, using my Food blog as a portfolio when I applied to my first agency job to now this shift in the Food blogging world in the last year where you keep hearing, every conference you go to a lot of the podcast episodes I’ve heard everyone’s saying You’ve got to build a brand.
The time to build a brand is now. And me, having worked in branding agencies for the last 12 years, working on building brand platforms and building brands for these huge global companies, I was like with my ear out okay, everybody’s saying you have to build a brand, but nobody’s saying what that means or what a brand really is or how this works.
And I’m in a mastermind group with a group of wonderful women who are all professional food bloggers of varying levels. And so about nine months ago, we were brainstorming topics for upcoming mastermind sessions. And I said I don’t know if anyone’s interested in, Hearing about brand, but this is what I work with in my full time job.
So I could certainly put together a presentation and I did this, 20 minute long, really high level presentation going over the basics of, what a brand is, what a brand isn’t. These are the components of a brand platform. Here’s how you do a brand mapping exercise, things like that. And when you’re presenting on zoom and you have those like tiny squares on the bottom with people’s faces in them, and I couldn’t tell whether.
Anyone was paying attention or whether they were enjoying what I was saying, or if they had just checked out and we’re working in the background and I finished and everyone was like, Oh my God, why are you not doing this? Like, why are you not doing this for food bloggers? This is exactly what we need.
And I said, Oh my God, why am I not doing this? And, put my head down and found a wonderful VA who specializes in helping people launch courses and. Within six months, Foodie Brand Lab was born. So now we have a, it’s a course and a consultancy, but created specifically for food bloggers by food bloggers as well.
Ashley Segura: That’s amazing. So you’ve gone through, I love that your journey started from. Creating content and being like a kind of like a face of a brand and communicating for that brand, whether it’s for ad copy or for blog copy, whatever that looked like, while also doing it for yourself, for your own brand.
So you really got to play around with things and see what stuck while also developing what I would think is like your own brand style and voice at the same time.
Katie Trant: Yeah, definitely. And I did rebrand, as I said, when I first launched my food blog, I was partway through my first nutrition degree. I did two, I did a bachelor’s and a master’s in nutrition.
And it was called the muffin myth, which was short for deconstructing the muffin myth. And it was this hyper intellectual Take on what, how people are confused about nutrition and I wanted it to be about that, but nobody knew what it was. They were all like, I love your baking blog and so I felt really strongly, and I cringed when people asked me what my blog was called.
I was like, oh, the muffin with and I decided that I wanted to rebranded and I was really encouraged not to. Not to do that. A lot of people were like, you’re going to lose all of your brand equity and Google won’t know who you are anymore. And so on. But I, at that point, I’ve been blogging for a long time, but I’ve only been blogging well for five years.
So the, it was the wild West from, 2010 to 2018, my site was not monetized. I was just like throwing spaghetti at the wall. So I knew that I had nothing to lose and I wanted to have a, Business and a brand that I was proud of so at that point I made the decision to rebrand to Hey Nutrition Lady Which people get like I don’t have to explain what the blog is about.
They know who I am They know that I’m the face of the brand. I am the nutrition lady behind Hey Nutrition Lady and so that was a really interesting path to go down and I think that years and Under my belt at branding agencies at that point had really helped me develop that clarity in no, because I had been through rebranding of huge companies, where they were like, we’re going to take a new name, a new look, a new position.
And, I had been through those processes. So I felt really strongly about doing that for my own brand. And it was the best decision I ever made. My traffic went way up, it had the opposite effect of what everyone said it would. I was in a position where I had nothing to lose at that point.
It shot up and my brand recognition went way up my brand identity and my tone of voice and everything crystallized around one really cohesive idea rather than just like something cute. I had thought of in the early days of blogging
Ashley Segura: that makes sense. And I love that. You went against the odds and evaluated.
From a perspective of what’s the worst thing that could happen. Let’s give it a try and actually did it. So say we’re trying to identify and do this experiment for people who are listening and they’re like, okay, I either have a brand or I want to launch a new brand. What are the basic elements of branding and how did you go through that process of you did a brand switch, but how did you identify what the first steps were going to be?
Katie Trant: That’s a good question. I think that the most important thing, like the critical thing that people need to get their head around is understanding what a brand is and what a brand isn’t. Because when I hear people talk about their brand, they’re typically talking about one aspect of their brand.
And a brand is actually an ecosystem. It’s comprised of dozens, if not hundreds of brand carriers or brand touch points. And so you’ve got, your visual identity. So that’s, your logo, your colors, your photography style, you’ve got your brand personality. That’s how you act, how you sound, how you write.
You’ve got your purpose and your position and all of these elements that kind of come together to form your brand platform. And I think that knowing. Who you are and where you want to go. So where you’ve come from, who you are and where you’re going are three really important elements that need to be.
in place before you can do branding work and branding work is the act of shaping people’s perceptions, right? Because your brand actually, it’s not up to you what your brand is. That’s the bad news. The good news is you can do work that shapes people’s perceptions, but the brand Lives in the hearts and minds of the consumer.
So it’s up to them, not up to us. And all of the work that we do on brand and on branding is in the name of shaping those perceptions.
Ashley Segura: So then how can you use content to shape that perception? Especially if, say you launch with a, either a new brand or a rebrand and It’s not landing the way that you expected it to.
People don’t maybe appreciate one of your three primary colors. And so how can you use content to shift that messaging and really land with the perception that you want to have?
Katie Trant: I think that in content driven businesses, such as food blogs, that the kind of harsh truth is that not a lot of people actually care how they look, your colors, your identity.
I think beautiful photos are really important, especially on Pinterest and, social media platforms that will drive traffic to your site and build brand awareness. But I think your content is like the meat and potatoes or it is like the backbone of any food blog.
And. So you’re, if your content isn’t resonating with people, you need to ask yourself, why are you reaching the wrong people, are you speaking to people who aren’t actually your true audience? Are you writing content or creating content that isn’t true to your brand? So is it? Not aligned with your brand personality, with your purpose, with the position you’re trying to claim in the market.
Is your tone of voice correct for the audience you’re trying to reach? And is your tone of voice true to who you are? And I think that with food blogs it’s been a really interesting journey creating Foodie Brand Lab. Because for all the years I’ve worked in the food industry, In branding, I’ve worked with like big fortune 500, I wrote the brand platform for a very well known Swedish automobile brand.
For example, I’m not going to name names, the biggest Swedish automobile brand and So that, creating the brand platform for a company like that’s, like over a hundred years old and they’ve got dozens, if not hundreds of different stakeholders. And you’ve got to have all these ducks in a row and you have to have this very thorough corporate scaffolding in place that like supports the brand and branding activities.
And then you look at a food blogger who is very often a single person who is It’s a founder driven brand, it’s not a corporate machine. It’s like Susie in the kitchen in Denver or, wherever, who is starting a business and creating content. And so a lot of the times that content, it comes from the heart, which means that the brand personality and Susie’s personality become very integrated in some ways.
This isn’t always true for every food blog, but I think that What’s interesting about content in these types of businesses is that it can be so personal and it can resonate, so profoundly with the audience in a way that a big global corporation is never going to be able to achieve.
Ashley Segura: Yeah, that makes sense. And it’s almost. Frustrating and a little bit hard to comprehend because as you do need to make pivots then for these smaller brands, that means it’s going to take so much more time. It may not even work. So how do you measure if something like that is working?
Katie Trant: Yeah, that’s a good question. And I happen to be putting together a unit on measuring success right now. So I’ve been thinking about this quite a lot, and I think that, you can measure success on a bunch of different metrics and, some of it is going to be traffic to your site and some of it is going to be, you’re going to have your sort of qualitative and quantitative measures of success.
So it’s like the quantitative things like, Site traffic, if you use any social listening tools and you’re, counting mentions of your site or your brand or your content shares, things like that. But then on a qualitative level, it’s is your content resonating with people, are your users like hitting reply when you send out an email?
Because what you wrote, really touched them. Are you getting comments on your site? Are people reaching out to you and saying, Hey, I made this recipe, I read your post, this really mattered to me and that kind of thing. But I think that it’s challenging because a lot of those metrics are innately woven together, braided together with other metrics that we measure.
I think bloggers have gotten really good at keyword research over the last five years and they’re using a lot of really good. Keyword research tools and optimization tools and so on. But what, and that is of course, super important because you need to do your keyword research and you need your content to be.
Optimized so that the robots can find it and put it in front of the readers. Like we always have to serve our robot overlords. But I think that what has happened is, I use key search. So I was always going for, Did I find a keyword that had a green light? Cause they have this like traffic light measuring.
There’s also these mythical blue lights, which are like really low competition scores. And I’ve only come across those a handful of times, but it was so exciting when I did, but are those keywords, the right keywords for your brand? Are those keywords, the right keywords for the position that you’re trying to claim in your brand purpose, or are they just easy keywords?
And I think that. We’re seeing a shift away from purely, keyword research and super optimized posts towards much more personal content where brand, building a powerful brand and a strong brand that resonates with people has become much more, at least talked about than it was in the previous five years.
And I think that. We have to do a combination of creating content that Serves our readers, whether or not you can find a green light for that keyword, if you can find a recipe that you really love, or, a keyword for an article that you feel like, okay, this is a terrible keyword, according to keyword research tools, but it’s such a great post that I know my audience will love.
If you know your brand and you know your audience. I think there’s, it’s really powerful to still create that content, so But it is challenging because all of those metrics are closely woven together.
Ashley Segura: Yeah, and it really comes down to what the goal of a piece of content is.
So if it is brand awareness or if it is trying to resonate with your users and do even a follow up piece to something that did really well, then that’s Content’s goal, and that’s it. It doesn’t need to be ranking on page one, or does it need to be generating conversions or new email subscribers?
It has its own specific goal. And I think that’s where we get really confused with creating content for brand is that we also still want it to do all the other things that we need every single piece of content to achieve. And that’s how successful content works. There needs to be individual goals.
And if you’re creating to emphasize who your brand is, especially with EAT and building authority on who your brand really is, like that’s huge right now. So it’s important to put resources to creating content that supports your niche or supports your brand’s authority versus Always generating new traffic or always generating new email subscribers.
Things like that.
Katie Trant: Yeah, and I feel like I think you’re the expert when it comes to this. So I would love to hear your thoughts on it. If you come across a keyword or you have an idea for a post, but you do your keyword research and you’re like, okay, I’ll give you an example because I am working on a recipe for buffalo butter bean salad.
And I’ll tell you the search volume for that is zero, but it is an incredible recipe. I love it so much. I’m obsessed with it. I’m going to put it on my blog because I just, I’m hoping that the Pinterest gods and the newsletter and all those things, and it really aligns with my brand and the type of content that I, serve my audience.
And I feel like if you’re lucky, in some cases, even if you have a keyword that’s zero today, It could catch fire, right? You could be sitting on something that becomes the next TikTok trend or, that keyword just because it’s zero today doesn’t mean it’s zero forever.
Ashley Segura: Oh, a hundred percent.
Look at Instant Pot recipes, for example. There were Different versions of those recipes, but now there’s literal websites built around just instant pot recipes that grew from social engagement, social sharing, people getting excited about it, seeing the great photos, like you mentioned that content creators.
So it isn’t always about chasing keyword search volume. Definitely not. I love that, that you’re posing this question with the brand subject because if it makes sense for, Hey, nutrition lady, then that’s enough, that’s sufficient to put resources behind and create it.
Katie Trant: And what do you think if cause I know that you and your team work with people on content strategy and content creation.
So what do you recommend as a mix of like optimized keywords that are going to help you build authority that are good keywords, versus just like content that comes from your heart and is going to build your brand, but may have a search volume of zero. What’s the balance there?
Ashley Segura: Yeah, that’s a fantastic question. And I think it really comes down to what your goal is. If you make money from traffic and this is your full time job, you don’t have any other income, this is your source of income, then I would put to like a 70, 80% of resources towards more traffic driven content and topic ideas and whatnot, and the other just more supporting or experimenting or doing it for social and seeing what sticks
but if this isn’t your primary source of income or traffic isn’t the biggest thing, maybe. You have a product, like a course and your goal is to get people to sign up for this course, then authority building content is going to be way more important and having maybe 60 percent of the content that you create that thought leadership.
I have a right to be talking about this and here’s a course that you should take. Like if you think about the user journey on, on things like this, it’s okay if they land on your website for whatever reason from social or Google, whatever the reason is, why should they care about any other content that you have to promote, let alone the action that you want them to take?
And so that’s when the percentages can. Change up or down, depending upon the answers to those questions, right? But yeah there’s a lot of variables. And I think right now, everyone, especially with AI is back to the, okay, we need to mass create content because it’s quote unquote, easy to do it.
And so whether you’re using AI, there’s this mass creation process. We’re forgetting about that traditional brand guidelines of having and a proper outline for your content. So how do you create brand guidelines? And is this something that you do for every new piece of content? Or is it just I know my brand voice now.
So I’m just doing an optimized outline. What does that look like?
Katie Trant: Yeah. So creating brand guidelines is something that I do for, big companies, you do a brand strategy project or a rebranding or a brand building project, and then one of the main deliverables is you hand over brand guidelines, and most often times that’s, depends on the size of the company, but it can either be like a PDF that they get.
Deliver it, and then it gets distributed around the company or some of the really big companies. They have a brand portal. So everything lives in one place and you can go in. There’s different kinds of software that is useful for this. And those brand guidelines are then used for anybody who is working with that brand.
So they would hand them over to, if we were the branding agency and then they were going to go to a PR agency or a content marketing agency or something like that. Those brand guidelines, go on the journey so that the next person working with the brand. Is doing it correctly in terms of, putting all the pieces of the puzzle together.
And usually what we would include in brand guidelines content wise is the brand personality brand values, probably tone of voice. So how you speak, and then there would be examples of how the tone of voice is applied in different channels, because it might be applied one way. on a white paper or a blog post or an information article.
And then you may have a slightly adapted tone of voice depending on the channel. If you’re in social media, if you’re in Tik TOK you might use different keywords or say different things, use a slightly different tone depending on the channel. And the brand guidelines are like your content.
Creating litmus tests. So you can go back every time you’ve written a piece of content and say, does this align with the brand? Is the tone of voice correct? Is this applied correctly? Typically there’s examples of do’s and don’ts and things like that in there. And when I teach brand strategy to food bloggers.
When someone goes through the Foodie Brand Lab course, the key takeaway at the end of the course, or the key deliverable is in fact brand guidelines. I even have one of the first wave of students who went through, she actually, Filled in the brand guidelines, we have a template that we provide and then she printed them out and had it spiral bound and she’s got it in her kitchen so every time she’s working on a piece of content, even though she’s a team of one, so it’s not like she’s handing it over to a content writer or a photographer or anyone, but she’s this is my Bible for working with my brand and it’s here beside me when I work.
And I think that’s so cool.
Ashley Segura: That’s really cool. Is it normal or even, is it okay to have that different tone of voice? You mentioned how, like on TikTok, you may sound a little bit different than you do say on a blog post. Where’s the fine line in that? Because I can already hear people being like don’t you have to sound the same everywhere?
Isn’t that the whole point of brand?
Katie Trant: Yeah. So I think you should have a consistent voice. What I mean by, you may have a channel strategy where You share different types of content in every channel or you may like, when I think about the classic channels for food bloggers. So you’ve got your blog, you’ve got your post, it’s probably written in a certain way.
Maybe you’ve got a video maybe, or maybe not. Yourself is in the video so they can see you and get to know your personality. I know that the type of content that I would choose to share on Instagram, especially in Instagram stories, which disappear is much more casual and much more personable.
Then what I would write on my blog, which it’s not there forever because you can of course go in and edit it, but that’s a piece of content that is published and it is fixed and it’s out there in my Instagram stories. I want people to get to know the more human side of me so that it’s more relatable.
So I still use the same tone of voice, but I think the range of topics becomes more. And that might be the shift that I’ve made in that channel. And it’s going to be, Pinterest where you only have a few words, so you’re going to have to choose them really carefully. And what are you trying to convey with those words?
Is it the same? Brand tone of voice. Yes. Might it come across as a little bit different? Probably because you’ve only got if anyone’s even reading the captions You’ve got like a little bit of copy on the Pinterest graphic, but you have such little space to communicate a message So you have to be, you know much more choosy.
You’re not really trying to Share your personality there the same way that you are in, Tik Tok. I don’t use Tik Tok or Instagram, Facebook, and you might have a Facebook group where you’re sharing, having conversations about different topics. So again, you’re still always true to your brand, but the conversation I think can be a bit fluid and change depending on the channel.
Ashley Segura: That makes a lot of sense. And I think the example that you gave where if you go on Instagram versus something on your website, that is an opportunity to see that behind the curtains, who the brand really is, those are the behind the scenes that this makes me think of like very old traditional marketing, where we would tell corporate companies give a tour of your office.
Let us see what it’s like. Working there. That’s the difference of you still sound the same and look the same, but there’s just a little bit more. Personable aspect to it.
Katie Trant: Yeah. And I think that behind the curtain is a really good term to use here because I think you have an opportunity to show like, Hey, you might see my blog post with like perfect photos and it’s really well written And then you come to my Instagram story and I’m showing you the mess that I made to make that happen.
And I’m showing you the fact that I’ve got a toddler having a tantrum beside this stack of pancakes or whatever. My son had a tantrum. I made the wrong kind of pancakes the other day. And it was like, I don’t know, I don’t know. There was hell to pay for that. I know. And funnily enough, I live in Sweden.
We’re Canadian. My children, like they identify as Canadian, although they’ve never lived there. And I made what we call Canadian pancakes one weekend, which is just like a traditional American fluffy pancake. And they were like, we wanted Swedish pancakes. And this time I made Swedish pancakes.
And that was. The wrong choice that time they want it. You never know. You never know. Wow.
Ashley Segura: How dare you? That’s even worse than trying a monster. Clearly. As we wrap up, I would love to know what your current secret sauce is. What’s maybe a book that you’re loving right now, a new strategy that you’re trying, a tip that you’d love to share.
Katie Trant: My secret sauce right now for my blog is that I am scaling back the posts that were, I think, for a period of time, I was really over optimizing. And so with the posts that I’m updating and the new posts that I’m publishing, I’ve gotten really aggressive going in there and cutting out whole sections that I’m thinking are people really actually Looking at this content, I think we felt like we really needed to write these long posts with a lot of information packed in.
And I think what I’m trying to do is convey the same information much more succinctly so that someone who’s busy, who’s reading the post, they get the personality, they get why I’m there and then they get right to the recipe with not a lot of fluff in between. So I’ve focused on personality and cutting the fluff and I feel like.
It’s working. I don’t know. Time will tell. The analytics will
Ashley Segura: definitely show you. I think that makes sense because from a user perspective, I’ve been seeing a lot of content creators now, instead of for a recipe, for example, instead of having this like really long and depth story and diving into all the details of every single step and like very specific formatting, they’re using images to be like, here’s step one, here’s step two, and like a sentence for each and it’s so helpful as someone who’s actually going through the recipe like, okay, that was an easy step.
I’m on to the next. I could see what I need to do. And there’s a quick sentence to break it down. Make sure you use the small knife for this 1 or what? Yeah, I’m. Sometimes not even going to the recipe card. I’m able to use just that little bit of info right above. And so it is interesting to see how content, what works and doesn’t work always changes, but from brand perspective, I’m loving how some brands are like really honing in on just this simplified piece of here’s what you need to know.
Katie Trant: Yeah, for sure. And I think that’s true. It’s true in every niche, right? Nothing lasts forever. Things are always changing. And what I love about The focus on brand now is that it gives people the possibility to try new things and be a bit more agile, try new things that may work in the name of building their brand, but that still serve their audience and, help them make great content.
So yeah, it’s a super interesting time in the old blogosphere. I’m really excited to see where things will go. I know a lot of people feel really doom and gloom, but I don’t. I’m like, yeah let’s see. Yeah, what’s coming? I don’t know. Yeah, exactly.
Ashley Segura: With that, we’ll wrap up and thank you so much for being on the show.
Yeah. Thank you for having me.
