Sidra: Hello everyone. My name is Sidra, and I’ll be your host for the first session for the last day of Prepathon 2025. Over the last two days, we learned how to crush BFCM sales season and how to make sure that our brand stands out. However, for this session, we’re going to be joined by Kelly Schuknecht, she’s the Chief Elevation Officer at Two Mile High Marketing, and she’s going to be walking us through how to build a personal brand that improves trust, credibility, and makes sure that our unique voices stand out in today’s digital space. So without further wait, let’s have Kelly with us on stage, hey, Kelly.

Kelly Schuknecht: Hello, how are you?

Sidra: I am good.

Kelly Schuknecht: Do we have my slides up? There we go. Well, I’m so excited to start out the day with you all, talking about the business of you and building a personal brand that converts in e-commerce.

I want to start out by sharing a little bit of the inspiration behind the name of my company. I live in Colorado, and you may or may not know of Denver as the Mile High City, I actually live at two miles high in an area called Leadville, Colorado, and that was the inspiration behind my logo and the name of my business.

I want to start by talking about why personal branding is essential for e-commerce businesses, so I’ve got a couple stats to share with you. 82% of people are more likely to trust a company when its senior executives are active on social media, and 77% of consumers are more likely to buy when the CEO of the business uses social media.

That personal presence is what people see, they learn about that CEO, that founder, that business owner, and they trust people when they see them being active on social media, so a couple of powerful stats I wanted to share to start us out. Now we’re going to talk about why personal branding is essential, I’m going to cover the three pillars of personal branding and how to build your personal brand, so we’ll get into some of the specifics of things that you can do.

First of all, I’m going to play a bit of a game here, I don’t know if I can see the chat, if you all can put into the chat, I’m going to show you a couple of brands, some logos, and I want to see who the first person is that you think of. So when I show you these, type into the chat the first person you think of associated with that logo or brand. Here’s the first one.

Got some Apple, so we know Apple is the brand, so some people put in the brand and then we also had, the answer there, Steve Jobs. I’m going to give you another one, I’m really curious if anyone knows this one, this is my favorite non-alcoholic beverage, actually the green one is my favorite, curious if anyone knows this brand. Not getting anyone in the chat, not familiar.

Okay, I’ll give you this one, this is a personal one for me that I love, Katy Perry, so Katy Perry is the name behind the De Soi brand and it’s a non-alcoholic beverage, and if you’re into non-alcoholic drinks, check it out. Next one, anyone have any idea here, any person that comes to mind? Okay, that one was pretty quick, you guys got that one, so Dr. Dre, Beats.

And then another one here, anyone familiar with Fabletics? No idea, all right, I’m stumping you on some of these, so Fabletics, when it first started out, Kate Hudson was the face behind the brand, I don’t know if she started it, but I know that was the person they were featuring. Last one, Berkshire Hathaway, anyone, even if you have no clue, put that in there because that’s okay. Nope, okay, so Warren Buffett.

So maybe we got about half of these, but there are a lot of times with a brand where we see a person, or we associate a person with that brand. There may be others you all have in mind, and if you think of others, put them in the chat, brands that you know and like and use and the person that you associate with that brand. All of that to say that the people behind the brand are really important, and not just the people but the stories that create that deeper connection with brand loyalty.

So I’m going to give you some more examples of some stories and personal brands that turned into successful e-commerce businesses. Anyone know Vanessa Lau? You can just put in the chat if you’re familiar with her or her products. Not getting any answers there, okay, well, I’m going to share this video, I’ll just play a little clip of it, but this is Vanessa telling the story of her business.

Vanessa Lau (video clip): This is step by step how we launched our milk tea company. Ever since my burnout in 2022, my body became sensitive to coffee, I didn’t realize how much my daily coffee was affecting my anxiety and how much my bubble tea was secretly making me fat. So in 2023, we bought the domain superboba.com and the process began, we bought raw ingredients on Amazon and got to work in our kitchen.

After drinking our own product for weeks, we decided that this could be a real business, so the first step was finding a manufacturer, we contacted over 50 and finally found one willing to work with our startup. Over the next six months, we got sample after sample that we tested with friends and family, we got to work on packaging design and even let our followers vote on the direction, and then we booked a trip to Taiwan to source authentic tea directly from farmers.

After a year of development, we finally went into production, our first purchase order cost most of our business investment, but we now had enough inventory for launch. It also helped that we had over 450 pre-orders thanks to building in public on Instagram before we even had our final product. We created clean superfood milk teas that you can customize at home, no expensive, time-sucking coffee or boba run to acquire.

We launched with our first three flavors, roasted oolong, classic milk tea, and matcha, and within months we’ve already had hundreds of repeat customers who love making cafe-quality milk tea in under two minutes. And just this month, we hit our first 1,000th order, we built the milk tea that we couldn’t find anywhere else, and we can’t wait to see where the rest of this journey will take us.

Kelly Schuknecht: So I think you can see there the story that Vanessa shares is so captivating, right, you hear this story and how she developed this brand, and Denise says, “That’s awesome,” yeah, such a great story. So I want to tell you a little bit more about Vanessa, in 2018 she quit a corporate job, she was working at L’Oreal, and like many entrepreneurs she didn’t have a safety net, she was working as a part-time barista just to make ends meet while starting a YouTube channel.

But then her personal brand strategy made all the difference, Vanessa didn’t try to be everyone to everyone, she got crystal clear on who she was speaking to, in this case aspiring content creators and entrepreneurs who wanted to build businesses using social media. And she showed up authentically, as you can see from that clip, she shared her real journey, the mistakes, the learning curves, the behind the scenes of building a business from scratch, she wasn’t pretending to be a guru who had it all figured out, she was documenting her journey as she lived it.

And the results were, in her first year she gained 100,000 subscribers, made half a million dollars selling digital products, and by year four her business had grown to $8 million in revenue with over 600,000 followers. So Vanessa’s story really sucks people in, right, you want to learn more about her and then also her product, and how she turned that personal brand into that e-commerce business.

I see some questions coming in the chat, and I do want to mention we will have some time for Q&A after, so we will get to those questions, if you have more, keep putting them in there and we’ll come back to that. So another example here, Luke Hemsley, anyone familiar with this one? I wasn’t familiar with that before we did some research for this presentation, but this is another non-alcoholic beverage, so Luke Hemsley created Wednesday’s Domaine and he has a non-alcoholic wine that he went to market with, I’m going to share his story here if it will work for me.

Luke Hemsley (video clip): So how is it made, can you talk me through the process? The first is starting with the base wine, the second thing is getting access to the latest dealcoholization technology, I think you have to be as gentle as possible in how you treat the wines because you don’t want to impact the flavor, the structure, the texture too much. To achieve maximum flavor, Luke uses the vacuum distillation process, we remove the alcohol and then we blend in some elements afterwards to reintroduce body, flavor, aromas, textures, all the things that you associate with a wine.

Kelly Schuknecht: All right, so you can see there a slightly different spin on the story, but Luke’s sharing a story behind the product and doing content like that to get people’s attention. So now I want to shift a little bit into applying this to yourself and your story in your e-commerce brand, it’s important to have those stories to share to capture people’s attention.

So I want you to take a couple of minutes here and think about, I like to call it your authority X factor, what makes you different? There likely are competitors selling a product similar to what you have, so what makes your story special? In those two that we just watched, Vanessa has a boba product and Luke has a non-alcoholic wine product, neither of those are 100% unique, there are other products out there, so why should people buy those particular products? It comes down to that story, that authority X factor and what those personal brands are sharing with the world.

So I want you to think about what your authority X factor is and just jot it down, take a minute to think about what makes you and your product unique. For me, just to give you an example of how I phrase this, my authority X factor is helping people take the expertise they already have but haven’t figured out how to share with the world and turn it into a visibility platform that drives customer trust and sales.

I blend strategy with storytelling so my clients can show up like the experts they are without feeling like they’re selling themselves. I like having just a couple of sentences that wrap up what makes me different, and I think that really helps when you’re creating content and marketing yourself and your product, remembering what that unique X factor is that you bring. And before I move on to the three pillars, if you’re really clear on your unique authority X factor, I’d love it if you would share it in the chat, tell us what your product is and what makes you the unique expert in that, so feel free to share so other people can get to know a little bit about you.

So I want to cover the three pillars of personal branding, for anyone looking to build their personal brand and sell a product or service, these are the three things to be thinking about. Number one is visibility, we just talked about that story, but your story isn’t going to attract opportunities or sales if you’re not sharing it, so the most important thing is getting your story out there.

Some of the ways that might look for somebody in e-commerce would be your digital presence, so social media, TikTok, Instagram, I think Instagram was the one we saw in the last two clips. But it might look like blog posts, what type of content can you put out there to attract your target audience, speaking engagements, getting visible in front of your target audience.

Traditional marketing, I don’t know if anyone’s heard of the Times Square feature, you can get a video on Times Square for actually a very small amount of money, it’s like a 30-second clip that shows every hour or so. I love this idea because if you’re featuring more visibility you can do this for a pretty small investment, but time it where, if you’re going to be in New York, you sit there for an hour and capture this on the screen behind you, it’s a really great PR opportunity for a pretty low cost.

And then features, so getting media relationships, getting featured in magazines, on websites, looking for ways to collaborate with other media that would help you reach your target audience. So those are some examples of ways you can get visible in front of your target audience, but I want to mention that it’s really important not to just do one and done.

So you do a video, or that Times Square example, you have this feature on Times Square, and then you don’t make the most of it by going out, taking a video of yourself seeing it, taking a picture of yourself in front of it, there’s just so many ways you can repurpose content. So it’s really important to make the most of the content that you create.

I just have an example of what that might look like, if you were to do a podcast or a video clip for TikTok or YouTube, these are a number of ways you can repurpose that one piece of content. You might be able to turn it into a lead magnet, create a blog post about the feature that you had, turn it into a full presentation to do a speaking event going more in depth on that topic, turn it into a book if you have multiple pieces of content you’ve captured, doing webinars, using it in your newsletter.

And then below that, I have all of these different social media posts you can create from things like that, a carousel post, an infographic, a static post, long text, short clip, all of these are ways you can take one piece of content and turn it into a dozen. So whenever you’re doing content, maybe starting with a YouTube video, make sure you’re thinking about ways you can repurpose that as much as possible to reach people where they are, your email subscribers may not watch your YouTube, but if you share it with them they may be more likely to go watch it.

This is a specific example from one of my clients, and if you were here yesterday you might have seen Matt and Miki’s talk, they did a talk for Prepathon as well, they have a YouTube channel, Boozy Browsing. They talk about some website design topics and they’ll make a drink, a cocktail, a mocktail, and talk about it, and they can take that maybe 20-minute video and turn it into clips that we can share on Instagram or LinkedIn.

They might talk about something that we could turn into a blog post, a longer-form content piece, and even featured articles, Miki is a Forbes agency council member, so we can turn some of her other content into articles where we can repurpose them there. So just to give you some specific examples of ways you can multi-purpose any piece of content.

Pillar number two is credibility, so it’s not just about getting visible in front of your target audience, but also the way you show up, the way you appear to people online. Every video, social media post, or PR opportunity is a receipt for your expertise, you want to show up in a way that positions you where people see you as the expert in your niche.

I used to work in publishing, I ran a publishing company for a few years, and one of the things we would tell authors all the time was never listen to this statement, don’t judge a book by its cover, because everyone judges a book by its cover. Most people are going to see a book cover and make a decision about whether or not they want to read it. Perfect example here is a book on habit building, “how to build good habits to transform your life,” this is a book where the cover does not sell it very well, on the other hand, Atomic Habits, very similar topic, way better cover.

So I like to think of this as, you are the cover of your own book, and how are you presenting yourself to the world, how are you selling yourself, do people see you as credible and as the expert, are you positioning yourself in that way? It’s really important to do that so that people trust you and see that you’re the credible person. Somebody said great book, Atomic Habits, I agree, one of my favorites, I don’t know, maybe “habit building, how to build,” is also a fantastic book, but I haven’t read it.

So again, the cover sells the story, you are the cover of your own book, make sure the way you’re showing up is the way people will see you as the credible expert that you are. One more example to drive this point home, are you more likely to buy from the brand on the left or the brand on the right? The brand on the right is a jumbled mess on the screen where the one on the left looks more dialed, left for sure, I agree.

Another way to build credibility is social proof, so getting reviews for your product, and sometimes this happens naturally, but sometimes you may need to think about going out and reaching out to people, asking them to post reviews. It depends on what your product is, but if you’ve given out samples, or you have content online and people that are engaging and using your product, reach out to them, ask them to post a review, remind people that’s what you need from them because they may not think to do it unless you specifically ask.

Another, some content ideas for building authority, ways you can build that credibility. One is user-generated content, so I mentioned asking people proactively for reviews, you can also ask people to post content, if you have those loyal buyers or followers who are engaging and using your product, ask them to post a video or blog or share it with their audience, again it may happen naturally, but this often requires you to proactively ask for it. You could also offer to give people samples of your product in exchange for a review or a video.

Thought pieces, so I have one here, an example of a long-form post I did on LinkedIn, I’ve found my long posts perform well on LinkedIn for some reason, people like to read these long posts. But if you have something you can share, this type of post would work well on Facebook or Instagram along with an image, maybe teaching something, sharing something you’ve learned, teaching something about your product specifically.

Social proof, so Dawn is in my author community, I have a community for women writing non-fiction books, Dawn took a course I offer on how to write a book in 12 weeks, and she was constantly telling me how great the course was and how happy she was with her book. So I was like, great, can you put together a testimonial for me, why not, she loved what she had put together through our product, in this case a course, so she sent me a picture and a testimonial and then we’re able to share that with the world, it helps people see how we’re able to help other people like them.

And then behind the scenes, this is a Super Boba example, showing how the product is made, or drinks you can make with it, or other ways you can teach people. So these are some of the ways you can build that credibility through your social content.

Pillar number three is consistency. I had a client, this is one of my favorite quotes of all time about marketing, who used to always say, 80% of marketing is simply reminding people that you exist, and I think there is no truer statement about marketing than that, it is about consistently showing up. So you can do a video one time, maybe it goes viral, great, but if you let that just die and move on, and six months later you haven’t posted anything, people aren’t going to remember.

So it’s about showing up in a way that is consistent, where people remember your product, remember you, remember your story. You might start to feel like a broken record, sometimes you feel like you’re saying the same things over and over again, but consistently showing up is reaching your target audience where they are at the time where it makes the most sense for them.

I showed you that Warby Parker example earlier, I love glasses, and sometimes I’ll just be randomly thinking about glasses I want to buy and looking on my phone, but I’m not in a place to buy in that moment. But if that brand, and a lot of them do this, they’ll do retargeting ads where I’ll see the ad two days later when I’m scrolling some other social media, it’s a reminder about their product, and then I go, oh yeah, I want to buy that, so it’s consistently showing up in a way that people remember you.

So consistency, you’ve got to start with creating systems and not just with being inspired. If you’re a content creator, you probably know it’s so much easier to create content when you’re in the mode of inspiration, you’re excited, you want to share it. It’s those moments where you’re like, I can’t think of something to post today, or I feel like a broken record, that happens to all of us, but when you put systems in place to help you think about content at different times and show up consistently, those systems really help.

Some of the systems you could create, building a content calendar, I know I’m more likely to show up and post content if I have it on my calendar to do this 15 minutes three times a week, or whatever that schedule looks like. And not just reminding myself to post something, but also having some ideas in there, some frameworks I can pull from, a place where I can dump ideas when I’m feeling inspired, but then pull from those ideas when I actually go to create that content.

Batching content creation, so if you create space to have a time and place to be creative, to brainstorm, to film several things at one time, creating that structure for yourself so you can do more with your time when it makes the most sense for you, instead of trying to squeeze it in between meetings. And then developing a template library, having a content bank, and then automating, can you batch your content where once a week you’re creating content and then schedule it out so you’re not having to worry about it other times.

So all of that to say, it’s important to focus on sustainable frequency over perfection, don’t try to be perfect, you’re going to make yourself unhappy if you’re striving for perfection all the time, but really the goal is to strive for that consistency in your showing up. I have some recommendations around how often to show up, and these are going to be different based on where your target audience is.

A lot of my clients are finding their clients on LinkedIn, so for my clients specifically I tell them to post to LinkedIn two to three times a week. For you, if your customers are potentially on TikTok or Instagram, I would recommend more often than two to three times a week, but whatever you commit to, the most important thing is committing to something that you feel you can commit to.

So don’t tell yourself I’m going to post five times a day, every day, seven days a week, if realistically you’re going to make it two days and then quit, start with once a day or every other day or whatever you can realistically commit to. If you have a newsletter, send one out at least once a month, weekly if you can. Guest on podcasts, two to three times a month, I make that a goal for my clients, the goal is to create content for yourself and to reach the podcast hosts’ target audience.

Publish a blog post at least once a month, if you’re the type of person who can go out and speak and that’s good for your product or service, go out and speak at least quarterly, and find four meaningful collaborations each year. Those collaborations, I mentioned my client Miki who is a Forbes contributor, that’s a great example, looking for ways you can post content on somebody else’s blog, or have a guest post on your blog, or an influencer you could reach out to on TikTok or Instagram to post something about your product. That one doesn’t come as easily, you have to be thinking ahead and being proactive to find those collaborations, but shooting for four potential opportunities in the year that you might be able to get more exposure that way.

So I want to end with some time for Q&A, I also want to share this QR code for the personal brand scorecard. This is something that, if you’re wanting to build your personal brand, takes you three minutes, it’s a quick quiz, you answer some questions, but in the process it’s going to make you think a little bit about what you are doing and what you are not doing, that’s the more important thing that you might be able to work on.

So the scorecard will tell you where you fall when it comes to your personal brand and give you some ideas of things you can work on if you want to develop it further, so I recommend taking that if that’s something you’re wanting to do. And then I’ve got my LinkedIn there if you want to connect with me, and I also wanted to spend a little bit of time on questions if anyone has any about personal branding or the pillars I mentioned.

Sidra: Well, thank you so much, Kelly, for that wonderful session, and I know we’ve got a lot of questions here, so let’s jump right into it. Oh, there are quite a few actually, let’s pin this one on screen, it says, how do you strike the right balance between authenticity and editorial discipline to ensure the brand feels human while also still effectively driving sales?

Kelly Schuknecht: Yeah, I think that’s a great question, it might have come in before I covered the three pillars, because the pillars I think give you that balance. It’s showing up consistently, but then also, I guess we didn’t talk about authenticity so much as credibility, but I think that’s a good point that it’s important to show up authentically. When it comes to your personal brand, you have to be you and fully you, because people feel that.

But when we talked about the consistency and the systems for creating that consistency within your schedule, I think that will help with being able to show up authentically. If you’re forcing yourself to put out content every day, but you’re not making time for the time to think and brainstorm and plan things out, then you’re going to just be forcing out content and not really showing up in a way that’s going to make you look the best possible. So I think it’s about creating those systems and making sure that you are in a place to create content when your brain is in that mindset.

I saw the comment that the LinkedIn QR code is not working, I don’t know if other people are having that problem, so I’m going to just put in the chat what my LinkedIn URL is so that you have that just in case.

Sidra: Awesome, and then I think let’s move on to another one, this is a repeat question, I think two people asked something similar, so I’m just going to pin this question here. So basically what they’re asking is, how do big brands, even brands like Cloudways, what is the best way to take a personal branding approach, should it be done by the executives, or should employees start building their own personal brands through their own domains on LinkedIn?

Kelly Schuknecht: Yes, so great question. The reason personal branding is just so important to me is that I was an employee for 20 years, I worked for other people for 20 years, and I always had some sort of personal brand thing I was doing on the side. I loved social media, so I was always playing around on different platforms and learning what worked well, not necessarily for my job, but for myself.

And because of that, I ended up, I say I accidentally developed a personal brand, but that accidental personal brand led to the next stages of my career. So I think it’s really important, I think it’s important for anyone who is the face of a brand, a CEO, to have a personal brand and develop their thought leadership platform, but I also think it’s important for anyone at any stage in their career.

If you’re just out of college, doesn’t matter, you should always be thinking about how you’re showing up online and developing your own personal brand that people are getting to know you by, you never know what sort of opportunities that will open for you in the future, so I think it’s important at any stage of your career to be doing that.

Sidra: Absolutely, and I think I’ll just add one more question here. How do you make sure that we’re also not sounding too salesy or too pushy while bringing our own personal brand?

Kelly Schuknecht: I think the biggest key to that is showing up in a way where you are sharing knowledge with people. So a big part of the personal brand I created on TikTok was, I had a background in publishing, so I started developing content teaching people how to market their books on TikTok, I wasn’t trying to sell them on anything, I was showing up in a way that was helpful, but then that turned into opportunities down the road.

So you genuinely are showing up in a way that you’re trying to be helpful and educational and teach people something. I always say this to authors, do not show up saying buy my book, buy my book, buy my book, nobody cares, tell them about the story behind the book, tell them about the things they’re going to learn in the book. Approach it from the viewer’s perspective, what will they get out of this, not what will I get out of this, and in the end you will get something out of it, it’s just a different approach to how you show up.

Sidra: Absolutely spot on with that. And then I think let’s just do one more question here, it’s by Sal, and he’s asking how he can make sure that his content stands out, especially in the face of paid influencers and startups that have really good funding available for them.

Kelly Schuknecht: Yeah, so I want to go back to that authority X factor, that is, I think, the most important thing to focus on if you want to stand out, and I say that from my own experience. When I started my business, I was showing up in a way where, who was I, I had been an employee for 20 years, I was brand new to having a business, but I was showing up and telling my story, and a lot of my story comes from being, I call it, the person behind the person.

So in my career, I was helping somebody else establish their thought leadership platform, and when I started sharing my story online, it resonated with people, I didn’t realize how much people would really engage with my story. But when I started sharing it, it was authentically me sharing my real story, and people were really interested in it. So I really tapped into my own authority X factor, what made me unique and how I was able to help people, and when I started sharing that, it was working, people were really interested.

So I encourage you to go back to that authority X factor, really think about what makes you different, because that’s what’s going to make you stand out, and then focus your content on that. Tell those stories, share your experiences, it’s going to resonate with other people in ways that will surprise you, but sharing that story is what will really make you stand out.

Sidra: Awesome, I think those would be all the questions that we can take on at this point, but obviously, Kelly, you can stick around the chat and answer people there. And thank you so much once again for being here, one last question from me, how was your experience being here on the Prepathon stage, what are your thoughts about it?

Kelly Schuknecht: Yeah, it’s great, you guys are super organized and I love this format, I think it’s great, wish I could see people face to face, but I’m hoping they connect with me online and I can see them that way.

Sidra: For sure, yeah, I feel that. And thanks again, Kelly, for being here, we honestly really appreciate it.

Kelly Schuknecht: Thank you, of course.

Sidra: All right, so that was it from Kelly, but don’t go anywhere, because we’ve got our next session lined up right away, it’s about the value of older customers and keeping them around, and then right after that we have a very fun activity planned for the day, so don’t go anywhere, we’ll be right back.