Actionable Steps to Shape a Successful Brand with Katie Trant

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using AI.

Bjork Ostrom: So here’s a funny thing on the Food Blogger Pro podcast, I don’t often talk about Food Blogger Pro membership. It’s a huge part of what we do and the reality is the majority of our time as a team is spent thinking about and working with the Food Blogger Pro members. So we wanted to take some time to remind people that if you want to take the next step, like go beyond just this podcast, you can join Food Blogger Pro. If you’re interested, all you need to do is go to foodbloggerpro.com. We’re going to tell you more about what a membership entails, and if you’re interested in signing up, you can just hit the Join Now button. What does that mean? Well, we have a community forum where there’s the food blogger pro industry experts, many names from which you probably recognize from this podcast.

We also have deals and discounts on some of the most popular and important tools for food creators and food bloggers. We have courses that dive deep on photography and video and social media applications. We do live q and as with industry experts. Like recently, we had a conversation with an SEO expert named Eddie from RIV where he talked about republishing and how to be strategic with your approach to republishing and why that’s important. We do these coaching calls where I jump on with a creator and we talk about how we can look at their business and grow their business. And the cool thing is for those of you who listen to this podcast, we actually have a members-only podcast called FBP On the Go where we take some of these video lessons that we’re doing, like these coaching calls or these Live Q&As with experts and we roll those up into a podcast. So if you don’t have time to sit down and watch those, you can actually just listen to them like you do this podcast, but it’s a members-only podcast. So if you’re interested, again, you can go to food blogger pro.com and check it out. It’s a great next step for anybody who’s been listening to the podcast for a long time and wants to dive deeper into growing and building and scaling their business.

Emily Walker: Hey, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team and you are listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. This week on the podcast, Bjork is interviewing Katie Trant from Foodie Brand Lab and the Food Blog, Hey Nutrition Lady. Katie has a master’s in nutrition and started her own food site Hey Nutrition Lady, way back in 2010. She also works full-time at brand and business consultancies, helping big companies define their brand. So it seems only natural that she decided to start Foodie Brand Lab to help food bloggers like you refine their brand strategy. In this interview, Bjork and Katie discuss everything you need to know about brand, what it is, why it matters, how to define brand, how it can influence your business strategy, and why brand is so important in this day and age. Katie also provides actionable steps that you can use to start building a stronger brand and to help you stand out in the crowded space of food blogging. Katie makes the argument that a strong brand can help withstand algorithm changes, ensures so many interesting thought exercises and ways to think about your business and your goals in a fresh way. This is a really fascinating interview that will give you a brand new perspective, pun intended, on branding and your business. We know you’ll learn a lot, and if you enjoy this episode, please take a moment to share it with your followers on email or social media. We always appreciate it. Without further ado, all at Bjork, take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Katie, welcome to the podcast.

Katie Trant: Thank you so much for having me. Bjork.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, you are tuning in late. You’re tuning in from Sweden. I don’t know if you’ve ever done a Swedish interview before, which is fun for me. If you draw the 23 and me, if I do a genetic test, it’s like that’s where my distant relatives would be. What’s the reason for you being in Sweden?

Katie Trant: So my husband got recruited for a job here back in 2010 and we thought we’d give it two years. We had a two year work visa and now we’re trapped and here you’re here we are.

Bjork Ostrom: You’ll never be able to leave.

Katie Trant: I don’t think so. I mean it’s really, especially when you have small kids, what’s provided by the government and the lifestyle here, the work-life balance, it’s just the winters are tough, but you can’t beat the lifestyle.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s what they say about Minnesota. It’s kind of similar, which are tough, but the people are great. Lifestyle is great. We’re going to be talking about all things branding today. Speaking of work, work-life balance, the work that you are doing, it sounds like for a long time has been in the world of branding and working with generally bigger companies, helping them go through the process of really tightening up their brand or going through a rebrand. Talk a little bit about what that’s looked like for you as you’ve worked in the world of the agency world, helping companies with their brands.

Katie Trant: Yeah, I want to back up a little bit before I got into the agency world, if I may, because I actually started my career path going into nutrition and I write a food blog. I’ve been writing it since 2010 called Hey Nutrition Lady. But as I mentioned, we moved to Sweden in 2010 and when we arrived here I was like, what am I going to do? Am I going to try and work as a dietitian in Swedish or navigate my way through the nutrition world in Swedish? And that just felt like an insurmountable

Bjork Ostrom: Task

Katie Trant: To do.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s complex enough if you’re doing it in your native language and then to do it when you’re trying to do it in another

Katie Trant: Culture,

Bjork Ostrom: But then also another language. Yeah,

Katie Trant: I mean organic chemistry, yes, in Swedish would’ve absolutely been of me. But prior to nutrition, I actually did a degree in creative writing back in the day, and so I decided I did a master’s degree in nutrition here in Stockholm and then I decided partway through that I wasn’t really interested in pursuing a PhD and I really needed a job and I kind of fell into the agency world. I knew a bunch of people that worked in agencies, it was pretty easy to market myself as a native English-speaking copywriter. And so I started at the first agency here in 2012 and there I worked a lot with food and nutrition brands that happened to also be working with branding. But also Electrolux is a Swedish company, so I worked on a lot of their kitchen lines and things like that. And it turned out that my background in science was a really big asset in the agency world because I had a creative role as a copywriter, but

I could go toe to toe with a strategist, I could interpret data and so on. And I just kind of fell in love with the pace of the agency world and the constantly changing clients and that. So I have for the last 12 years been in various positions from copywriter to creative director, now I’m agency director here and working with all manner of clients, big Swedish brands that have a global presence and smaller brands that are more niche in the Nordics and kind of everything in between. So it’s been a great journey and been exposed to a ton of different industries and niches as well along the way.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, and one of the exciting things is you’ve taken, it kind of feels like a Venn diagram where you have that experience with branding in the agency world, your experience with nutrition and food and then also the site that you’ve been working on

Katie Trant: And

Bjork Ostrom: You’ve kind of found the overlap of all of those and you’re now starting to work with people who have a food creator business blog or they publish content online, maybe on social platforms to help them go through the branding process to make sure it’s not always necessarily even rebranding, it’s just like establishing your brand. Is that similar to what you would do with some of these like a multinational Swedish corporation that’s going through the process? It’s just smaller company but similar

Katie Trant: Process? Definitely. I think that a lot of the work, you very rarely get a huge, working with big corporate companies, you very rarely get a huge branding or rebranding project. It’s typically refining the brand strategy, working on various components of the brand platform, sharpening up bits and pieces here and there. So a lot of it is looking at what’s already there, what needs to change, what needs to evolve, how you’re trying to expand your offering, find new markets, find a new audience, that kind of thing. So

Bjork Ostrom: There’s

Katie Trant: A lot of fine tuning.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, and it’s interesting, I have friends who do video work and they’re working with Saab, but actually there’s a subsidiary of Saab called scpa, which is they do these AI-powered boats and it’s just really incredible. But within a big company there’s companies and then and all of these different kind of considerations. So what have you, in working with companies like that and working with brands like that, what’s the realization you’ve come to around what they’re trying to do when somebody comes to you and they’re like, we need to focus on our brand, that feels almost like the what’s at the top, it’s brand, we need to figure out brand, but what’s below that? What’s actually happening or what does somebody actually want when they say, I want to have a strong brand? What does that mean?

Katie Trant: I mean, I think we need to go back even further and define what is a brand. Because I hear in food blogging in the last year, definitely the conversation has shifted dramatically to it’s time to build a brand. Everybody has to build a brand, you need a brand. And I totally agree with that statement. I think more than ever the time is now, but nobody’s talking about what that means or what a brand even is. And when I hear food bloggers particularly talk about brand, these big companies, they’ve got a brand team, they’ve got a head of brand, they’ve got all kinds of people who work under them so they understand the architecture of a brand. It’s just that part of that architecture probably needs to shift when it comes to food bloggers, I hear people talking about brand and most of the time they might be talking about one part of a brand. They might be talking about brand identity or brand personality or some aspect of this very complex ecosystem that is a brand. And I always start by telling people what a brand is not, which is kind of easier than defining what a brand actually is. And I think it’s important for people to know that a brand is not a logo, it’s not a color scheme, it’s not a name, it’s not a tagline, it’s not a visual style and it’s not even you, the business owner in most cases. And in fact a brand is, it’s about perception and it doesn’t belong to us. A brand is, it lives in the hearts and minds of the people who interact with the brand and they decide what, which is kind of scary because it’s out of your hands. But

What’s empowering about working with your brand is all of the brand building and brand strategy that you do is directed at shaping that perception. And that’s something that’s true regardless of whether you’re a Fortune 500 company or someone running your business from your kitchen in Minnesota. Those are equally true.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it feels like it’s not those you talk about, I think initially people would be like brand is the colors of your site and the font size, but it also feels like it’s not those, right, that’s included within it, but that’s not exclusively what it is. Is that what you’re looking at? Exactly.

Katie Trant: Yeah. I mean all of those are components of a brand. I mean the colors, the logo, the color scheme, the typography you choose, those are all components of your brand identity. But brand identity itself is not the brand.

Bjork Ostrom: Brand identity in that case is a sub component of broader brand. So could you break brand up into different buckets like that? So brand identity being one of them that would be like fonts, colors, what is the spacing? Lindsay’s been working with the Katie on her team to figure out how are we going to get good spacing on the print page. It’s like that’s not exclusively brand, but maybe it’s part of it. So that’s a brand identity.

Katie Trant: It’s

Bjork Ostrom: Almost like design which goes in,

Katie Trant: Yeah, that’s identity. And also, I mean the spacing on a print page is also part of brand experience because it’s how the person who’s interacting with your brand experiences it. But there’s absolutely buckets when it comes to building a brand we work with. There’s lots of different terminology depending on what agency you’re working with or who you’re working with, but call it a brand platform or a brand house or something like that. And those can be as complex or as simple as you want them to be, but it breaks it into manageable content buckets. And so brand identity is certainly one of those along with brand personality. And then you have sort of the more strategic parts of your brand, which would be your brand position, your brand purpose, your brand values, a value proposition sometimes. And then you can get into as part of the brand personality, you can get into tone of voice, how your brand sounds, how you act in different channels and so on. So those are all different modules I would say of the

Bjork Ostrom: Brand and to drive the point home further, if you worked with a designer

On redesigning, that would be some of the identity stuff, but you wouldn’t necessarily work with them on warming what your personality is with the brand, what the voice is, is it irreverent, is it serious? Is it really detail-oriented or the value proposition that is, we talk about that almost like adjacent, would you say to niche in a way where it’s like, hey, here’s special about me, here’s why it’s or the brand, here’s why you’d want to come to me versus another random site that’s posting recipes in our case. Can you talk a little bit about brand value proposition because that one is interesting.

Katie Trant: Well, I think you mentioned niche and I think that I’ve been having a lot of conversations with people about niche because you get told in the blog world you got to find a niche, you got to a niche down. And I actually think some of the most powerful brands in food blogging do not have a niche, which is a really interesting thing. But I think brand is more powerful than niche. Your niche is definitely a part of your brand and it’s a part of your brand position specifically because you’ve narrowed in on a position and your position is relevant in the market in which you act. So I do this brand mapping exercise, I’m using my hands for the people that are listening, but we have a matrix and you kind of find your quadrant of the internet. And so I write a vegetarian food blog, so I’m not competing with someone who’s writing a barbecue food blog.

So the position is amongst other vegetarian food blogs and what makes me special in that position, how can I compete and stand out amongst other players in that space? And you get kind of more and more and more granular until you find your position and then your value proposition exists. It’s one of the few parts of a brand platform that’s actually designed to be external facing. So it’s actually your messaging to your audience that you’re serving, but it’s saying, Hey, this is how I can serve you the user in my specific position or niche that I’m here to work with.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it seems like some of these things that we’re generally kind of aware of, okay, we need to make sure that from brand identity that is consistent and it looks the same and emails match with what the web experience would be and what is your voice. People talk about voice when you’re writing. I think we generally understand that and especially when it is a personal brand, and I think it’s almost, tell me if this feels off, but it almost feels easier when it’s a personal brand because it’s like who am I trying to be? And then using the medium of social platform or email or blog to express that, but it still feels helpful to solidify what specifically that is. So you are almost aware of your own tendencies. I think about it within the context of this podcast, like this podcast, everything that you do online has a brand. It is a brand, and it’s just like how intentional are you with crafting that? We could probably be more intentional with thinking about what that is with all of these different variables, but talk to me a little bit about that idea of personal brand versus kind of a traditional brand. Because we’re here in Minnesota, Target Corporate is going to have a much different opinion than Pinch of Yum, which is a personal brand as it relates to decisions around all of these different buckets and how we want to kind of project our brand within the world.

Katie Trant: Yeah, well it’s interesting that you say that Pinch of Yum is a personal brand because I used Pinch of Yum and actually Food Blogger Pro as an example when I was talking about personal versus traditional brands and brand ambassadors in the Foodie brand lab course. And at the time that I put the course content together, I actually defined Pinch of Yum as a traditional brand and Lindsay as the ambassador of that brand.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, I can see that. That’s an interesting distinction. I’ve never thought about that,

Katie Trant: But I’ve actually seen in the last several months, what I have perceived as a very intentional shift towards becoming much more personal.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s accurate.

Katie Trant: And I think that that’s, as a branding expert, I’m like, I see this, see it happening and I love it. I’m here for it. And I think it’s very relevant today with the rise of AI generated recipes and everything that’s changed about the internet, making that conscious decision to shift turn the ship a little bit more intentionally into the personal brand space, I think is really intelligent.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s really interesting to hear it’s just been these shifts and nudges that have happened that result in if you nudge one or two or three degrees for three to six months or a year then and every day you’re moving forward, then after a while it’s like you’re in a much different place than you were a year ago. And so it’s interesting to hear you reflect that back because if you were to look into the conversations for Lindsay and I over breakfast or dinner or on a walk, it’s like some of those conversations around, oh, what would it look like if I was more appearing more in videos or is it the emails or from Lindsay versus just from a generic Pinch of Yum or whatever. So all that to say very interesting. Talk a little bit about that distinction, brand ambassador, like an ambassador of a brand versus personal brand versus traditional brand. So there’s almost like three kind of at play.

Katie Trant: So this was something that when I started to put Foodie brand Lab together after more than a decade deep work with traditional brands, I had to do quite a lot of research and work to get into the distinction between what is a traditional brand and what is a personal brand and what makes it special. And I mean there’s as many opinions as there are experts, but what I have come to believe is that a traditional brand can be born from any kind of inspiration, whereas a personal brand is centered around an individual. So the brand tends to encapsulate their strengths, their personalities, what makes them unique as an individual. And these businesses are not always small scale operations. I mean Oprah Winfrey has a personal brand and she’s

Bjork Ostrom: Martha Stewart.

Katie Trant: Exactly. But I think that a lot of the times when we have businesses like food bloggers where we have solopreneurs and we have small teams and so on that they tend to be personal brands because we build them. Anyone especially who’s been food blogging for a long time, we started back in the day with like blah, blah, blah, here’s a story about my life and a recipe. And I don’t think it’s going to shift quite back to where it was, but I think the personalization of content now and developing richer and more relatable personal brands I think is having a really powerful effect in this time that we’re living now with AI and search changing and a brand ambassador. On the other hand, if you have a traditional brand like Target for example, they may work with people who are the face of the brand while they are not themselves the brand. I mean, I see you very much as the brand ambassador for Food Blogger Pro, which is much more of a traditional business and brand than Pinch of Yum is in this context.

Bjork Ostrom: Can you talk more about that? Meaning there’s the business, the business is Food Blogger Pro and then there’s the ambassador, which would be

Katie Trant: Me

Bjork Ostrom: Doing the podcast maybe showing up on social with the podcast clipped, but I’m not doing blog posts for instance or sending emails. Is that kind of what you’re getting at?

Katie Trant: Exactly. I mean you’re very much the face of the brand and I don’t think that anyone thinks about Food Blogger Pro without also thinking about Bjork. So your role is to be the face of the brand and you represent the brand at conferences and in social media and maybe in a newsletter. Although I think your newsletters are written by someone else typically. And you’ve got a team behind you and Food Blogger Pro who is doing a lot of the work on the brand and they are all representatives of the brand. You want anyone who is working with you and your team to be a good fit for your business. They need to be a good representative of your brand. But I think it’s you yourself who is the face of the brand.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s interesting. And so to draw the comparison Food Blogger Pro versus Pinch of Yum, if there’s a spectrum that Spectrum is, in our case, is it a brand with a brand ambassador versus a personal brand? We would be closer to a brand with an ambassador, we being Food Blogger Pro. Lindsay would be closer to personal brand. Obviously it’s a spectrum. You’re not just either one or the other. I think of Magnolia, Joanna Gaines as an example. It’s like is it a personal brand? No, it’s like Magnolia. What do people think of when they think of Magnolia? They think of Chip and Joanna Gaines. So they’re the ambassadors of that brand, but it’s not a personal brand being like, Hey, I’m out there creating this. It’s me. It all kind of comes back to me. Whereas it would almost be, and tell me if you feel like this is true, almost celebrity would be the ultimate example of personal brand, it’s like somebody who is, they are the product to some degree celebrity is kind of all-encompassing. Yeah,

Katie Trant: I think so. But I think there’s also celebrities who, I think of the designer, Kate Spade and her name is the brand, but she died and the brand carried on without her. So it’s very much a traditional brand in that case, even though it has her name.

And I don’t think you’re absolutely right that especially in our field, there is a spectrum of are you more of a traditional brand or are you more of a personal brand? And I don’t think there’s a right or wrong answer. It’s not better to be one or the other, but I think it’s interesting to understand. I get students who come into the course and one of the first units is what is a brand and traditional and personal brands? And I ask people to pop into our Slack workspace and say, are you a personal brand or are you a traditional brand? And I would say that 95% of the time people say I’m a personal brand. And then I’ll go and I’ll look at their website and I’ll say, actually, I don’t think that you are, and here are the reasons you’re not telling personal stories. You are showing very little of your own personality. You are very much operating this business like a traditional brand. And once people understand that it doesn’t change the way they operate their business, but it changes the way they think about it a little bit and helps them put together their brand strategy and their business strategy in a way that serves them a bit better.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s even interesting for me to think about it as we kind of did the real life comparison, a food blogger prop Pinch of Yum. So much of it is personal. Lindsay said, I’m not interested in working with a bunch of writers. I’m not interested in creating a team, scaling a team.

It’s her canvas. The medium that she’s producing as an artist is a blog. It’s social media and that’s what she wants to create on. For me, that’s not the same. I love doing the podcast, love being a part of that, but a huge part of my interest is business and what does that look like to have a business and a team And we’re lucky enough to have a great team for Food Blogger Pro and they they’ll put a blog post out and it’s not like I need to touch it or have every be involved in every corner of it. And so even just Lindsay and I who work on these businesses kind of together kind of separate, but our own preferences for how we approach them is reflected in the brand. And it’s interesting to hear you reflect those back and I think it’s helpful for people to go through that exercise to kind of understand

Katie Trant: What

Bjork Ostrom: That looks like for them as well. So taking a step back, why is it important? We’ve heard a lot about brand in the last year. I remember interviewing Paul Banister from Raptive and he was talking about this idea of who’s not worried about helpful content update like Disney.

Katie Trant: Or yeah, exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: These companies that have such a strong brand. And so you hear even in the world of search people talking about brand, brand, brand, but why is that important and why have people been talking about it more within the last year?

Katie Trant: Well, I think the last year has been really bumpy for food bloggers. We had this helpful content update last year that just devastated a ton of sites and pretty much simultaneously we have chat GBT coming along and we’ve got AI-generated recipes and other tools for people creating even fake images and so on. And so I think that the days of just working super hard on keyword research and trying to rank for optimizing your posts are kind of behind us and I don’t want to discount the value of SEO and doing that because I think they work hand in hand having a strong brand and being able to identify your niche and find those keywords and understanding semantic SEO and how to rank for them at the same time, I think there’s so much noise out there and the power of brand has to do a lot with eliminating decision fatigue. So I don’t know how many chocolate chip cookie recipes there are on the internet, a million maybe. And if I am searching for chocolate chip cookies and I see 10 recipes on page one, how do I know which one to click? And if I see a brand name that I remember and I remember having a good experience with that brand, I’m much more likely to click on that recipe. I think that this is true in so much of our life.

I live in a cold country, I use a lot of chapstick and I have to have chapstick brand chapstick, I will not buy anything else. I don’t think it works, but it’s also about decision fatigue. If I stand in the pharmacy and I look at 20 brands of chapstick, I don’t have time or the desire to try them all. So I keep going back to this one trusted brand. I think that that’s really a brand is very much about establishing trust and a powerful brand is always going to outperform the market. There’s some really interesting statistics and I think one of them that I reference a lot is with the power of brand Spotify versus Apple Music and Spotify, it’s a Swedish company, it’s global, huge now and in the US Spotify has an estimated 90 million monthly users, whereas Apple Music has about 38 million. And what’s interesting about that is there are 113 million iPhone users in the U.S., yet they’re not using the native software. And I have an iPhone, I get offers all the time from Apple, three months of free Apple music, this and that. And I have a good friend who is an engineer at Spotify and I was like, maybe I should switch. I keep getting these offers, I could bundle everything together. And he said, honestly, the catalog is the same. You’re going to get the same experience,

Bjork Ostrom: Same music.

Katie Trant: Yeah, the same music. The recommendations are maybe a little bit stronger in Spotify, but that’s not really how I listen to music. I’m like a repeat listener album. Yeah, exactly. Yet I stay loyal to Spotify and I just think that those numbers are mind-blowing when you think about the number of iPhone users there are, but that is the power of brand

Bjork Ostrom: That literally happened for us where I was like, if we’re paying, we do the Apple one where it’s like you can’t get everything news blogs, you get the music and you get extra storage. And so I messaged Lindsay, I was like, would you be okay? Just what if we just tried doing Apple Music and not doing Spotify and she’s like, I really don’t want to. I was like, let’s just try it. We did it. And she’s like, please, let’s please go back. This is so terrible. And it’s interesting because like you said, it’s the same music, but for whatever reason, I do think part of it was you have this decade of built up recommendations and

Katie Trant: The algorithm

Bjork Ostrom: Knows

Katie Trant: You.

Bjork Ostrom: So that’s I think part of the staying power of it as well is it knows us really well. But yeah, it’s something that I think we all want as creators is to be somebody people come back to a brand that they recognize. I think of Kate all when we interviewed and talked about Pinterest, she was like, it’s really important to start putting your logo on your Pinterest images because you want to have not only a click to your site, but you want to have brand impressions and brand is important. And it was interesting to hear her talk about that showing up within the world of Pinterest.

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But how do you do that? So I think people get the Spotify example, but if people want to be that as a person who’s creating food content online, obviously that’s a big question and it’s like you dive deep in your course talking about how to do it, but

Katie Trant: What

Bjork Ostrom: Are some of the things that we can start to think about now that help set us up for being a brand that people trust that they come back to, that they view as reliable and therefore are more likely to click on it in a search result or in Pinterest or just type it in when they’re looking for a recipe and go to that site to see if they have something? How do you become that type of brand?

Katie Trant: Yeah, I mean, let me be perfectly honest with you. Brand is not a quick fix. Brand is definitely playing the long game and Google does not care about your brand one bit. So having really nice branding or a really solid brand strategy, Google’s not going to go, oh, okay, you get to go on page one. That comes over time with establishing trust with your audience and having them come back to you over and over again and establishing authority in your niche. But I think that the most important parts of a brand strategy or a brand platform to me are purpose, position and personality. And so your purpose is all of us or most of us are running businesses with our food blogs. So of course you exist to generate an income and put food on your table, but fundamentally why are you doing this? What is your reason for adding to the internet?

The internet surely does not need another chocolate chip cookie recipe, but what is going to be so powerful about you and your brand that you should show up and be there because you’re going to provide something that nobody else is going to provide your purpose, your reason for being what gets you out of bed every morning, and then your position, which we touched on a bit earlier, which is really defining what differentiates you from other players in the same niche, in the same area of the internet. So of all, if you’re a barbecue blogger standing out amongst all the other barbecue bloggers, what is your unique position that you can take and then your personality and that’s how does your brand look sound act, how do you behave in different channels? And you may behave differently in Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, your newsletter, your actual content on your website, they may all be different iterations of your brand personality and your brand strategy. So you may develop a channel strategy that has different elements in there, but all of it should relate back to who you are as a brand and why you’re doing this.

Bjork Ostrom: I think of Dave Ramsey, the finance. So the advice he gives is pretty generic financial advice. You could look back 20 years, 30 years and people are going to have similar opinions on maybe not as aggressive with don’t have any debt. But what feels so clear to me is specific, well purpose, position I guess all of ’em specifically, I was going to say position, but the position of really strong position of all debt is bad.

Maybe not mortgage, but all debt is bad and you need to get rid of debt, you need to get rid of it as quickly as possible. Having a personality that’s kind of blunt and brah a little bit and having a purpose of helping people become debt free, I think of that it’s much different than if you had a blog and the blog was like investment terms and how to understand investing and what is compound interest. And it’s like you’re kind of having similar conversations, you’re helping people become financially educated. In his case, it’s wrapped with this really strong, really amplified purpose, position and personality agree with it or not, it’s there. And that’s almost feels like part of what it is is that there are going to be some people who don’t agree with it,

Whether his personality or position the purpose, probably everybody could gather around that, but there’s a really clear understanding of what that brand is and what it’s about. And in the food world, I think one of the things that could potentially be a vulnerability is you’ve stood up this company, which is really good at doing keyword research and seeing opportunities, but it’s the way that people find you. It’s like a search result. They come to your site, they look at it, they may or may not make that recipe, but the unique differentiator within it didn’t really exist other than you were good at search, which worked and still does to some degree. But the defensibility of that is it can only go so far because you’re reliant on an algorithm update and it didn’t really feel like a vulnerability until a year ago

Katie Trant: When

Bjork Ostrom: Suddenly a lot of that shifting sand in the algorithms happened. What happens if people no longer come via search? Are they still going to come to your site because the brand itself is bringing them in? And I think about that with a Dave Ramsey. It’s like if they had a search algorithm, they’ll probably lose traffic, but they’ll also probably have people continuing to come to the site. Is that a little bit of what you’re getting at with the reason why brand is important because it can persevere through algorithms or

Katie Trant: Definitely

Bjork Ostrom: Search changes?

Katie Trant: Definitely. I think that the concept of having a thousand true fans and that is really intertwined very carefully or very closely with having a strong brand. I think if you have a strong brand, even if my search function goes down or something and I know I can rely on Pinch of Yum for a great recipe for, I don’t know, quick and easy air fryer, tofu, I’m going to go there because I know I can trust it. And I do think that Dave Ramsey is a good example. He has a very strong brand, he serves a particular type of person. I think, and I follow a lot of financial influencers, it’s kind of like a rabbit hole have gone down in the last year

And I follow, so a lot of women in personal finance and the community that they’re serving and the stories that they’re telling are so different than Dave Ramsey to me, much more appealing and human and approachable forgiving. And they are doling out very similar advice. Not everything is the same. I mean Dave Ramsey says, if you have debt, the only way you should see the inside of a restaurant is if you’re working at it. And this is they’re telling a different story. So when I want to go back for financial advice, I’m going to the ones who I trust. And I think with all the algorithmic activity we’ve seen, if I had a, people are inherently lazy so they’re not printing out cookbooks of their favorite recipes and so on, and they’ll typically search the same thing over and over again. And if I search chocolate chip cookie and the recipe that I loved that was on page one is no longer there, I’m going to find it.

I actually had this experience with a recipe for apple waffles, apple cinnamon waffles that I’ve been making for years. And it used to be on page one and it disappeared and I had to comb through the way back time machine. It took me a significant amount of effort to locate this recipe because it had been so decimated by the algorithm. But I remembered it and it wasn’t a brand I was super loyal to. I was loyal to this specific recipe, but I had needed enough times that I wanted to go back to it. And I think that having a powerful brand that people remember, first of all, it’s not necessarily that they have to relate to it. I don’t like Dave Ramsey, but I still understand and relate to his content and you bring him up, I know what we’re talking about, but brand recognition and brand memorability are so important for us as food bloggers. If my recipe drops off, I have a recipe that’s been number one, the number one income generator on my website for six years and I’m terrified that it’s going to drop one day. But I just hope that if and when it does, because all good things come to an end that someone would say, oh, I remember that recipe on hay nutrition lady, I’m going to go back there and find it. So it is that memorability that we’re hoping to achieve.

Bjork Ostrom: And in a world where to use the finance example, Dave Ramsey would’ve 15 years ago, 20 years whenever he started what he was starting, just created a content business where they’re just pumping out content and figuring out how to get people there versus a brand that people understand and they gather around. It’s almost like you create a community of people with shared belief. And if you draw that out over 20 years and you’re like, what’s the bet on what business becomes more successful? My bet would be like, oh, it’s the company that has invested in clarity around these things. Like you talked about the idea of purpose or really understanding your position, your personality and making that also clear for sure. And so for us as creators, it feels like the call to action is, Hey, as you think about creating for the next five or 10 years, it’s important to understand keyword research. It’s important to understand how the algorithm works. It’s important to understand how to optimize for search and Pinterest and Instagram. But within

Katie Trant: That,

Bjork Ostrom: It almost seems like what’s more important it that you are creating a business that stands apart by considering these things that we are talking about. And the hard part is it’s what your course covers, but there’s so many different things that we could get into. It’s not like there’s these little quick actionable takeaways, but if there were, what would those things be that people could start to work on today that they could even from this interview start to fit into their process If they’re currently doing keyword research and figuring out how to get something viral on Instagram, if they also want to think about their brand and how to create a compelling brand that draws people in

Katie Trant: So

Bjork Ostrom: Over the next 10 years people can start to become search traffic changes to direct traffic. And the last piece with that is just yesterday I was looking at for Pinch of Yum kind of doing some analysis and saying, what if all of our search traffic went away? And what was reassuring when I did that is I looked at the last year, I was like, oh, we’d be fine with just direct traffic. And obviously that would tail off over time and there’d be a huge downside to not have search traffic, but to get to that point was a huge sense of relief because we know that people are just coming back now.

Katie Trant: And I think that is because Pinch of Yum is an incredibly strong brand. I mean, Lindsay posted a recipe last spring or last year in February I think, which was basically a package of instant noodles with butter and honey added to it. That’s not even, you know what it was? I went, when I was in the us I went and I bought those specific noodles so I could make the recipe. I saw it and I was like, yes, I want that. I want recipe. That’s not even a recipe. And Deb from Smitten Kitchen, she posted a recipe for butter pasta, literally butter tossed with hot pasta. And I think that Lindsay and Deb can get away with those things because they’re incredibly powerful brands and beloved brand ambassadors. And so it takes a ton of work to get to the point that you can post a recipe for butter pasta and you’re going to get return visitors. Nobody needs a recipe for butter pasta, but they do it. And I think that that’s incredible. It’s a testament to the brand.

Bjork Ostrom: Well, and I think the other piece, and this goes, it’s almost goes against that a little bit is Lindsay will say, I really don’t want to put something into the internet that doesn’t need to be on the internet.

Bjork Ostrom: So you’ll look at when we’re recording this at the time of the recording, it’s like October 15th, she posted something, last time was the eighth, last time was the first. So she’s posting once a week and the process that she’ll go through is like, Hey, is this something that I feel like for the next week for the two weeks that I can, or the next 10 years that I can come back to and promote as this is the feature of right now. And so I think if you were to do all quick and easy, it might’ve been part of the SOS series, I don’t know if it was, but that specific recipe like, Hey, if you’re limited on time, here’s some things that you can do. But part of it is antithetical to this idea of how do you figure out a search keyword that’s going to rank and then produce a lot of content at scale. And instead it’s like, I’m going to publish when I feel like something should be published so people know that I’m not just publishing this to try and get a keyword. I’m just publishing this because I think it’s going to be something that’s helpful for people.

And the other piece with it is to start to view content and recipes as similar like we talked about within the context of Starbucks. And it’s like pumpkin spice latte. They’re not coming up with a new drink every year.

Bjork Ostrom: They’re saying, Hey, this is our catalog. We might shift and change and adjust things. But as the internet starts to become saturated with all sorts of content, especially as content becomes AI-generated, how do you become the source for people to come back and say like, Hey, pumpkin Spice Latte Starbucks, great. What is the equivalent for us as food creators to look at that and say, every year we are creating a piece of content that we can maybe refresh a little bit, but it’s kind of part of a catalog that we can shine a light on. That’s one of the changing rhythms of content now as well, which is you become a catalog and you have your greatest hits and you reference those greatest hits every year as opposed to being a content warehouse where you are just pumping out a manufacturing line of content. Do you feel like that ties into the conversation of brand and even Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte as an example?

Katie Trant: Yeah, I think it definitely does. I mean, I think that inherently people trust people more than they trust big corporations. So when you have someone like Lindsay making a recipe that’s so easy, but it’s so good and that’s relatable. It’s like, I’ve got kids, I’m tired, I don’t have a lot of time to cook dinner and I just want to eat something that tastes good. And it’s that established trust, the Starbucks pumpkin Spice latte, it’s like every year they come out, they taste reliably the same. It’s going to come, you understand the experience you’re going to have and that’s that repeatability. And food blogs may not serve up repeatable experiences in that the recipes are constantly changing, but the experience of interacting with the brand is what should be repeatable and understanding that I’m going to spend my time and my money making this recipe.

I want to know that it’s going to work and I want to know that it’s going to work for me because I think they say there’s someone out there for every weirdo in the world, but there’s also a food blog out there for every person. I’m not going to love recipes from every site. So I need to know as a user that this is a site and this is a brand that’s going to work for me specifically as well. And I think that the way search is changing. I’ve seen some snippets of Google the way they’re changing and pulling up recipes specifically based on not just the top 10, but serving up based on, you can search based on the ingredients that you have at home and based on the type of event that you’re serving and so on. And I think it’s really going to change.

Search is going to continue to change in the next few years. And if we as food bloggers are going to stand still and just do the same keyword research in the same optimization that we’ve always done, you’re going to get left behind. I think those things are shifting as well, and as they should. And as I said before, they’re as very much as important as brand, but it is the powerful brands. Like you said, Disney isn’t concerned. Not many of us are as big as Disney, but I think if the fact that you see that you have enough return traffic that you could lose all your search and still be okay, that’s a testament to the power of the brand.

Bjork Ostrom: And it’s also an unfair advantage of producing content for 14 years

Katie Trant: Certainly. But I’ve been producing content for just as long and I’m nowhere near in the same position. So I think it is a testament to the brand.

Bjork Ostrom: So to me it feels like there is no downside. It’s not like a opinion, do I want to build a brand or not everybody’s building a brand. It’s just a matter of clarifying the elements that are within your brand. And it sounds like that’s a lot of what your course does. So can you talk a little bit about Foodie Brand Lab, the premise of it? You can talk about where people can sign up because my guess is some folks will hear about it and be interested

Katie Trant: In

Bjork Ostrom: Checking

Katie Trant: It out. So Foodie Brand Lab was actually born from, I’m part of a mastermind group of bloggers that meets, we meet once a month and we have been doing so for almost two years, and we have different topics we go over. And last year I said, I don’t know if anyone is interested in hearing about brand, but this is what I work with in my day jobs, so I’d be happy to talk about it. And when you’re presenting on Zoom and you’ve got those tiny squares, you can’t really tell whether people are actually, I didn’t know if they were working in the background or doing something else or totally tuned out. And I did this 20 minutes super high level presentation. What is a brand? What is a brand, not these are the elements of a brand platform. Here’s how you do a brand mapping exercise. And I finished and they were like, oh my God, why are you not doing this? Why are you not doing this for food bloggers? And I

Don’t think I slept for a week. I was like, why am I not doing this and put my head down and built Foodie Brand Lab? And I built it because this conversation of the time to build a brand is now keeps happening, but I’m not seeing a lot of conversation about what that means. And so I thought that there was a gap in the market that needed to be filled. And I think that brand support, after many years of working with a brand agency, you work on these big projects with these big global corporations and they are so long and so slow and so expensive. You sit in a room with 15 different stakeholders arguing about the wording of a brand purpose statement or something like that. And it’s frustratingly slow at times. And I thought if there’s a need to serve food bloggers with brand and to make brand strategy and brand support accessible, because I talked to Dwayne from Cultivate, and I’m not going to name any names, but he told me about a big, big food blogger who they had built a custom site for. And he said that that business behind that blogger had spent six figures working with a brand strategy agency before they came to them to do the redesign, which is absolutely the correct order. You should do it, you need

Get the brand house in order and then you do the redesign. And I don’t think that brand strategy or brand support needs to cost six figures for the average food blogger. So I took everything that I know from more than a decade of working in branding agencies and more than a decade of writing a food blog and going through all the algorithm updates and doing the keyword research, it’s sort of bringing these worlds together. And I packaged it into a digital course for food bloggers called Foodie Brand Lab, and that’s our entry-level. It’s a self-paced digital course, and they get access to a Slack workspace to ask questions and monthly office hours. And then we have some premium levels of services. Well for people who either don’t have the time or the bandwidth to go through the course on their own, if they have a bigger site with a bigger team and they just want someone to do it for them, then we also have offerings to do that as well.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome. And what it feels like it does is build a really incredible foundation that then you can build off of. And my guess is some of it is new information that you’re having to make decisions on and think about, but my assumption is probably a lot of it is just pulling the information out that’s already there and defining it and saying, here’s what it is. It’s helping you clarify some of the things you already know but have never clarified.

Katie Trant: Yes. And I’ll give you a really good example of that. My friend Jess, she writes a wonderful food blog called Inquiring Chef, and she’s in my mastermind group. So she was a beta tester for the chorus as well. And she is been working really hard on expanding both her brand and her business strategy. So she’s got the site Inquiring Chef, and then she started teaching cooking camps for kids called Inquiring Chef Academy. She’s got a cookbook coming out. And she was like, I just don’t understand how to work with my brand across all these different touchpoints. And I said to her, and I think this also circles back to the question you asked earlier that we never answered about that one thing that people can do.

So the one thing that we did in her case was answer the question, who is the inquiring chef? And I said, is the inquiring chef you Jess Smith? Or is your purpose serving a community of inquiring chefs? Is your user the inquiring chef? Because if it’s the latter, that opens up your brand world and your business strategy. You have inquiring Chef Academy, you can create a line of spices or baking mixes or whatever for inquiring chefs. She was like, oh my God, that’s it. That’s the one thing. So figuring out that she herself was not the inquiring chef changed everything.

Bjork Ostrom: Oh, interesting. Yeah. And then it becomes like you have content for kids who are inquiring chefs.

Katie Trant: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, I love that. So we’ll link to it in the show notes, but people can also find it by going to foodie brand lab.com. I know that you do courses a group that will go through at the same time. Is that right? Or can people sign up at any time?

Katie Trant: So we had the first cohort go through or sign up, and then we close the cart to make sure that that group could get through in a good way. But we’re actually going to open the cart in the next couple of weeks and then leave it open because part of our brand position as Foodie brand lab is making branding accessible to food bloggers, to all levels of food bloggers. And so it actually didn’t sit right with me to have it closed and inaccessible at times. So that’s a change we decided to make. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. And then is there a specific URL that listeners should use or just go to the homepage?

Katie Trant: What you guys, they can just go to foodie brand lab.com, but we will put in a discount code for podcast listeners so they could just put in the discount code food blogger pro and that’ll knock $50 off of the course.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome. Cool. Katie, really fun to talk to you about this. I think it’s super important conversation to be happening always, but especially now as the landscape shifts and people approach content creation differently where they’re thinking not just about how can I rank for this keyword, but how can I be a company or a brand that people think about and come to. So super helpful, excited for people who are able to go through the course and love to have another conversation here in the future. Thanks for coming

Katie Trant: Down. Yes, definitely. Thank you so much for having me.

Emily Walker: Hey there. This is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team and thank you so much for listening to that episode. We really appreciate it. If you liked this episode or enjoy the show, we would really appreciate you leaving a review or rating wherever you listen to your podcast. Episodes, ratings and reviews, help get the show in front of new listeners and help us grow our little show into something even bigger. Reread each and every review and it makes us so happy to hear when you’re enjoying the podcast or what you would like us to improve or change in upcoming episodes. All you have to do is find the Food Blogger Pope Podcast, wherever you listen to podcasts, whether it’s on Apple or Spotify or another player, and enter a rating and review. While you’re there, make sure to subscribe to the podcast so that you never miss a new episode. We really appreciate it so much and it makes such a huge difference for our show. So thanks in advance and that’s all we have for you today. So have a great week.