Personal Branding vs. Outreach

“Should I focus on personal branding or outreach to grow my business?”

If you follow me on Instagram you’ll know this is a question I get often.

Pay attention to this email.

Because I’ll share with you which one to choose to skyrocket your business.

There are two main forms of cold outreach:

Cold email

And

Cold DM’s (Instagram/X/LinkedIn)

Imagine if you will, that you receive an email from a stranger. 100% cold.

What do you do?

Unless you’re socially retarded, you’ll do one of two things:

1. Search the sender’s name on Google

2. Copy + paste the sender’s domain into your browser

If you search the sender on Google and nothing shows up, you’re going to be suspicious.

“This guy is trying to sell me something online, but I can’t find him anywhere.”

Red flag.

If you copy + paste the sender’s domain into your browser and the website doesn’t load,

Another immediate red flag.

Now, whenever you receive a cold DM from somebody, what’s the first thing you do?

You check their profile.

Do they have followers?

Do they have mutual followers?

Do they provide value?

Your online presence — social media profile, Google search results, website — are all aspects of your personal brand.

In other words:

Having a strong personal brand helps you do cold outreach better.

So personal branding wins right?

Before you jump to conclusions, let’s mirror your perspective.

Imagine you decide to focus 100% of your attention on your personal brand.

No outreach. The only way you can get clients is from social media.

You post on YouTube religiously.

0 subscribers, still a video every day.

No one knows you exist.

Maybe a video here and there gets picked up by the algorithm and you get a few subs.

After months, a few dozen people know you exist.

After months, you have a little bit of internet clout.

But you made precisely $0.

So:

Cold outreach doesn’t work well without personal branding to show relevance.

Personal branding doesn’t work without people knowing about your content.

You know what’s the easiest way to solve both of these problems?

Do cold outreach AND personal branding at the exact same time.

Imagine this:

You post one Reel per day.

Your reels funnel people to a lead magnet.

Anyone who downloads the lead magnet gets added to your email list.

Simultaneously, you send 100 outbound messages per day.

Your outbound messages funnel people to book a call.

Anyone who books a call from your outbound messages gets added to your email list.

Anyone who isn’t looking for your services at the moment can subscribe to your email list for value to help their business.

You also suggest that they follow you for free value.

On your email list, you promote your social media content (new videos on YouTube, your Instagram page) as well as your offer.

This creates a marketing ecosystem around your personal brand:

It doesn’t matter where someone enters your marketing ecosystem from (Instagram, cold DMs, cold email, YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, X)

They will find their way to every other channel.

You’re omnipresent.

And you can add fuel to the fire by posting more (which helps outreach campaigns perform better)

And every outreach you do leads to a % of people entering your marketing ecosystem.

You can make followers.

You can make fans.

And here’s why building a marketing ecosystem like I described is so important:

Only ~3% of any market are active buyers.

Meaning they’re ready to buy right now.

3%.

Without a marketing ecosystem, 97% of your efforts are wasted.

Turned into heat.

That’s horribly inefficient.

So capture people who aren’t ready to buy now.

Eventually a fraction of the people in the 97% will transition to the 3% of active buyers.

And if they see you on Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, and X, you’ll be the first person who comes to their mind.

And remember —

This person might have entered your ecosystem from a cold DM.

This person might have encountered your personal brand from a cold DM

Not necessarily organic content.

Let’s recap:

1. Doing cold outreach without a personal brand leads to worse results due to a lack of trust.

2. Relying solely on your personal brand is ineffective because results take time and cannot be predicted.

3. Only 3% of any given market are active buyers. By creating a marketing ecosystem around your personal brand, you can be in touch with the 97% when they’re ready to buy.

Go out there and crush it.
-Eric