In this video, we are gonna talk about a secret weapon for brand social media, archetypes. Archetypes are about deciding the role that a brand plays in a consumer's world and how they come across on social media and becomes basically a template for the kind of content you create to get a strategy that works. In a previous video, I talked about how to start brand social media from scratch if you have nothing. But for this archetypes workshop, we're gonna ask the question about what do you do if you've already started on social, you have something going but just doesn't do good enough. As someone who has worked through this now with hundreds and hundreds of brands in cut 30 and then brands from startups to fortune five hundreds in the work and workshops I do, I've built methods for this. I'm gonna teach them all here. We're gonna walk through how to do this exercise. We're gonna walk through five archetypes that apply to the majority of brands. I have examples in here for software,
fashion, interiors,
resale, food and beverage,
and services. You have a wide swath. No matter what kind of business you have, there's no excuse not to tap in. So after we go through the exercise itself, we're gonna walk through each of those archetypes,
what brand they're good for, the question to ask yourself, the type of content they make, and examples of brands that are doing the strategy. No fluff, all tactics. And as you can tell, I love to talk about this. And I'm happy to workshop live in the next community call we have, which I will link down below for any projects you have. Let's lock in. So first off, if you haven't done one of these with me before or haven't been to a tour date, this is a good time to let you know that I love exercises.
I love a series of questions, filling out a document, and making a plan. And a few reasons this is useful. If you are a freelancer,
going into a conversation with a client and then actually having something you can run, a process,
not only makes you look more professional, but also helps establish buy in with the client on what you're gonna do. It's the same thing in the conundrum of if you work on social media at a brand. For a lot of people, you're often a younger employee and you're usually faced with the challenge of how do you convince leadership to act on these ideas. So archetypes is a concept that goes back into marketing overall. In overall brand strategy, brands often look at what is the archetype our brand has. And there's a number of strategies
around actually putting together the brand persona and the brand voice. So we're gonna distill that concept that a lot of CMOs and executives are familiar down to social media. So how this exercise would work if you wanna run it for your brand, a brand you work at, or for a client is you would run through the archetypes below. I have five here. There's definitely more. You can make up your own. You can cut it down to just the two or three that are relevant. But, basically, you start by going through the options. And then a key step here, and what I wanna call out right at the beginning, is a lot of brands have an idea for some amazing thing they wanna do on social. But rarely does anyone actually ever do the big idea. Why not? It's because they're constrained. They only have so many resources. They only have so many teams. Even though they have this vision, they don't have the reality. And so the second step in this process is to actually map out what resources you have to execute the content or what resources do you think you can get. Because this is really important as we dive into these. You'll find with the Oracle archetype, I'll talk about first, that's about having an expert in your organization or on staff. So if your org has that, it becomes really a no brainer to center your content around it. But if it doesn't, you may have to look at picking another archetype. And so in that process, go through who can be on camera for the brand, who can design for the brand, whether that's internal graphic designers, whether that's an agency you already have, whether you have a budget to retain someone, and then where do you get Hence, what can you actually showcase? What's going on at the company that you can make content about? So once you cross reference those, you pick an archetype, and then you go through the different content ideas you have there, you start to build out a brainstorm list. So when you end the exercise, you've picked an archetype, you've listed the resources you have or don't have or what the company is willing to do or pay for or try to find, and you actually have a list of ideas people are excited about based on the archetype. So you have a content road map that people are already bullish on. And you can bring that to a system like content pillars that I talk about in other videos to actually run an ongoing social process. And if you have this skill set, if you can do this, if you can get by and help execute this, this is one of the rarest skill sets. Right? A lot of people work in social media. Not a lot of people make social media actually bang. And I love nothing more than watching this process work. Every time someone cracks out on a cut 30, we'll walk through a few of those in the examples here. It just gets me stoked. So without further ado, let's tap into some archetypes. So first is the Oracle. This is best for brands who can teach people about the brand space, the world they inhabit with deep expertise.
So it relies on a core expert or a team of several experts who can storytell. And so if you ask the question, what does our customer need to understand or want to understand about the world that we inhabit that nobody else is explaining properly. And so then they do historical explainer content. So for instance, if you sold chess sets like I have in front of me, you are able to break down the history of chess in general and major competitions or outliers or certain moves being adopted or the design of chess sets. You have this whole history around that. You wanna expand that world? You can go into all the tabletop gaming. You can go to chess' connection to strategy and war, to the psychology of competition. You have a world of history to talk about as a content pillar. Then category comparisons.
Use that expertise to talk about things that are better or not. An excellent example of this is a dentist we had in Cutthirty who would talk about if certain products were actually worth the money or if new processes or ideas were actually valuable for customers with different teeth problems. And the formula is is x or y better for z. So if your expertise is helping explain that, whether that's what type of dermatological treatment, does this shade of makeup look better with this skin type, that comparison for a certain end person is excellent tactical content. And then third is why things are the way they are. We have all these assumptions in life. Why we do our taxes a certain way to why suits are formal wear to why cameras have aperture.
People are way more interested than you'd think in the little things that are consistently surprising about life in all ways. And this is one of the ones I love to lean into because I don't think anything is too boring. There's a brand I work with that does industrial parts manufacturing and you may think at the outset that that sounds kinda dull, but then you look at there's a story behind every screw, every bolt, every welding piece, the machines, three axis CNC,
supply chain, why these things are made in that country versus the other. You'll be surprised how deep people nerd out about them. And the best part is maybe there's not a 100,000 people a video to watch it, but say there's 2,000. They're nerding out about welded parts. You're probably adjacent to an industry that's gonna be procuring them. And the last content type for the oracle is predictions for the future, thus the name that we have. So based on all this expertise, what do you think is gonna happen next? So historical explainers, category comparisons,
why things are the way they are, and predictions for the future. Let's walk through some examples. So one of my absolute favorites and probably the easy to point to is Ken Sakata. You heard me talk about his video before because I bought products because of this. So he will go into the background behind a workwear pant. Why it was designed? What their history was? Salvage denim. We've all heard the term about salvage. He's able to talk about that accurately. And what you will see him do is he will set up some of the topics. So for instance, the background in a pilot's jacket and it will eventually lead to him releasing his own version under his brand Front Office. And it doesn't happen every time. He may talk about other tangential topics, help build the world and his expertise. But when he cares enough about a jacket and he's dove deep into it, when he then releases it a couple months later, you're like, yeah. This guy's really studied the art. And so one expert, he is the social media for the brand. They don't even have a separate content in their separate page where he talks about a whole world of things and you trust his expertise when he then actually releases product. And how that comes out is you'll see historical videos at the top of funnel with big wide reach. You'll see details about the things that he is developing and then you will see carousels of the actual releases like, uh, these fingerprint pants which you have seen me wear in content that I love and bought with my own money. It's the women's wear example, but I have the men's. And that's a basic exact example of a content funnel. Then a local one to me that I know because they are a a local business here in the Orange County area is Blam Motorworks. I love their content. They film in their garage. And look, Dave, this is a good example of if you do have someone with a professional film background who has a nice camera and knows how to set and frame these, these aren't the craziest highest production videos, but they do spend time making them look good. And they talk about the restoration and conservation of Porsche, which is what they're experts in. And it's amazing, obviously, having a business where you can show really cool looking cars to help anchor it. Not everyone has it, but if you do have it and you have a manufacturing facility or you have access to those, you've gotta be telling those stories. And so they have an expert on camera explaining the work they do, how the rear steering wheel operates on a nine eleven r. So it's just an explainer of how that works all the way to actually walk throughs of the projects they are doing. An excellent example of the Oracle in that brand, and you will see guys in the comments either arguing about the Porsche world or asking questions,
establishing the brand as expertise.
Another one of my faves is, uh, Crease Furniture, and we're gonna talk about two Creases here, k r e I s s and an actual c r e a s e that I've worked with later on. It can get a little confusing, but, uh, this brand has their standard social media, but then they also do a lot of having the founder on their feed and the founder has an own account where he is talking about underrated plans for your landscaping, trends that are in and out. They're doing stuff that's in their showroom. They're doing all the typical brand interior content with an occasional appearance by him, but then his social media is the real driver. So in this two account method, you're able to post your typical content on main that you want. You're able to use your larger expert that's building up as an influencer to help grow that account, you don't need to rely on it too deeply, and then he has his own presence as well. And he is talking about trends. His boucle played out. What's the best paint color for an entire home? Landscape hacks. Latest trends. Very top of funnel expertise driven focused that then funnels into what they sell at the brand. And if you wanna look at a formula to do this, there's previously no better place to look. So he can highlight, okay. Here's a viral kitchen. Here's, you know, here's all, like, 10 of items you could have, the state of a trend, and he is just sitting down doing these edited yaps. And the last one I'll talk about here because I don't wanna be too founder focused because you'll notice there's a lot of founders founders in those other videos. I like what Rarify has done because they just have someone on camera. So Rarify's resale rare and collectible furniture. And any brand that's a retail store or reseller should be making content about the products they sell explaining why it's good and useful is the biggest no brainer you have, and they just have someone from the team on camera talking about the different things that they sell, why they became famous. It's a collab with a, uh, an influencer. Follow it's funny. And it's different members of the team. That's what I like about this too. It doesn't always have to be one person. I actually like the idea of having a team showing different expertise and they'd be able to walk through the things that they sell. Now you'll notice all these are very visual brand, but it doesn't have to be like that. There's a great example as a YouTube account. It's like Infinity or Instantly or one of these email marketing firms, but they're just answering common email marketing questions or talking about outreach techniques. This works just as well for an agency. Anything with a topic to talk about can work for the Oracle. Let's talk about a fun one, the performer. And then we're gonna get into my favorite after that. So with the performer, the content is a show. It's entertainment driven. It's personality first. It's built to be binged and shared rather than focus on selling. The product barely needs to be mentioned. It's often omnipresent throughout the entire content. I'll I'll tell what that means. So Durschutes is a great example of this. They do skits, fashion skits. For a lot of people talk about them, but they'll have a couple creators. They will go to interesting places. You'll see their budgets expanded over time to include travel. They will have skits. They will have compilations.
Basically, extremely relatable entertaining content where the clothes are always on. That's what mean by omnipresent. They may not necessarily be talking about the clothes, though sometimes they do, but their presence is what anchors it. And the question to ask is, if our brand had a show, what would it be what would it be about? Would people watch it without knowing if it was ours? And an excellent example, this is Mohawk Chevrolet, who for a long time basically did a spin off of The Office on their TikTok with some characters. This is great. At places offices that have a lot of downtime or they have a couple funny personalities in there, like leaning into that and doing a bit of a scripted series and doing skits with those people in and out becomes a fun way to do it. And again, then being in Mohawk Chevrolet or dealing with the things around running a car dealership makes the business itself omnipresent. And this also ties in the really viral examples, people like LC Sign where basically everything is a skit that leads into promotion of their signs. There's extremely entertainment driven. It's an entertainment hook on all of them. And before we get into my favorite one, I wanna talk for second about Framer. If you wanna elevate the look and feel of a website experience, one of the easiest ways to do that is with shaders in Framer. If you wanna do this on your canvas, go up here to the plus sign, that is your insert panel, and you go down to shaders. Now let's walk through some of our options that we have. So each shader has a default and you have options. So for instance, this gradient section, I can choose the colors. I can choose the speed. I can choose the scale. Then these are image shaders I can use to manipulate a picture. So you see here I can select the image. So if I put one of my backgrounds here for example, there's different types of cells,
can adjust their thickness, can invert it, have some of these more more mosaic styles, go high pixel, low pixel, play with the aberration. Then they have several effects I really like. Great despite of something like a tech website. These particles that kind of drift and you can set them in a super slow speed or a scale for a background. You can control the speed and interaction. I think it has like a cool ambient effect. All these backgrounds are responsive and fit into any part of your site. So for instance, you see I brought it in here and added it to all of the different segments
and I could begin to layer text over it. If I deleted it, it removes it from all. If I wanna have a style that matches a little more like what we did with that pixel, I can bring it in here and begin to work around it and actually continue to manipulate the shader inside my web builder. They're great to swap out existing backgrounds or just put an interesting idea together. Make a simple landing page that much cooler. You can check these out and learn more about Framer at the link in the description. If you have any questions about the web experience or want me to cover it in any future tutorials,
let me know below. Now for my favorite of the social media archetypes, and don't worry, there's the the ones that are remaining after this are the ones that are way more like tactical and straightforward. I'm just doing the fun ones first. This is the world builder. Building a massive content that's interesting, far reaching, and surprising. Far beyond the world that the brand inhabits. This is if you really have the ability to go outside the box. Can we make something creative that people will love so much? They love the brand right next to it. So for example, that our brands making short films, doing a fictional character series, immersive intellectual content, and curation. So this is best for teams and founders that are willing to take a risk. It's not for everyone. But when people start to ask, how can my software brand make content that's really cool? How can my boring business do something outside the box? This is the one I point to. You're gonna have to take some risks, but there's an awesome world to build here. My favorite example of this Death to Stock. Death to Stock is a is a stock photo website. Straight up. They do shoots for stock photos. They're a little out of the ordinary. With their content, they do a immersive intellectual world where they have their own in house creator and they partner with other creators to talk about what is happening in the world around them. Something really strange is happening in packaging. The hottest girl you know just got into electronics, and they're detailing, like, the cyber deck trend. So they are talking about all the things that are trending in the visual world. And then when it ties to the brand is, yeah, we we do stock photos that are also on trend versus the average ones you get. So it takes an intellectual concept tied to the value proposition and then executes it relentlessly at a super high level. And people build a real affinity with the brand. They immediately go, oh, we we get it. These people understand us. Understand the artistic community, the visual community, they provide value, and they tell really dynamic interesting stories. Is this an easy strategy? No. Is it one that makes them by far the best content of anyone that they're competing with? Yes. The ultimate tech example and one of my favorite examples for this, um, because their product objectively is bad. Right? No one knows what Cluelly does. Two people are buying from Cluelly, but their social media is amazing. And if you're able to marry those two things, if someone was taking the same strategy they're doing, but applying it to a business that actually has some legs could do a lot. So they basically have office skits about a fake fictional story of what's happening in the business that are really well produced and done with a recurring cast of characters, all this narrative driven content, but it is all iPhone. It is all base captions. It is just scripted and put together really well. And then a more esoteric example is Fern who are basically doing really beautiful short films.
Talk about the essence of things that their fragrance represents. Where if you did have a really artistic team or access to an amazing creative director, they have built a truly like unbelievable series around this. And I do think that they're at the point where, say, you have been investing in social media and you have a brand that just can't make anything interesting and you're working with a few agencies, you're tapped into this stuff, you have some kind of budget, it may be worth thinking about taking the moonshot. This is the time. Right? Or if you keep trudging along in the same stuff and spending money on it, it goes nowhere. Use that same budget to do something interesting.
This is the time to act on it. So now getting more tactical, the catalyst. The catalyst uses content to push people towards a better version of themselves. Your content is the bridge between who they are and who they wanna be. So it's educational, but doesn't require a big expert all the time. It can have multiple staff or team on there. But it's like how do we in different ways, whether that's with carousels, whether it's inspirational motivational content, whether it's just simple explainer videos. How can we make our content proofing guidance of how to help our demographic achieve what they want? Such training and process documentation,
inspirational stuff like text overlay, like simple one shot content, and then community highlights and and challenges. And when people say, what do I mean by community? If you look at accounts like big accounts like Artifaxing, they're a great example of a community based content. Right? Where they are curating stuff, their community sends them all the time because they've built up an audience that wants to have a dynamic multi way conversation with them. We look at lifestyle of, you know, base living is like a curation account. You could just as easily do this as a brand. They have a couple catchphrases, but I must live a certain way. Like, they're basically creating almost almost meme account stuff around the demographic that they're trying to serve, people that are looking for that more back to the earth lifestyle,
and they are curating the world around that. In way, it doesn't require anyone on camera. But I think my favorite example of this is someone who, um, I worked with closely on their social strategy, which is Kreese Group, so a manufacturing group. So you'll notice in a lot of their content, they're doing things like, okay. What's a brief that gets a result when you are giving something to a manufacturer? What does a simple product really mean? How does this process
that is used in a fashion process actually work like this laser manufacturing? Let's recap this interesting sustainable fabric. So they're building a world around being a manufacturer. That's always something. People always point to me. They're like, oh, how do I make this boring business content? Like, I think in your world is not as boring as you think. There's a million people who do import export stuff from China or there are manufacturers who would think that their stuff intrinsically is uninteresting. And really, you just have to look at the branch of where can we go visit around us that does something interesting and how deep people will get into it. So they go through all the choice whether it's label choice for your brand, they're going to the trade shows their demographic is interested in to show them the highlights if they can't afford to go. They're basically helping be that catalyst from where their audience wants to be to where they are. If they become clients along the way, great. Then the last one we'll note here is called the helper. Brands that don't have a deep expert to put on camera, who wanna lean on value content, it's not like motivational in the way the catalyst was. That's the biggest difference between the two because they are pretty similar is that the catalyst is like is aspiring.
Like, there's a better life or a better brand out there. It's gonna be shared because it's motivational. Whereas the helper is more practical. So often relies on a core person like a creator, but they don't have to be deep expert. They don't have to be a founder. They can be sharing it along the way. It's someone who's more like on the journey with you or who's really relatable. And so the question asked is what are the little helpful things that we can do that our customer will appreciate, and what are little anecdotes that they'll find that they can relate to? So this demographic does visual tutorials in this archetype, carousel stories and like light tips, story vlogs, then interviews and curation. So what I like for this that I actually met the woman at Shop Talk is Kyoko Beauty. So this is an excellent choice for a beauty brand. Right? Where they're using a handful of creators to basically kind of break down, okay, what is Korean skincare? So they're a retailer that aggregates different Korean skincare brands. And basic help, like don't buy this serum, get this instead. But again, not presented by like some super established makeup artist, etcetera. They're just talking through realistically what are all these different things you might wanna make along your buying journey. If I'm interested in beauty, I'm interested in Korean beauty. I wanna choose a cleanser. They are at a level like, again, not that far above their consumer. Not preventing it like, hey, I'm a chemist. They're doing those comparisons and answering the consumer's questions for them. That is the role of the helper. And this is an excellent account to look to for that for using multiple creators, for using multiple styles. I think they're a great example. Um, another example, Cutthirty Grad, Hashi Home, they're doing relatable stuff about being a host. So you have a lot of skits in there, and they're kind of presenting that life of someone who's a host with kind of relatable notes about them. So it's less about being super useful to that person and more about being relatable to Everyone who's actually a host relates to the kind of content they make and of course her ceramics
are at the heart of all of them. This is a secondary approach from, okay, this is very info help focused. This is just relatable helper focused. And then another software one that I wanna call out, um, I know they've sent their, uh, creator, Miranda, who's amazing through Cutthirty a few times is Marpipe. So Marpipe does one of the dullest things you can do from a software. They do catalog ads for Meta. If you don't know what that is, it's like a just a dense part of like the Meta advertising experience. The auto generated ads of your products that show up, they help make them beautiful. And so they have a creator that they who's also has her own account who makes a lot of informational content about marketing. What are the trends? What's happening in the world? And what they notice is even though a lot of these aren't directly related to the brand. Even though they take a lot of shots on goal and it's not like constant hits all the time, what it's done is providing this stream of informational content has made it so the brand is much more recognized and their ads perform better. As a perfect example of organic and paid going hand in hand is if you have just any degree of brand, right, and any degree of informational content that's actually helping their user. It's like, oh, I heard of that brand. I remember the video they did about marriage marketing or sneaker fatigue or whatever it is. Oh, here's what they actually do. For a more dense complex product, just being that entry point, helping get that click, helping reduce the money or the barrier to entry it requires when you're advertising is a massive value add that putting a creator on main, having them do helpful content can help execute no matter how technical the niche is. If you have questions about this or wanna workshop this for your brand, the community call info is below. We are doing that in just a few days. If you missed that one, there's one every month and I'll update this to the most recent link if you're watching this later. All of these archetypes, I will have the cheat sheet for down below as well. So you can grab all these links, try to make it as easy as possible. I cannot encourage you enough to do the exercise. Right? Actually go through, think about what does your brand have as far as talent? Do you have a full expert? Can you get just a creator? Can you be more helpful versus more aspirational? Do you wanna take a real shot on goal and then do some world building? Now you have some examples. You're armed with some people to use and have conversations about with your team, and you can stop kind of floundering around. Stop trying to be everything to everybody and lock in on one archetype. Hope you found this helpful. As always, thank you so much for watching.