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Yes, in my experience, a personal brand helps reduce the cost of paid traffic and send free clicks to a store.
This is why many A, B and C list celebrities own stores that seem to "grow" out of nowhere.
Let's talk about that...
Multiple Traffic Sources is profitable
I know what you are thinking... "Well, so what...? I am not a celebrity".
That is true.
But that doesn't mean you cannot benefit from the traffic model by creating a niche celebrity brand.
At EssTwo, my agency, we are a paid traffic agency that builds an end-to-end system to maximize store profit. Something we call the Profit Ecosystem. This ecosystem includes a lot more than paid ads and email.
Within that Profit Ecosystem System, I am constantly advising store owners on the benefits of multiple traffic sources.
The main advice sounds something like this: You absolutely want to be running paid traffic. That is table stakes. But it would benefit you greatly to have another organic traffic source. A personal brand is a good and affordable way to do that.
Note that a personal brand is completely different to your business's brand. Your personal brand is about you, your world, and what you care about. One of the things you care about is the problems you solve via your store's products. Therefore, speaking about your business and your products (or the problems they solve) becomes natural.
Ecommerce founders are in the attention business
To explain my main point, let's look at how celebrities operate.
A celebrity with an Instagram account might have 5 million followers. When they add a link to their bio, they can see thousands, if not tens of thousands, of clicks to that page.
No paid ads or SEO required.
If a celebrity diverts all their attention and clicks to their own ecommerce products, they effectively have a repeatable organic traffic source that is hard to compete with. If we quantify this, they have the same store traffic as another business spending $10,000 or more per month on ads.
Think about that for a second... That means they have more room to maximise profit. And maximizing profit is the goal.
A few years ago I was at a mastermind, and a successful store owner said that this was "unfair", that they [celebrities] get "free traffic" for doing "nothing".
This founder failed to realize that we are in the attention business. A celebrity brand takes years of consistent creation to build. It's much harder than paying for paid media.
Hear me when I say this: It doesn't matter where the traffic comes from; if you have enough of it, you will convert customers. Therefore, if you wish to build a niche celebrity brand in your field, you can benefit from this "free traffic" too.
Having a personal brand means attaching a traffic source to your name.
A personal brand makes paid ads cheaper
One experiment we ran for our client(s) focused on how to build a personal brand faster.
Building a brand is about being in front of your audience as much as possible. You must be seen. And the more senses you activate, the better. For example, a personal blog is okay. A podcast with show notes is better; a video is even better, but a consistent social media presence is best.
But paid traffic can make consistent social media easier.
So, if you wish to move faster, what can we do? Everyone knows that building a consistent social media presence takes a lot of time or money if you outsource it.
Here is the easy way: create a series of short, evergreen videos where you talk about what you care about. You can talk about the problems you solve in your company, what you stand for, etc.
You put these videos into low-budget paid traffic campaigns on Meta, and you leave them alone. If these videos are truly evergreen, you never need to change them. If you spend $1 per day per video and you have 10 videos, you'll spend about $3,500 per year for a massive boost in visibility.
A magical thing happened over time when we tried this. The cost of conversions started to trend down as the audiences we were targeting recognised the brand's founder, their face and voice. After six months, the average price of converting new customers dropped by 9%.
They also saw an increase in organic sales.
Remember, branding is about being seen. Not conversions.
A comment for people who wish to be private...
It's okay if you don't wish to be a public figure. For a long time, I was in this category.
You need to accept the trade-off. People connect with people. Without a personal brand, you miss out on its benefits.