Let's get visible, visible.
It's time to get visible with your business. Read on for advice, and Q&A with Daisy Morris of The Selfhood. (Pt 2 on promoting your business and getting people lining up to buy from you.)
So today, we continue the theme of promoting your business, by getting visible, so that you can generate demand for what you’ve built.
Thanks for some of the lovely comments about the post last week (how to get people lining up to buy from you) because I’ll be honest, I was a tad worried it was too simplistic — my advice was to find promotional activities you love, to share your most authentic truth, and do it with confidence. Clearly I needed more confidence(!) but in retrospect I am reminded that we are in need of more ‘simple’ in business. Plus, we always manage to overcomplicate the theory in practice any way 🤪.
Inside today’s post you’ll find:
A low-commitment side hustle idea from Wynter
An interview with Daisy Morris from The Selfhood on how to make your business known
Further resources to get you feeling good about promoting your business
Final call for my free workshop for Founders in 7 hours
Wynter have kindly sponsored today’s post with an amazing opportunity for you all.
They are looking for professionals across tech, marketing, product (and more) to join their research panel and get paid $90-180 per hour. You’ll be testing new products from leading businesses in as little as 15 mins. It’s the perfect way to earn a bit of extra cash as a side hustle or to fund your business building!
Sign up to start getting paid for your opinions on new products, and get inspired for building your own in the process! Sign up as a panelist here.
Daisy Morris is on a mission to make URL as human as IRL, and explains why you don’t have to be visible all the time to do well.
It was a pleasure to interview Daisy Morris for this week’s Founder profile as I could think of no better guest on how to be visible with your business. Daisy runs social media marketing & content consultancy The Selfhood and has built an incredible personal brand and presence for herself in the process.
Watch the 20 min interview or read the highlights:
Daisy, please tell us about yourself.
I’m a digital marketing and social media strategist and I run a platform called The Selfhood.
It was born from a frustration I felt whilst working in house, when people asked questions to the agencies we were working with about digital marketing or social media and we were made to feel a bit silly. I feel that if you don’t ask you’re never going to learn. I know a lot of my friends with small businesses can find social media overwhelming but I’ve always found it fascinating… and so the vision for The Selfhood is making social media more friendly and more human. A rule I set for my clients or community is that no question is ever too big or too small.
I work with clients 1:1 on organic social strategy, paid ads, content creation (the full digital suite) and I also do educational workshops, events and panel talks. There are also some digital products and courses in development. I absolutely love it; with quite a short attention span, because digital and social are always evolving it keeps me on my toes which I really enjoy.
How do you think about being ‘visible’ in your business?
I think being visible is a choice and I don’t buy into this idea that we have to be constantly online to build a brand; I know plenty of people with successful businesses who don’t post on social media at all.
Often when we think about visibility and personal brand we think about sharing our personal lives. But I don’t share my personal life in my business as its two different things. It might evolve over time for you, where the more you’ve been in your business the more comfortable you might be sharing. But I think to begin with, start small.
We often have reservations about sharing our achievements or sharing what we’re working on because we don’t want to sound like we’re showing off. But if people don’t know you exist… then they don’t know you exist.
I’m really grateful that most of my work comes through my community which I do attribute to my visibility but that doesn’t mean you have be doing a morning vlog everyday.
But whilst I see people without personal brands do well, I have also seen businesses grow really quickly, gain opportunities and see their personal profiles grow in ways I don’t think they would have seen if it wasn’t for putting themselves out there.
How do you personally strike the balance?
Growing a brand does take time. I recently took some time off from social media full stop. You have to step away to find clarity as its such a noisy space.
Now I’ve never felt more clear on The Selfhood and what it is that I need to be doing. If we spend too much time online in the same places then things become a bit stagnant. So if you’re someone that feels like you have to be online all the time to maintain visibility — you don’t.
Michaela Coel, producer and actor from ‘I may destroy you’ when she accepted her award speech said ‘In a world that praises us for constantly being online and visible I urge you to step away and see what comes to you in that silence’.
How have promotional activities evolved for you?
When I started, I had left my full time job to do some freelancing before going travelling. When I came back to the UK within two weeks we were in lockdown and all of my clients were in hospitality so I had to get really creative to get some revenue!
I knew I wanted to get more into the Wellbeing sector so I wrote a trend report and interviewed loads of people I really admired in this industry for quotes and research for the report. Then halfway through I thought shit I have no one to market this to!
I hadn’t really used my LinkedIn much before and my personal Instagram was more family and friends than for work. So I created an Instagram account and started teasing out some content from the report, starting a newsletter, then I ended up going from nobody to having 250 downloads for the report which generated enough new business that I wasn’t crying about not being able to pay my rent for the next month (which was happening).
I was really new to the online space so the trend report was my way to showcase my skills and what I could offer businesses without me having to be super visible. So I would also say it’s worth thinking about how you can use your skills without having to do the whole online thing… if that doesn’t feel right for you.
Now I do a lot on LinkedIn as there is so much opportunity here, I think we praise Instagram too much in the creative world but its been great. I also have a newsletter which feels like a personal space where I share resources and check in with my core advocates rather than it being a sales resource (whereas I use Instagram more for that brand building).
I am also looking to diversify into Pinterest because it is important to spread our visibility. It is difficult and it gets more and more competitive in the online space as more people join platforms it does become harder to be seen. So I would rather see my clients spend more energy on one or two platforms and do these really well then be on four and compromise the quality of each.
It’s about knowing where my audience is most likely to be and where I will gain the most the traction.
I see it as about playing to your strengths too. If you don’t want to dance on reels, don’t.
Long form content isn’t dead, people might assume that because video content is booming other forms are not worth it but blogs are great. It’s about identifying where your key demographic sits and going where they are.
How do you decide what to say, I know you advocate for content pillars?
Content pillars are essentially different talking points. Mine are entertainment (I like to keep social media fun and interesting), education, wellbeing (as I’m also big on making sure we don’t get burnt out creatively with tech), connection (getting to know my audience and vice versa).
Everyone’s content pillars will be different. The way you think about your content pillar is: what do my audience care about; what do I care about and what is that sweet spot. So a really good exercise is to write these down on paper and see where they marry up in the middle.
If you’re looking to sell new business the best thing you can do is answer a problem. So identify a problem and sell them a solution because that’s how you position yourself as an expert and you build trust. People will also feel seen.
For example, “I feel really insecure about posting about my business online” — which lots of people do — whenever I’ve posted about this kind of problem I get so many people say “I thought that was just me”.
You begin to build connection when you tap into people’s mindsets. It’s not just their demographic but their psychographic and what they care about, their beliefs and what change do they want to see in the world.
It’s not about pigeon holing people and giving strict personas but starting to get a view about how people think, their concerns and their beliefs. Which although it evolves over time, is the best way for me to build connection.
I think it’s also really important that you speak to your community. I probably spend about an hour a day speaking to people in the DMs which is a lot but that is how I start to really understand the sentiment of my audience and I can adapt quite quickly. I know when people are feeling creatively burnt out, I know when there is a new trend coming and so on, so I can be quite reactive to that. It shows my audience that I care and that I’m listening.
Let’s talk about the audience v community distinction
Audience is people who follow you and interact with you and a community is people who follow you, interact with you and also interact with each other. When I run events I ensure its 50/50 them learning from me and them getting to know each other because if you can be the person that facilitates and builds relationships that is so rewarding. When I started The Selfhood it felt really lonely and these kind of events where I went and met people felt so key.
I get asked all of the time for recommendations and I have a bank of people sitting in a Google Doc sheet who I’ve never even met, but I’ve seen their work and their testimonials online and now will happily recommend them. It’s great to see them work with each other and collaborate.
I think thats one of the best things about online communities — they can be perceived as lacking substance or value — but I have seen the complete opposite. Two of my really good friends I met online, we are now working on a really great project together and secured some great business as well as they have been really great friends throughout the pandemic.
Amazing work, so really visibility is not just about us, its about the people we got into business to serve in the first place.
You can find more of Daisy at her Instagram (best account I follow, hands down) and on LinkedIn. Let her know I sent you!
Thank you, Daisy!
Build more visibility in business with these resources
Matilda from Miel Digital runs a brilliant digital marketing agency and her newsletter is full of goodies as well as being entirely free. Sign up for the lowdown on SEO, paid media, marketing trends and more. I also like her Instagram and her memes a lot.
Feeling brave and ready to ‘do’ authenticity in a raw, unpolished way so that you can build trust with your audience? The answer is TikTok (sorry). This guide from Li Jin is for startups ready to leverage TikTok to understand the right content, timing and audience to go viral.
The whole ‘build in public’ thing is very of the moment, and also very The Ask newsletter in terms of a theme and all of its various pros and cons. More on this in a later post! To whet your appetite take a listen to Buffer’s podcast episode on building in public, featuring the founders of Paynter jacket who have since been copied (hint: that’s a con).
As mentioned above, I do like to write about personal brand building as a form of business growth, but I do also believe that building a personal brand comes with some costs to your business:
I’m really hesitant to suggest this book to you as it may have just become my new secret weapon in business, but heck, I love you all too much to keep it to myself. Daniel Priestly, Oversubscribed, talks tactics in creating demand in your business. You can thank me later.
Ready to pitch to press? Some cardinal sins and sage suggestions from Muck Rack’s guide to PR pitching.
Workshop for Founders — it’s today!
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Founders. Are you cultivating the best self you can be for your business? Over 70 of you are signed up and I can’t wait, if you haven’t already Grab a free ticket here, (it will be recorded if you can’t join live).
Are you still deciding what business to build?
In 2022 a handful of people will be able to join a cohort, taught by me, to unlock what business is right for them. If you want to get clarity and narrow in on your ‘thing’ with the accountability of the group to ensure you stay on course then this is for you. I actually built The Ask in a similar group programme, where I finally put an end to my excuses. Beta group registration is now open.
Image credits for today’s post: The Pawst.
Thanks as always for reading! Next week is all about managing yourself as you build your business. You don’t want to miss out — Subscribe now if you haven’t.
Ellen Donnelly, Founder + Chief Coach, The Ask.