From Visible to Invincible: Strategies for Business Growth

At the end of the day, social media can blow up in a second, you can lose access, you can be hacked, you will lose those followers if they if you don't have a way of continuing that relationship, so you want to use that, and then convert them into email as followers at the end, like that's your primary goal. So building something for your email list is so so important for when you're actually going out and doing these visibility campaigns. You need somewhere to bring them back to.

This is the Entrepreneur School Podcast where we believe you can run a thriving business and still make your family a priority. This show is all about supporting you the emerging or early stage Entrepreneur on your journey from solopreneur to CEO while wearing all of the other hats in your life. My name is Kelly Sinclair and I'm a brand and marketing strategist who started a business with two kids under 3am, a corporate PR girl turned entrepreneur after I learned the hard way that life is too short to waste doing things that burn you out. On this show, you'll hear inspiring stories from other business owners on their journey, and learn strategies to help you grow a profitable business, while making it all fit into the life that you want. Welcome to Entrepreneur School.

Hey, hey, welcome to episode four in my series, all about Maximizing Your Visibility. If you haven't caught the other few episodes, go back and listen to those make sure that you put some time in your calendar to do that, because these really all build on each other. But I'm super excited for today's episode, because I'm going to give you the actual five top visibility strategies that I have used to grow my business over the last six years to hit that six figure mark to get featured in media, I was on the front page of our local paper recently been on the radio, lots of online articles have also just been able to grow relationships and build a wonderful network of people who are supporters and, you know, referrers, and all of these things that come from actually putting yourself out there. So let's walk through how you can get more eyeballs on your business, some of the strategies that I have used, because while these may not all be for you, I'm going to just break down like why they worked for me and what you might want to consider if you are thinking about doing these things, and whether some of them are definitely just a blanket, yes, you absolutely 100% should apply this strategy in your business, because it doesn't matter on your industry. But I've always said that having a custom plan is really important. In my 15 plus years of doing marketing and communications, I have never created the same plan twice. Because every business is different, your industry is different. Your goals are different, what you sell is different. So we're going to keep that in the back of your mind as you're thinking about how to map out your customized visibility strategy for whatever campaign that you want, and how you're going to use this right away. Come q4 of 2023, because that's where we're at right now. And of course, you can use these all year long in any combination. So let's dive right in.

The first strategy that I want to give you is the one that I think is the most underused or underappreciated, I guess, of all of the visibility strategies, and that is offline marketing. Okay, so this is where you go IRL, in real life, and meet other people. So think networking events, think conferences, functions, places where here's two criteria for you are either full of people who you think would be your potential clients, so your potential audience, or they're full of people who are going to help you get in front of your potential clients. And maybe sometimes it's one event and it does both of those things. I definitely want to give you that thought of not just going to every single event that comes up because the hacking get super tiring. It takes a lot of your time and energy and I know that you're busy and you have a lot of other things going on. So really be strategic and intentional when choosing the types of events that you want to attend. And consider how you can figure out how you can find a circle basically You want to continue going to, it's awesome when you find a community that you can build your own reputation in. So one is just your local community, because this is really a great opportunity for you to get in front of people who have businesses or who exist within the same space that you do. And you'll start to notice, once you go to a few events, you see the same people over and over again, which is great, because the more they see you, the more they think about you, and what you do and how either they could access your services, or they could share you with somebody else. So these are, usually when you go to an event, there's some kind of opportunity for you to do a little pitch like you got to introduce yourself, whether it's a, an opportunity to have like a 30, or 62nd, Business commercial, some events have things like that, or you're just going to meet somebody in the buffet line, or at the table for your luncheon, where they're going to ask you, what do you do. And so then you pull up the business card, you send them to your website, you open your Instagram profile, and you tell them what you do. So you create that connection, which is awesome. And I have to say that when I look back on all of the clients that I have got to work with over the course of my six years in running my own business, a lot of them have come from me going to events, and building a reputation for myself within the community where I live. So the very first thing I did when I decided my business was going to be a real thing was go to a networking event, and hand out business cards. I was like, I don't know what I do. But here I am in business. And so like you meet people, and you see them again. And then I went to another event where I got my first two clients, and one of those clients ended up being an amazing partner with me for over five years. So there is so much power in creating real life relationships with people. And also just establishing yourself as the go to person in your niche in your community. It's really, really a great opportunity, especially when people are looking for local vendors to provide the services and looking within our local network first. So I know that there's a lot of power in that. And whether or not your business is something that you can do online, it's you consider yourself to have a digital business or like a virtual business, there's still extra power in the relationships you build within your own community. So don't forget about that as a network as a place where you can be building relationships getting visible, getting more eyeballs on your business. Because people trust people faster, when you meet each other, like you know, right away, if you vibe and connect with somebody. And that makes a huge impact. It takes a lot of Instagram posts to create that same kind of connections with somebody. So that's the first strategy that I still to this day, make sure that I'm using regularly so that I can build the kinds of relationships that I want to help grow my business.

Strategy number two, is collaborations. So I don't think I even realized how many of these things I did or sort of how this was all in one category of working with other people. And I will define this in my own little Kelly dictionary way, which is where you're doing something that uses and leverages the power of multiple audiences. So people already have their own individual audiences, they're building up on social media, through their email marketing, however else, they're collecting people and creating an audience for themselves. Maybe it's a podcast, and people use each other to leverage and springboard and get more eyeballs on your business. So examples of collaborations include being on podcasts, or speaking at events, or doing things we call Lisp swaps, where you share something, a value that points to another person and they do the same for you. So being in a bundle, a gift giveaway, these kinds of things where basically all of the contributors are also promoting it, the person who created the thing is promoting it. And all of the contributors to the thing are promoting it. So whether that's that bundle or like a summit, you've probably participated in these kinds of things, as a like, as a learner as somebody who's there to get access to whatever's being provided. And they're great because a lot of the times you get like a big huge batch of like free stuff. I've been participating in a couple so if you're spending my community for While you're on my list, you will have seen two different bundles that happen over the summer that I wanted to share with you that are part of, you know, growing my visibility and reach and also getting to add more value to my audience. So I really look at these as win wins. And it's really amazing because you can you create the relationships with the host person. And then you can maybe go on to do other things with them. It helps entrepreneurship to be less lonely, you have a team, you have like a community around you promoting something, you're part of something, it's exciting immediately when you have somebody else sharing about you, that gives you more credibility, it's just credibility by extension of somebody else, putting your picture on something that they're doing. So it's pretty powerful stuff

I used to and this is going to roll into the third strategy here, I used to host a summit, an online summit called the entrepreneur Success Summit. And truly, I think that is the starting point that this podcast evolved from. And it was an online a multi day online event where I had multiple speakers, probably 20 to 30 speakers at each event. And I actually ran it live on Zoom, the speakers came for like 45 minutes each. And they presented on their area of expertise. And I interviewed them and I was like the emcee of the day. And basically, we put that together as a really amazing free event. And everybody who participated was able to also promote it. And because they did that, probably we had about five or 600 people sign up for each event. So it's amazing way to boost your email list and get more people into your world on the internet. And it's also an amazing opportunity to connect with these other people and have something to share with them. So that's really where I'm going with a third strategy, which is to actually host a core collaboration opportunities. So when you are the host of it, you have the platform to share with other people. Sometimes you can feel a little bit like uncomfortable reaching out to people to participate in their stuff, like pitch yourself. I'd love to be on your podcast, I'd love to speak at your event. Here's why I'm awesome. And it works really nicely. Sometimes if you're like, hey, I have this thing. Do you want to speak on my event, participate in my bundle, be on my podcast, go on Instagram Live with me, it doesn't have to be something complicated and big. But if you put the offer out there, they're getting something out of it right away. And that just gives you a little bit more leverage to come back and say, Hey, so we did that together? What can I do to support your audience? And it just is kind of like that mutual opportunity creation, which like I I remember having my mind blown when I first discovered what summits were, this was like, pre COVID. So people were like not doing so many things, I think on the internet like that as they are now. But I was like, Wow, what a great way to bring together so many different people reach all these different audiences. And I have no problem asking them if they want to be on it. And then I have, you know, an opportunity for them to share something that I'm doing with their audience later on. It's an exchange, it's just a really great way of doing business and growing your audience and growing your business at the same time. So that's the third one, which is hosting some kind of collaboration, event or experience where you are the one who's putting it together. So that's a little like, you know, a more advanced skill. And I am going to teach you how to do all of these things inside of my upcoming program the visibility booster bootcamp. So stay tuned for when that launches, because we're going to talk about all these strategies and actually how to implement them and give you an opportunity to try this as part of your own custom visibility plan and your visibility campaign for the last quarter of the year. So spoiler alert, that's coming soon.

Okay, number four. And this is one that I think has created so much for me in terms of confidence, my ability to have clear messaging, I just have generally more clarity as a result of this third strategy, which is consistent long form content. So if you need to educate your people in order for them to be aware enough to purchase what you have if you are sell Link your knowledge in any way, if you're a consultant, a coach, an educator, if you teach people stuff online, this is huge for you taking the opportunity to come up with a way for yourself to create consistent long form content. Now, when I first started doing this, for me, it looked like a weekly Facebook Live. And I've told the story a million times, but I did Facebook Live videos every single week for two years. And I always say it was not about the views, it didn't blow up my Facebook account, I never went viral with any of that content, I did create a really wonderful like library of information that I was pretty proud of. But the process of the creation was huge. It was about getting confident in talking about what I do. It was about using that confidence, then it fused into the other things that I was doing, which was having conversations with people about potential work. So that allowed me to landmark clients, I was able to position myself as a speaker better because I had all this practice, I'm now able to do this podcast with a lot more ease because I went through that process. And so even if podcasting is something that you're interested in doing this long form content is super helpful for yourself. To get more clear about how you are serving this world, and how you show up and what you talk about, and how to talk about it in different ways, and how to even just get the speaking skill of extemporaneous speaking, which I have been building for the last four years really from doing this consistent content creation. So as the long form, which has a more educational informational tone to it, it's not just about how tos, it certainly also includes like shifting perceptions. But it's where you have an opportunity to create a video a podcast, or something like that, that people can consume for you know, more than seven seconds, you can teach them some more value than what you can do on a seven second Instagram reel. So highly recommend the consistent content, because that's something that really helps to increase your visibility and increase your ability to really step into bigger visibility opportunities. So it's kind of like a stepping stone strategy as well.

Okay, and the last one I want to give you, and this is something that I really, really want you to consider. Because visibility for the sake of visibility is pointless. I think that I was I don't know if it was a previous version of this episode I was recording or if it was a previous episode of this podcast. But imagine you're in a parade, and you walk down the streets. And there's millions of people watching this parade. But at the end of it, all it happened was that you gotta like wow, they all saw you there, you wave that was cool. Maybe your sign was in it, that's great. But at the end of the day, if they don't have a way of connecting with you, or if you don't have a way of connecting with them, that is a total lost opportunity. So this strategy is to have a freebie for email list growth. So to create, it's called a freebie, or it's called a lead magnet. This is something that you make that you give to people in exchange for their email address. So whenever you are exercising any of these other visibility strategies, if you do get on a podcast, you have to send people somewhere to continue that relationship with you. And you want to do that inside of email marketing. This is one of the best strategies for growing your business for building relationships and making sales, we can have all kinds of conversations about this specific tactic. But I highly recommend you think about a way that you can offer something, a checklist, a tip sheet, a mini video training a mini course, whatever it is, I have right now for you the ultimate visibility toolkit. It is training and it is a resource that you can actually use and implement in your business. So that's just an example for you that you can go and grab and check out how that all works. And I know that you've subscribed to people's email lists before and that's something that you need to build for yourself because at the end of the day, social media can blow up in a second. You can lose access, you can be hacked, you will lose those followers if they if you don't have a way of continuing that relationship. So you want to use that and then convert them into email as followers at the end like that's your primary goal. So building something for your email list is so so important for when you're actually go going out and doing these visibility campaigns, you need somewhere to bring them back to you, you don't even need a website to have an email list. Because any email list software has built in landing pages that you can just share that link. It's fine. There are messy ways to do this. Absolutely. And I'm happy to walk you through those, that's definitely going to be something that we cover inside of the visibility booster bootcamp that's coming up. So I just want you to have this in your mind that visibility needs to be captured. And the best way to do that is through email. So getting somebody's email, I don't care if you go to an event. And as a starting point, you take with you a piece of paper, and you get people to write your their email and you tell them, You're going to manually send them something, you do that. That's cool. I did that before too. But you know, we have like privacy laws and stuff about sending emails, so you do have to collect and gather their permission. So that's one way that you can do it all the messy ways. I'm all about the messy action. We've talked about that time and time again on this podcast.

So I hope let me just recap here, top five strategies that have helped me to grow my business, my visibility, my income, all of it in the last six years, is in person events, and relationship building, aka offline marketing, collaborations, consistent long form content, freebies, for email list growth, like lead magnets, and hosting collaboration events. So those were like that. That was a two parter. So those are the five things I want to hear from you. Which of these is the most surprising to you? Send me a message over on Instagram. And let me know you listen to this episode. And which one of these you thought, huh, I didn't think about that before. Or, Oh, you're right, I better get on that thing right now. I would love to hear it. I'm so glad that you're able to be part of this series.

Obviously, I love talking about visibility, I think it's really the ultimate goal that we should all have as business owners, because it is the key that gets you in front of the right people who need your services, who need your products, who need your help, which allows you to flourish as an entrepreneur, live this lifestyle of time and financial freedom, be able to spend more time with your kids be able to do the thing that you actually love doing and I just am so what's the word I'm looking for. I just feel so grateful that I have found something that I love to do this much. And I know that it is a thing that helps you unlock your own passion, and be able to step into that. Because I believe truly in my core, that if you are doing the work that you feel most passionate about, that lights you up and gets you excited, you are raising the vibration of the world, and you are helping to make this place a happier place to be. And I think there's just so much negative stuff happening that let's just focus on boosting this up, living out your passion, making your passion a success. So go out there and do something that helps get visibility for your business. I'll see you again next week.

You did it you just listen to another episode of the Entrepreneur School Podcast. It's like you just went to business school while you folded your laundry, prep dinner or picked up your kids at school. Thank you so much for being here. I want to personally celebrate your commitment to growing your business. You can imagine I'm throwing confetti for you right now. If you enjoyed today's episode, please leave us a review. Make sure you're subscribed and let us know you're listening by screenshotting this episode, and tagging us on Instagram, head to entrepreneurschool.ca for tons of tools and resources to help you grow your business while keeping your family a priority. You can subscribe to our email list and join our community. And until next time, go out there and do the thing.