I always get to this point and go, ah, how do I do this again? That’s right. Building your business community. All of these pictures were taken in the last two months. So I just got back from a road trip to Queensland and so the photo in the top right, the bottom right, the bottom left, this is Brisbane. Bottom right was Gold Coast. Top right was Noosa, which is as far north as we went. And then on the left, I was in Melbourne, I think it was last month, I can’t remember, for a conference.

So I am a random weirdo who likes to build community and I do that for a multitude of reasons, including the fact that I’m an extrovert who spent 17 years working alone from home. So I invite myself to Christmas parties. I will gate crash your work event if there’s free booze and food. And I think I’m going to have a good time. We’re going to talk about building your business community. And I want to start off with a definition of effective marketing and ineffective marketing.

So please let me know in the chat what you think. What is ineffective marketing? What is effective marketing? And I’m going to go ahead and click on a third. effective marketing will attract your ideal clients. It’ll act like a beacon to pull people to you. A third of effective marketing should repel people. I put out marketing designed to repel people. I want to push people away. Yeah?

Because the more that I can repel people the more that I can attract people. And then no matter how brilliant no matter how you know controversial or otherwise no matter how powerful of your marketing is not going to be noticed. Yeah. So what is ineffective marketing then? Ineffective marketing is the elevator music of the internet. It is neither seen nor heard. And sadly we are diligently marketing away you know doing our stuff posting consistently and what’s Absolutely nothing. We’re marketing to ourselves. We are in an echo chamber.

So I want to talk briefly about our biggest and most common fears in marketing because raise your hand if you don’t really like marketing. What I do is deeply daggy. I do hope in my eulogy people do not mention you know that I was a marketer by trade. That is not something you know that is highly sought after. It’s necessary but it’s kind of necessary in the way you know paying your rent or paying your mortgage is necessary. We do it but we do it with some resentment. So it is very, very common if this is you.

If you don’t like the idea of marketing, if marketing and sales makes you feel squeamish, uncomfortable, desperate, you’re totally not alone. Welcome. I know you. I know you. I was you. But trust is the ultimate human currency. And Tom mentioned attention. Attention is a great way of thinking about this because of course, in the age of information… What is the commodity? The commodity is other people’s attention. Yeah.

And they’re not going to give you attention if they don’t actually trust you in some way, even if it’s just like they trust you because you’re a bit of a, you know, car crash and they know that if they give you attention, it’s going to be entertaining. You know, it’s not the best kind of trust, but it is still a kind of a trust. So of course, this is what we’re trying to do when we’re building a community around our business. Yeah. Now, what are options if we don’t build a community.

You know what? are we talking about when we talk about building online community and building you know face to face community? Like why would we bother to do that? Tom spoke about crowdfunding but you know there may well be plenty of people in this room who are like kill me now I would rather chew broken glass than do crowdfunding. know so therefore if we’re not building a community around our business we’re relying on things like ads. And ads tend to be very expensive.

This is not a starting point. Yeah? It’s it feels productive. I see a lot of people wasting a lot of money on ads because it’s like I’m doing something. I’m spending money. I’m running ads.

It’s a great way of feeling productive and it’s a great way of spending money but it doesn’t necessarily work. So Whilst I am not anti-ads, I’ve got a Google ad campaign running right now. It is pretty much priority number 97 after testing your marketing organically. So what are we going to talk about? In the next 55 minutes, we are going to be talking about your minimum viable marketing plan. I have been following my minimum viable marketing plan since January 2010.

So February 2008, I started my business and 2009, I had my first baby. And January 2010, I thought, you know what? I’m not much of a marketer if I’m not actually marketing myself. And I know it works because I’m doing it every day on behalf of other small business owners, on behalf of other soloists. So I’ve got to commit and I’ve got to do it. And I can’t just… it in on Tuesdays or do it you know when the mood strikes because the mood will never strike right? We can postpone that forever. I’m going to do it every month.

So this is what we’re going to be talking about. This is what I’ve been doing since January 2010. Next we’re to talk about taking an omni-channel approach to marketing. So if you’re sitting on your hand thinking I can’t wait to ask Brooke what is the one market channel I need to be on? I’ll just you know put you out of your misery now.

There is no one marketing channel. there was one marketing channel, there would be one money tree and we would all be sitting under it and money would be raining on our heads. There’s no such thing. I would love to tell you otherwise but it’s just not true. Number three, the third thing we’re to talk about today is your attitude upgrade because I dare say you are going to be at the center of your business. Yeah?

You are going to be taking a disproportionately large amount of risk and responsibility. So you therefore are the major business asset and what is the asset inside the asset? Your attitude. So briefly, was a, I am now rather a business coach. I call myself a veteran business coach because I’ve been doing it for 13 years.

Like I said, I love asking questions. I’m a very nosy person and I tend to be quite bossy because I’m the eldest of four girls. So I’m a great delegator. Before I started my business, seven, 10 years ago, I worked in public relations and it was in PR. that I first discovered the internet. used to publish a big multinational clients website. I used to update it regularly with content.

And that was my first taste of the internet back in the olden days. Very exciting. Technology has evolved immeasurably since then. So when I first started my business in 2008, I called myself a digital marketing agency owner. Now this is a pretty common business model now. If you’ve been to Bali or Ubud you probably would have met 25,000 digital marketing agencies that virtual teams but 17 years ago it was pretty exotic.

I would get the work and if I couldn’t do it myself I would find somebody online who would do it for me and these people were contractors many of whom stayed with me for years and years and years. Um, gradually I started moving away from that and into training, into coaching, because social media was exploding and it was clear and obvious to me that the technology was evolving at such a pace and social media specifically was making it so much easier for anyone, any business owner, any soloist, any social enterprise to jump on the internet and be able to do things themselves.

So I had two small children at the time. It was a great excuse to leave them behind with their father, jump on an airplane and start teaching courses around Australia, which I did in about 2012. So I’m a self-employment and social enterprise geek. I first came across social enterprise in Cambodia and Vietnam in 2002 when I was a young tour leader.

They weren’t called social enterprises, but they were social enterprises and they made a shit ton of sense. We’re talking about two very poor countries, both devastated by war with significant issues, economic and social and many other ways besides. It made sense for social enterprises to be thriving in these particular places.

And I was just fascinated from the get go. I thought like, this is enterprise and social good. you know, having a baby together, like what more do you, you know, what more do you love about this? So I’m also a music lover. I’m a dance floor starter. I’m a noodle soup lover. Noodle soup is my love language. Any day of the week is a good day for noodle soup. So to start off with, I wanted to reiterate that big brand marketing isn’t relevant to marketing your business. lot of loud voices on the internet saying you gotta do this and you gotta do that.

You gotta raise awareness and you gotta do this and you know like 95 % of it is irrelevant if you do not have a budget of you know 100K a month to spend and a team with which to delegate to. So if you’ve got $2.50 to spend welcome let’s spend it wisely. So part of what I do in my business is I help people to actually grow their professional reputation. And this is part and parcel of what we’re going to be talking about today.

Because as I said earlier, if you are not building a community around your business, then the other options you have is to kind of interrupt people, know, kind of go, hey, an ad. Here’s an ad. You know, here’s a pitch. Here’s a cold pitch. You’ve never heard of me before and now I’m in your LinkedIn. And that way is slow, expensive, and highly ineffective.

The better way is to borrow other people’s audiences which is what you can see here when we when we appear in the media when we appear on other people’s podcasts on other people’s stages in other people’s Zoom rooms we’re borrowing other people’s audiences and we’re oftentimes getting paid to build our leads, to build our audience, to build our community around us. So if we can start with some fundamentals with growing your influence and I strongly recommend that you do not decide that now is the time to get shy. If you are going to start a business and more to the point if you are going to continue in business for twelve months five years ten years hopefully forever after hopefully perhaps you might be happily unemployable like I am. the rest of your life then you’re going to have to get over your shyness or your self-consciousness because you in the spotlight is part and parcel of growing your social enterprise and building a community around you.

So what are we talking about when we talk about influence when we talk about reputation? We’re talking about leading with you. So what does that mean? In the age of AI, the danger is we outsource way too much of our power and we start to look like everybody else. What is the point of marketing? It’s standing out in a sea of sameness, right? When I go to the supermarket, I’ve got 30 options for different types of bread.

And that means that the branding is going to have to get better and better and better. Your point of difference, your differentiation, is going to have to get so good that you render your competitors irrelevant. So you want to make sure that your theory of change that Tom’s been talking about, your vision, your values, your mission, your densely branded language, which you know we can see all around us with politicians when people say to me what is densely branded language?

I say it’s kind of like what politicians do except more poetic, better. What do politicians do? They kind of repeat themselves. They create some kind of phrase and they repeat it and they repeat it and they repeat it and they repeat it and it becomes associated with them. So we’re not politicians thankfully, but what we’re trying to do with densely branded language is we’re trying to use certain phrases such as render your competitors irrelevant. I created that phrase and I use it repeatedly so that it becomes something that’s, you know, synonymous with me.

The second thing of course we’re trying to do is say something worth listening to. It’s super, super important that we do not outsource our creative thinking to, you know, a VA, chat chippy tea, or anyone else. Knowing our topic and being passionate about what we’re doing is absolutely fundamental.

And this is something that I ask of my coaching clients pretty much every day of the week. know how deep is your passion? How deep is your love for this? Can you pick five to seven topics related to your social enterprise idea and talk about them happily for the next 10 to 20 years? This is what I’m talking about when I say say something worth listening to. Some of what I’ve done in the last you know 13 or so years that I’ve been training is I teach people how to start a business quickly and easily.

People sometimes turn up with some pretty you know random ideas. They’re like my sister and I were doing a puzzle and we decided we were going to you know make puzzles. That was that’s our business idea and I’m like how deep is your enthusiasm for puzzles? Because you’re going to be talking about puzzles the next ten to twenty years. So make sure that whatever idea that you choose is something that’s got some depth to it. You know it’s not something that you kind of like the idea of or it looks glamorous or you think it’s a growing area or you think it’s a trend.

It has to be ideally something that you feel you know the depth of your curiosity the depth of your passion is going to drive you forward when you know times are tough when you kind of lost that loving feeling. Now what is branding and Tom touched on this it is repeatedly and consistently telling your story repeating yourself repeating yourself repeating yourself again. This is fundamental to retention. You’re going to hear me say the same thing in the next you know fifty or so minutes. Because if I say something once you’re going to forget it. So you’re going to have to hear me say the same thing from multiple different ways multiple different angles. So that you retain that information. This is not boring. This is necessary for retention.

Yeah this is necessary for us to be remembered. And then the final piece of the puzzle is building a body of work for people to go to. Is anyone here binged anything lately? Because maybe my Spotify habits gave you a bit of a hint but when I like something I really do have a hint. I love to thrash it. I love to find a Netflix series or some kind of box set and I’m just like it’s midnight and I’m like Brooke go to sleep it would be so smart to go to sleep right now.

This is what we do yeah when we find something that we’re interested in in 2025. So your your social enterprise your business it needs to have a body of work online so people can binge. I’m going to show you how to get started with that in our minimum viable marketing plan. So What is the minimum viable marketing plan? The minimum viable marketing plan is one piece of long form content published on your website every single month. Yeah, come rain, come hail, come shine.

This is hopefully easy because you’ve got plenty to say about your topic. And if you are studying something right now, if you are studying social enterprise or business or something else entirely, doesn’t matter what it is, know, acupuncture, whatever, then great, you’ve got an advantage. What I want you to think about is how do I take what I’m learning and put my study notes onto my website? Yeah. So one piece of long form content published on your website per month, every month, forever after.

This should be easy because your depth and your curiosity, your interest, your passion in your topic, you know, runs deep. So this doesn’t have to be written. could be video, long form video is maybe 10 to 20 minutes. It could be a podcast. It doesn’t have to be highly produced. have my own podcast. It’s, you know, it doesn’t have to be fancy. It doesn’t have to have all kinds of, you know, high production values. Then we’ve got one to two mass emails to your list. You’ve got something to email people about now because you’ve got your long form content, right? So that’s part and parcel of this second part, because this is your distribution. The third part again is also in effect, your distribution. it’s also your community.

Where is your community? Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, threads. I’ve been you know into threads a lot lately. I’ve been making a point of actually posting and not just reading. Telegram, WhatsApp, all these places are places where people are gathering. And then finally your life’s a pitch everyday reach outs to individuals. Now life’s a pitch is an attitude. Life’s a pitch is an attitude that we are all interconnected. That telepathy is not a reliable communication strategy. And that people are actually conspiring to help you out.

If only they knew who you were, knew what you wanted, knew what you were doing. Yeah? So life’s a pitch everyday reach out is making sure that you’re keeping up relationships with people. Now I’m not for a moment suggesting you need to go out five nights a week networking. Tom’s brilliant at networking. He’s a massive extrovert. I love people, but I only love the people that I love. And I can feel my life force getting sucked out of my chest sometimes. There’s definitely, you know, too much networking where I’m like, oh, kill me now. I just need a scotch in a dark room. So this is not about face-to-face networking.

This is about relationship building, which after all, is what community building is all about. So there’s more to it and there’s more detail in the minimum viable marketing plan. So if you do want to take a, if you do want to grab yourself a copy, there’s also a free video training for that minimum viable marketing plan to make it easy. But I want to go into a little bit more detail now as to, you know, what’s involved. So, and we are going to get into content themes in a second.

So every month you have a content theme that relates to what you’re selling. And you might be thinking, well, you know, it’s a social enterprise. Am I selling? Yes, because there’s an enterprise element. That’s my favorite part of, or not my favorite part, two equally fabulous parts. Enterprise means that we are selling and even if the commodity is other people’s attention, even if it’s crowdfunding, even if it’s I’m growing my email list, even if it’s you know sign this petition or you know please participate in this survey, it still requires you to sell.

You sell your children to eat their broccoli. You sell your friends to go to Vietnamese and not Thai. Yeah? Once you get to Vietnamese and you might persuade them to order the Vietnamese pancake and not the spring rolls really, because spring rolls, you know, pretty uninteresting. So you’ve got a content theme every single month. Now my content themes are up here on my wall. I produce those content themes. I wrote that thing about five years ago. I just cycled through it. So every May is about creativity. May starts tomorrow. April has been about packaging and positioning. So every piece of content that I create, ideally will relate to those content themes. Your email list is critical. Absolutely critical.

It has on average, a 4,200 % return on investment. There are some people that actually put a value. There are some people that put a value to email addresses. So how much is the business worth? Well, the business includes an email list and the our list is you know worth this much. Social media. think one of the things that we overlook with social especially if we’re a bit self conscious especially if social is a bit new to us we’re not we don’t really feel like we get it. It makes us feel like we’re back at high school. Maybe we’re a bit older. I don’t know.

We miss the fact that this is a great place for you to test ideas. It’s a great place for you to test marketing, test messaging, test ideal client group. you know, ask questions, like gather information. I am one of those weirdos who actually reads the comments on social media. I love reading the comments on social media because like what other way do we have of understanding other people’s ideas, other people’s minds, like the way other people tick. It’s such a privilege. And then the fourth part related to those everyday reach outs. We are not born well connected. I don’t know about you.

I wasn’t necessarily, yeah, I absolutely had some advantages, had a few connections, but we are all able to build a network. And if you find yourself miserable, you’ve probably seen that meme before. If you find every day a misery, look at who you’re surrounded by. You could be surrounded by assholes. Maybe you need to edit your network. Maybe you need to cut some people out. Maybe you need a divorce.

Who knows? Not for me to say. So let’s kick into saying something worth listening to. What does that mean? It sounds smart but what does it mean? It means putting and this is my blog that you’re looking at. It means putting more of yourself in your marketing. It means putting more of your opinions in your marketing. It means actually standing up, putting a stake in the ground and saying this is who I am.

This is what I stand for. This is what I stand against. It means like owning your opinion and not baying yourself out. Not being the elevator music of the internet. Yeah? Welcoming trolls and haters. Because if you got a troll or a hater, number one, it would be very rare. If you got a troll or a hater, congratulations. Call me, let’s have a celebratory drink. It means you’ve actually reached a certain level. visibility. I have had next to no trolls and next to no haters over the last 17 years, 16 years of posting on the internet. So the point that I’m trying to make is stop playing it safe.

I don’t know about you but I am bored to tears of a lot of the marketing I see. I just kind of read it and my eyes blaze over. I spend all day every day on the internet and like Tom was saying earlier You know, we have short attention spans, say something worth listening to, nail my attention, you know, pull me in from my brain rotting scroll and say something that’s actually exciting or different or interesting. All right. So all of those blog posts that I just cycled through, all of them related to self-employment, digital marketing and sales. Yeah? And they were all opinionated.

They were all kind of you know story led. They were all had myself kind of weaved throughout it. So the point is your five to seven content pillars are the thing that you do. Yeah? And start with the bleeding obvious. Start with the bleeding obvious. You want to make sure it relates to the thing that you do. But the hook is at the top. the story is at the top. This is the bit that pulls you in.

So I could I could write a blog post on rock climbing which I have. I could write a a blog post on Leonard Cohen and Björk which I have because like I said I like to impose my musical taste on people. But it all comes back to those five to seven content pillars. Digital marketing. Business. know self employment. Etc. Etc. So Another hint with your content pillars and please I can see some people taking notes. I hope that you are taking notes to actually write down those content pillars.

A hint with this is it has to be more than one word because as Tom was talking about we need to be specific. Yeah. One word is way too broad. One word is irrelevant because it will pull in all kinds of people that have nothing to do with your audience. Yeah. So it’s going to have to have two to three words probably to give it a little bit of specificity, but still make it broad enough that you could write on that topic for the next five, 10, 20 years. You could produce content, you could record videos, you could record podcasts.

Now the other thing that I love about what I do, that the one thing, you know, that one of the things that really gets me excited about self-employment. that I can make something out of nothing and I do all the time. I can wake up in the morning have a shower the shower gods visit and say Brooke what about this? And I go ah brilliant idea and I go on the internet and I create the thing with words and then perhaps maybe I start selling it that afternoon. So this is entirely possible.

This is you know what we’re doing right? We’re making something out of nothing. But I want you to think about not just today, not just now, but what’s my long view on things? Yeah. Cause today, now I’m interested in ricotta recipes. I bought some ricotta from Harris farm. It’s on the turn. It needs to be used. So I’m Googling ricotta recipes. I want to know, you know, what I can do with this ricotta so that my partner teasing me about how it was a terrible idea to buy it doesn’t turn out to be true. But I don’t want to be known for Ricotta right?

Like there’s a long game here. What do you what do you want to be doing? What do you want people to talk about at Eulogy? What is the legacy you want to leave behind? What is the thing that breaks your heart about the world? What is the thing that boils your blood? So for new marketers who are, you know, don’t really, they’re kind of feeling like a massive fish out of water. A really good starting point is the how-to content.

The internet is full of how-to content. How to start a social enterprise, how to build an online community, how to start an email list, how to create a website, how to do minimum viable marketing, how to start a social enterprise quickly and easily. to start a business on a week in a weekend. Yeah. Give us a tip. Give us a micro transformation. A lot of modern day marketing is generous spirited. is educational. Yeah.

Modern day marketing is content marketing and content marketing is inherently generous. We’re away everything. If you sell services especially you’re selling promises. I’m selling something physical like a pencil or a lipstick you know I can we can look at it we can touch it we can smell it we can go is that my shade I don’t know does it look good against my skin I’m not sure what’s the price okay yeah maybe yeah okay I’m buying it if I’m selling services if I’m selling something intangible you know I sold coaching what is coaching it’s talking If we’re selling services, we’re selling promises, we need to educate people on what it is. We need to give it all away.

We need to demonstrate that we know what we’re doing. We need to demonstrate that our particular way of doing it is better or more relevant or more powerfully specific than the next person. And then of course storytelling which is learned lessons from lived experiences told in stories. Now, on the other end of the spectrum, we’ve also got story content. Tom touched on this earlier. Stories are absolutely fundamental.

We love to kind of give things a new sexy name and, you know, pretend that they’re new. They’re not. We’ve been, you know, telling stories for years. This is how we keep culture. Before we wrote things down, we sung and we told stories to remember. So this is what differentiates you from Chachipiti. You have to weave your story throughout so that there’s something distinctly you about that piece of marketing. There’s something distinctly you about that piece of value, that piece of online.

Why content? Why content correlates symptoms with the deeper underlying causes? So this is specifically fabulous for social enterprise, but for any business. What are the, you know, the surface level symptoms are the least interesting part. It’s the deeper underlying causes that help people really see and understand and that differentiate you. The insight bond content that reframes perspectives.

then finally the scenario or the identifier content you know so this is the stuff that calls people in yeah if you are you know are you blah blah blah blah blah it’s it’s the stuff where somebody goes they they get in contact with me and they say it’s like you’re squatting in my head I don’t understand it’s like you could read my thoughts I don’t know you know were you reading my thoughts so feel free to take a screenshot of slide because it is a bit dense. but this is a kind of a grab bag to kick off your imagination. So you’ve got your five to seven content pillars which is the kind of parameters the sides of the river. The river bank. Of what you’re going to be talking about 3D marketing.

And then I want you to look through the lens of what do your ideal clients desperately need to know and why do they need to know it? Just because you think it’s interesting and you think it’s important doesn’t mean it is. You’ve got to actually show me and connect the dots so that I’m going to sit up and pay attention. What do people commonly misunderstand? Why is it important for you to correct this?

People commonly think that starting a business is expensive. It’s laborious. It requires you to do three incubators and spend a lot of time and talk a lot. It doesn’t. Why is it important for you to correct this? Because that stops people from starting. That stops people from actually earning money today in their brand new business. What breaks your heart and why should your ideal clients care? It breaks my heart that more people are stuck in jobs that they hate, wanting to start a business, intending to start a business, gonna start a business, could or would or should have started a business, but just never quite get around to it.

Because they keep listening to the people that say it’s very difficult, it’s very complicated, very stressful, very you know, you’re have to be very motivated. I’m as motivated as a bloody wet sock. What hill would you die on? Why is this important? What’s the bigger picture and the ripple effect of this? Yeah? So what do you feel really strongly about? And again, it has to you have to make it relevant to me. Your cause is not self evident.

There is nothing more. wasteful than somebody that comes up and says hey you know save the whatever the the gnats save the leeches the leeches are dying you know and I’m like I don’t give a **** about the leeches just don’t so we’ve got to make sure that we’re actually making it relevant for people and that we’re in the right room talking to the right people. What change do you want to see? Why should we care? What do you rant and rave about? You’ve had a few drinks on a Saturday.

You start on that story. You start your rant. Your partner starts kicking you under the table. Your friend’s eyes glaze over because they’ve heard it a thousand times. That is a clue for you as to what you actually care about, your passion. And what wakes your ideal clients up at 2 a.m. that relates to what you do? It’s likely different. from your actual focus. Yeah. Cause of course what is communication? What is marketing? What is communication?

We’re trying to meet in the middle. We can’t just kind of stand over here shouting and hope that people engage with us. We have to understand how we meet them in the middle. Alright, so I want to talk briefly about my influence framework and this kind of brings that omni-channel approach together. So we start with our owned media. This is our once a month, every month, come rain, hail or shine, I’m posting. I’ve got a piece of long form content. This is my online body of work, my binge worthy resource that I’m building over time. And then we have search everything optimization. It’s 2025.

Somebody just reached out to me and said, I found you on chat GPT. So that’s cool. So we’re not just searching on Google anymore. We’re searching in AI, we’re searching on social media, we’re searching with Siri and with Alexa and all the others. And so what does this do? Well, if we’re building a resource, an online website that’s full of information over time, relates to our key topics that we’ve defined for ourselves then this is going to help us be found. This is how Macquarie Group found me, this is how Dakin Air Conditioning found me. They came through Google. Everybody Googles.

My GP Googles while I’m sitting in front of her. Then we have public relations and social media and we’ve got a bit of an intersection here, yeah. We’ve got a bit of cross over here because this absolutely definitely helps our credibility and helps our authority. I have had journalists find me through Google and I’ve also had journalists find me through Facebook groups. Oh I’m going in the wrong direction.

Finally this is our life’s a pitch. Remember I said life’s a pitch. What are we doing? We’re borrowing other people’s audiences. We’re building our own audience. We’re building our own network. We’re creating partnerships which means we’re able to do way more with way less. We’re able to reach volumes. rather than do everything slowly which is all by ourselves. And so over time this is how things connect and add up to influence.

This is an omnichannel approach to marketing which is you know this feeling of like you’re everywhere. People I was interviewed on a podcast this morning and this woman who I’ve meeting for the first time before she interviews me she says you’re busy and I’m like really and she’s like, well, you look busy. I’m like, it’s just marketing, isn’t it? It’s just being everywhere. Alright. Attitude upgrade. Last part.

and then hopefully I’ll give us some space for Q &A so please go ahead and type your questions in the chat. Don’t be shy about doing that now. Um as I said earlier building an audience around your business is part and parcel of being a founder. Now hopefully you’re not a psychopath and you actually like people. You’re interested in people. You don’t have to love all people because that would make you weird. But you’d like people. Yeah. And so what are we doing with business building?

We’re trying to gather that email list. We’re trying to build that email list, build those social media communities, build the word on the street, build the recognition. So somebody sees your face and they’re like, I know you? I’m like, I’m on the internet. I don’t know. Have we met? I’m not sure. Now, talked a lot a little bit about this already in the age of information that commodity is attention and it is the most precious thing. Yeah? It is the most precious thing. Other people’s attention.

Money is way less precious than time. Right? So it is a privilege to do this en masse. So here is your here is your challenge if you will. If sales and marketing are essential to building an enterprise, essential to staying in business, essential to being able to enjoy all the perks, yeah, if sales and marketing are critical to that, then you can do it with resentment and snobbery and embarrassment, or you can do it with joy. Yeah, I don’t know about you, but I’d rather actually enjoy the process because it can be of the most fun, one of the most creative things that you do.

Because marketing is creativity meets empathy. Yeah? Meets that kind of what are other people interested in? What are other people fascinated by? What are my you know what are my people obsessed with right now? So it is a lot of fun when we embrace this. When we recognise this can be one of the most creatively satisfying things that you can do and it also just happens to be highly profitable as well.

Alright, a myth. You do not need to have a large audience. The first year that I earned over six figures, I took home over six figures. I had an email list maybe of about a thousand email addresses which is quite small for a business. You do not need to be an influencer. you do not need to try to be an influencer. Yeah.

You can do very well with a small audience. Way more important than the audience size is your ability to actually make people feel something. Yeah. Your ability to make them feel something so that they will take an action. Now, there are 25,000 reasons to be fearful. And I am not without fear. Yeah. Every time I go to stand on stage I think is today the day that I shit my pants for the first time or will I vomit? Don’t know. Maybe I’ll do both.

But the point is not that you know you feel fearful, you feel uncertain, you feel insecure, you feel self-conscious. This is normal. How can you be confident about something you’ve never done? Right? No one feels confident about something that they’re new to. But the point is we put fear in the back seat and we’re in the driver’s seat. Because when we let fear kind of take the reins and drive the car, we give away our power. We give away our joy. We give away the satisfaction that comes from having made a real impact in the world with our very own social enterprise.

Now, what you’re doing with marketing is you’re trying to make people feel something. they don’t feel something they won’t act. Yeah? If if you’re only rational and you’re only logical then they’re going to say oh that’s nice. If you if you post stuff on the internet which makes them feel good and they go oh that’s nice. Scroll click yeah? If you want them to actually do something get off the couch you know sign something buy something actively make a change gotta get emotional.

You’ve gotta have that kind of it you know exchange of energy through a screen. And hopefully you’re feeling my energy right now right? It doesn’t have to be a face to face warm bodies in a room thing. You absolutely definitely can do this through the written word through audio through video you know through digital marketing. Your story is your asset and digital marketing is how you leverage this.

There is something unique about your story. Your story cannot be replicated. Yeah. I mentioned being a tour leader in Cambodia and Vietnam. I wove into conversation about having a background in PR, having young kids, running away from them in order to run courses into state. This is kind of done in a very deliberate way and if you’ve heard me talk before you might be aware of those details already. Yeah, you’ve gotta tell your story repeatedly to audiences tiny and vast.

And then I think this is the final slide. Second last slide. Modesty is dangerous. It’s a learned affectation. I don’t care about imposter syndrome. I think imposter syndrome is like the tip of the iceberg. Imposter syndrome, is, you know, this desire to kind of hold ourselves back all the time. And if you’re anything like me, you know, my parents are somewhat appalled, at least initially. that their daughter was a digital marketer.

They couldn’t quite believe the fact that I was on the internet saying, hey, look at me. Yeah, because this is my background and this is a lot of our backgrounds. Whatever culture, whatever subculture, whatever family, you know, you were born into, a lot of us were socialized to let our work speak for ourself. Don’t stand out. Don’t put your, you know, neck up. Wait. Earn your rights. know, earn your, you know, be diligent. in the hours etc etc etc. This is not just wrong, this is dangerous.