Hey, it's Samantha Hartley of the Profitable Joyful Consulting podcast. And today I'm talking with you about strategic visibility. This season is about business growth strategies, and being more visible is a great way to grow your business and if it sounds a little bit like isn't visibility marketing? It is. But this is more the idea behind marketing rather than the specific tactics that you might choose.

So why is it important for you to be visible in general? Well, obviously it's so that your audience finds out who you are. Back at the Coca-Cola Company, they had a metric for brands, one of them, it's called TOMA, Top Of Mind Awareness. So if you say name a soft drink, are we the number one when that's mentioned? And if you just think about it with brands that you know, like name a jeans brand, name an SUV brand, name a search engine, name a famous movie star, all of the names that come to you, top of mind, say something about the brand of that particular person or company.

And so what's important for you is that we want you to have a high top of mind awareness in your niche for your audience. We want them to learn if they need a leadership consultant or a finance person or if they need help with their IT, we want you to come to mind for them. So another term for my time in the field at the Coca-Cola Company was ubiquity. The brand needed to be everywhere, ubiquitous. And I think that's an overwhelming prospect for a lot of consultants. The idea that we need to be everywhere, but it's not everywhere, everywhere. It's everywhere your target audience is looking for someone like you or is spending time and so they might encounter you and that can be offline at networking events or at conferences or speaking wherever they're congregating offline as well as online in our social media channels and online networking events and online conferences and things like that. So ubiquity doesn't mean you need to be everywhere, because I think a lot of people find that overwhelming and so they do nothing out of overwhelm, they really do nothing or so little that it might as well be nothing. The thing is, I don't think the consultants that I'm working with or that I encounter feel like they are not visible, but they're constantly getting the feedback of, oh, wow, I never heard of you or wow you're a well-kept secret and that's pretty frustrating. If you have been consistently marketing yourself and you keep getting this well I've never heard of you kind of feedback, then you have to wonder, like how much more visible do I need to be?

And the truth is, you need to be way, way more visible than you think. You have to put yourself in way more places than you think. And I think that the reason that I wanted to talk about this topic today isn't that you don't know what to do. It's that the magnitude of visibility as a strategy is so important and shifting your beliefs and your actions around visibility are what I want you to do as a result of hearing this today.

So let's first talk about why we're not as visible as we should be. I think obviously, fear. It is scary to be as visible as we need to be. To be in all of those places, to put yourself out there and though the extent to which you're out there is probably the extent to which that's within your comfort zone or just the extent to which you can keep up with it, because let's be honest, a lot of content has to be created, a lot of promotion of that content then happens. So there is a certain amount of effort that goes into this. But more often, what I see limiting the consultants that I know are definitely concerns about what will happen if I'm as visible as I need to be. So you might have heard of Tall Poppy Syndrome. It's this idea that if the flower that grows above all the rest of them it's easy to have its head chopped off. One of the top concerns for CEOs, this is of corporations. If you ask them about what their top fear or concern is, it's fraudulence. Not that they would commit fraud, but that they might be fraudulent, so it's imposter syndrome. So if you imagine that CEOs of major companies have imposter syndrome, then of course, if you come down to individuals like us, all of us have a little bit of that insecurity, fraudulence complex, imposter syndrome, all of those kinds of things that limit us from being as visible as we need to be.

So I talked a little bit about limiting beliefs before. We'll keep talking about those and definitely we talked about self-sabotage. And I do think not being as visible as you need to be is a sabotage strategy because you do a lot of work and you have tons of value to share and then not putting that out there for people to figure out, for them to discover is sabotaging you. It's not allowing you to be as big as you can be because our audience doesn't have psychic powers. They're not going to just find you, stumble across you one day and be like, oh, how wonderful, that we have to put ourselves on that path for them to stumble upon. We have to put ourselves out there. So why don't we? Well, obviously, if it's fears and limiting beliefs, there's a lot of work to be done on that. But I think among the easiest things that you can do is hook into every single day your why, why are you doing this? Why is that important for you to be visible? Why do you want to be seen? Tap into that world changing piece of you. And I sometimes have it on a world-changing level, but a lot of times I will connect to my why on an individual level I think about one individual that I worked with and being in her home with her family and how important it was for her to grow her business. And I think if I can just do that one more time with one more person, it really helps me to get myself out of me and my concerns and onto those like Amy that I can help. I want to find other Amy's going to find other Cheryls who would find others like they're out there for me. And so when I'm feeling like this is a really scary thing to do, I think “Amy needs you. Cheryl can't find you if you're hiding out.” So think about ways that you can hook into your audience and those inspiring clients who pull you out of yourself.

There are negative models out there who are doing visibility wrong and if you see it, it can deter you from wanting to do it as well. And this can be somebody who just splashes posts the exact same verbatim thing onto 50 channels all at once on the same day or just repeatedly does that in a way that doesn't add value. It can be someone who goes from emailing their list once a month to suddenly like, oh, I'm going to try a daily email strategy. And they email every single day until they get burned out after six days and then they stop doing that.

So, yes, there are negative models of this, but you're not going to do that. This is not who you are and what I think can work best for us is to commit to one channel, commit to one thing that you're going to do and then realize whatever you do, you have to promote, ok? So if you're going to write a blog post because blogging is going to be your thing that you're going to do. You've got to promote every single blog post you write on all your social channels. So remember ubiquity, that blog post has to be ubiquitous on all those channels because people don't have psychic powers and they really don't use RSS feeds anymore. So they're not going to come back to your blog unless you tell them about it. So we've got to go to them. The podcast, I create these episodes, but then also I promote every single episode on my social media channels. That's the only way that people would find out about them. Yeah, it's in the podcast app yes, but we can't rely on the podcast app. We have to do the work to promote the things that we've done. Back to my former employer, the Coca-Cola Company, when they did an Olympics or any other sponsorship, so they were Olympic sponsors. There's squillions of dollars in that sponsorship, they did a one to one match. So if there is ten million dollars sponsoring a thing, they would do ten million dollars minimum to promote the thing that they sponsored. Okay, so they're not saying we're just riding on the sponsorship itself. So that means if you've done a new video and you put it on your YouTube channel, you have to put as much effort into promoting that video as you did into creating it. Makes sense, right? So that's the way you'll amplify everything you do. Just think of it as a creation and then an amplification or promotion of it.

That way you are beginning to be as visible as you need to be. I know you think, “But the video was the visibility.” Now we have to tell people about it so that we're truly visible. When you're being visible, what you're being visible with most often is your content or your brand message or some other way that you're bringing value to those who notice you. So if you become visible to them, they see something of value and that's how you begin to be top of mind. They begin to learn you and have expectations of you. Remember, in your brand, we want to have what do you want to be known for? You are communicating, this is how I want you to think of me, this is what I want to be known for and as you're putting that out there remember that video is really supreme. If you can do that in video content, it's actually the best possible way to do it.

0And the second-best way it's going to be with photographs that can be images of you or of the value you bring. And then after that, remember your brand name, branded language. Things that they can begin to learn and associate with you, and that way your visibility begins to build traction right? It's like, oh, I've seen that person before I remember that video content, I remember she talks about these things, things like that. You want to create this kind of body of work that begins to teach people who you are. You know a crazy and unexpected way that I like to see people be visible is by giving reviews and testimonials, especially video so if you've used someone's services or products and you can make a video testimonial about them, then you're associated with success. You've had success with something you're giving a happy review and it communicates generosity. There is always really wonderful things that come across in that. So I've always had a good experience with doing this. And I've also noticed this for my clients and colleagues who talk about doing it, it's an unexpected way for you to communicate your brand value by endorsing another brand. I've been working for a while on an e-learning project and in my work with my client Jessica, on something entirely different, I'm building her consultancy. I will sometimes mention that work and she now has an opportunity to do e-learning. So she wrote to me yesterday and said because of your work on that one, you're now the go-to e-learning person for me. And here's the truth. I'm not the go-to e-learning person in the world, but for my client, I am. And that's really the goal of our visibility is you're not going to be "The Premier Go-To" whatever you are for the entire planet, just for your audience.

So when you're thinking about the intention behind your strategic visibility, that's what I want you to think of. You want to build your identity as the go-to person for your people in your niche and I find that seems a lot more doable. I hope I have inspired you today to get out from behind your desk, to make more videos and in general to be more visible to your clients. I'm Samantha Hartley, I wish you a profitable and joyful consulting business, and I will see you next time.