Can you build a brand without spending all your time on social media
Mia Feilman: Most marketing has the shelf life of a trending sound. This is Got Marketing where we unpack campaigns, marketing news and what actually sticks. Hello friend and welcome m back to Got Marketing. The women I meet have a love hate relationship with social media. They don't want to be chronically online. They have no desires to be a influencer or creator. And the most common question that I am asked after what is a marketing campaign Is can I build a brand without spending all of my time on social media? That is legitimately the second most common question I'm asked and the answer is yes. And we are actually going to cover that in today's episode.
Got Marketing welcomes Ellen Hooper for a chat about entrepreneurship
Joining me today for this chat we have Ellen Hooper who is the founder of the Corporate Escapees club. She's an executive coach helping people who have left corporate to start small businesses like she did a few years ago. She is also a Ripple Festival speaker, uh, this year talking about equal parenting. And she also happens to be all one of my favourite people. So welcome to Got Marketing, Ellen.
Ellen Hooper: What an intro. Normally I'm really cringing through an intro, but that was lovely. Thank you.
Mia Feilman: Aw, I'm glad, I'm glad it was off the cuff too, which I think is nicer rather than a scripted intro, don't you think?
Ellen Hooper: Yeah.
Mia Feilman: Yeah.
Ellen Hooper: It definitely feels less like a weird award ceremony that you're there for.
Mia Feilman: Yeah. And that you wrote your own intro as well. Yeah.
You've been running your business for five years
All right. So, uh, how long have you been running your business for? I should. Five years.
Ellen Hooper: Five years.
Mia Feilman: Five years.
Ellen Hooper: I know I should celebrate. I'm always telling my clients to celebrate and I'm. I've written a list of people to bring to my business birthday party but I haven't quite got there yet. Yeah.
Mia Feilman: Also like, we are already off topic. Go us. I don't like doing things that other people do. So if I'm going to celebrate a birthday, it has to be in a really creative, me, uh, out of the box way and I ain't got the energy for that right now.
Ellen Hooper: I am completely fine with doing things like everyone else does sometimes.
Mir has been using social media to grow his small business since 2010
Okay, so what was your love hate
Mia Feilman: relationship with social media before you built the business?
Ellen Hooper: It's so funny because it didn't occur to me to use social media in my business for like multiple years. And I think that's a big part of, you know, my background is legal into hr, so I've spent a lot of time kind of on the running of businesses but not on the kind of bringing in of revenue. And that's one of the big reasons I've loved working with you Mir is because I have this massive marketing black hole of knowledge information, which has been great because I don't have any outsized concepts about what marketing means. I only know about marketing in the particular example of my business and a small business life. So my relationship with social media for business was kind of non existent. It just seemed like things that other people did and it's been really interesting. Five years later, I speak to lots of people looking to start businesses and they think that Instagram is the place that's going to make them a million bucks.
Mia Feilman: Yeah.
Ellen Hooper: And it's not.
Mia Feilman: It's not, it's not anymore. Maybe in 2010, like it was so easy to grow organically on social media, particularly Instagram, and you could build to 10,000 followers, no problem.
Ellen Hooper: Now what I hear and what I
Mia Feilman: experience is, you know, if you grow by a couple of hundred followers a year organically, you are doing extremely well. Like it is such a stagnant growth. Growth platform.
Ellen Hooper: Absolutely. Like I'm three years in with 3500 followers and that has felt like this huge slog. Um, and if I look at how much money that like blood, sweat and tears has brought into my business, it's probably 15%.
Mia Feilman: Yeah.
Ellen Hooper: Right.
Mia Feilman: Yeah.
Ellen Hooper: Ah.
Marketing without social media is possible, but it depends on your business model
Mia Feilman: So I've spoken about this topic before on this podcast and the previous episode, which the listener can go back and listen to. The topic was marketing without social media. But I actually think a more accurate way to frame this conversation is marketing without reliance on social media. Because I believe that as a marketer, I live in the real world, you do need some social media, but you don't need to build your entire business on it. Do you agree with that?
Ellen Hooper: Yeah. And I would say certain business models can exist without social media at all. Particularly my clients in corporate Escapees club are people who've come out of corporate, they've built their own businesses, they tend to be consultants of various kinds. Risk consultants, HR consultants, recruitment consultants. And those businesses can actually survive without websites. Mhm. Because it's such a different business model.
Mia Feilman: I don't want to hear it.
Ellen Hooper: I don't want to hear it, Ellen. I'm not saying they should.
Mia Feilman: Good.
Ellen Hooper: But it is possible because you're. It's just a business model where you're looking to get what, maybe three clients a year, all paying you like hopefully six figures to do a big piece of work in a way that keeps you busy, hopefully for three days a week. So yeah, you can absolutely run a business without social media, but it can't be a B2C business. Like if you're, if you're trying to sell high volume to individuals, then it's very hard to do that without a social presence. I love this.
Mia Feilman: Take that your business model determines your marketing strategy as opposed to this. You know, all advice is right for everyone. And so if you are somebody who doesn't enjoy social media, creating videos, creating reels, making the storeys, posting on LinkedIn, then all hope is not lost. You just need to look at your business model. And to your point, I was just thinking about when you were talking about the consultants makes so much sense to me because say you leave corporate and you become a communications consultant and you're working with the brand manager, marketing director, uh, at a corporate. They're not on social media. The senior brand manager of Maybelline New York is not on Instagram every day. She might have a personal account and it's probably a private account.
Ellen Hooper: Yes. And so it's like what she looking out on there. And this is the thing about, I uh, do think if you want to sell products, I think if you want to sell something less than a hundred dollars, then Instagram's a great place to do it. And the thing I'm really interested in is when I'm talking to people who are kind of looking at leaving behind their corporate lives, there's this big skew towards thinking that that's the pathway for them, that that's what they're going to need to do or want to do, like start an Instagram about account, build an Instagram following. And that's a good pathway if you do want to grow a membership or a community. But I think when you're, until you're in the game, you don't know how much smoke and mirrors and outright lying is kind of happening out there. So I think the person who you're like following and I'm um, really impressed by, firstly, social media wants us to put everything into a 60 second, down to 30 seconds, down to 10 second snippet. So if I'm on there telling you I have a million dollar business, I don't have time to also tell you that I'm spending 900 grand to keep it running. I don't have the time to also tell you that it took me five years of making 15 grand of income a year to get to that stage.
Mia Feilman: I think you're being very generous with the uh, oh, I didn't have time to tell you that versus I decided not to share that with you because it doesn't fit the narrative. Of me being an overnight success. And if you work with me, you will be too.
Ellen Hooper: Yeah. I'm so curious at people who have very marketable, useful consulting skills, not seeing that as a viable pathway that it really is for them. And look, I've just drunk the Kool Aid a bit too. You know, about two years into my business, the most lucrative, the most financially successful part of my business was the first two years just doing solid consulting and executive coaching. I, uh, opened zero up. And I was like, God, those are good days. I was having a look, you know, I managed to double my salary in the first year of running a consulting business.
Mia Feilman: And what marketing did you do for that B2B business?
Ellen Hooper: Yes. So I had an approach of like referral based, but also a strategy I think too many people leave on the table, which is who gets inquiries about the type of work that I want to do that they don't want to do. So good. So so much of my business in the first year came through employment lawyers because employment lawyers get asked like, is this thing legal? He's doing lots of restructures and change management and then the client's like, so stressed and they're like, help us, help us have the conversations with the employees. Uh, you know, our people are mad at us, like, help us. And the employment lawyer's like, we don't know what to do about that. And so I got a lot of referrals that way. So I had a very basic website which did the classic thing I think a lot of businesses do at the start, it listed my 9,000 different services that I could offer. And most of my work came through word of mouth. And the one thing I did do that really works for me because I like writing, I'm quite extroverted and I'm quite happy for you to give me a microphone. So I challenge myself to post on LinkedIn every day, but I would just do that from my phone in a 15 minute time slot. And that's why that strategy worked for me. It wasn't particularly strategic. It was just this idea that people in my network would remember who I was and what I was doing.
Mia Feilman: So good, so clever. I really love that point about who's getting inquiries for work that they don't want to do that I can do. And I can think about so many useful examples that so a, ah, website designer that doesn't do SEO, copywriting or keyword research, you could become their strategic partner. If you are an SEO writer working with that, uh, web design agency. I know that there are Agencies who don't run campaigns, they just, they do more always on marketing. They do monthly social media retainers, monthly emails, but then they would bring someone like me in to run the campaign. So it makes so much more sense to, to do that referral based work.
Ellen Hooper: So good because so many people try to get referrals from their competitors or spend a lot of time with their competitors. And I think there's some real benefits to a shared understanding. It's a nice place to, you know, to share the up and down of uh, business. But I think you will get overflow work from someone who does the same work as you like really once every two years. And so you're much better to try to get referrals from people who, it's like, who are your clients going to trust?
Event networking for sure. I get so much work from events when I go
Mia Feilman: Okay, so you, what else did you do in the B2B side business? And then we'll talk about what you do now that you also have a B2C business.
Ellen Hooper: I mean in a lot of ways that was kind of it. Uh, and when I would get close to coming to the end of a project, I would ask my current client if they knew anyone else that I should meet. And that was a really good way to get warm introductions with someone once again that my prospective client would trust. And that was kind of it. I have always been a fan of and it kind of works for me personality wise to do things like go to events and meet new people. So that's always been kind of part of my process quite organically though. But yeah, referrals were just my biggest source of work.
Mia Feilman: I get so much work from events when I go, but I live nowhere near where most of the events are. And um, I've actually started to put like a line item in my budget of travel to go to Melbourne and Brisbane. And I haven't been to Sydney in a long time because I know how beneficial it is to go to those events. It costs me a lot more than it does cost you to go to a Melbourne event. But yeah, I can get so much work from that in person. Event networking for sure.
In Corporate Escapees Club, we help people find their right approach to business development
Before we get back to the chat, I wanted to ask whether uh, all those courses, digital products and lead magnets have actually helped you make better business decisions or are you still making all the important ones inside your own head? I started the Village for female founders who want clever, kind, experienced women around them when the decision actually matters. People who will challenge your thinking, share what they know, make useful introductions and tell you what they really think. Plus me obviously reading the documents, reviewing the work, doing the research and occasionally ruining an idea before you waste money on it. That's the Village. If that sounds like the kind of room you've been missing, you can find the village@campaigndelmar.com. are, uh, you also seeing in the Corporate Escapees club just a lack of. Not a lack of, but just an absolute disdain for doing any sort of outreach, for asking for a referral, for, you know, just set picking up the phone and calling someone and saying, do you know anyone that might be right? Do you know any barristers? Do you know any? Yeah, I know. You seem so comfortable doing that. Like that's every second thing I see from you is, hey, do you know this person?
Ellen Hooper: Yeah, I do like to do that. In Corporate Escapees Club, we do two things that are really important to help people find their right approach to business development. Because in that consulting world, that's what we're doing. We're developing business. We're not necessarily selling in the same way that we're kind of selling in B2C. And so the first thing we do is the kind of Pareto principle, this concept that 20% of your effort gets 80% of your results. Very simple exercise. On the left hand side, you write down all the activity, all the kind of business development, marketing, sales activities you've done over the last 12 months. And on the right hand side, you write down your biggest wins, your biggest clients, where they've come from. When I did that in my first year of business, the biggest client that my business had successfully won that year came from a conversation with a dad in a playground.
Mia Feilman: No way. That's so good.
Ellen Hooper: Because in Corporate Escapees Club, so m, much of our focus is on doing less stuff that doesn't matter. Yeah, comparison is huge. You know, we get so much like, oh, well, I just saw someone else who kind of runs a similar business to me and they just hired two staff. Should I be hiring two staff? I just saw someone else who's got cool merch. Like, should I have cool merch?
Mia Feilman: Oh, uh, they wrote a book. Should I write a book?
Ellen Hooper: So firstly, like, so normal. And we keep coming back to like, but does it fit your personality profile? So then the second thing we do is we do do personality profiling and I kind of have this concept. It's my, it's my ip. I do a lot of training with corporates, law firms, professional services, consultants on this. But it's like there's four kind of quadrants of selling. There's a driver, which is me, thought leadership, give Me a microphone, put me on podcast, take me to an event. That's strategic. Love it. There's the connectors. They want to host groups, they want to have lunches, they want to hang out. There's the nurturers. They're like, do not put me in a networking room. I would like to have coffee with five people I know very well. And then there's the experts who are like, I'm going to produce a white paper, I'm going to be published in a journal. And it's just knowing which type of sales you like and then literally just doing that and not doing anything else.
Mia Feilman: I feel like I'm a mix of all four of those.
Ellen Hooper: Yeah, that's because you're so skilled.
Mia Feilman: Oh. Oh, thank you. I don't think that's true. I just think I haven't looked at it carefully enough. Great exercise though.
Ellen Hooper: It's good.
Mia Feilman: I mean, you work with many women like I do, but why does reaching out to someone you already know feel so much harder than posting to a feed full of strangers?
Ellen Hooper: It's the same reason though, that Big l' Oreal and Pepsi and Apple can get stuck in trying to acquire new customers instead of retain current ones. Even though we know retention's cheaper and has the biggest return on investment. I think sometimes it feels boring. And I just also think as women, we just like hate centering ourselves and asking for help. So we do a lot of work around how can you show up and how can you outreach in a way that centres the other person? How can you do it at a pace that works for you? So for my clients who really hate the idea of selling, like, the strategy we, uh, develop with them is we are not selling anything in outreach. Just, like, literally think of five people who you genuinely are. Like, I haven't spoken to you for a long time. I really would like to know how you are and when you're busy with work and you have no desperate energy, just ask them how they are. Like, that's it. It's such a numbers game. And just keeping your network warm in an authentic way is super useful.
Mia Feilman: Yeah. The amount of opportunities that have come out from, hey, can we just catch up and see how you're doing? I, uh, see your repositioning your business. I'm available to have a 30 minute chat and then by the end of the call they're like, oh, by the way, I'd actually really like to join marketing circle. I'm like, oh, well, okay. Uh, sounds fantastic.
Beyond referrals, you also have some other tricks in your bag
Like, you know, it doesn't always happen. Clearly. But it's crazy what happens when people feel that you are inviting them into your world and that you are making them feel quite chosen and thought of.
Ellen Hooper: And I think it's just about being authentic about that. Like, I'm quite direct. So I'm happy to have a strategy which some of my clients are too, which is to actually go, oh, I haven't had any work, come in for a bit and reach out to people and go, I would like to work with you. Yeah, been thinking about you. I would actually like to work with you. Some of my clients, like, give me a vomit bag. I just can't.
Mia Feilman: Yeah.
Ellen Hooper: Uh, and I'm not a big fan of pushing through that stuff energetically. I feel like you just end up with bad results and feeling sick. So it's just about finding strategies that work best. And the other thing people massively overthink is I don't believe in being too strategic with our connections because I can go. I went to an event randomly two years ago and, um, that turned into a client today. And people recommend me even if they've not got literally zero use of my services ever. So. So all connections are useful connections if you're not an asshole.
Mia Feilman: Exactly. That's so true. I think we need to think about our audience, not only as prospective customers, but as evangelists. There are people in my community that have come to so many events, that listen to my podcast, that reply to every email that, um, they have a full time marketing job. They're probably never going to work with me, but they refer me to so many people. That relationship is equally important to nurture. Like, and, and I've never paid them a dollar for those referrals. Beyond referrals, you also have some other tricks in your bag. Guess they're not tricks. Um, strategies. Mia, by the way, I did drop a kettlebell on my pinky finger today and I'm currently icing it, so I'm not at my best.
You do direct outreach and you also do guest masterclasses
But you do direct outreach, which we talked about, but you also do guest masterclasses, which I'm interested in talking about with you, and plugging into existing communities like mine, Marketing Circle, which is becoming the Village. So, yeah, can you talk through how this has worked for you in practise?
Ellen Hooper: It's taken me a while to get sophisticated at it and there's a bit of a dual focus. You know, part of my business is a speaking business, so, uh, from time to time I get paid to speak. Very few people make full incomes from
Mia Feilman: just speaking, despite what Instagram will have
Ellen Hooper: you believe 100%, unless you're an Australian of the Year or an ex cricket captain. Um, so when I do masterclasses or when I go and speak to a group, firstly, I just really enjoy it. Secondly, I don't find it takes a lot of effort for me to prepare. And when I'm speaking for free, I make sure that the topic is something that's going to be quite easy for me to prepare because it's a gamble on an outcome. And over, uh, time, I've gotten better at what's my call to action for that group? Like, how am I getting them to stay with me? So it's, you know, am, um, I just asking them to connect on LinkedIn, because I post so regularly on LinkedIn, that's a really good strategy for me. Am I getting them to sign up to my work wife, my weekly edm? I certainly hope so, yes. And it's like playing around with that because if I asked to connect on LinkedIn, maybe I get like 50% of the audience. If I ask them to give me my email address, I've gotta be offering them something pretty good for them to actually make that exchange. And then the thing that I have gotten better at is doing more of a direct sell in a very comfortable way. And that's hard, but I will think about that audience and be like, what's the thing that I offer that's going to be best for them? I now offer coaching for barristers, but before I realise that I should do that, my husband's a barrister, I'm an ex lawyer. It's really fun. They make heaps of money, they pay me heaps of money, they get a huge return on investment really quickly. I can't believe it took me so long to think about it. But before I kind of landed on that, when I did something with barristers and I was like, I don't really offer anything to them, you know, at the end I would say, oh, I run a career coaching programme. If you have any solicitor friends, if you have any lawyer friends, if you've got partners who need support, you know, send them my way. And I found that they did so going and speaking, making it in a way that's really useful for you. Like you do not want to be spending hours preparing if it's making you feel, like, really stressed, maybe it's not the right strategy for you having a clear, like, top of funnel call to action. Follow me on Instagram, connect on your LinkedIn, sign up to my email list and then having an ask is what what turned that into just being something that was hopeful that people would see me in action and like me to more of a sophisticated machine has probably taken me like three years.
Mia Feilman: I also do a lot of guest masterclasses. I really love it because it's 45 minutes with that group and the kind of marketing that I teach and use and advise on is like steamed green vegetable marketing. It's not like, here are, ah, five content hooks for Instagram. And so I need that time, I need 45 minutes to really get into the, uh, the weeds of, of what I do. And by the end of the 45 minutes, generally they're pretty impressed. But my best tip for guest masterclasses is don't go and create five different trainings or masterclasses. Literally have one that you get so good at presenting that each time you present it, you refine it just a little bit better. Not scripted, but you just get so comfortable with the material. It's like second nature and that you start having more and more fun with delivering the material and then all you need to do is like, change a few of the slides, maybe even the name. So when I delivered some training to Corporate Escapees Club, I just renamed my masterclass to you are a marketer now. Congratulations. This is your new job. Whether, uh, you are a HR consultant or a, uh, brand strategist, this is your job now. And so, yeah, that's, that's my top tip for guest masterclasses. Don't go and make five of them.
Ellen Hooper: And you want the audience to come away because with the small percentage of those who might need your help to feel like, oh, uh, cool, I actually know what I don't know now and I need some help with this.
Ex corporates fear LinkedIn because they don't want colleagues seeing them running business
Yeah, all right.
Mia Feilman: We've spoken a little bit about LinkedIn, but let's go there. LinkedIn terrifies people, and particularly ex corporates, because they have this sort of mental block around the fact that they don't want their previous colleagues and previous employers to see them running a business. Like, it feels very cringy for them that they were behind the scenes of this big organisation and now they're out there promoting themselves daily on LinkedIn. And, um, to that, I just want to say that all of your corporate colleagues are jealous of you who have started the business. They all want to start a business. So many of my ex colleagues from l' Oreal have reached out to me over the years saying, how do I go about starting my own business? So that's the first thing. But often corporate escapees, so people who you work with, they can't wait to get away from the business, what they were doing when they were employed and they want to do something different. So then they're also worried that the audience that they have on LinkedIn isn't relevant. So all of this is just, they're just convenient excuses for reasons why they're not posting on LinkedIn. Right.
Ellen Hooper: Yeah. And we got a question marketing circle about, should I delete my LinkedIn and start again? So I was like, no, don't do that. I think a few things about LinkedIn. It is the easiest platform to market on. Yeah. You don't have to create any stupid videos. You don't have to go into Canva. Uh, you don't have to sign someone to help you. You can like literally post one sentence. The biggest thing I see, when people start their kind of process or Practise posting on LinkedIn, they want to write bloody articles all the time. They have these long posts, they're like talking about research, short, short posts. No one cares. But only 1% of people post on LinkedIn, so it's wild. It's like, it's just such a great place where you can be heard and listened to. And I think though, if there is a certain particular person who you feel self conscious about, just block them. Mhm.
Mia Feilman: 3 DOT. Do not show me this content and move on. Curate the experience. Like the amount of people I have blocked on unfollowed on Instagram. Like, why aren't we doing that on LinkedIn?
Ellen Hooper: Hmm. Absolutely. And it's like, if you want the freedom and flexibility that comes with running your own business, this is just the price.
Mia Feilman: Thank you.
Ellen Hooper: LinkedIn is not a strategy for everyone, but it's a good cheap one. It's just an easy one.
Mia Feilman: Yes. But I'm getting increasingly frustrated with people who say, I don't want to do Instagram. I'm like, okay, all good. Don't do Instagram, do LinkedIn. Oh, I don't want to do LinkedIn. I'm like, okay, no worries. Go to in person events. Oh, uh, I can't. I don't like doing in person events. Okay. Do guest masterclasses. Oh, I don't want to do guest masterclass. Go and get a job. Go get a job.
Ellen Hooper: That's true. If you don't want to sell. Firstly, all businesses are sales businesses. You know, I spend a lot of time executive coaching people in corporate and we call it all kinds of different things influencing executive presence, political acumen, sales. Yeah, it's everything all of us have to convince someone to do something and sometimes it's convincing someone to buy stuff. Yeah. Nicole Hathley, who's a good friend of mine, a personal branding expert, she always says, unfortunately, your work doesn't speak for itself, you have to speak for it. So finding the right strategy for you, which doesn't have to be on LinkedIn. I've got plenty of people in corporate escapees club who don't have a LinkedIn practise and that's no problem. Some of my clients ex public sector and actually like their audience just isn't there or isn't very kind of impressed by that approach. They're not kind of practised in, in LinkedIn, so it's not like it's the one size fits all strategy. But lots of my clients come in being like, it's not a strategy for me, and then end up realising it's actually quite an easy one if they just build the muscle. So working out if you are a poor fit for a strategy or just scared, very helpful, Very helpful.
Mia Feilman: And look, I'm a big believer that your marketing strategy should reflect your skills. Like you said earlier, you're a writer, so am I. I'm also a, uh, very raging extrovert. So I'm good in person. But when I started video doing videos, it was like 15 takes. I am not good even to this day. After so many years of just pressing record into a camera and just talking to myself, I've gotten better at it, but it's never going to be my natural skill set. So then you choose different strategies that align with you and there's, uh, more than one way to grow. But don't take the P and tell me that you don't want to do any of it because, like, what's left then? Like, you have to do something.
Ellen Hooper: Yeah, you have to do something for business to come in. Absolutely. It's just it, like you said to our corporate escapees, it's just part of the job now.
Mia Feilman: Yeah.
Ellen Hooper: And if you want this to keep being your job, then you've got to give it a go. Because the worst thing that I see when people do take the leap is just being under a lot of financial pressure. And the more pressure we're under, I think then the more desperate energy we have. I've definitely been there and it makes it much harder to bring work in to price, work correctly, to do the work that's best suited for you to keep finding new work. So, yeah, if you want to run a business, you have to have a sales strategy.
Mia Feilman: Yeah.
To what degree should marketers be building personal brands
Uh, so you work with professionals, they're skilled. So to what degree should they be building personal brands and how much should they be showcasing their expertise and their qualifications and their training in their marketing versus what you and I were talking about earlier, where a lot of social media has become sort of manufactured authority and expertise that only seems to exist in someone's marketing, not outside it.
Ellen Hooper: So I'm an International Coaching Federation accredited coach at a professional certified coach standard, which is like two out of three rungs. The next run is a master coach. Only 16% of accredited coaches in Australia are, uh, at that level. So I have this really high level of qualification and that has come with extensive training, over 500 hours of coaching, extensive assessment, and it helps me feel really confident that I can hold whatever weird stuff comes up in coaching sessions, because it always does. And my clients also don't care about that at all. So there's this real tension. There's this real tension. The word coach has been completely trashed.
Mia Feilman: Yes.
Ellen Hooper: Online, it's problem, I would say. And sometimes in the career coaching part of my business programme I run called your next Move, I will speak to people who are like, you seem great, um, but I'm actually still in debt to my last coach and I didn't get anything out of it and it really upsets me. There's whole Reddit threads on. Are, uh, all coaches grifters?
Mia Feilman: Yeah.
Ellen Hooper: So there's this real challenge in terms of personal branding.
I think qualifications are important, but they're kind of like the foundation
Super keen to hear your thoughts. I think the qualifications are important, but they're kind of like the foundation of the house. And most people want to work with you because they connect with you as a human being.
Mia Feilman: Yeah.
Ellen Hooper: So stuff's gotta be in there. But I think I have been surprised that it's not as important to people as I would've thought it was.
Mia Feilman: Yeah, I, I am too. I still think that you should share your qualifications and your relevant experience and accreditations. Like, on every sales page on my website, it says that I'm a certified practising marketer. I'm a fellow with the Australian Marketing Institute. You know, that kind of thing, I think becomes very relevant at the bottom of the funnel when someone's actually at that stage of making a purchase decision, not so much at the top of the funnel, but the problem that I have with actual experts and professionals is that they don't want to make any claims because they don't want to come across as someone who has manufactured authority. So, like, I'll give you an example, one of my members doubled her, uh, Profit. And I didn't want to say she doubled her profit because she was working with somebody else at the same time. I'm like, it still happened. She still doubled her profit. You want to take credit? I didn't want to take full credit for it. You're like, I'm responsible for 50% of the doubling of her profit, pretty much is what I. And, like, I am the most confident person I know. And even I needed to kind of really temper the way that I communicated that. I think I wrote something like, janine doubled her profit within, you know, 12 months of joining Marketing Circle. She was also working with a financial coach. You know, and it's like just to. Just to make sure, because we. We care about nuance and the gurus and the grifters don't care about nuance.
Ellen Hooper: It's tough because I call that commitment to accuracy. And, you know, I've got a legal background, so I've got so much commitment to accuracy that I've had to really temper in myself. Because it does also hold us back from getting, I think, the same cut through as people who are not as interested in integrity. John, what it reminds me of, it's a random analogy, but I'm gluten free. And so you go to a restaurant, they ask you if you're celiac. And it's like the restaurants who even care if you're celiac and who want to tell you that the chips are going in the same fryer as some breadcrumbs have been in. It's like, that's how the expertise comes through. They don't want to make a claim that this is completely gluten free and you're going to be completely fine. And that's what we do too. We're not prepared to oversimplify the results or make a promise. You know, I could say, like, come and do your next move, you'll get a pay rise, but some people don't even want that. Yeah. So you and I have talked a lot about having that challenge in. The thing that I'm really great at is helping you find a strategy and a pathway for you. That's what I'm great at in Corporate Escapees Club. But it also then doesn't help me go, like, come in. You'll post once a day on LinkedIn and you'll make an extra 50 grand. So the more expert we are, uh, the more nuanced our offering is and then the more challenge we have in our marketing about telling those storeys.
Mia Feilman: I feel like I've covered this in previous episodes of Got Marketing, but I feel like it's important to recap the risk of over relying on social media.
The topic of our chat today is marketing without reliance on social media
Anyway, so the topic of our chat today is marketing without reliance on social media. But I think it is worth mentioning the risks of going all in on an Instagram strategy, or even a LinkedIn strategy, and not building out a funnel. There was a Australian influencer turned founder who made this viral video a couple of months ago, basically poo pooing the whole marketing funnel and, like, you don't
Ellen Hooper: need a marketing funnel.
Mia Feilman: And that works for her because she posts twice a day on Instagram. Her whole business is. Is on Instagram. But many people don't want that. And we've seen some real dangers of that going wrong with, you know, people's Instagram accounts being hacked and locked out, and also just the inability to stop, like the inability to just go, you know what? I need to just take a mental break from social media for a month.
Ellen Hooper: I think what I've learned from you, actually, and, um, what I now advise my corporate escapees club, is you are much better to start with an email list than you are to start with an Instagram account. Like, that is yours. Those people are yours. You can communicate with them directly. And because it's not sexy advice, I don't think that many people really understand the benefit and usefulness of that. When I moved into the B2C space, which, by the way, makes me way less money, takes me much more time, costs me much more to run, both in terms of effort and then also, like, actual outlaying costs. You know, that experiment has been really interesting for me and I'm about two years into it now. I still get more sales from my email list than I do every now and then. Every now and then, one person will come and pop up in Instagram. They'll see what I'm doing and they'll book into a programme. But really, it's more likely that they're going to watch and watch and watch for literal years before they purchase anything. Yeah. So I need to get them into my email list so that I can access them.
Mia Feilman: Yes, absolutely.
I think there are people quitting stable corporate jobs and choosing B2C business
I think there are a wave of people quitting these stable corporate jobs and they're overwhelmingly defaulting to a, uh, B2C business because, I don't know, that's. Like I said, they want to get away from corporate or they think it's going to be more fun or it's going to be more lucrative because they see all these B2C businesses seemingly crush it but a B2B consulting offer, uh, sitting within their existing network could replace their salary so much faster and with less risk. So why do you think so many people are leaving these jobs and choosing what seems to be the hardest version of building a business?
Ellen Hooper: I think they don't know that it's hard.
Mia Feilman: Yeah.
Ellen Hooper: I think that no one's talking enough about, sure, I got these results, but it took me five years. And look, the thought process I went through is my consulting business. Like I was just looking at my first year of revenue, which was $350,000 of revenue. Like, far out.
Mia Feilman: Yes.
Ellen Hooper: And it was my first year, so I was like, is this good? I don't know.
Mia Feilman: And, uh, let me guess, your costs weren't 349,000.
Ellen Hooper: No, I mean there was. I paid myself $50,000 of super.
Mia Feilman: Yeah, nice.
Ellen Hooper: The leanest business I've ever run. And there was a few reasons I moved away from it. I did what lots of people did. I bought myself a job. So I was working like I was working in corporate. I was making a lot more money, I had more flexibility. Ish. But I just made my client my new boss.
Mia Feilman: Yeah.
Ellen Hooper: So breaking that down, I also was really keen to make more impact, which is something that I do get to do in B2C. But my B2C programme that I've been running for two years now, including doubling the price of that about 12 months ago, that's probably bought me in like $60,000 of profit in a year. Like it. I just think it's useful to be like, this is real life. Like these are the stark examples of what those different business models look like. But the amount of people who look online and run the numbers of, oh, well, if I sell this much to this many people, you know, that quickly equals this amount of money and have no concept of the time to buy, of the time and energy that it takes to kind of build audiences that are that big. And more and more I'm hearing from people that big audiences are not converting into big dollars.
Mia Feilman: Everyone that I know agrees that it is so much easier to sell a 10, 15, $20,000 retainer to one person than it is to get 10 or 15 people to join a group programme. This is not 2018 Covid era, where online courses and memberships and online programmes, and I say this very freely in marketing circle, that not everyone should be running group programmes. You need to be really in demand for your one on one services and you need to have a big enough audience and almost capped at, uh, what you can do one to one to then go. This is the only way to work with me now is a programme. But there are still people on Instagram, Ellen, who are like, I want to have an online course business. I don't know what that course will be, but that's the business that I want. Like, you have no hope on earth.
Ellen Hooper: Online courses are also just becoming more and more sloppy. So I have a online version of my your next move programme. It's like I like to offer it because it just means you can do that work in an incredibly affordable way that's also not kind of dipping into my time and energy. When I set it up in Kajabi, it tried to write it for me with AI.
Mia Feilman: Yeah.
Ellen Hooper: And I was like, no Kajabi, I'm an expert. I've written it. Like I spent so much time deleting AI stuff that Kajabi wanted to create for me.
Mia Feilman: So.
Ellen Hooper: So m. Much of the stuff that then you're purchasing is just like, actually it's not really helping the industry.
Mia Feilman: The Kajabi co founder, uh, stupid notifications in my dashboard every day are ah, driving me mental. Like I'm ready to raise a support ticket saying, how do I remove this? Like, stop giving me your useless recommendations for my business.
Ellen Hooper: We are hot out of time.
Mia Feilman: But I really wanted to ask you lots of questions about selling to corporates. So what if I just brought you back and we did a whole other episode on selling to corporates? Does that sound good?
Ellen Hooper: That sounds really fun.
Mia Feilman: Okay, amazing. So to round us out, thank you so much for all of your ideas.
Your business model should decide whether social media is optional or essential
Your business model should decide whether social media is optional or essential. If you don't like social media, you are not up shit creek. Good news. But you do need to consider your business model and you also need to consider which social media is going to be better for you. Maybe the performative nature of Instagram isn't your thing, but then you do need to make friends with LinkedIn or um, brace Pinterest in your life or I don't know, go old school and go all in on Facebook. I don't think the risk is disliking social media. I think the risk is not carefully considering which are the right channels for your skills and your business model. Do you have any closing out thoughts?
Ellen Hooper: Social media is built to be an addictive black hole. And I actually think the biggest risk of a, uh, marketing strategy that relies on a lot on video platforms is having no concept of how much of your time you're spending on literally gambling whether you're going to bring any clients in. I know that for myself, the amount of money and time that I've spent attempting to build a social following, attempting to turn a social following into something that produces a big enough margin, has actually just been a bit of a scam. And I think that's the big risk is just being on the hamster wheel and wanting to produce whatever that content every day, content twice a day, and not kind of thinking about how could I be making money, like, real money, cash in my hand right now instead of doing this and finding the balance of that.
Mia Feilman: That's such a good point. Yes. I really love that.
If you're enjoying GoT marketing, make sure you're subscribed
Thank you so much, Ellen. We'll, um, we'll set up that time
Ellen Hooper: for the second episode. Can't wait.
Mia Feilman: Talk to you soon. Thank you. You listened all the way to the end. If you're enjoying GoT marketing, make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss what's next. Podcast reviews are like warm hugs and one of the best ways to support a small business. You can connect with me, mia Feilman, on LinkedIn and Instagram, and I always welcome your feedback and questions for future episodes.
