Leveraging Your Personal Brand on Social Media to Get Clients

Hello everyone. Thank you for joining us today. Coming to work and spend your time with us, with me today. Talking about personal brand, social media, specifically how to get clients or how to be on socials to gain clients. A little bit about me before that. My name is Magali Mas D’Amato, Mags for short, because a lot of people call me Magali, and that just doesn’t sit well with me.

Right, Mags is okay, Mags, cool, never mind. I’m a global marketing and social media consultant. I’ve been working in social media on marketing for the last ten years, helping brands like Nationwide, Insights, Innocent, Nissan, Visa, and others that I didn’t put here because of space, to adapt, optimise and localise their content into a new market or a certain, age group

that perhaps they didn’t have in considerations when they created this strategy. So, I basically help people move their strategy around and get into a specific niche market culture. Right. These are a few of the things. One point here, I’m neurodiverse, of course, so if it’s not on sight is out of mind. Right. So you’ll see me having a look at my slides because I know what I want to talk about.

I know what is coming. And also the same time I don’t until I see it. So please don’t worry about me. I’ll just be going back and forth. We are talking about harnessing social media for personal branding, how to build genuine trust with your following and afterwards once you get that following, once you get those leads, how to convert those leads into clients.

The reason that I want to ask you here is how many of you offer your services as consultants?

Okay, quite a few of you. How many of you work with product-based products, services, offerings? Okay, so a few of you, the reason I’m asking is because it’s fairly different at some point and I’ll try to adapt what I say to both, but if you have any questions afterwards, just let me know, because I want to start with understanding how personal branding works in socials.

How this changes. It changes a lot according to the speaker or the person talking about it. Right. Personal branding sometimes is what you do online, also, people, I want to tell you personal branding is how you show up. the colours you wear, all the interactions that you have. It depends what speaker you’re talking with. It can go in one direction and the other.

Basically personal brand is the unique identity, our reputation that we built for ourselves, either online or in person. Both work. Whatever you’re aiming to do. There are three pillars for a personal branding, which is authenticity, consistency, and value, which are three perspectives that not everyone covers. But this will work online in a very good way. Authenticity. Here I added, I don’t know if you know this cereal brand Surreal?

It’s protein based cereal brand. They work with having protein cereals that are zero sugar, different tastes, whatever. They actually market a very tight niche, which is people that do exercises. But here they use the Kellogg’s typography to make it look really fun. It’s very aligned to what they do, which is a little bit salty, like making fun of what they do.

So that’s why they use Kellogg’s to be like, we are zero sugar, but it is in the same typography and how they work. There’s another pillar which is consistency. This is a colleague of mine which is called Andy Lambert. When I talk about consistency, I’m not talking about posting or showing up every day, but the direction that you talk about, right?

Specifically, for me, I work with local brands, and I talk about global or international social media, but that’s what I talk about because that’s the consistency that I want to give to my clients. It doesn’t mean that I’m showing up every day or posting every day. I do interact a little bit every day, but that means that I am not going to be talking about email marketing.

Although I do know about it. Like, I’ve been working with email marketing for a really long time, it doesn’t show in my consistency in that way, because I want to be known for a certain thing, which is international social media. So, this is something that I usually don’t post about. Here Andy talks all the time about B2B social media on marketing, and he shows videos,

he shows up in comments in whatever he does he talks about the perspective of B2B. So the first things come to mind when I think about him is

that.

Right. So that’s how association works with him. Another pillar is value, which ties a little bit to consistency in how Andy always shares value here while talking about video. But this is Annie-Mai Hodge with Girl Power Marketing. There’s a lot of people doing social media updates. Probably if you’re in our newsletter, you will get them like they’re everywhere,

everyone has their own weekly social media updates, yet she’s the one that is recognised for them the most. And when people actually want social media updates this is the first person that comes to mind and will talk about when you are talking about it. It doesn’t mean that there’s anything else out there, it’s just she’s adding value every time that she posts.

She’s consistent. She posts that every week, so you know that every week you’re getting that out of her. The goal of doing all these things and to build these pillars and the consistency is to create associations. So when people think about social media updates again, I’m a huge Girl Power Marketing, the first thing that comes to mind is that. When people think I should set another example about social media sales, I know, I need to go to Robert Knop,

he’s great, I’ll share the slides afterwards with him if you want to follow him. He always post about that and explain how social media work in sales. Then how I build my brand with chasing global marketing, social media. The idea with every touchpoint that I create is for people to create that association. So when they think about

global

social media, they start thinking about me in the same way that you guys need to post and be consistent in that way that you want someone to remember you for something in particular, it’s the association being the ones that we need to create with this. So how do we build over our personal brand and socials? Before we get into thinking about creating content, there is a few bits that we need to understand first, which is who’s your audience?

What are our platforms? Choosing the right, I say ‘right’ social media platform, there’s not a right or wrong answer on this. It’s according to where your audience is, and don’t worry about taking pictures, do take pictures if you want to, I will share this afterwards, so don’t worry. So when we are thinking about our audience is to think about who is your audience?

Like where are they, what kind of platforms they’re in, how do they speak? Like, do I have any, connections on LinkedIn that might be part of my target audience, can I reach out to them? Can I ask them questions like, don’t worry too much about creating a perfect buyer persona because we tend to overthink this stuff and it’s better actually just to reach out to other people and ask them, how do they perceive us, if they work with us, if they work with a professional, similar to us, why do they hire them?

It’s all of these questions that we can reach out to other people to understand what they’re looking for, and the next step, once we know that is selecting our platforms, what we can do in two different ways, right? We can either do what works for us. For example, I hate Instagram. I know like social media person saying like they hate Instagram.

I am not there. I won’t be there. I don’t film TikTok’s. I know my audience is on LinkedIn because they’re usually VIPs or CEOs or Founders or people that are, you know, decision makers and I usually find them on LinkedIn. So I don’t spend time on Instagram, not because it’s not valuable, but because my time is limited, as all of ours, and unless you have the resources or you work with someone else that allows you to have more than one platform, it’s better choose to have less and do better than be everywhere and be very burnt out because we are not going to be able to actually keep with the consistency and be there and post

as much as we should do. The other option is sorry, fish where the fish are, which is basically my audience on LinkedIn, I’m on LinkedIn because I find them there. Right. And I should set an example, but I already mentioned, if your audience is a small business owner, TikTok and Instagram might be a good option for you. But as is me, your audience are decision makers, you’ll probably find them on LinkedIn, it will be easier to find them on LinkedIn because you can search them for job titles, basically.

Right? But again, this all depends on a lot of things of your audience, your timing’s, your resources. The more resources you have, probably the more platforms you can be in, if not less is usually better. One thing I do see a lot of people,

“I don’t want to say failing on, but perhaps over complicating. it’s the fact that they don’t have an optimised social, social profile. I just forgot the word for it. But one of the things I wanted to make sure when we craft our profile, here’s a LinkedIn one, this guy talk about this all the time, he’s Jessie Van Breugel,

”

I don’t know how to pronounce the surname, but he talks about it all the time and how to get leads and how to craft your profile to do it. And one of the things that he raves all the time is just to make it really easy for clients, make it really easy for clients to know what you’re doing, to be able to say in a single phrase, what you do, if you’re a marketing expert, if you’re in email marketing, if you’re a founder, if you’re an investor or whatever, people need to know what you do.

Sorry. Right away. And there is a, this is why I ask if you guys have products or service-based offerings. Because for products when I say differentiation is key. For example, for toothpaste, toothpaste usually do all the same, right, it’s the same product, what it changes is how we use one or the other because they have different benefits basically if it’s whitening or if for sensitive teeth.

Right. But it’s basically the same product. Well, for services we need to make sure that results are key. Because when decision makers step into this phase they need to know what you do and what they’ll get right away. Because fear of messing up, which is FOMO, is much bigger at this stage, the fear of missing out, so people will be scared,

not if not working with you, but if there are results that you’ll bring. If you can ensure that you’ll give them results, you’re already getting ahead on this stage because they want to make sure that they’re not messing up in front of their colleagues, coworkers, they’re not actually using budget that they might not have a lot and you’re not going to deliver.

So making sure you deliver those results is the first key and focus. On another tip on this is just to make it super easy for clients to tell other people about you, and that’s how you know if your messaging is clear enough. So if a person can say, hey, I’m going to hire you because you’re going to help me with our email marketing and you’re going to deliver me these results, you’re not making it easy for them to get the budget for it.

So a great tip there is, ask other people to review your profile and tell you in a sentence, what do you do? And if they really nail that, you know that you’re doing a good job with it. Next tip is to start posting. So a year ago I barely had less than 300 connections on LinkedIn. Now-a-days I have more than 2000 followers.

It doesn’t seem like a really big number, right? It could be much more than that, or people that grew more in less time. I’m not a super fan of sending connection requests like crazy. I just make sure that they’re super conscience, because those 2000 followers and connections that I have bring me clients and then bring me money, and that’s the goal

and that was by selecting the right ones rather than just going crazy and sending connection requests. Once you start posting, it’s just a mix of different things. Again, you should know what you’re talking about. You know what your personal branding is, I want to, I am, blah blah, blah, and I want to be talking about this. You nail that down, you know who’s your audience.

You know what platforms they use. We need to start posting. We can talk about trends and relevant industry tactics. We can, you can write your own articles and position yourself as an industry leader. You can talk about results and services. I went viral a couple of times. That didn’t mean that my followers increased a lot, but it did gave me a lot of visibility, and I gained a couple of leads, and closed a couple of contracts afterwards, specifically for international clients.

So it’s being super conscious of what we post and how people perceive us and what they get out of it. Most of the time the people that hire me are actually lurkers. They haven’t interacted with me. That doesn’t mean that the content that you’re putting out isn’t worth it, but they do tend to take between 5 and 7 times before they reach out to you.

So how much you post, usually it’s relevant to this stage when they get to know you, because it will take some time for them to reach out to you and for you to make sure that you’re offering the services that they need. If you really don’t know where to start, this is one of the tricks that actually allowed me to start specifically being neurodivergent, which is working with templates.

I actually just went on LinkedIn, look for people who were doing similar stuff to what I was doing, and I had a look at what they posted, created a template, and then I created something similar. This doesn’t mean that you go on LinkedIn or Instagram or whatever, and you just duplicate exactly the same content. It’s just to help you have an idea of what the cadence of the content is.

This doesn’t mean that we’re going to just like do a copy/paste. This means that we are changing the posts that we liked and adding our own value to it. Right? We’ll never recommend for you to do a copy/paste. Another of the things that we sort of get caught up a lot is on creating new content and every time just, you know we’re creating new stuff and be creating new topics and be all the time in this sort of like over productive stage which we’re not actually, we don’t need to.

There’s a lot of value in repetition. This is Jesse Chan, she created, she grew, oh like gross amount of followers in a really short time. She has her own agency now. She didn’t start that long ago, but she usually, like the images are very similar, but the content that she posts is usually the same. She always starts with

I gained X number of followers since January 1st, I grew my LinkedIn to 26,000 in five months and the post to the right is actually fairly similar to the one in the middle. So again, we don’t need to be posting new content every time, but we do need to repost the content that has worked, just change a few things.

Try again. Sometimes content that we already created is very good and we just need to keep posting it again because people that follow with us in the last month might not know what we posted six months ago, and we really need to be smart on this. And that doesn’t mean that we need to be over delivering all the time.

Just be really conscious that this also works. Now, let’s say that you’ve been posting on socials, you’re creating your personal brand. You know what direction you’re going, you’re posting consistently. You’re getting those leads. You’re starting those conversations. How do we turn those conversations into paying clients? Honestly, there’s no magic recipe to get leads. I’m not going to lie on

this one, it’s like whoever’s coming in and telling you, like you’ll get ten leads per month that are high qualified and you’re going to make money out of them, they’re probably lying. It never happens that way. Getting leads can happen through direct messages. It can happen through email marketing. It can happen at networking events like today. Everything is going to change, and it’s going to work differently according to what you feel most comfortable with.

I was lucky enough that I didn’t need to reach out to people a lot to get leads before I actually started freelancing, other people just went freelance directly, and they needed to pay their mortgages, and they needed to pay their staff. So they had to go out and use DM’s to look for clients. Depends on the situation you’re in.

If you do that, it’s absolutely fine. Just start conversations. Add value to whatever conversations you’re having with people. Make sure that you’re being helpful. Make sure that you’re reminding people of what you do so they know when, oh, if I need to do this, I know this person is available. They have brought me value in the past, so I’m going to go back to them, right.

Getting prospects can be from outbound streams or inbound streams. Outbound, we reach out to clients. Inbound clients come to you right? Outbound again you start like us, getting direct messages, attending networking events, running paid ads. It depends again of what situation you’re in, that if you need to go out and get clients, or if clients can come to you by posting on socials or having your personal branding and, you know, doing things a little bit more slow, slowly. It can happen through hosting webinars, workshops, SEO optimisations.

In either way, you need to put yourself out there perhaps less, perhaps more, depending on how many leads you need and how many closes you need to do. Again, this is just a way to starting conversations so people get into the next stage when they’re ready to buy from you. There are a few things about how clients choose that is going to make a whole difference, which is proactivity, which is, wants the project and can work independently,

if I’m emailing you because I want something, I want you to help me with email marketing, I’m just making up a stage, let’s just say that, now you’re an email marketer and you reply ten days later, probably that’s showing me that there’s not a lot of proactivity from your part, and I’m going to have to chase you or depending on the timings that I have, I might not have ten days.

Right? So being available, being proactive, like replying back, chasing people. You guys have no idea how many times I’ve had to chase people that actually really wanted to work with me. They forgot, they had other things to do, so always doing that follow up is good, it shows that you want to work with them. Building trust so you’ll know you get things done and you have that confidence to do it.

Which sounds very silly because you might be the best expert in your field. But if you’re not showing that confidence, clients do tend to get that fear of messing up, and they usually take a step back when they need to do that because they need someone who can deliver because you’re hiring a third person because you need them to sort out your issue.

If you could sort it by yourself, you probably would. You’re on that stage. You’re of course, how clients choose is by knowing that you will deliver results. So you again, fear of messing up is higher than fear of missing out so they can work, what they really want, sorry step back there. They might really want to work with you, but they don’t know if you’re going to be able to deliver results,

that’s also going to take them in another direction, so we need both of them and by being the obvious choice, which I’ll explain a little bit in the next slide. But there is no use of being the best of your field or like unfortunately, you can be the best of your field but if you’re not the first choice that comes to mind, they might not choose you.

It’s as simple as that, unfortunately. Again. And how do you become the obvious choice? I’ll share this. This has saved me so many times, which I usually have a one hour call when I’m at the stage with clients, be like, okay, I want to work with you because I want you to help me solve this. I follow this stream which has different, context, discussion like situation.

What do they want? Indicator of success? What are their risks and concerns during the project? What is the value and what are the parameters they would like, we need to consider while delivering a project? This is so I know a lot of the things that they require that they need. So when I send back a proposition I know I’m going to nail all of this because we already had these discussions.

Usually when I work with clients, also, I already know them, so I have conversations with them. They might have come to me asking about something different than social media. So usually people that I do know, it’s not just like colleagues that I have that are asking for our approach, but knowing this is just to make sure that they have nothing to say back to you.

And one of the questions that saved me a lot that depends on who you’re talking with, or if you’re confident or you’re not comfortable with them, if you’re comfortable is, if I can find it, what quote would give you an absolute heart attack? So you already know what’s, it’s very silly, right? But when you’re talking with a client, it’ll be like, well, okay, how much do I need to budget that

I know will just give you a heart attack. I will be like, okay, if you want to charge me 10k for this, I’ll just probably tell you to f**k off. Right. So now I know that I need to, whatever I do needs to be lower than that. I’m not asking for how much budget they have, because clients usually don’t tell you that right away.

But I’m asking for a limit. If it’s less than that and my fees are higher because that’s how much it cost me to maintain a business. I’ll just be like, might not be the best option, but now I know, basically, for all the questions, all the problems they have, the number, everything, so when I finally send a proposal back, it’s nailing everything.

I am the obvious choice. I know what their wishes are like, I know what conversations we need to have. We just need to start. Basically. And finally, when I do some of the propositions, I try to make it about them as much as possible. We’re humans. Nobody cares about the other person, which is absolutely normal. You might be super empathic, and you do care about a lot of people, but also at the same time you care about yourself and clients get the same.

I need to make ends meet and they care about their projects, their business, their water. So whatever I do, I should make it about them, which is why it’s so helpful having the context discussion that I had with them previously, because I know what their issues are, I know what they need. I cannot up my offering to exactly what they need, because there’s no chance for us to work together.

If they want blue and I offer red, right? So this is all to make it about them. If it’s not possible for me to adapt, I’ll just point them in the right direction because there’s still a relationship they might work with me in the future time. But again, if I’m not perfect for them, they can’t afford it, or they want something else,

they don’t realise they want something else, which usually happens. It’s just a thing of sending them in the right direction. Perhaps you can build a referral with someone else and still get some commission out of it. Last bits are really a proposal. Basically, be confident. There’s a lot of things that I’ve discussed with clients when they hire me again, because I was just portraying out.

I’m being confident. I’m making sure that you’re going to hire me for this. I’ll deliver that, if I can I’ll deliver even more why, because I want the relationship to keep going. But also it’s that bit of like being confident about it and being like, I know my sh*t, I know what I do so I know what I can deliver, and they know that they don’t have to chase you because they know that you do know your stuff right?

A last thing is, learning to close deals takes time. My first one was terrible. Of course they didn’t call me. They didn’t call me back. The next one was also terrible. They didn’t call me back either. But then I knew a little bit more about it until my third and my fourth one, and I just kind of like, got into the gist of it.

My proposals were getting better. I was nailing down a little bit more. I was feeling more confident of what I was doing. And again, the first ones are basically, I’m going to be a little bit awful, right, you feel you left the call, you feel nervous, it’s like, yeah, this didn’t went well.

And that’s it everyone. I hope that was easy enough to follow. So it’s just a last recap points, know who you are and build on an authentic, consistent brand. You got what it takes to do what you do. So just follow that and just make it super easy for clients to know what you do too. That’s just going to make it super easy.

Create content that just builds trust and connections. Building on what you can deliver for them on just your strategic actions to convert followers into clients. Start conversations, reach out to them and know what you have to offer. And that’s it. Thank you everyone! If you want to connect on LinkedIn or you have more questions, feel free to get the QR code out.