Get yourself out there, whether you’re a sales person or a business owner and create your brand. If you’ve already got a brand, have a look and see how you can just make a tweak to improve it and get out there and become known for what you do.
Dylis: Hi there, this is Dylis Guyan and welcome to the Inspired Selling Podcast, the place where business owners and sales people who sell to bigger businesses discover how to attract, convert and retain more of their ideal clients without any of those nasty, sleazy pushy sales tactics.
So welcome everyone. I’ve got a great guest today, as always, in Ian Moyse. Ian is going to talk to us today about branding. So, let me just tell you a little bit about Ian and then he can tell us a little bit more and give us context of who he is and why he is an authority to speak on the subject of branding. So Ian is a recognised speaker on iCloud and Social Selling, and is a non executive director to number of firms in addition to his leadership role at Natterbox. Great name, by the way, Ian. I love that.
He was also awarded UK Sales Director of the year in the BESMA awards in 2015, which is a huge accolade and is regularly listed in top lists of sales leaders and influencers. So I’m absolutely delighted to have you here with us today Ian.
Ian: Thank you. Thanks for the introduction. Yeah, and around the context, we’ll talk about personal branding in a second. I guess what you said there was how I got into this? It’s by accident, totally by accident through my day job in sales.
Dylis: Alright.
Ian: I have been in sales leadership for years. As many, and I’m sure those who are listening of would have noticed, that the sales environment has changed, the buyer dynamic has changed in the world we live in with technology. We as humans have changed how we react to things. It’s got harder to engage with customers. That led me into social selling before it’s called social selling. Fundamentally, in running sales leadership and running teams, trying to figure out how do I to keep being successful? How do we still get to the table and engage with customers? And part of social selling is the nature of how you look, your perception, your first impression, how you come across, the judgment people make on you in the electronic age.
So, I didn’t set out and haven’t been on courses or marketing sites. This is from just real world experience of having to do it. Then I’ve had some accidental benefit, which I guess we may talk about and some of the things I’ve learned. I’ve done this the hard way. I haven’t been on a course and then suddenly here’s all the answers. I’ve learned by trial and error over many, many years.
Dylis: A well trodden path, as they say.
Ian: A painful, bumpy path.
Dylis: I know you’re very modest Ian because I know you vaguely. But, I’ve researched you and you’ve got a wealth of knowledge and experience. Your background in these executive director roles, non-executive roles, that you hold, which also brings a wealth of experience as well as your leadership roles. To win that award for UK’s Top Sales Director of the year is really an accolade in itself….
Ian: Thank you.
Dylis: It speaks volumes. So your modesty is appreciated, but you don’t need to be so modest.
Ian: Okay.
Dylis: So tell us Ian, what is personal branding? Just really give us an explanation to put that in context so that everybody understands, because this branding word keeps getting bandied about. Often people say to me so Dylis, what is this? So give us your take on this Ian?
Ian: Yeah, so if you look at corporate branding in simple terms, if someone says a corporate brand to you like Nike or McDonald’s, you immediately typically visualize the logo, maybe visuals or feelings of adverts, or what you’ve seen. They’ve packaged it so you immediately have a good feeling or a negative feeling depending on your own personal experience.
Personal Branding is about getting that based on yourself. It has different techniques, some overlap but, you’re not really going to run TV adverts… Well how can you do that that? Years back, you couldn’t really achieve that. Your personal brand was in meeting people and how you engage with them, they liked you or didn’t, and you just built that rapport.
In today’s electronic world, it’s changed, fortunately or unfortunately and we’re not going back. We’ve got a plethora of platforms and LinkedIn being the prime one in business. But, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and you can keep going into all the other specialised ones and ones that the millennials and Zs are now using. You can look up anyone as you would have done with me and I would do with you. You can in seconds, get an impression of an individual without even meeting them.
Now, it might be you’re about to see someone speak at an event, or someone’s coming to meet you, or someone’s coming... Often a good…the simplest example is interview. Recruiters are absolutely using this. If you’re going to see someone, they’re going to look and have a look at what do you represent. There’s a CV, which is controllable and then there’s the rest of the information, which is controllable, but typically people don’t control.
So going back in the sales story and journey I’ve been through, it used to be you’d maybe have a call with a customer or prospect. You’d get through, get a little bit of interest from them, a few hot button statements, okay, maybe it’s worth talking, maybe get a meeting. Then at that meeting, it would often be “Well tell me about you and your company” and you’d get that opportunity to tell your story in a controllable fashion.
In today’s world, that’s gone, because a) you’ve got your website, which is controllable. That’s what you represent, and people can see. Then there is the information about your company on the web, and reviews, etc. But they can also now, unlike before, find out about you. It may not be your choice for them to find out about you. But it doesn’t take two seconds to search in the wonders of Google with your name or look on LinkedIn or go straight to the social platforms and get a feel for you.
Dylis: Yeah.
Ian: Are they credible? Do they put much information about themselves? Or is it just really basic? An idea when I’m interviewing people, fundamentally, the first thing I look at is, particularly in sales, where’s that CV? How do they interact? Are they on LinkedIn? If they’re not on LinkedIn, there is a big issue here for me because, unless it’s an industry, and technology isn’t such an industry, where that’s totally inappropriate, it immediately shows me they haven’t kept up to date and relative, etc. Then I look at what the quality of their profiles is and does it match the CV. The number of times I look at it and the pattern on that LinkedIn, has different gaps to the CV, it immediately raises factual questions.
Dylis: Of course.
Ian: Then I’ll always look at, and I do this with any prospect customer and I even get my team to do is, look at the other profiles look at where can you see that person? Because you can understand more about the human you’re going to engage with. What do they do on Twitter? Are they on Twitter? Do they share information? What are they interested in?
In social selling terms, you’re looking for insights you’re looking for, are the connection points? Did you go to the same college? that you tend to find out something. Do you have the same hobby or passion? Is there commonality? Which we used to do when you turn up at someone’s office. You saw a picture of sailing on the wall, you’re like, ‘Oh, do you like sailing’ and that instigates it. Now, you need to do it one step back and the beauty is you have access to more information than we’ve ever had access to before.
Dylis: Yeah.
Ian: The downside is we all have access to more information. So it works both ways, depending on what information you put out there and how you represent yourself.
Dylis: It’s about being congruent, isn’t it? As you’ve just said that somebody gets a feel for who you are. Then it’s not disjointed across the platforms.
Ian: Yeah. Yeah.
Dylis: A lot of people, and I still hear this, and I know there are more people are going social now. But there are still people, who, and actually it’s more sales people I see than business owners. But the sales people think well, why does it matter? I’m not a social celebrity. I don’t want that. I don’t want to be involved in that way. Why should I expose myself, metaphorically speaking, across social media platforms, and create a brand for myself when I actually work for a company, and they have the brand? So why is it important that they consider that? This applies to business owners as well, of course. Those who say, I’m too busy for any of that. I don’t want to be positioning myself in that way.
Ian: So that’s a good question. We can cover it in a number of ways. So firstly, it’s not about being celebrity. There are by-products which I’ll touch on in a second. accidents that can happen, if you want to go down that road.
But firstly, by not having a profile, you don’t know the recipient, that you’re going to see, you don’t know how they’re viewed. So if they look…because I’m social, and I see it as an information source. In the sales force environment I started from, if I look and they don’t have a profile, there’s immediately a negative there. They don’t understand the modern world we work in. They’re welcome to their opinion, but if you’re going to see 20 customers and 10 of them don’t care, but 10 do and have a look and just go alright, and it can be anyone on here. You immediately got a negative or neutral with ten people. For what reason? Because you couldn’t be bothered to just do some basics, and a little bit of effort. It doesn’t cost you. You can do it with no money or doesn’t cost a lot of money. Surely this isn’t like branding the company where you need to have deep pockets, or a marketing team. This is pretty simple stuff and getting the basics right.
When you’re talking a business leader, you represent your company brand. People buy from people. Whilst your company brand may be good, some personal example, industry example, look at some of what’s going on in the press right now. Organisations where individual execs at their business have been negatively reported in the press, and the business is tarnished with it. The business’ stock price goes down, not because the business is done anything wrong or performance has changed but, because an exec has had some bad news about them. So the question is, if you think bad news can have a negative effect, can positive profile have a positive effect?
Dylis: Indeed
Ian: Why do people like Branson, there’s personalities in business? You don’t have to be like the Branson’s of this world and the Zuckerbergs and the kind in the industry. But, if you’re running that business, you have a voice. You are the front leader in the company. How can that be leveraged by the business? People like to feel like they’re dealing with not a faceless organisation. Who is behind this business? If you are a leader in the business, do you have an ‘about us’, and ‘this is our founders’ page on your website? Great, so why don’t you therefore have a social profile, which says a little bit more about you, what you’re about, your mission statement, and give some cultural view.
This can lead to press opportunities, it can lead positively or negatively to the engagement your business has with customers. It depends on the market you’re in; B2B B2C, the type of technology or product or service that you’re selling. So it all varies. But a prime example, a simple example, totally out of my contexts, if you’re an artist or designer and you do wondrous works, the personality behind that, and you look at a lot of big designers, we know who they are. They’re celebrities like Katie Hopkins on TV, etc. Why is that? Because the nature of what they do as a designer, it’s them.
Dylis: Yeah.
Ian: So, you want to know about them. You want to feel you can engage with them, you know who they are, and it makes you more engaged with their product.
Dylis: Also it establishes your credibility.
Ian: Absolutely.
Dylis: Being seen as the expert. Many times, I have seen people who actually are not maybe as good as they think they are even, but because of their exposure, they position themselves and they become very credible, and they’ve created top of mine thinking in the face of their clients. So, I’m not knocking anybody, I’m just saying that there are those who I have seen who have really exposed themselves, metaphorically speaking, of course, and have become known and have done very well. You only have to look at the evidence of the use of social and branding of yourself to see that it works.
Ian: To your point, you said about what was the individual care that come in. It’s a simple one. And I say this to salespeople, if you build that persona in branding it goes with you. It’s yours.
Dylis: Yeah.
Ian: It goes with you throughout your career. The company brand is with you, when you’re selling, it helps you in that engagement, but it doesn’t help you as an individual and you’re the one selling to… So I, turning that on it’s head, I often say to my sales people, when we’re competing with a known competitor, ‘You’re not competing with that vendor.’
Dylis: Yeah.
Ian: You’re competing with the individual salesperson representing them today in that customer engagement. That’s who you’re up against.
Dylis: Absolutely right.
Ian: The Brand helps around it, but that’s who you’re up against. We’ve seen this, if you get a junior, inexperienced or bad salesperson at the other end who handles it in appropriately, you get liked and you may not have a certain feature in your product or service. There may be tweaks, but often with these things, you’re relatively close and the customer is making micro decisions of … We often think and get this and I’ve heard this before ‘we like you guys’. It’s an intangible, but we like your team. We like the girl or guy that came to see us and we felt we could trust you.
That starts the day prior to meeting them. Because, if they only have to look at your profile, and they can make pre-judgments and pre–judgments can be unpicked but you make those pre… you may see a celebrity on TV or somebody you dislike, you may meet them in real life, actually they’re really nice, didn’t expect that. We’ve heard that. I won’t say who but we’ve heard that. But, it goes both ways. Some of our family deal with some celebrities, some of the things they arrange and we’ve seen ones who are wondrous in that persona, but in real life, not so nice, and you’d be shocked and vice-versa. The ones you expect to be full of themselves, who have been really genuine.
Dylis: There’s a couple of points there because this kind of highlights where just be authentic and be yourself across all platforms, and who you are as an individual. So that no matter when you are interacting with anyone, they get that same feel of the brand if you like.
Ian: You’ve got to be.. right, yeah. You’ve absolutely hit the nail right on the head, being authentic is a key.
Dylis: Yes.
Ian: In social selling, what you’re doing is, the first thing that comes across is your brand, how you look and the first impression you make. The same that used to be in meetings, you turn up with a shirt, and first impressions count, you wouldn’t turn up in ripped jeans, unless you’re a designer. But if you’re going to a corporate business meeting in the city, you dress appropriately, you act appropriately. First impressions today are typically electronic. That’s the first thing. So what you’re then trying to do is get engagement.
Social selling, this term is all about just getting engagement, which turns into a real world engagement. Once you’ve done that, the social selling bit is done. It’s done its job of getting you to engage back to where we were. Now it’s down to you as an individual and your skills and experience, as it was always. But, the first part is how do you look for people first impression of you? Then how do you engage with them in terms of insights and interactions? That’s where, exactly what you said there, of being authentic.
Because I’ve said to people go and look at the senior person you’re trying to get hold of on Twitter and all that profiles, get a view of who they are. Is there anything obvious? If it’s they happened to go to the same college you went to there might be a point of engagement, or they’ve posted something where you can comment on it authentically, or add insight or something to start with. This might be ‘Oh, that’s a good question you asked’, ‘this report I saw recently was of you’. It’s all about getting noticed.
Dylis: Yeah.
Ian: You want to get noticed by the person who you want to have engagement with and obviously, ideally speak to and meet, etc. But getting noticed in a positive way. The minute you get noticed because you’ve posted something relevant or insightful that helped the discussion, they’ve asked a question, they’re going to look at your profile. It’s back to the branding piece. You can’t avoid it. You can’t have one without the other.
Dylis: Yeah.
Ian: So, it’s about how do you use the word brand? How do you use these platforms and technology to your advantage to look good, to engage well. If you’re not authentic, and you comment on something you know nothing about and it works, what happens when you meet them and they want to talk about 17th century architecture that you’ve been looking up on Google posting back about? Your flawed because you’ve been false from the start, you’ve lied. So, you have to be authentic, as you say, consistently not only on how you look, but on any engagement you have. If there isn’t an engagement point, don’t falsify?
Dylis: Yes, absolutely. So what are the key elements that people should think about then? Because, we’ve got curating content, we’ve got posting our own content, we’ve got video, we’ve got re-purposing. This podcast is an ideal example, where we’re videoing, that will go on YouTube, the audio will go on iTunes, I send the audio off to get transcribed. That along with the audio goes out to my subscriber list. I don’t always, but I have done on a number of occasions, re-purposed the transcription, so taken out some kind of key quotes or created a smaller blog posts or whatever. So where do people start? Because I think, again, people are a little bit overwhelmed. The set up the platforms and then they think, ‘right, now what?’
Ian: Well, certainly I wouldn’t say start with curating content unless you’re an avid writer, and you find it easy and it just flows. It’s the easiest thing in the world for you, which typically for the majority, I don’t think it is. First thing for me is clean up the profiles you’ve got, make sure they look good, the profile photo, the headline, how it looks and make it all fit. If you ever look at mine, it is not perfect, and I’m constantly tuning mine. I’ve had a couple of social people reaching out with a couple of tweaks here, so I’m still learning from other peers and I’m tuning. I’ll see someone else’s profile in passing and see something they’ve done and say ‘well, I like that. I’ll plagiarise that.’ So I’m constantly tuning. So first thing is get it right, and then constantly be nudging it. It’s like your house, right? First thing is when you move and you make it all nice, but then you’ll start tweaking things and repainting things and I’ll get around to changing the door handles and doing this sort of stuff.
So, but when you’re doing your profile, if you look ever look at mine, one of the things I learned recently was making it a bit personal. So if you look at my headline piece on LinkedIn, for example, I tell how I got into computing. The environment I want to be known for is cloud computing. That’s the world I’ve worked in for the last 12 years. You can’t be known for everything. So what are you going to want to be known for? What is your area of passion and expertise? That’s what you want to brand yourself for.
I tell the story, at 14, I fell into this and I made it a little bit of a.. that’s a…so it feels more realistic. It’s about me, not just fact, fact, fact, fact, then there’s obviously the company stuff. Getting your photo right is a simple one. A number of people just have photos that are just poor photos, either by selection, or by lighting, etc. Get a good photo done of yourself. Here’s a real tip, real easy one; go and test it for free. There’s a site called www.photofeeler.com that I came across by accident. When I did, I thought this is interesting. So, I tested my own photo. The photo I use on on my social profiles right now is not what I used to use.
So I used a photo, you put your photo in and people will vote on it for business or personal and it’s free. So what you do is, you go and vote on other people to build some credits up and it’s just click, click, paste. Where Facebook really started originally was this sort of thing. It’s highly credible from that picture and that’s what you’re going to be judged by. The beauty of this is, it’s not people that know you who have a bias already. It’s anyone out there. So you go and do it, get your points or you can pay but I do the free one, it takes takes minutes. Put your photo on, sit back, and people will vote on it on how well did it come across in terms of credibility, or seniority, etc. The you can test another photo. So I tested the one I had originally and then a new one. And interestingly, okay, the new one was better. So I put that up. Then along the journey, I thought actually, I’ve got the same photo that you see on my profile now. The original one had no glasses on. I had another one with glasses on, the same photo. Just taken a couple of times like this.
Dylis: Yeah.
Ian: So I put the glasses on and my ratings went way up. Who knew? So now you’re always…
Dylis: Well there we are then, come on let’s get our glasses on.
Ian: Who knew, right? Now what I’ve done is I’ve also tested, just out of curiosity, something I tweaked don’t know why and I flipped the photo. So I’m facing the other way, tested that it went up again. So now you if you see my photo, there’s a reason I’m looking at one particular direction with glasses on because it gave the highest result. First impression looking at photo, it got me the highest results from any random person looking at it on average, some weren’t, right? But in terms of the criteria, so I tested it, that’s what I did. So I haven’t selected that photo by accident.
So, little things like that that now if someone comes to your profile, the first thing they will glance at is your photo. There is nothing new about that. Humans work on imagery. It’s all psychology, right. It’s ingrained to us. A picture paints 1000 words. They will look at the photo and make a first impression of credible, senior, junior, respectful all that stuff, in microseconds, micro-decisions. So why would you not do the best you could? Then it’s that they glance, ‘Okay, let’s have a look at the profile.’
So every little bit, I want it if someone does choose to look at my profile, they go away with the best impression I could possibly give them of the right things. So, there’s no negative in, and hopefully they go actually, maybe we should talk to this guy. Now, from doing all this, why would you do it? This is probably where we should have started. In general business, it gives you that profile. But off the back of it, totally accidental because remember I didn’t do social selling. That was about trying to just be relevant, to remain successful in sales hence lead to branding because that’s part of it etc.
In terms of other pieces, I’ve, because of the profile I’ve built in Cloud, purely through social and do nothing else but looking right. Then absolutely, I started creating my own content, running a bit of a blog, post on LinkedIn and shared it, had a thought, and I’m constantly doing this now. I’ll see something happening in the world or customer experience think there’s a story there so I tell it with opinion. I’ve had some posts get 10-20 thousand views and lots of likes. So you get known for it. Now, I get invited to speak at a lot of events.
Last year, for example, I went out to, where was it? Bulgaria for a couple of days as the keynote, I did four major speaking at this event. They took me out for…Oracle’s got me blogging social influence for SAP, Sage, Equinix. I’ve just been approached by another major brand. jJust because they see you online. They see you’ve written good content, they see what you’ve done on social. They check you out. So, rightly or wrongly I’ve become what’s called a social influencer in the cloud sector. A little bit for social selling, which is a…and through what I’ve done on social, I’ve got to meet lots of people in my arena. So, book authors, global best selling book authors in the sales arena because we’ve engaged on social, we’ve got to know each other on social, because I’ve commented, or I’ve appeared in a list with them, because of something I’ve done on social. Many of them I’ve now met with personally, when they’ve come to UK, they sort of reached out, “Are you around? Maybe around we could meet?”
So, it benefits your real world engagement but that’s not what I set out to do. It’s a by-product of having a good profile, having a voice and becoming a semi thought leader in that space. If you’re a business leader in your industry, that has benefit because, magazines; I was reached out to yesterday or the day before about the 30th anniversary of the internet by journalists, because they’ve seen me all over and they go “Have you got a comment?” The comment went into the press article with the company name.
Dylis: There is no doubt, absolutely no doubt that buyers as well because of course not everybody, not every buyer is looking. So, when sales are made, it’s not just because the buyer was looking. But certainly for the buyers who are looking, they will look you up, and they’ll see where you are, where you’re showing up, and how you’re showing up. There’s absolutely no, that is inarguably the most important part is to be seen and be in places where your potential clients are going to be.
Ian: Absolutely. I sometimes get this “I’m not on social, so there’s no damage,” but there’s no positive either. There is damage, depending on the opinion of the viewer. We’ve got to think, and more and more in in the world we’re in right now with millennials and Zs, if you’re not there then you’re not real.
Dylis: Yeah.
Ian: That’s the mindset. They’ve grown up with this technology.
Dylis: Give the three keys then, of what people absolutely need to do right now. I know we’ve talked about a couple in terms of your social media. But in terms of the branding within that, what are the three things that people need to consider?
Ian: Sure. So I would say that one, let’s do three after the one. The first one is beyond the platform. Be exactly what you said. I get this asked often, be where your customers are. People often ask me, well, “Which social platform should I focus on?” My mind says, “I don’t know because I don’t know your business market.” If you’re, as I said earlier, if you’re a graphic designer or you do artwork, Instagram because visual etc. combined with Facebook, if you’re in selling enterprise technology solutions in the sort of market I’m in, you’ve got to be on LinkedIn. But I’d also suggest Twitter, because a lot of the people to engage with is on there. So you’ve got to look at what business you’re in? Where are the people you want to engage with and view you likely to be and do them well. Don’t try and do…now I do them all against my advice, because the nature of being in social media and doing these sort of things I’ve had to be dragged into them. Initially, I just did LinkedIn well. Then I moved to Twitter, I wasn’t on Facebook and Instagram and now I’m on all of them.
But don’t try and boil the ocean. So don’t come off of this and be like I’ve got to go to set up all four of them, because you’ll get buried. Pick the ones that are important. If LinkedIn is the most important to start with, as it may be, certainly for business leaders, go and review your profile, your picture, test you picture, make it look good out of the gate. Number one. If you have multiple profiles, now number two is make them consistent. Cross link them. They all have the ability to put a link to another profile, link to the other one.
So, if someone finds you on one, don’t make it their job to go and search on the other profile and try and matchup is that the same person. Right? Make it so you can click and go straight to you. If you look at mine, mine will link to pages that list all my social profiles and you can go to all of them without mistake you know it’s me because I’ve made it easy for you.
Then, the third one, if you can get that right, and you want to start going down this thought leadership peice is to create content. If you’ve got a voice, you’ve got an opinion on something, that has value. If you’re a leader of business, and you meet people, and you chat to them and you can give them good insight about how this works and the way it’s changed a business or why this is the right thing to be, whether it’s design work or architect, whatever it is.
You’ve got knowledge, create some articles, but make it interesting. You’ve got an opinion, if you can talk it, you can write it or get someone in your business to write it and market it for you, record something like this, transcribe it, edit it a little bit, if you’re not a writer. I find it hard to write initially, but the more I write now, and what I found is my style is conversational. I’ve had a lot of the people I blog for, some of the names I mentioned, like that, because it’s not very matter of fact, factual, scripted marketing type speak. I just right off the cuff of and I couldn’t believe it and use words like I’m conversing. It makes it very readable and engaging, so I’m getting invited to do more and more blogging.
Now, when you do, if you get to that stage where you’re writing good content, it’ll get shared. Guess what? By the nature of it, people will often look and click to see well who wrote it, because they’re interested oh this is really good. That natural human…who is it? Therefore your profile needs to look good because you’re bringing them back to you now. It has this knock on snowball effect. That will be the fundamentals.
There’s lots of nice little tricks and niceties you can do. For example, if you go to my LinkedIn profile, you can go to ianmoyse.co.uk and Twitter go to ianmoyse.cloud. It’ll take you straight to my, I’ve just created a domain name, costs me about £15 a year total. So when anyone says where do you find me and I give them those, I know them off the top my head. I can’t go, ‘go into LinkedIn and search my name.’ Now it’s putting it back on them the audience, I can’t tell them go to linkedin.com/…., you don’t remember it. So, I created a nice front end domains that make it easy for people to find me. Then when they get there, hopefully your perception will be, if anyone goes to look, it’s a good profile. It can always be better. Then you can see the content I’ve created.
So I’m linking… the game is to get people to stay with you, so to speak. As businesses doing websites, you don’t want them to come to your website, click go elsewhere. You want them to spend time there. So I want people to see something I’ve tweeted, click back, have a look who I am and go ‘Oh, okay, there’s another article’, maybe they’ll re-share it. Then I get to a bigger audience and more people. It’s a weird environment.
Dylis: Yeah.
Ian: I’ve heard marketing people say to me when I describe this, what they’ve come from with websites and SEO and all that stuff, this doesn’t compute, tagging people in you don’t know doesn’t compute. I’ll write an article about something and if there’s someone whether they’re famous or in the public eye, or that’s relevant to that, tag them in.
Dylis: Yeah.
Ian: They might share it and suddenly you’ve got an audience of 2 million from it.
Dylis: Yeah.
Ian: There’s nothing wrong. That’s the etiquette of social media that you’re not… I’ve had some say well, you can’t just tag them in. Yes, you can.
Dylis: Yeah.
Ian: Don’t be shy. I’ll tag every person in. I’ve had some good shares, I’ve had comments I’ve made on social put on posters of shows in London. I’ve had tweets appear on TV programs. It’s a little bit of a game to me now of how can I create relevant, good content that gets my profile out there because I’ve got dragged into this world?
Dylis: Yeah.
Ian: You don’t need to go that far. But, it just shows what’s possible really easily, just by using this stuff that’s free.
Dylis: Indeed. I think also that it’s really important not to lose sight of the objective of what you’re doing.
Ian: Yeah. Yeah. You obviously or you said at the beginning, I said, ‘What do I want to be known for?’ Its cloud.
Dylis: Yeah.
Ian: What do you want to be known for? If the objective is creating opportunities for your business, don’t get disheartened when you don’t get floodgates of leads, because you tweeted something. It takes time to build a profile. But if you think about mine now, I get invited to speak at events for free, which previously, you want to come you have to pay. Because of the profile I’ve built, I get invited to speak at an event for free. Then I can talk about something thought leadership wise, but guess what the company brand that I work for is on the slide.
Dylis: Yeah.
Ian: I can get sneaky at the end. By the way, guys, if anyone’s interested, in 10 seconds and I tell them quickly what we do, this is how you contact us etc.
Dylis: Yeah, yeah because, there is purpose to all of this. Because what people don’t want to do is get involved in this to the detriment of taking it to the next step, …
Ian: Yeah. Yeah.
Dylis: Where they meet people, or they’re engaged with people. But then, not taking it to that next step to achieve the objective of the whole exercise any way.
Ian: Yeah. What you could do is, one good tip as well is build your profile, start some article. If you get a little bit of thought leadership going, what you’ll find is if you if you tag in people who are influential, who are influencers in your market, it might be journalists, might be analysts, might be people in the public eye,
and get them to share your content, it’s the best free advert you can get. Yeah, because you’re reaching the audience, you want to reach through someone else. Therefore, it’s semi got their endorsement.
This is what this whole, you see it and the Kardashians is the most extreme example. They get given jewellery, they get given clothes, etc. to wear because if they’re seen in it, and they share it on social media, guess what? Same happens with the Royals. They wear a dress, it sells out in the shop, it was in Marks & Spencer, it sold out in a day. So in this sphere of general business, if you can get people who influence your customers, to say something about you positive or share an article or something that you’re associated with, once you get into that, it gets easier and they’ll share more. You get a free push to the audience you want to get to, because the audience may not be following you, but they’re following them.
Dylis: Yes, yeah. Ian, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much, really insightful.
Ian: You welcome.
Dylis: So, if anyone would like to get in touch with you, how would they do that?
Ian: Sure. So I sort of pre-empted that right. So ianmoyse.co.uk or ianmoyse.cloud. That’ll take you to LinkedIn and Twitter. I’m contactable on both of those platforms.
Dylis: Perfect, perfect. Thank you. Thank you once again, and just hold on for a while. Thank you and I’ll speak to you again soon.
Ian: Thank you.
Dylis: Wasn’t that great? So, get yourself out there, whether you’re a sales person or a business owner and create your brand. If you’ve already got a brand, have a look and see how can I just make a tweak to that and improve it and get out there and become known for what you do.
So thanks again for listening or watching the Inspired Selling Podcast. If you would like further interaction with me, please come and join my free Facebook group, which is also called Inspired Selling. Just search for us on Facebook www.facebook.com/groups/InspiredSelling/, click to join and I’d be very very happy to meet you and welcome you into the group. So for now, have a fantastic day, do be the best you can be and I’ll speak to you next time. Bye for now.
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