What happens when business founders show their faces in digital marketing?

What should the role of business founders be in digital marketing? As an entrepreneur, how much of yourself should you put out there for the world to see?

Over the last decade, the hockey-stick-curve-to-the-moon surge in digital marketing has seen companies churn out blog posts, ads, videos, social media posts, and email blasts to clients by the billions.

Over 10 million blog posts are published EVERY DAY. 

On YouTube, over 500 hours of video are uploaded EVERY MINUTE. 

Add that to the hundreds of millions of social media posts made and ads served every day.

Your potential clients can get the same advice you are giving from thousands of other blogs, YouTube videos, online courses, email newsletters, etc. 

How do you differentiate yourself?

The power of showing up for your business
(Hint: Elon Musk has more followers than Tesla)

But there are three main ways to differentiate yourself that cannot be copied.

Before I share them, here’s the key to unlock them: It is difficult to do these things without showing your face, or at least sharing your name. 

There is a reason the search engine optimization guru Neil Patel has more Twitter followers than Search Engine Journal (440,000 vs 282,000 – On YouTube Patel has over 1 million Subscribers, SEJ has about 18,000). 

It’s the same reason why Elon Musk has more followers (109.4M) than Tesla (17,2M), Beyonce has more followers (15.7M) than Sony Music (759,000), and Bill Gates has more (60.7M) than Microsoft (11.7M). 

Lessons from The Two Comma Club

The Two Comma Club is a group of entrepreneurs who have made over a million dollars from one sales funnel on the sales funnels platform, Click Funnels.

In 2021, Russell Brunson, co-founder of ClickFunnels, spoke about one of the traits that most of the members of their Two Comma Club shared.

They were front and center in the digital marketing efforts for their businesses. They were in videos, used their names to sign off promotional emails, and appeared in promo images.

What I took from all this is that it costs money to build a brand that people will follow— and even after spending millions of dollars on brand building, businesses still get aced by individuals in terms of influence.

The personality driven business

So if you don’t want to spend a ton of money branding your business, use your personal brand as the fire for your marketing. Use your quirks and your knowledge and experience.

Marketing guru, Dan Kennedy, calls this a ‘personality driven business.’

According to Kennedy; one of the fundamental characteristics of a personality driven business is that “there needs to be a guru, a hero, a leader—someone with whom everyone is involved. Most likely that character is you.”

We follow people. We are drawn to people. We form personal connections with the people we identify with—even if we have never met them.

So, if you have a company website (which hopefully gets lots of visitors) that has a blog and all the blog posts are signed off ‘By Company Team’ or something similar, you are missing out on a key building block of trust and credibility. 

Your potential clients want to know, “How can I trust you?” 

When business owners put their hands up

One of the most fundamental credibility markers is when an entrepreneur or business owner can put their hand up and say, “Hello world. It is I. I did this. I stand by it. Here is my pretty mug – and look, I didn’t even photoshop it.”

One of the most fundamental credibility markers is when an entrepreneur or business owner can put their hand up and say, “Hello world. It is I. I did this. I stand by it.

If you can show your team too, Booooom! A thousand times better. Having other people put up their hands and say, “Yup, this business is legit enough to give me a job, is an extra level of credibility.”

When I ran my first digital marketing business in Harare, Zimbabwe, I had a client visit our office once. “You guys are really serious,” he said as he sat down for our meeting. “I had no idea you had an actual team working with you.”

Boom! That was him starting that meeting off from a point of conviction. 

Now, obviously many startups don’t have a team behind them. Don’t pretend to have a team when you don’t. Millions of clients are happy to work with solopreneurs. 

As clients, we want you. We want not just your skills, but your personality, your likability, and all the awesome things that make you the person we finally choose to work with. 

Remember: Human connection. That’s what we’re going for here. You are trying to show people;

1. different facets of your character so they can relate to you,
2. your knowledge and skills so that they see that you actually can deliver the results you promise.

As clients, we want you. We want not just your skills, but your personality, your likability, and all the awesome things that make you the person we finally choose to work with. 

You are the differentiator.

But how do you bring out your uniqueness? How do you set yourself apart from all the other people doing the same thing as you?

The three key ways to differentiate yourself in digital marketing

Ok, now that I have shared the key for the personality driven business with you, here we go.

Here’s how to drive it home and infuse it into your digital marketing and differentiate yourself from the global hoard of merry content creators that is bloating server farms around the world with their vanilla version of listicles and lackluster advice.

1. Tell your story

How did you end up doing what you are doing? What is your motivation? What was the turning point that drew you to this field? You don’t have to spit it out all at once. You can let it come out in bits that help to illustrate a specific point.

Then, on your about page as you talk about the problems you help your clients solve, include a short version of your story (See example on our about page). 

Link to the story in blog posts that need that extra perspective.  This not only helps website visitors understand you’re credible, but it also helps you do that thing that Google likes; link to other pages on your site. 

2. Have an opinion

Of course, people can copy a blog post that contains your opinion and just reword it, but that’s not what I’m talking about here.

What I mean is, over the course of all your digital marketing, make sure that you include your personal experiences, deductions, and conclusions that lead you to think all the stuff you are putting in your blog post, video, email newsletter, etc. 

…differentiate yourself from the global hoard of merry content creators that is bloating server farms around the world with their vanilla version of listicles and lackluster advice.

All those experiences you have had that make you believe what you are saying, put them in there.

Refer back to other opinions you shared before (More internal links! Yay!).

Refer to colleagues in the industry who you respect (External links! Thumbs up for SEO). The sum total of all of this is your personal experience fingerprint. No one can duplicate that.

Back your opinion with evidence that supports you or with a reason why you say what you’re saying.

For instance, if you state a strong opinion. Something like, “Don’t believe what you’re hearing. Despite inflation and despite what the experts are saying, toymakers are going to see record sales this holiday season.” Now note, this is not an actual opinion, it’s just an example.

So you make a statement like that and immediately people are thinking you are on drugs because everyone in the industry is saying something else. Then you hit them with some hard facts that back you up.

The sum total of all of this is your personal experience fingerprint. No one can duplicate that.

Not every opinion needs to be backed up like this. On Twitter, for instance, you can state your opinion and let the conversation lead to the unfolding of the full truth—or a full-on digital war.

3. Show your results

Everyone can show results, but not your results. When you talk about the services and products you sell, give evidence that they actually work. Testimonials and case studies are great ways to do this. 

Because there are so many crooks out there who pull ‘testimonials’ out of their butts and plaster them all over their websites, Internet users have become very skeptical about these. The solution? Use as many video testimonials as possible. These still have lots of credibility.