Discussing Digital with Naomi Stonier – Podcast Transcript

Discussing Digital with Naomi Stonier – Podcast Transcript

In this episode, we dive into the world of organic digital marketing with marriage coach Naomi Stonier. Naomi shares her unique approach to building relationships and connecting with her audience through social media.

Naomi reveals her daily content strategy on Facebook and LinkedIn, where she shares stories and insights about relationships. She explains why she moved away from batching content and now focuses on writing one personalized post per day using a problem-solution-process-result formula. By anonymously sharing content ideas from her client sessions, Naomi ensures that her posts are relevant and valuable to her audience.

One of the key strategies Naomi uses is going live on social media after her client sessions. She discusses various topics and makes offers in just 5-10 minutes. While engagement isn’t her main goal, she has seen how live videos boost her reach in algorithms. Naomi emphasizes the importance of connecting genuinely with her audience, rather than obsessing over numbers.

Authenticity is a crucial aspect of Naomi’s digital marketing approach. She shares photos of herself and her family instead of using stock images, which helps to build trust with her audience. Naomi also explains why she stopped creating graphics, finding them to be too time-consuming.

As her business continues to grow, Naomi plans to outsource more platforms, but for now she focuses on Facebook and LinkedIn, where she gets most of her business through networking connections. She also emphasizes the importance of repurposing content across platforms and pitches, which saves her significant time and helps her move people from social media to her email list and future online programs.

Throughout the episode, Naomi highlights the importance of adapting and experimenting with different strategies to achieve the best results. She firmly believes in taking an organic, authentic, and capacity-focused approach to digital marketing, centered around genuine human connection.

This transcript of Discussing Digital with Noami Stonier has been produced using the transcription function of Easy-Peasy.AI

You can find out more about Easy-Peasy-AI here

 

Transcript of Discussing Digital with Naomi Stonier

**Rob Osborne**:
Hi everybody and welcome to this edition of Discussing Digital. Today I’m discussing digital marketing with Naomi Stonier. Naomi is a marriage counsellor. So Naomi, can you tell us all a bit more about what you do and then how you use digital marketing to promote your business?

**Naomi Stonier**:
I absolutely can Rob, so thank you so much for having me on. My name’s Naomi Stonier and I am in fact a life coach for marriage. And so I work with people, I don’t work with couples, I work with people on an individual basis, teaching them the skills that your parents didn’t model for you that make marriage a hell of a lot easier and happier and healthier. And so how I use digital marketing is I’m on socials all day long, sharing what I do. I’m telling stories all day long about relationships and what you can do to make them a lot easier.

**Rob Osborne**:
Yeah, I know. One of the good things, obviously we know each other through networking, but one of the good things is seeing each other’s content and you post every day, which is really good. And you don’t seem to repeat yourself, although it’s a similar theme. So it’d be interesting to discuss a little bit about how do you come up with your content ideas? Because some of it relates back to your own experiences and others are kind of new.

**Naomi Stonier**:
Yeah, well, so for me, it’s an approach, called organic marketing, which you and I both know, which means I am organically one person at a time connecting with people on socials and growing my audience. I’m not paying for any traffic, any advertising, and I’m just organically networking on socials. And what I am doing, for me, everything I do is about service. So this is my approach. Everything I do is about service. And giving value. So when I help you, when I give you value, and I really help you in your relationship, it creates that know, like, and trust. And if I help you enough, you’re going to think, wow, if just interacting with her on socials is enough, it’s helping me this way, what must it be like to work with her? So you talk about my content. Well, I’m just telling stories. I’m telling my clients’ stories and my stories about the everyday experiences that we have in our relationships. And, you know, there’s a lot to write about.

**Rob Osborne**:
Yeah, yeah, I know what you mean. So do you actually have almost like a planned set of stories that you’re going to be doing? Or is it kind of every day, what story am I going to create and then just doing it when you think I need to put some content out there?

**Naomi Stonier**:
So I’ve tried lots of different methods. Rob, and I have, you know, had, it’s been, I’m in my fourth year of business. And this is not something that I learned overnight. So first of all, you know, I was putting stuff out all the time. I don’t, so what I do right now is I wrote, I write a post every day. So that is what works for me. I’ve tried batching contents. I’ve tried all the, the plans. I’ve tried platforms where you batch a month’s worth of contents. But for me, that didn’t work because of the way I write content, because I am writing a story about a relationship. So it will be a relationship. I’m working in a formula called problem, solution, process, result. So the problem in your relationship, the solution, my process, and then the result that will create you. And, and, and so what I have found work for me is to write one post every day. And that way it’s a fresh inspiring to me content. When I batched it, when I used to write 20 posts in a go and batch them for the month, it got very formulaic. Cause I was just like, oh, just got to get this out. I’ve just got to get to my 20 so I can, I can batch this programming all in and forget about it. And that didn’t work for me. Yeah.

**Rob Osborne**:
Yeah. And I think that’s really important that you recognize that, that it wasn’t, it wasn’t working for you and you were losing that personal touch. Cause obviously some of that was, you know, sort of your very specialist market and it’s all about your experience and things like that. So actually being able to kind of lose some of that in your content, wouldn’t be good. I’m guessing. I think it sort of came across as being a bit for one of a better term. It didn’t work. It didn’t work.

**Naomi Stonier**:
And so for me, I am prioritizing connecting with you like genuine connection. I want to connect with you. I want to tell you a story. I want to help you. And I am doing that in, you know, what I actually learned to do, Rob is I, I spent a lot of time on socials. When I first started, I felt like a drop in the ocean. No one cares. No one’s watching. This isn’t work. King. I felt awful. And I actually had to step away from socials and I went off networking and I met real people and I started signing clients. And then I was able to, you know, then I really was a coach. And also I was being fed from the connection of real people. And what I learned was to take that experience that have a networking and bring it back onto social. Yeah.

**Rob Osborne**:
No, I think that works really well as well. Yeah. And I mean, one of the other things about your, your, your content as well is that actually you’re not using stock image photographs, all the photos, all the pictures of you or of you or your husband or your family, you know? So with those, do you deliberately go out and, and kind of stage them or are they actually, well, this is a picture of my husband alive from my holiday or something like that.

**Naomi Stonier**:
Yeah. I, I, you know, it took courage. It’s taken courage to sort of get out there, share my story, my story about my marriage problems and, you know, share, listen, I never thought I could do this, but I did it. And so I, I believe very deeply in what I do and I’ve got my husband’s, my husband’s on board with what I do. He thinks it’s important to share this and I’m just all about stopping the scroll, Rob. Yeah.

**Rob Osborne**:
Yeah.

**Naomi Stonier**:
And so, I mean, I fell down the rabbit hole of graphics and, you know, hours in Canva creating graphics and it’s awful. I hated it. I would like, again, batch 25 graphics and they had to be perfect and they had to be right. And if I got the color right, that was going to create a client for me. I’ve let go of all of that. The quickest thing to do is take, take a photo of my face and plonk it on there because we know the algorithm. We know it works more likely to stop the scroll. And it’s also the quickest thing I can, I can do to get to the people who need my help. Yeah.

**Rob Osborne**:
Yeah. Well, I think that works, works really, really well. And it’s good that you’ve, you’ve been through those experiments. You found out what works, develop that formula and then kind of you’re, you’re following it, which I think is really, really good advice because it just shows that you are looking at what’s working, what’s not, and you’re being able to call upon your experience to create your content, which is, which is brilliant. It’s been trial and error, trial,

**Naomi Stonier**:
and I’ve, I’ve, I’ve had to, you know, navigate that experience of trial and error to get here. Yeah.

**Rob Osborne**:
Yeah. But I think it’s important to do it. You stuck with it, but also you haven’t just plowed on. You’ve looked at what’s worked and what hasn’t and, and, and gone with what works and do more of that and stop doing the other stuff, which is great. You kind of, you know, in your comments, you, you, you’re working very much on social media. It’s mainly on two at the moment. You’re on Facebook and LinkedIn. You pretend one. So two questions related to that, really. Are there any particular reasons why you’re not trying any of the other platforms as well? And secondly, which will be the interesting question is, is there any, well, are there any difference in clients that you’re protecting landing? And also, are you getting different results across the tape? So there’s a few things there, but yeah,

**Naomi Stonier**:
yeah, yeah. Well, what I have always been taught and what I have learned is that, that there is no magic. There’s no sort of secret formula here that, that hits all the boxes. Like all of these platforms are massive. Okay. And all of these platforms can create infinite business for all of us. Right. There’s no, there’s no secret here. It’s just, you go to the platform that is, you know, resonates for you the most and work it. And so, I was just, I’m of that age where Facebook was the platform that I was on. So I just went on Facebook. And then once I got into our networking group, I then moved on to LinkedIn because, because, you know, Facebook is so enormous and I wasn’t signing any clients on Facebook. And so I thought, okay, LinkedIn, because my whole network that I’m networking with is on LinkedIn. But actually now that I’ve, you know, gone through the trial, trial and error that I’ve gone through and I’ll just get on for the love of it. And I share for the love of it. I do sign clients through Facebook as well, but because I’m organic marketing, because I don’t pay anyone to do this, I do it all myself. I’m not going to go on every platform. I’m very strong on one or two. I mean, I’m probably mostly on, I get most business out of LinkedIn. I’m mostly on LinkedIn now because it really goes well with my networking. Yeah.

**Rob Osborne**:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I think that’s really, again, it’s good advice really. You know, here are the, you know, I’m just doing these two platforms. I’m comfortable with them. They’re working. Um, why do anything else? You know, cause then,

**Naomi Stonier**:
you know what, once I get to a certain income, I’ll be paying someone like you, Rob, to, to get me out on all platforms. But until then it’s just, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

**Rob Osborne**:
We had this conversation when we caught up a couple of weeks ago. Yeah. It’s really good to be sensible, know what your capacity is and know what’s working for you. So I think that’s that again,

**Naomi Stonier**:
a few things very well, not all of it.

**Rob Osborne**:
Yeah.

**Naomi Stonier**:
Not very well. Yeah.

**Rob Osborne**:
Yeah. But a lot of the posts we’ve talked about are kind of, you know, static post picture and, and, um, text, but you’ve been doing video, particularly you’ve been doing quite a lot of live video as well. So, so how have you found that?

**Naomi Stonier**:
Yeah. I mean, I’ve always done it. I went from, from those first early days, like so nervous. Um, and just, I’m now, you know, I just got the reps in Rob and I just would just show up, talk about something. I’ve done it enough that now what happens is I get off a client session and then I’ll just share what we worked on in that session. All anonymously. Of course, I protect my client’s identity, but I will just share, listen, are you dealing with this? Um, and here’s how I, here’s how I’ll help you. You’re with it and make an offer. It’s very quick. It’s a very, you know, in five, 10 minutes, I’m done. Yeah. And it’s quicker than writing a post. I mean, where I want to get to, I mean, my posts are all long story posts and there’s a great argument to be made for, you know, you need to be making shorter, snappier content for now. Those story posts work, but I definitely want to get to, you know, a live, a story post, a short post with graphics. Yeah. And me mixing that content up, but you know, Facebook loves lives. So it bumps me up the algorithm. So even if nobody watches that live one, it bumps me up the algorithm. And two, you, I go past in the feed and it just creates this persona of I’m, I’m there in front of you. It’s that touch point. Yeah.

**Rob Osborne**:
Yeah. But, but even if so, I should say, even if somebody isn’t watching it live, it’s still there on your feed. So if I come back, come back to it, they can watch it at a later date. So, you know, and that’s one of the things that sometimes you get a bit hung up with. Some people get hung up with, oh, I’m doing a live, but actually there is no live audience at the moment. You almost think, oh, should I do it? Should I stop? But actually just keep going because you never know when somebody’s going to come, come back to that content.

**Naomi Stonier**:
I have really, this is the other real, real piece of success I’ve had, Rob, is I have had to go on a journey to completely let go. Of the kind of response I get. Yeah.

**Rob Osborne**:
So,

**Naomi Stonier**:
know, the, the, how much engagement you get really is not related to how much business you make. Yeah. There are so many people silently consuming your content. And when we talk about touch points, I mean, like I hear it bandied around all the time. Like the latest one I heard is people need 40 touch points before they buy from you. But that touch point does not need to be, they sit through the whole life. They make a comment that they just, a touch point is they just see me go past their feed. It’s enough for them to go, oh, look, there she is again. There she is again. Yeah.

**Rob Osborne**:
Yeah.

**Naomi Stonier**:
I have completely let go of the, of the engagement. And it, you know, back in the early days, it was like I had a Facebook group that I could not grow. I worked in it like a full-time job and it didn’t grow. And I was in so much pain about it. And I was so attached to the number in this group. Yeah. That’s all gone. And it’s so much easier to just show up, share, share, share. You know, I believe so deeply in what I’m doing. I’m just shouting it from the rooftops. Yeah.

**Rob Osborne**:
Yeah. It’s interesting you saying about Facebook groups. On a previous edition, I recorded earlier this year with a business coach, a guy called Ian Dixon. He’d spent a lot of time building a big Facebook group because a couple of, three or four years ago, Facebook was kind of really trying to drive out, build a community, build a group. But he was saying, it is really, really hard to keep anything like that going because you’ve got to put loads of stuff into it. And unless you’ve got rabid fans who are posting stuff as well, it is, it is a nightmare. Yeah.

**Naomi Stonier**:
And it’s borrowed real estate. You don’t own any of it. Yeah.

**Rob Osborne**:
Yeah.

**Naomi Stonier**:
It’s all their platform. It’s all their, they’re boosting them, not us. It’s, you know, they get, they’re getting so much out of it. I mean, what I do see is very successful is pop-up groups. Yeah. So I see people, they’re launching a program. They do a week pop-up group to warm you up, to then sell to you into their program. They are very successful. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Groups. Yeah. I agree.

**Rob Osborne**:
I love that term as a pop-up group. I hadn’t thought of it. I’m going to use that now.

**Rob Osborne**:
Yeah. My, my, my community is big on pop-up groups. Yeah.

**Rob Osborne**:
Yeah. Well, it makes sense, doesn’t it? Yeah. And, and, and as you, I mean, the other thing to go, to go back around content and growing your business. I mean, one of the other things that we chatted about before is, is you are very clear and very, you know, you have a clear understanding of your capacity and how your business runs. You, you, you know, you can work with X clients at a time. So therefore, you know, you’ve got a very good idea about how to, you know, how big your funnel is and how you feel, feel it. So, which I think is another, although it’s not directly about that, but digital marketing, it’s a clear part of it because actually, again, you, you know what you need. Yeah. And so you know how, and you’ve now developed your content and your process to, to really help keep that full.

**Naomi Stonier**:
Yeah. And it, you know, for me, it really is meeting one person at a time. One person, you know, I’m going to talk to one person, then the next person. And when you break it down like that, socials becomes a much easier experience. Yeah. It’s just one person at a time. That’s it. Yeah. And you just, connecting with one person, one person, one person, and then you don’t need hundreds. Yes.

**Rob Osborne**:
Yeah. Yeah.

**Naomi Stonier**:
And also the big, you know, some of the biggest, I see people with big following, you know, people earning, that I know are earning millions and they’ve got 10 likes on a post. Yeah. You know, it doesn’t correlate. Yeah.

**Rob Osborne**:
Yeah. But it’s good to, you know, that’s a, that’s a, you know, again, there’s that thing about, I’ve got to chase the numbers sometimes. Yeah. And it’s really good. You’ve got, beyond that, you’ve gone through that and realised that actually those numbers are nice, but they’re not important really. It’s all about, this is what I need. This is the process that works. And it’s filling. And also,

**Naomi Stonier**:
we want to be using socials to funnel people onto our email lists. Yeah. Using socials to funnel people off socials into our, you know, it’s all about, I am going to be using socials to, you know, at the moment it works for me, my model to sign a client. But as I say, on a scale, it will be, I will be harvesting email lists and getting, talking to them off socials.

**Rob Osborne**:
Yeah. Yeah. And this is something we were talking about, again, when we had that chat last week or so, that you’ve got a vision and a strategy of where your digital marketing and, and your use of digital is going to go as well, isn’t it? You know, from, from startups with, you know, putting a lead magnet in place and email marketing, which you’re working on at the moment through to potentially having a, a learning platform in the future as well. So I think that’s quite exciting. And you’ve got that sort of model in place and,

**Naomi Stonier**:
you know,

**Rob Osborne**:
direction of travel strategy. What are you,

**Naomi Stonier**:
what are you doing around SEO Rob? Because you mentioned that something you’re going into now. Yeah.

**Rob Osborne**:
So, so again, that, you know, that that’s, it’s a big part thing. I’m interested in this content and, and actually SEO, a lot of SEO is driven by content because it’s all about, you know, one of the things that Google is all about is presenting the right websites when you ask a question. And so, you know, following things like the, the, the, they asked you answer kind of strategy. I’ve forgotten the guy’s name who wrote the book. But that’s basically what the idea is. You put lots of content on that’s answering the sort of questions that people are likely to be typing into Google. And therefore Google will present that, you know, if you’ve got that content there, then, you know,

**Naomi Stonier**:
you can check it out. So,

**Rob Osborne**:
so,

**Naomi Stonier**:
you know, in the future, can I be taking the posts I’m putting on socials and repurposing them, putting them in a blog in my website? Absolutely. Absolutely.

**Rob Osborne**:
And because you’ve got good stories already, you know, they’re, they’re kind of keywords rich for the sort of thing that you’re likely to be, people are likely to be searching for you for. And so, yeah, you know, it’s, that’s a great way. And, and that’s another thing that I encourage is actually how can you repurpose content? Because for small business, you know, for small business owners in particular, but it works across all sizes actually goes back to the whole thing. We started off with talking about how to get your ideas for your content and how do you create it and how do you get the time for it? Being able to repurpose content and use it in more than one place is a massive time saver. That’s what I do. Yeah.

**Naomi Stonier**:
I repurpose it everywhere. You know, so I’ll, I’ll talk about it in my networking pitch. It’ll get same post is on LinkedIn and Facebook. I’ll talk about it in a live. It’s all the same piece of content. Yeah. Again, Rob, that has saved me a huge amount of time. And now just have, I’m writing one thing a day and creating sort of four pieces of content out of it. And that’s, you know, I had to practice, but that’s now a very quick process. Yes.

**Rob Osborne**:
And that’s, yeah, yeah. And I think that’s, again, another great thing. I know we took, you know, you said you do, you found batching didn’t work, but actually batching works really well for me. And that’s what I do. But I do, I have lots of, I actually have, I, I think of them as layers or I like you’re playing Tetris. So I’ve got a foundation layer, which is something that goes out every day. And then I’ve got a testimonial Tuesday. So I put a testimonial out on a Tuesday. I’ve got around the office on a Monday. So to start people off, people getting to feel a bit about me because it’s not just a Magnolia wall office. I’ve got a lot of personal touches. I do a couple of polls a week and things like that, as well as posts about my services. Yeah.

**Naomi Stonier**:
So that’s how you batch it. Yeah.

**Rob Osborne**:
Yeah.

**Naomi Stonier**:
So I would love to learn how to batch.

**Rob Osborne**:
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, interestingly enough, it’s, it’s something I’m looking to set up. One, I’ve got a five day challenge about doing the foundation work. And then I’m looking to actually develop that into a program of actually delivery of talking about how to develop those different, those extra layers called conquering your content.

**Rob Osborne**:
So that’s my strength. Yeah.

**Rob Osborne**:
That’s his working title that I’m getting towards. So, yeah, it’s a, it’s a, yeah, it’s okay. But, but that’s something that really appeals to me. Yeah. I’ve got a really good idea. I want to do a podcast. Again, it’s great content. It’s not too bad. So, uh, produce, it’s very interesting, you know? Yeah.

**Naomi Stonier**:
And then you could write a post about the podcast. I mean, you know, I, my lives, I go through stream yards and I, they automatically go onto YouTube. So I have a library of lives that will, can be turned into podcasts. Yeah.

**Rob Osborne**:
Yeah. Finally, if I was going to come back to you about earlier, we’ll talk about lives. I’m going to ask if you use stream yard or if you use the native one. So it’s good to know you use. I mean,

**Naomi Stonier**:
i mean yeah i’ve been told that the the bet the best for the algorithm is going direct on facebook

**Rob Osborne**:
but stream yard is a is a you know good second yeah yeah most and a lot of people people use it and there’s one of those balancing acts isn’t it it’s like how big a difference does it really make um and and i’m a full believer is done is better than perfect so actually if it’s you know if it saves you a bit of time to do a live on stream yard that you can go across facebook linkedin and onto your youtube channel the fact that it might have a slightly less positive impact on the on on each of those platforms algorithms is more than balanced out by the fact you’re actually

**Naomi Stonier**:
putting content out live on three platforms what is your thoughts about posting more than once a

**Rob Osborne**:
day on linkedin um i do it as much as i can right and i i think it’s for me it’s more to do with visibility and credibility all right now whether or not it truly drives the algorithm and there’s loads of stuff out there um i don’t know but for me um i i think the more frequently you post the more likely are you are people are going to see you and even if they don’t see you at the time they

**Naomi Stonier**:
can still see that you’re very very busy and very active you know what i have heard is that linkedin penalizes you for posting more than once a day so if you look at the the analytics your second post your post will the first post will stop that it will stop reaching

**Rob Osborne**:
and it moves on to the second post i mean there’s anecdotal evidence that might happen sometimes but also there’s whole rafts of anecdotal evidence that different types of posts have different reach and it keeps changing so you know this you know i i’ve seen posts that you know this week’s flavor or flavor of the week and i’ve seen posts that have different reach and it keeps changing and it keeps changing so you know this you know this week’s flavor or flavor of the month this month is just text only posts and then flavor of the month next month could be posting a document or you know and then the flavor of the month the one after that is video so basically what it’s all about linkedin is constantly experimenting with linkedin it was all platforms what the algorithm is all about is trying to put the right content in front of people that keeps them hooked and interested and it really just depends on what people um are responding to and what they’re reacting to so actually there might be situations where if you’re putting lots of posts out but

**Naomi Stonier**:
none of them are interesting and nobody’s reacting to them then you might get downgraded none of them

**Rob Osborne**:
will do well yeah you know so so so it’s it’s a weird thing but that’s what the algorithms are all about really they’re trying to make you as the you know not as the content creator but you as the person who’s actually looking at linkedin or whatever platform it is um they’re trying to make sure that you get the stuff that keeps you interested um and so it does you know it varies from platform to platform it varies all the time because they are constantly constantly changing the algorithm because they’re looking at what works and what

**Naomi Stonier**:
doesn’t well that feeds works and you know it’s a constantly evolving platform you know um you know

**Rob Osborne**:
because people make these sort of statements don’t they and what it’s based on yeah you know and so so for me it’s like what works for you so you’ve found a formula that works for you right and nobody’s gonna say it’s wrong because actually it works you know you’ve you’ve got a a capacity of services you can deliver and your processes you’ve you know you’ve experimented with all these different things and your processes are working right and they’re keeping your business topped up and that’s what digital marketing or any marketing is all about so you actually you know you’ve you’re working at this point but you’re not at the sweet spot of the moment i keep doing this it keeps

**Naomi Stonier**:
working all right that’s that’s what you need um and also it’s learning you know there is an art to selling on the internet you know i’m talking to people who’ve never met me and they are paying me thousands of pounds over the internet okay and so there is a trust element there and trust is built through my visibility and also me genuinely helping people so when and I’ve genuinely helped them enough for free they trust me to pay them and so this was also the why I did it organically because there’s no point paying for ads getting a load of info getting a load of leads in one they’re very cold and two have I got the ability to create enough trust and help this person understand how I’m going to help them for them to actually work with me so that was the you know again when I get to a certain stage I’ll be coming to you Rob and you’re going to be helping me with my ads but until then

**Rob Osborne**:
I’m at a good level to just convert it myself yeah steady at the steady pace yes yeah and the other challenge for you in some ways because of the kind of what what you do is you know you can always ask for testimonials but quite often you’re either going to get something that’s anonymous because somebody doesn’t want to sort of say yeah or you know you have to have a very very trusting client that’s willing to give you that because now it’s

**Naomi Stonier**:
difficult for them for people to kind of it’s very private I mean my testimonials are mainly

**Rob Osborne**:
anonymous do you think anonymous testimonials are still valuable oh absolutely you know and again because of the nature of what you do and how you know the sort of people that need your help I think they would you know most people would expect them to be anonymous because it is you know you have to be very um you know very confident in yourself that you’ve come out the other side to be able to go you know yeah you know I have marriage problems and I’ve been to a marriage counsellor and now and now it’s worked you know it’s great this work but do you know what

**Naomi Stonier**:
I mean so it’s quite you know I mean everything I’m doing on socials is inviting people into a

**Naomi Stonier**:
so usually that one hour conversation is enough for this person to think right she’s the right

**Rob Osborne**:
person for me or not yeah yeah and that’s the other good thing that you’re doing is you’re offering as you say a free consultation that gives them a chance to get to know you uh as well and I think that that again um is quite uh an important thing I’m a little bit conscious of time you know um and uh you know with the storm raging outside how long our internet connections will hold up as well um so a couple of things I should sort of I mentioned this before we sign up there’s a couple of things I like to ask everyone um and that’s to give a couple of good tips one is a piece of advice for people to do all the time because it’s good advice do this so what’s your do this piece

**Naomi Stonier**:
of advice for people doing digital marketing seek genuine connection yeah genuinely talk be a real human being and talk as you would in person

**Rob Osborne**:
in real life to people on social media yeah okay that’s a really good one and conversely what’s your tip for don’t do this it just doesn’t work um

**Naomi Stonier**:
yeah I mean again again in the complete reverse I really think it is if you are just going on with the agenda of making money you will probably fail you know it’s just like networking you know if you go into networking to have a genuine conversation and find out about someone you’re much more successful than you know is this person going to pay me

**Rob Osborne**:
yeah yeah absolutely and you’re absolutely right there that’s cool so if people want to get in contact with you because they might need your services or just interested in what you’re doing with digital marketing what’s the I mean I will share your links uh in the show notes and everything but what’s the best way for them to get in contact with you

**Naomi Stonier**:
if they want to they can email me at naomi at plumocoaching.com that’s p l u m o coaching.com and of course I am on linkedin and facebook all day every day

**Rob Osborne**:
excellent well thank you so much for your time today naomi uh it’s been really interesting chatting with you uh and it’s really interesting we’re looking forward to not only what you’re doing now what you’re doing in the future with digital marketing so thank you ever so much

**Naomi Stonier**:
thank you so much for having me on

**Rob Osborne**:
thank you

My Favourite LinkedIn Functions

My Favourite LinkedIn Functions

Introduction

Although I’ve been promoting digital marketing services for a number of years, it’s only recently that I’ve started really promoting these on LinkedIn. This is because I was only doing digital marketing on a  part-time basis whilst I did interim work and I was using LinkedIn to connect with recruiters and interim client contacts.

I’m now using LinkedIn to promote my digital marketing services and thought I’d share the functions that I have found most useful. I am only using the free version of LinkedIn, so there may be richer functionality and even better functions in the paid version, but I’m not able to comment on them at the moment.

LinkedIn Analytics

LinkedIn Analytics

I’ve always been a fan of tracking your numbers, so being able to look at analytics on LinkedIn really appeals to me. As you can see from the picture, analytics are available from the home screen on the desktop version of LinkedIn. They are also available on the mobile app.

Analytics are mainly focused on profile views and post impressions. Profile views is quite limited in the free version but there is a lot available to look at and play with in the post impressions area. Well worth looking at on a regular basis.

Conversations Happening Now

LinkedIn Conversations Happening Now

I have included this function as it existed at the time I ran the workshop that this post is based on, but this function has since disappeared from my profile.

This is a section in the Post Impressions section of the analytics and shows you three posts from others that are currently performing well and are relevant to your business, encouraging you to wither interact with them or repost them with comments. This is a good way to boost your engagement and create a post if you’re struggling for an idea.

You need creator mode turned on for this. There is something similar in this section if you don’t have creator mode turned on too.

Notification Button

LinkedIn Notification Button

If you look at somebody’s profile on LinkedIn, you will see a little bell icon. If you turn this on, LinkedIn will notify you that when they have posted something. There are a couple of levels to this, you can either select being notified for all posts or just their top posts.

There are a number of uses for this.

If you want to learn from somebody who is already an expert in their field, then being notified of their posts is a sign you can learn something new.

If you want to support a friend, colleague or client, you can turn this on and then support their posts by adding comments and engaging with it (LinkedIn’s analytical term for likes, etc).

Recommendations

LinkedIn Recommendations

Another powerful function available from the profile page is the “request a recommendation” function, which allows you to request a recommendation from somebody. The main people you should be targeting are people who you have done work for where you know you’ve delivered a good service to them. The really good thing about this is that you get to review what they’ve written before you post it to your profile, so if you don’t like it you don’t have to share it.

You can also be proactive and give somebody a recommendation. It’s on the same drop down menu from the more button on their profile.

The LinkedIn Social Selling Index (SSI)

LinkedIn Social Selling Index

The 5th function to share here isn’t available from within LinkedIn, as it’s part of LinkedIn Sales Navigator, but it is free.

The SSI is LinkedIn’s gamification of your activity and is a score out of 100. The score is based on 4 main sections and you get a score out of 25 on each section.

The 4 sections are:

  • Establish your professional brand;
  • Find the right people;
  • Engage with insights; and
  • Build relationships.

As you can see from the picture, I need to build on my “Find the right people” score.

It does give some high level comparisons with others in your industry and in your network and as you can see I’m not doing too badly in comparison with them.

LinkedIn Profile QR Code

LinkedIn Profile QR Code

The final function I’m sharing here is only available on the mobile app and that is the profile QR code. This is a great way to get people to connect with you when you meet them face-to-face at business events, expo’s and networking meetings.

To get to the QR code for your profile open the LinkedIn mobile app, click into the search bar at the top of the screen. Then s little symbol will appear in the right hand side of the search bar on the next screen. Click on this and a QR code will appear. IF anybody then scans that with their mobile phone they will be taken to your profile and will be able to follow you and ask you to connect.

Final Thoughts

I’ve found using these functions has really improved my usability and visibility on LinkedIn and I’ve barely scratched the surface of the functions available. I hope you have found this useful and you go away and try them all out.

Discussing Digital with Nikie Forster

Discussing Digital with Nikie Forster

In this edition of Discussing Digital, I speak to Nikie Forster of Curious Lighthouse Learning Consultancy. We discuss how Nikie is making great use of LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube, as well as some of the many different ways she creates content.
Nikie also shares her One Good and One Bad tips, which is something we ask everyone who takes part on an episode of Discussing Digital to share with us.

 

Transcript

Welcome

Hello, today on discussing digital I’m with Nikie Forster from the Curious Lighthouse Learning Consultancy and we’re here to discuss digital marketing and particularly how Nikie uses digital marketing in her business. So Nikie would you like to kind of introduce yourself and tell us a bit more about your business.

Yeah, absolutely, well first of all thanks for inviting me on Rob, very kind of you. So my profession is a learning and development consultant and the way that I usually describe my business is if it’s anything to do with learning I usually get involved in it, but my my two main areas that I focus on are helping managers to manage their people better and helping trainers to train others better. So those two ends of the scale of what I do, I work with large and small corporates, independents, pretty much anybody that wants help with learning I do and I do that face-to-face and virtually as well.

Brilliant, okay now obviously we’re here to discuss how digital marketing fits into the promotion and growth of your business,

Yeah.

Now obviously you and i are friends and well connected so I’ve seen that you you are very active on digital marketing so it’d be really good if you could kind of give an overview of the different elements of digital marketing that you do and and also as part of that if you can kind of go into a bit more detail about which which ones seem to work best for you.

Approach to Digital Marketing

Sure I would say my approach to digital marketing is a little bit scatter gun approach to be honest, although I am getting better at it so I really like it when something’s very relevant to what’s going on, which is probably why I struggle a little bit with the forward planning of stuff but I tend to use LinkedIn as my main digital platform because with the stuff that I do and talking to corporates and other trainers that’s predominantly where my audience is, but with some of the other bits and pieces that I do as well I find that YouTube is a good place for me to post stuff as is Facebook and I’m just starting to get into Instagram. Instagram’s one of those things that kind of I know I should be doing more on but it it’s just it doesn’t feel comfortable yet, whereas Linkedin feels very comfortable for me to be on, so I try and post on a Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Sometimes that is very much just a quick post and other times it’s a little bit more in depth, but I always like to include images and stuff like that, I tend to find they get the the most engagement.

LinkedIn

Yeah, it’s really interesting you saying that about one that you have identified that Linkedin is a good platform for you because of your kind of most clients that you’re looking for are there, but also your comment around the fact that you kind of feel you should be on Instagram but you you struggle with it because it doesn’t come naturally to you. I think that’s really important for people to understand that that is the case I think it’s you know for me quite a few it’s actually if focus on the one that works best for you and don’t always worry about you feel like you’re under pressure to be on the others yeah.

Instagram

Yeah, I think that one of the reasons why I struggled to kind of let go of Instagram is because although I’ve said you know in terms of the corporate side for management development definitely, but in terms of the trainer stuff that I do, they could be corporate trainers but they could also be entrepreneurs who want to train others in their specialty so they could create their own online courses, and that’s a very different ballgame so Instagram feels as though that would work better for that group,

Yeah

So yeah it always feels a little bit like a juggling thing whereas at the moment what I’d want to do is you want to create one post and just plaster it everywhere which I need.

Yeah, and again there’s nothing wrong with that but as you say there are there are kind of different nuances across the channels so obviously Instagram in particular uses things like hashtags a lot more differently to say Linkedin, although hashtags are appearing a lot more on Linkedin at the moment and is going down that route so yeah. You also mentioned mentioned YouTube earlier so how are you finding YouTube and how are you finding what’s the best way you found to grow your subscriber list? because it was it always feels like a challenge on on YouTube

YouTube

Yeah, so when I say I use YouTube, what I really should clarify is probably a couple of years ago I started using it and set up my own channel on there and I was posting quite regularly and I used to post it. Originally I had a topic particularly around management development and I would split it into four and make four shorter videos and then upload them one a week for a month. Ii thought that that would work well, but what i realized was that people don’t particularly like parts – part one, part two, part three on YouTube, they just want something that’s condensed down into two or three minutes and then they can go off and do something else, and then the pandemic hit and then I had to share my office with my husband and all the nice equipment’s in the office, so it kind of went by the wayside. So doing videos for me has kind of been put on the back burner a bit, but when I pick it up again, what I really use it for isn’t so much to grow the channel on YouTube, it’s more a case of uploading it there so that (a) I can create subtitles, because for me that’s the easiest place to create them and then (b) upload it to my website, because again it’s the easiest way of doing it or posting on social media, so I almost use it like a software tool, rather than a digital marketing tool if that makes sense.

It does, it makes perfect sense actually and your comment there about using youtube for for subtitlings and creating captions, I use it exactly the same way at the moment, because as you say it’s got a very good transcription engine and so it it then takes minimal effort to kind of make the subtitles more readable, whereas I certainly found things like Facebook where they’ve got transcription services you have to do a lot more editing. Talking about visuals and things like that I know one of the things that you’ve kind of been focusing on in your learning development marketing is around the use of Lego, which is a great visual product, I mean how have you found that has helped?

Lego

Oh it gets so much more engagement. I should explain that when I am training people I don’t like taking photographs of people while I’m training them, I think it’s off-putting and I think so people feel as though they then have to almost like put on a show of what they’re doing. So sometimes I will take pictures of if they’re doing an activity so so that people can see the props that I’m using and Lego is is one of those props, so it really helps me to show people the kind of stuff that I’m doing and everybody loves Lego and it’s so bright and colorful and I use it within my management development but also within training and I also have it for other trainers to be able to use this activity, so it kind of covers quite a wide range of my business which is why people probably see it quite a bit, but yeah the visuals of that, I think it just kind of takes people back to their childhood or if their parents playing with their own kids so it’s universal. You cannot sit at a table with Lego in front of you and not pick it up and start building stuff with it, it’s almost impossible to do. So yes I do find that I do use a lot of Lego imagery in my social media posts, but like I say it does get really good engagement.

Yeah, and do you actually obviously sort of like as you say you’re using it during courses whether that’s online because I know sometimes you actually send out the Lego packs to the person you’re training things like that so do you actually kind of take some images while you’re doing the training so effectively you’re almost getting creating content whilst you’re doing something else rather than having to make a special effort to create content?

Yeah, absolutely. So I’ve just finished doing a one-to-one management development program virtually so the whole program was virtual, so I sent all that stuff out to them and rather than trying to take screenshots of them holding things up I was showing my setup here in the office where I actually got the Lego off to one side so that people can see that’s the props that we’re going to be using today. So yes, I do think that the stuff that gets a lot of the engagement is the behind the scenes and the in the moment stuff, rather than the setup of everybody holding their certificates or all that kind of thing. I think people like to know what’s going on. How did that come to be? What’s that person actually doing? How are they making a success of something? and I think people enjoy the the journey rather than the end result, otherwise it would just be me banging on all the time about come buy my services, my courses, things like that and those direct sales pitches don’t get any engagement at all, except from your cheerleaders who really like the stuff that you do.

Yeah

So yeah, you’re absolutely right I do take a lot of the in the moment and the behind the scenes images.

E-Mail Marketing

Do you do any other stuff, like email marketing, to try and keep people informed about what you’re going on and stuff like that?

I’ve tried, I’ve tried. I have a couple of freebies in terms of online courses and I’m just doing some more ebooks, which is short kind of you know 12 ways to do … type of stuff and I do have something set up that can acquire people’s emails for that but I really struggle with the whole newsletter style thing. I don’t like newsletters. I don’t read other people’s newsletters. I’ve got no desire to create my own newsletter. So there’s a bit of a barrier there for me for that. Should I be doing it? Probably, but in a way that works for me and I haven’t worked out what that way is yet. It’s certainly not a bulk standard monthly newsletter. I need to think a bit more about what that is.

Yeah, again I think it’s important you know, that if you’ve got a mental block for want of a better word or this is something that doesn’t work for me, I don’t think you should beat yourself up about the fact that that doesn’t work for me, but actually I’m happy doing this stuff, so I’ll do lots of that, because sometimes people kind of you know, you hear gurus saying you’ve got to do this, you’ve got to do that and then you beat yourself up and don’t do anything, whereas if you go I can do this bit, I like doing that, a bit like, you know, what you were saying earlier about Linkedin is something I like, I’m happy with, so I can do lots of that, whereas this other stuff, it’s hard work. Life’s hard enough anyway, let’s not try to do something hard, that you can do relatively easy and I know you do loads of stuff anyway so, it’s really good you know, what you do is good anyway. So just touching back again on some of the stuff you’re doing repurposing. Obviously, because you do training courses anyway, you mentioned you had a couple of freebies that you do, so have you got any training platforms where you put courses that you you’ve created to hopefully get you some some additional income that way as well?Rather than just being a just a marketing tool for digital marketing?

Yeah, absolutely, so for example the Lego that we talked about earlier, as I said, I use that across several different areas, both in terms of using it to help managers to open up and discuss things and things like that, but then I take those activities that I’ve created and put them into a course so that other trainers can come and have a look at those and then use them for their own learners. So I’ve got several online courses specifically around that and I’ve got them on several different platforms for different reasons so I use a course creation platform called Thinkific to create online courses and I love them. I think it’s really easy, really easy? very straightforward to use. Very intuitive to use. You do a lot on it but there’s no marketing from their point of view involved in that you have to do all the marketing yourself. So if I’m ever marketing my Lego courses, that’s predominantly where I’m sending them to. The other place that I do have them is on Udemy, but, I think Udemy is fantastic at what it does in terms of getting out to a global audience, but they take so much of the profit from it so, it’s all about quantity with Udemy rather than building relationships with people and doing it that way. So yes, I’ve got those, I’ve got a couple of other ones about creating online courses. The management development stuff tends to be more specifically face-to-face or I do programs rather than one-off events so that that tends to be more invoice-led rather than a course that’s bought online.

Cool. okay, so as we discussed this beforehand I was going to ask you a couple things, so can you share with everyone one good thing that you’re doing in digital marketing that you kind of think ah, this really works for me and i’m just doing loads of it.

One Good Thing

The one thing if I had to really nail it down would be the behind the scenes stuff. Tell people what you’re doing so it’s not selling but it’s about what you’re doing, so like I said before my virtual management development program that I’ve just been running, I’ve been posting the behind the scenes stuff on that and just talking about what’s working, the fact that I found a new piece of software to be able to use to do it. So I’m sharing my own journey and story but people are still hearing what it is that I’m doing so if they need that in the future they know that that’s something that I’m experienced in. So that is what I would say rather than trying to sell on social media, is share your story in your journey and become the person that people think about when when they need that.

Absolutely, I think that’s really good advice. I was going to say what you’re saying. It’s about that whole meet, like, Know, trust stuff and to get people getting to know you and your approach and things like that rather than as you say here’s a hard sell type stuff.

One Bad Thing

Equally if there’s one thing you say “oh, it just doesn’t work for me, I just don’t want to do that”

I actually think this is something I learned very early on when I went into my own business. I started up my own business end of 2015 and I think for probably at least six months the way in which I did digital marketing was how I thought I should sound and how I thought I should come across which which was still very corporate and I’m not saying I’m not professional, I am, but I’m very informal and it took me a while to realize that actually if somebody’s going to buy a service from me then they get me. So that’s what I need to put out. So everything that I post now is very much just how I would be if I was training somebody or helping somebody you know create their own online course or whatever, because then there’s no surprises. I think people buy people not products, so that helps that they know what they’re getting. So to narrow that down because I went off on a tangent there, so as always so to narrow that down I would say “Just be yourself” whenever you are doing social media, just be yourself.

Yeah, that’s great, that’s great and I think that’s really really, really good advice. So finally is there anything else that you’d like to just highlight before we wrap up?

One of the things that I try to do is to stay current and I think that’s important. So although I’ve said before I like LinkedIn, I feel comfortable there, little things tweak and change. I’m talking about algorithms or things like that but just things like being able to put feature pages on, or being able to do a voice note for things, so i think even if you’re comfortable on a platform it’s still keeping up to date with what’s going on and also just pushing yourself slightly to see what else is out there. So I am never going to be on Twitter, she says. I’ve got a Twitter handle but I don’t look at it. But like i said before Instagram is probably somewhere where I want to go, so it’s keeping up to date with things and having somebody like yourself who can help navigate that stuff as well I think is really important.

Cool, thank you for that, I do my best.

 So just before we wrap up, do you want to just kind of share out your different digital marketing platforms so that anybody that’s watching would like to go and see the wonderful work you’re doing and the wonderful marketing you’re doing, so they can actually see what we’ve been talking about?

Fantastic. Well I can’t actually remember them all off the top of my head but i think what i would probably say is that the best one to contact me on is going to be LinkedIn and you can look up my name, Nikie Forster (n-i-k-i-e) but actually i think it’s probably going to come under Curious Lighthouse, so if you look under Curious Lighthouse for anything – Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, it’s all under Curious Lighthouse so that is what I’d probably say but LinkedIn is if you’re looking for a response from me that’s probably the best place to go

Yeah that’s fine you have sent me through some urls and that so we will share them in the comments with the descriptions on the videos but they will magically appear here as well.

Wonderful. Thank you.

Okay, well in that case I do thank you for your time today and I hope everyone’s enjoyed watching this because Nikie’s just shared a load of really, really good tips. I would suggest you want to go away, watch this video a couple of times and really take take apart some of the great tips that Nikie’s shared with us today. So thank you so much Nikie and I look forward to catching up with you again in the future.

Wonderful, thank you very much indeed Rob

Digital Marketing Summit Southampton 2017 – my thoughts

Digital Marketing Summit Southampton 2017 – my thoughts

I spent Thursday and Friday of last week at the Southampton Digital Marketing Summit 2017 #DMSSO17, and am providing so feedback on my findings from the two-day event.

It was a really good event but it was interesting that a lot of it was focused on search, either search engine optimization or pay-per-click advertising but there were some really interesting statistics that came out from it.

They now reckon that over 60% of searches are on mobile and one of the most interesting ones is probably that 20% of searches that are currently done through the Google app are done by voice and that by 2020 they are predicting that actually 50% of all searches will be done by voice which is something you really need to think about with your business, promoting your business online and how you’re going to link with that particularly with the fact that actually a lot of voice searches are linked to local searches as well. In addition, you need to think about the devices that are driving voice searches and what they use for a search engine behind the scenes – Alexa from Amazon and Microsoft Cortana are both powered by Bing. Siri from Apple was using Bing until September this year.

Another hot topic they were talking about at the summit was a major rise in paid adverts across digital marketing platforms and how these can now be targeted very much at your custom audiences so that’s something to think about.

One interesting observation from me was that there wasn’t that big an emphasis at the summit on social media. There were a couple of sessions but it really was focusing on the whole content marketing, search engine marketing side of things and I can understand why that appearing in search results is more likely to lead to sales as people are looking for your services at that time (this is called attraction marketing) rather than your advert appearing on social media and hoping somebody will visit it, known as interruption marketing.

 

What do I do with my video now?

What do I do with my video now?


Video is great for promoting your business, but once you’ve made the decision to get one or more videos produced and you’ve been given the video files, what should you do with them?
The obvious answers are put it on your website and share it on all your social media channels – but how do you do all those things?

Posting your video on your website

When you put your video on your website, don’t make the mistake of loading the video file to your website, as your website hosting platform won’t be optimised for streaming video, so your video won’t play very well when people visit your website.

Video Hosting Platforms

YOuTube LogoThe two most well-known video hosting platforms are YouTube and Vimeo, which both allow you to set up free accounts or channels. There are other video hosting platforms, such as Wistia, but these charge for their services.
I tend to use YouTube, because it is the second most used search engine on the internet, is owned by Google and you can link your Google Analytics for your website with your YouTube channel so you can get all your Google performance metrics in one place.

Once you have put your video on your hosting platform, you need to embed the video onto your website. It’s fairly easy to do this, on YouTube you click on the share button, go to the Embed tab, copy the line of HTML code that is shown and then copy this into your web page at the place you want to embed it on your web page. Note that there are some options available to you when you create the embed code, including video size, so choose the settings that you want.

When you embed the video on your web page, think about where you want the video to appear. In general, it is best to put the video as near to the top of your web page as possible, as you want website visitors to watch it and they are more likely to do this if they see it at the top of the page.

Posting your video on Social Media

Social Media Logos Montage - Facebook - Twitter - LinkedIn - Pinterest - InstagramAlthough it is possible to share your video from YouTube, it is better to post the video natively onto the social media channels you are looking to share it on, as the algorithms they use for deciding whether to share your post with others all favour video hosted locally over video links. Loading videos locally onto each social media platform will also give you access to post insights. Facebook in particular provides some very detailed insights to how your video is being watched and there is a second level of detail provided about the audience once the video has been viewed 100 times.
Uploading video works the same across all the platforms, but they do have some nuances that you need to be aware of.

facebook logoFacebook

When you load a video onto Facebook, the system will select 10 thumbnail images from the video and you can choose which you want to use. You can also load a custom thumbnail if you don’t like any of the options available to you.
Facebook also has a very good tool for adding captions to videos and as over 90% of video views are made with the sound off, it is advisable to add captions if your video doesn’t have captions already. It is possible to export the captions file to reuse elsewhere, should you wish.

Twitter LogoTwitter

Twitter is fussier about the video files you can load. It only allows you to load .mp4 and .mov formats and the video files must be less than 512 Mb in size.

Instagram LogoInstagram

Instagram will only let you load videos that are less than 1-minute-long and you can only load files from your mobile device – there isn’t a facility to load a video from a desktop browser.

linkedin logoLinkedIn

LinkedIn is currently rolling out a facility to load videos natively, but this is only available from the mobile client.

What to do with your social media posts

Once you have your video on your social media platform, there are things you can do to increase their exposure. On Facebook you can share your post into relevant groups. On Twitter you can get people to like and/or retweet your posts and similarly you can do this on Instagram. Follow this link on more ideas for sharing content.


Rob Osborne of Red Knight SolutionsIf you need more help or advice on what to do with your posts, please call me or leave a message and I will be happy to pass on my advice. If you are looking to get videos produced, let me know by calling the Red Knight Solutions offices on 02392 265725.