Learn how building your brand online will allow you to build trust, grow your list, and drive sales with branding expert Maya Elious.
IE 437: Building a Brand Online with Maya Elious
Maya Elious is a personal branding strategist and the CEO of Built To Impact. This coaching company primarily focuses on women of faith and female entrepreneurs who are experts in their field and want to learn how to position their expertise online and package a high-ticket offer to build a six-figure business. She hosts the podcast Work Hard, Life Soft.
How important is personal branding versus business branding?
Personal branding is essential because people want to buy from people. When you look at business brands, like larger corporations, they are leveraging people to sell their products.
Years ago, they would leverage models, and actors and actresses would market their products. Since the influencer marketplace has blown up, we leverage personal brands even with business brands.
Personal branding is important because it builds trust instantly. We love the humanization side of sales and marketing. Social media has added to that so much over the years because we can see behind the scenes and what is happening in real life.
Tabloids used to be really big. In the grocery store aisles, you could see what the tabloids said people were doing and now you know it isn’t true because that person posted on social media that they were happy and with their family.
Social media has created a level of entitlement that consumers feel like they deserve access to you but it does allow you to control your own narrative and connect with your consumer in a more intimate way.
What types of content are most effective for brand building?
When you are creating content there are three pillars that Maya uses.
- Trust Building: Creating content to build your brand or trust. Do people know who I am? Am I able to answer three questions? Who am I? Who do I serve? How do I serve them?
- Marketing: Creating content to build your email list and generate leads. What free or low-cost resource can you put out?
- Sales: Creating content to build your bank; meaning selling. Use content that will convert to your products and your services.
When people go to Instagram, stories, or posts, can they get an idea of who you are from a value or interest standpoint?
What are you into besides just being an expert? For example, Maya is a romantic. She loves love. She loves traveling and the beach. She loves spending time with family, including her parents, her sister, nieces, and nephew.
Build the brand with the human part first and then build the brand by positioning your expertise.
Can people see that you have evidence of what you say you are good at? If you say you are a business coach, are people seeing content of other clients saying they got results working with you? Do you see content of you working with clients? Do you see content of speaking on stages or podcasts?
First, create content that builds your brand with you as the expert and then next with you as the human.
Once people recognize your brand, feel a level of connection, and want to be more bought in, do you have a resource for them? Do you have a free e-guide, a webinar, or a way to book a 20-minute call?
You want to be intentional to invite people to a deeper level of intimacy and relationship with you. That is what content is.
Content is a conversation between you and the people that you want to serve and want to buy from you. You need to create relationships with them. Building your list is a way to go deeper with that.
Content for building your bank could be to let people know you are hosting a 3-day live event in Atlanta, Georgia, along with what it will be about, and includes a link for them to buy their ticket.
Jenny asked if Maya feels like she goes deeper into the problem she solves as she moves through the three pillars. Maya thinks she does.
People are buying based on value. Value is going to be measured based on the depth of the pain and the ultimate desire of the consumer. As you are looking to build more trust, you need to showcase to the potential client that you understand the problems they are dealing with and have a solution for them.
What areas of content do you feel that you can go deeper?
With podcasts, on YouTube, emails, and webinars, consumers are investing more of their time to learn about you. Those are the areas that you want to go deeper.
Social media will only be bite-sized pieces of content. You have to be strategic about social media and leverage it to build enough trust to get them to move to another platform where you can go deeper. Social media is moving so quickly that they might only spend 3 seconds reading a caption and then be finished.
Typically, people who are listening to podcasts, reading emails, watching YouTube, and attending webinars, have a higher level of investment.
With social media, they may not take the next step to convert to your list. Is there a particular platform where people should put the most time?
Maya currently spends the most time on Instagram or organic ads. She is starting to put a lot more time into YouTube with long-form content.
There is a lot of content and noise on social media. Based on the algorithm, it is just not a good use of time to assume you will get customers from that place. It is a good place to tell people to go to keep up with you as social media is social proof. It isn’t the best place to expect to convert.
The long-form content that you know people are investing their time in is also where people tend to invest their money. Podcasts on YouTube allow them to see you but also allow them to hear your voice for the extra connection.
YouTube is necessary because of the way social media has changed with quick-form videos. They feel like they know you and see you continually educating them on the problems they are struggling with.
With sales, it comes down to trust and fulfilling a need. Assuming someone sees your brand and trusts that you have the solution, they need to know they can trust you.
When you think about sales and relationships, typically long-distance relationships are going to be more difficult than dating someone who lives in your city because you can see them every day and the rapport is there. When you are in the online space you have to think about the next best thing since you are not able to see them in person and build that trust.
For Maya, it is going to be some level of live video, webinars, live interaction, or sales calls. Is she able to get on the phone with you and talk to you in real-time?
The level after that is going to be YouTube. She wants to be able to see the person on video, watch an extended piece of content, and make sure she understands the context of what they are teaching. Does she vibe? Does she like his or her personality?
Next will be podcasting so she can still hear their voice. Maybe she isn’t seeing them moving but she has seen images of them. When it comes to trust and relationship building, how can you create the highest level of intimacy, within reason and boundaries, in the online space?
A lot of times, people will start in the online space as a hobby. They are not thinking about profitability and how they can continue to grow it.
How do you turn an online brand into a profitable business?
You need to have an offer and you need to be willing to sell. In our minds, you say you want to have a business and want to impact people.
We overthink content and underthink sales. If your content is not tied to a sales strategy, you will only have a limited impact.
When it comes to selling, people think selling is dirty, not good, or sleazy. When you think about who you have sold to, those are the people who have the highest level of impact. Impact doesn’t happen just from free content. Impact doesn’t happen from having a signature offer. Impact happens from selling the signature offer.
When Maya looks at the people she has impacted over the years and the clients who have had the best results, they are people who invested because Maya sold something to them.
If you want a profitable business, you need to be realistic. Are you showing up and selling? Are you giving yourself the opportunity to present a paid offer in front of your ideal clients?
If you want a profitable business, you need to do the work of what a profitable CEO would do, which is creating an offer, selling it, and then being consistent. It is that icky feeling that a lot of women in particular get from sales.
Jenny reiterates the idea that you are selling from a point of trying to solve their problem and being able to impact as many people as possible.
It isn’t really sales. It is helping them, educating them, and giving them the things that you want to put out online. You are just bundling it into a pretty package where they are going to get results faster rather than trying to piecemeal everything online from little bits and pieces of content that you put out.
Maya looks at selling as creating an opportunity for somebody to have more or better. This person is already seeking these things anyway.
Your ideal client is actively looking to invest in the solution they are seeking. They are going to spend money anyway. There is no reason to feel guilty that they are going to spend money with you if you know and feel confident you can give them the solution they are looking for.
We also feel icky about sales if we concern ourselves with what is going on in someone else’s pockets or bank account. It is not your responsibility to worry about how much money they have. It is your responsibility to worry about how much value you are giving.
If I am giving you the value that you have communicated for the price point that you desire, I am offering it with integrity.
We don’t need to look at sales as taking money from people. We need to look at sales as giving value and presenting an opportunity for more or better. It is just an exchange. One person is giving you value in the form of money and you are giving them value in the form of service.
How can small businesses compete with bigger brands online?
This isn’t necessarily talking about giant brands like Nike. It is about someone who is starting today and they go to social media and see someone with 87,000 followers or another person with five million.
To compete, you must have a high level of intentionality to build a relationship with your client or customer. When you begin making more money, you have to figure out how to scale without losing the level of connection.
That is an easy way to compete with another brand that has hundreds of clients when you only have to manage a few clients. You can call them and just check to see how things are going. You can respond faster and have a better level of customer service.
Having intimacy and customer service is an advantage when you are smaller. The art of excellent customer service is going down the drain. It is important to show people a level of care and respect.
Having great customer service and customer care is going to set you apart. Great customer care can look like intentional onboarding. Check to make sure they received the email to log in to their course or access to their portal.
Be intentional about making people feel confident about the decision they made to work with you. That relationship can only make it easier to get more referrals from within the network of people that you are already starting to attract.
How is AI impacting online branding, and how should brands adapt?
You can compare AI to money. Money is a magnifier and it is going to make you more of who you already are. If you are already great at communicating with your audience, you are going to leverage AI to be a better communicator.
If you are distant, inconsistent, and don’t know how to speak to your audience, you are going to plug things into artificial intelligence based on how you are already acting and showing up, and it is going to give you that output.
AI can help us expedite our processes but the process that is going to be expedited is the process you have already mastered. AI isn’t going to make you better; it is going to make you more efficient in what you are already doing.
When it comes to personal branding, AI cannot replicate or replace you. That is a fear of a lot of people. They think AI will create content and all of the sudden, they will be gone. Their writing isn’t necessary. Their podcasts’ voices are even being done with AI now.
But when it comes to the personal connection that you can only provide through your stories, there is no competition. AI is not going to replace you.
Maya’s clients ask her if she uses AI since she is a messaging expert. She has sometimes but other times, she forgets that it exists because she is used to using her brain, doing market research, and having conversations with clients to see what the best language for them is.
It comes down to ascertaining if she is using a language that is authentic and that her ideal client is going to understand.
Maya is not against AI. She just doesn’t want us to lean so heavily on it that we lose the basic foundations of messaging and communicating with our audience.
For AI to be effective, it has to understand you, your audience, your business, your vision, your goals, and everything you are looking to do. Otherwise, it is just spitting out someone else’s.
If you are using it for yourself, it has to become like an assistant that knows you. You have to feed it with a lot of information. A lot of people forget that. They just start asking questions without having provided them with any background information about their business and where they are trying to go.
Rather than looking at AI as a resource to replace you, it should be a resource that supports you in the same way that you would hire an assistant.
You have to be good at delegating or else they are not going to be able to support you in the best way possible. Otherwise, you are going to become frustrated and there is going to be a disconnect.
If you want to leverage AI to the best of its ability, you have to be very clear with your instructions. Have you fully communicated what you are trying to do so they understand everything?
One of the most challenging parts of being a CEO is learning how to be a better leader. As a leader, you try to get people to follow your vision.
People can’t follow and support your vision unless you are clear on your vision and give clear instructions. If you try to use AI and it’s not working to your advantage, you have to ask yourself if you are being clear with your vision. Are you relying on AI or your team to be clear on your behalf? As a CEO and leader, that is your responsibility.
Build Your Online Brand Checklist
Discover the foundational pillars you need to cut through the noise, get noticed, and build trust in the online space.
If you had to start from scratch today building your brand, what would you do? This checklist gives you points about getting people familiar with your brand name, your face and headshots, building your list, content ideas, converting, etc.
This checklist is going to help you. Give yourself deadlines to see how much of the checklist you can accomplish in the next 30 days. It is a great road map to help you move forward on all the ideas you have. Get your checklist here.
Action Steps:
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