Transcript
Julie Solomon (0:00)
When your messaging is aligned with those core desires, urgency isn't a hard sell. It's just the natural consequence of them seeing the value that you bring.
Unknown (0:10)
Welcome to the Influencer podcast. I'm your host, Julie Solomon. If you found yourself here, it means you are ready to unleash the powerful visionary that lives inside you, turning you into an authentic leader who creates influence, impact and change. Let's get started.
Julie Solomon (0:32)
Hello, friends, and welcome back to another episode of the Influencer podcast. I'm so excited today to dive deep into the world of community and how we are building community. How we are remembering to focus on having more of a community brand in 2025 instead of a personal brand in 2025. Now, I know that we are already in spring by the time this podcast is coming out. I'm recording it a few weeks prior. This is gonna be May. We're like five months into the year so far and I wanna just make sure that we stay tapped in and tuned into the importance of scalability and the importance of growth. And I think that community has such a big part to play in that. So I wanna dive through my thought process on this and really just the importance of moving people into the community lanes of where you want them to go. So with that, my friends, let's get started. As we head more into this year, I am seeing, and I think I'm going to continue to see a big shift from these big audiences to hyper targeted niche communities as the most significant shift in community building. One client that I work with, Elise, was building her brand for a while, but she kept struggling to make what she felt were true connections with her audience. She had a wide reach, but she kept feeling that the engagement just wasn't as strong as it could be. And so we did a few things to support that. We focused on refining her messaging to speak to her ideal clients. We really rooted in to what was the experience that she was wanting to create for this ideal client once they were in her world. And the result from this is that Elise went from feeling like she was just talking into a void with pieces of content to actually having conversations with clients who were ready to invest. We were able to narrow down her niche and really tailor her messaging around the desires that her clients had. But most importantly, what that led to was deeper engagement. Because when you speak to the right people, you don't need massive numbers. You just need that focused connection. And so I want to talk about like, what does that actually mean? And so I want to use this idea of a niche community right Niche communities are thriving. It's about quality over quantity. The engagement's more valuable than sheer size. But. But how do we really know how to refine the audience targeting and what's worked best when deepening that? And I truly believe that to deepen engagement, we need to target people who resonate with our core message, not just the offers that we are creating. So I'll give you an example. One of my clients, Dana, she's a business coach and she came to me really feeling overwhelmed with how to scale. She was worried about being too niche. She was worried about not being able to attract enough people. But when we aligned her messaging around women who just want to essentially step into their power without sacrificing their sanity, that's when everything clicked for her, because that's kind of the world that she's in. And so we were able to really craft messaging that positioned her as that thought leader for women. And this clarity allowed her to create content that wasn't. That didn't just feel like generic surface level advice. It actually directly spoke to what they were experiencing. And most importantly, it put her in the driver's seat of leadership, made her be so obvious as the choice of the person of authority that they needed to learn from. And I think that that is a huge distinction in how we need to go about having this community first mindset and how we create content for it. That it's not just about sharing tips, it' not just about value, but it's really, how am I leading? Right? Because followers don't follow followers, they follow leaders. And community needs leaders. They need people to lead them to where it is that they're going. And so we really have to hone in and honor who we are as leaders and who we are as people in positions of authority. Stop hiding that, you know, like, actually let that radiate. That kind of goes back to that episode that I did on using beauty as a strategy. If you haven't listened to it, you should. It was a couple of weeks ago, but it's kind of of that mindset about how are we moving people to where it is that we want them to go? How are we enticing and creating a feeling that goes beyond just the surface? One way that we can do this is really thinking about the different platforms that we use. So I'm going to take Instagram, for example, and how we can approach Instagram in terms of our community building. How can we attract people on these platforms? How can we make sure that we are not just attracting them and providing value for them, but we're actually showcasing our leadership. And so for me in my business and for a lot of my clients businesses, Instagram is the most powerful front door channel. But what I've also found to be just as crucial is my podcast. You know, it's not just a place for me to share expertise, but this is really where I go deeper. You know, I build relationships with you over time, you come back. Over time you're able to drop into so many different types of podcast episodes and conversations that are going to hit so differently depending on where you're at in your business and where you're at in your journey. And I really use podcasting as a consistent touch point where listeners can get to know me, they can learn from me, they can feel like they're part of the journey that, that we are essentially on together. And I mean, yes, it's one of the also the best ways to warm up leads. But more importantly, I think that a piece of content that goes beyond an Instagram story or an Instagram reel, and when you're really kind of zoom, zooming out and thinking about content strategy and how it supports you in building community, is that each piece of content that you create, and this is why I love podcasting, because each episode can essentially lead to deeper engagement, lead to deeper calls to action, lead to more thought provoking conversations. And it's all strategically woven into the content that I create. And that's really how I want you to be thinking about it too. It's like, how is every piece of content that I create, no matter what platform it's on, how is it woven together so that listeners or consumers or community members can naturally see how we can work together?