18 Aug Lockdown entrepreneur says selling under personal brands can be lucrative
BUSINESS founders should consider establishing their own personal brands to reach lucrative markets on social media, according to entrepreneur Amelia Sordell.
Asked about launching a marketing business called Klowt during the Covid-19 lockdown, she told GB News: “Like a lot of people, I was sitting in the four walls of my home with my two crazy children who were also going insane and I thought is this really my life?
“Do I really want to be doing this rat race, working for someone else for the rest of my life?
“So I had a bit of a moment of madness, quit my job on a Friday.
“I started my business on a Monday and by Thursday had my first two clients.
“It is backing yourself but also I’d started building my personal brand already up to that point, which I think is a really important point.
Speaking to Liam Halligan in an interview during On The Money on GB News, she added: “In my prior role, I was helping businesses and founders of those businesses build their own personal brands because I could see the value of people buying from people.
“We all know people do business with people. That’s why you’re sitting here today because people want to speak to you and hear what you think. That’s how we all buy things.
“I could already see that marketing was going that way. And then the pandemic happened and all of a sudden we were sitting at home scrolling through our phones just desperate for some kind of connection with someone.
“It made sense to me that I should start a business to help founders reach the people that they want to reach who are currently sitting at home scrolling through their phones.”
On marketing on social media, she said: “The reality is you only have 24 hours in a day, your sales team only have 24 hours in a day. There’s only so many phone calls and so many connections you can make in that time.
“Social media enables you to have an infinite number of conversations. I can reach millions of people with just one tweet, with just one LinkedIn post to reach a million people over the phone that would take more than my lifetime.”
She added: “It’s not just about being on every channel. It’s a bit about being on other channels that your customer is on.
“If your business sells b2b, you’re much better off in being on LinkedIn, because other businesses are on that platform…
“It’s not just about being on social media, it’s about understanding where your customer is and then going to your customer where they spend most of their time, which is on their phone.
“I think the first and foremost thing is people need to understand that as I said earlier, people buy from people. You as an individual have ten times the reach of your company brand online, leads brought in through the founder’s personal brand convert seven times more frequently.
“You get your brand messages when you share them as its founder are shared 24 times more frequently than from your company’s social.
“I’m not saying personal branding, as in marketing yourself as a founder versus marketing your business, replaces company branding, but if you’re looking for quick wins and you want to get some business through the door and people know what your business is, it’s much easier to do that by infiltrating communities as the founder then from the company brand.”
