When done right, social media is a powerful marketing channel. That's where Jessica Wikingellis comes in. Today, she's sharing her method for creating a social media marketing strategy that sells.

Specifically, Jessica shares:

• Why branding is key for social media success.
• How to bridge authenticity with sales.
• Key social media traps (and how to avoid them).

Mentioned in This Episode:

• Connect with Jessica on:
• Instagram
• TikTok
• LinkedIn
• Learn more about Love Wild Rivers: www.lovewildrivers.com

About Jessica:

Jessica Wikingellis, co-founder of Love Wild Rivers, brings over a decade of expertise in marketing at Corporate Global companies and Agencies, with a specialized focus on social media strategy and management. Her adventurous spirit and entrepreneurial savvy have seen her launch three successful businesses across various countries, gathering unique insights and inspirations along the way.

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Work With Me: growthdirective.com

About Angela

Angela Frank is a fractional CMO with a decade-long track record of generating multimillion-dollar marketing revenue for clients. She is the founder of The Growth Directive, a marketing consultancy helping brands create sustainable marketing programs.

Her new book Your Marketing Ecosystem: How Brands Can Market Less and Sell More helps business owners, founders, and corporate leaders create straightforward and profitable marketing strategies.

Angela is the host of The Growth Pod podcast, where she shares actionable tips to help you build a profitable brand you love.

Welcome to The Growth Pod.

Today on the podcast we have Jessica Wikingellis, who is the co founder of Love Wild Rivers and she brings over a decade of experience in social media marketing. She has built three successful businesses across various countries, gathering unique insights and inspirations along the way.

Jessica, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you, thank you for having me. I'm really happy to be here.

I am very excited.

We were just chatting before we hit record and this will be the first time we've really done into social media and the power that it has for making sales for your business. And so today you're going to share how we can create a social media strategy that sells.

But before we get started, can you share a little bit about your approach to social media?

Yeah, that's a great question. My approach to social media I think very much aligned with why I started my business in the first place.

I have over 10 years of marketing experience working for both corporate brands and agencies. And why I started my business was because I saw that lack in the industry of building connections and relationships.

A lot of times on the agency side, they just want to sign on the clients and then the clients, they just want to sell their services and products so they can sign on their clients. But there was no building connections or relationships between the agencies and their clients or the clients and their audience.

And that's the reason why I started my business and that's my approach to social media. I'm really here to build more connections and relationships and teach my audience and my clients how to do that for themselves.

Because I believe that when we build connections and relationships, that's how we build trust and that's how we also make sales.

I love that we talk a lot on the podcast about the importance of creating that relationship with your prospects, be it through email, the communications that you have on your website.

And so I love how you are also bringing that concept of education into social media as well and creating that relationship with the people that you are bringing into your community. So I'm curious to know what are your top tips for, you know, building this relationship but then creating a social strategy that ends up selling.

Right. Because we want people obviously to come into our community and we want to build those relationships with them.

But at the end of the day, we do want to be able to grow our businesses through social. So how do you achieve both?

That's a great question.

I think the main thing I see a lot of times social media strategies out there being quite shallow and we have a four step method that I really believe In. But I think the main tip I would give is really to dig deeper into your social media strategy and that comes with first in your branding.

Like dig deeper into your branding, who you are, what's your mission, what's your values, what's your opinions? Because that is going to really make us stand out on social media. Today we see so many people having very generic content and they all look similar.

So if you don't dig deeper into why you started your business in the first place, it's going to be harder for you to stand out on social media. So that would be my first suggestion. The second suggestion I would say is dig also deeper down into your ideal target audience. Who are they?

Not just Ben in Georgia who's 50 years old. Right. We really want to dig deeper into what are their pain points, what are their desires, what are their emotions, what are their day to day life.

Because the more we know about our audience, the easier will be to attract them and also to build that connection and build that trust and relate to them. Because when you don't know who you want to attract, you're speaking to everyone and then you kind of speak to no one.

So I would say focus a lot on those two, your branding, how to stand out who your target audience, you can really attract them. But then also the two other pillars that we focus on is have a content plan so you can stay consistent and stay on brand so you know what to create.

But then also build that sales funnel so you have a system so you can guide your audience through the entire consumer journey and guide them to purchase at the end of the day.

I love that.

I think one of the important things that individual business owners are trying to bridge that gap or strike a good balance on is authenticity in your social media content. How do you go about creating authentic social media content without maybe, you know, sharing everything about your life?

Or I think people are maybe a little scared of judgment or that they might come across as cringe if they lean too much into authenticity. So how do you take your content pillars and then bring in this element of remaining authentic to yourself?

That's a. Yeah, great question. I keep saying that.

No, I think I recently actually did a social media post about this that I believe that the corporate brands and the bigger brands can actually learn from the creators and the coaches in the industry by being more authentic and putting more personality into their content. Because creator and coaches are very good at that on social media.

I think when it comes to how to stay authentic but not getting too personal, it comes back to your branding, what is your brand identity and why did you start your business?

If you dig deeper into your own values and opinions around your industry or your mission and your vision and why you started your business, that is your brand identity, that's your personality and that's what you can talk about. And when you talk about those things, you're being authentic.

So always think of like talking about within your industry so you don't start talking about your dog or your kid unless that has something to do with what it is that you are working within, within your business or your brand.

So my suggestion would be to really, when you want to be authentic, think about your brand, your brand identity and that personality and that's going to help you stay authentic, but also stay on brand.

Obviously I love that, bringing that concept of your brand identity and then marrying that with the parts of you that are very authentic. When we are creating our social strategy, you know, you've mentioned that we should keep in mind to set ourselves up for success on the other side.

What are some things that you've seen as big mistakes that clients make before working with you or just that you see people making in general when it comes to creating social content?

Big mistakes. I wouldn't call them mistakes, but something that I've seen a lot of my clients fall into. Especially when it comes to social media.

If you are marketing yourself offline, in network meetings or whatever it can be, and you have your pitch and you know your branding and who you're talking to and so on, and then you jump on social media. What I see is happening for a lot of people is number one, they start comparing themselves to everyone else.

Because before you jump on social media, you don't have that comparison because you're not going to jump in a room with 10 other people in the same industry and start comparing yourself. That doesn't really happen offline, but online it does.

So what happens to a lot of personal brands, coaches and creators, sole entrepreneurs, is that they start comparing themselves and start judging others, judging themselves. And that's why it's so important to stick to your branding and really knowing of who you are and how you're unique and how you stand out.

Because what happens is that they start having self doubt and they don't believe in themselves and they're not confident enough and that turns into their content.

And that when they show up in their content, people can sense that and feel that and see that and then they don't want to do social media, they don't want to create content anymore because they have these self doubts feelings. So that is, I wouldn't call that a mistake, but I've seen that happening a lot.

So.

So my suggestion to a lot of people who are in this industry is to really block out all the competition if you feel like you are starting to have that self doubt. What's happening a lot of times when you do that as well is that you start copying what others do.

So that actually, to be completely honest with you, happened to me, I jumped on social media.

I've been doing social media for so many businesses for so many years, but when I started to do it for myself, I started getting into this the same thing as my clients did. And I had to take a step back and ask myself, why am I doing this? Why am I good at this? Like I need to stick to my own branding.

So I would really advise people that jump on social media is to stick to your brand, block out everyone else. Unless you use it for inspiration and repurpose it to your own branding, then that's great.

But it's a very thin balance and it's a thin thread between the two. So yeah, I think that's the biggest things I've seen, at least with solo entrepreneurs and coaches.

For the bigger businesses, on the other hand, we work both with solo entrepreneurs and bigger brands and for the bigger brands it's more about bringing that personality in. So what they're doing a lot of times, I take as an example real estate business. A lot of real estate agencies look the same.

They all post their sold properties and they all post their listings and it's very similar to each other. So what they need to do is like the opposite.

They really need to bring that personality out in their social media because they're not standing out, they're looking all the same and very generic.

I love that.

I think that the comparison game is something that so many people, myself included, at certain points really fall into that trap of like, oh, people are doing this, I need to be doing that. And I love what you're saying, you know, just don't play the comparison game, focus on what you were saying earlier.

Your core brand identity is remaining authentic to yourself and then for larger brands bring that element of personality. And I think that your example with the real estate agents is so spot on and I have seen that so many times.

And then when people, people are able to bridge the gap and bring that personality and have someone educating.

I know that there's a lot of YouTuber real estate agents who share about the benefits of Living in the area and things, it really makes you feel connected to the people behind the brand, the people that are doing work there and who you would be working with to purchase a home for this example. So we've chatted about a lot. We've chatted about things that we should do, things that we shouldn't do.

If somebody is listening and they are feeling overwhelmed by the thought of creating content, you know, there's so many different social platforms. You have to be consistent. What is your advice to somebody who is feeling overwhelmed by social media?

Yeah, we get a lot of clients who are solo entrepreneurs and coaches that feel overwhelmed by social media. And what I've seen with a lot of them is that they don't really have a strategy and plan in place.

So many people think they can just jump on social media and start it off and they'll be fine. But that might have worked 10 years ago, but today we really need a strategy and a plan in order to become successful on social media.

Whether you have small following or big following, we all going to need that because it's going to take away that overwhelm because you're going to feel more confident and you're going to have more clarity in what it is that you're going to post, what when you know who you are and how you stand out, and when you know who you want to talk to and what your mission or your intention is with each content piece. So when you have a social media strategy and when you have a content plan, it's going to become so much easier.

So for all the solopreneur and coaches out there, I would say get a strategy, get a content plan. If you need a coach or someone to support you, great, do that as well. But to stick to that, that would be my main thing that I would tell someone.

And that goes obviously for the bigger brands and bigger businesses as well. Usually they already have a strategy in place or they have a content plan, so it looks a little bit different.

But if you feel overwhelmed, stick to your content plan.

Block out, like we talked before, block out all the competition and block out everyone else and just focus on your brand and why you're different and why you are good at what you do.

Jessica, you are someone with over a decade of experience in marketing and social media and you help clients achieve greater success from their socials and I'm sure that keeps you really busy. But I'm curious to know what's next for you. What are you working on?

Thank you for asking that. We actually rebranded ourselves recently and added some more services to our portfolio which includes funnel stacking and AI technology, et cetera.

But for over six years I've been focusing on done for you services where we create social media strategies, digital strategies, social media management and everything for our clients.

But we recently also launched a course and a program for solo entrepreneurs who wants to create their own social media strategy and their own content plan, but together with our help. So this is our next big thing that we're launching right now.

We've had a couple of test runs and a couple of people entering it that loves it and we will do everything with or they will do everything with our support. So they will go through each step. Yeah. So that's our next biggest thing.

So if somebody's listening and they're thinking that the course sounds great or your done for you services sound wonderful, where's the best place for them to connect with you?

Yes. Thank you. Connect With Me Love Wild Rivers on Instagram and on TikTok.

You can find me Jessica Wikingellis on LinkedIn or lovewildrivers.com is our website where you can find our courses, our programs and our done for you services as well.

Amazing. And if you're listening and any of that sounds good to you, all of the links will be in the description of this episode.

So it's really easy to find what you need. Jessica, thank you so much for joining us today. I really enjoyed our conversation and I know our listeners got a lot out of it.

Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of The Growth Pod. I look forward to seeing you in the next one.