Be Human.

I used to stress out a lot about marketing. Like, OMG this has to be all complicated and how do I carefully craft a message so it’s just perfect and keep my brand under constraints and say just the right things at the right time in order to execute perfectly and get my customers at just the right time?

Man, that’s exhausting. And in the end… that approach reaped very little reward. Very little engagement, crickets.

And then I started just having conversations, in real time and in my writing. I pretended I was just talking to my friends and peers. I made mistakes and never double checked or edited. I wrote like I spoke and only allowed myself to type up a post when I was in bed, ready to go to sleep.

And it worked! People started responding, engaging, and commenting on how much they liked my content. Really? My academic writer self was scratching her head thinking “But I sound all goofy and it wasn’t properly structured.”

Well guess what? My audiences liked it because I was more human. They knew me, not some perfectly crafted pretend vision of me.

So I adopted this strategy across all of the parts of my business.

I joke with my clients and learn about their lives. We talk like friends and I know them well. They sometimes see my kids running around behind the scenes and I sometimes see them in their pajamas, or crying.

I’ve eliminated all of the formality in my work, and have kept it gritty and practical, but comprehensive and effective. I roll with my mistakes and I try not to speak like I’m a corporate robot anymore.

At the end of the day, I don’t care who you are, how famous you have become, or where you live. You are still a human and you want to connect. You want to be known, and that helps both of us get the most we can out of our work together.

Being a human has also allowed me to create relationships with people I might have been anxious about connecting with before. We have a common foundation, no matter what.

As it turns out, I’m really good at connecting and making people feel comfortable. And here I was, keeping that super power under wraps. Silly me. ⠀
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Tell me in the comments…

Are you being human? If not, what’s stopping you?⠀