If you have a business, you’re likely familiar with the idea of the “Know, Trust, Like Factor” when it comes to your customers and clients. Trust, however, is key to another side of business: running it. That is, trust in yourself. And, to an extent, trust in life itself, or something greater than yourself if you believe in some form of a divine entity.
One podcast I wholeheartedly recommend all witchy business owners subscribe to recently had an episode on this very topic.
Trust in oneself
Some things in business can only be learnt through action as well, so you can’t wait until you trust yourself fully. You need to build trust through taking imperfect action and seeing it all as lessons.
Building a Personal Brand
Having run a business separate from me before, I know it’s scarier to put yourself out there as a personal brand. You will fail and you will fail publicly, even if you have a solid strategy in place. Humans are unpredictable, so the circumstances in sales are never 100% fail-proof.
What having a solid business, marketing, and sales strategies does is minimise the risk of loss for the business. It controls what is within the business’s control and it makes it of the highest possible standard.
For example, as a personal brand, especially when you don’t have contractors, you need the right business model. Then you need systems and tools to make working both in the business and on the business easier. They will also be what allows you to bring in more support. Once those are in place, you are ready to welcome clients, which is the job of sales and marketing.
Sales and Marketing Strategies
I use the plural “strategies” because sales and marketing are two different things with separate goals. As such, they have different ways to go about the strategy. Marketing is the top layer of raising brand awareness, and bringing people from strangers into your world.
PR and advertising are activities that contribute to marketing, as is networking. I would say that, in spite of being called “email marketing”, your newsletters fall under your sales strategy.
The sales strategy is how you bring your potential customer, which has been individuated and vetted by your marketing, from having a pain point to seeing you as the solution. It can also be the case that you have a client journey starting before people realise they have a problem.
Or if they realise they have a problem, they may not realise what the problem is. One common example is the idea of people with a headache not searching for solutions about dehydration when that may very well be the cause.
How the client journey builds trust in business
Another area that you need to have in place in a way that gives you confidence is the client journey. Tools like a Calendar with booking times already available, AI inbox management, and a CRM can all help streamline the experience of working with you from a client’s first enquiry.
Knowing that I have everything I need in my CRM gives me confidence in my ability to be there for clients. I’m also focusing on creating systems in my marketing efforts, since that was a big energy leak in 2023.
Plenty of people have built successful businesses just showing up online and handling sales in the DMs, so you might find that it works for you too. However, you might find it’s easier to build trust in yourself as a business owner when you have your ducks in a row.
The role of manifestation
It’s common among spiritual entrepreneurs, whether they run a spiritual business or, like me, they’re just witchy girlies with a business of another kind, to bring Manifestation into their business.
After all, it is the way in which we run our lives. It makes sense that we would rely on our inner (or outer) compass with our livelihood.
This, however, can open a can of worms when you have a history of trauma or other reasons for trust issues to begin with. It can make us hesitant to take aligned action, and remain to over-reliant on strategy.
The strategy we rely on could be wrong too, if we didn’t take the time to build one that works with our energetics.
The importance of showing up for yourself
One of my favourite brand strategists, Robyn Savage, posted a reel yesterday reminding us all of the importance of treating our businesses as an entity outside ourselves if we struggle with showing up in it.
That reminded me of a key component of trust which applies to trust in business: you need to make your word to yourself binding. I’m talking about blood oath level of binding.
Sure, life happens to everyone. I wasted a whole hour yesterday between chasing the remote for my heater I somehow misplaced, and a wave of grief hitting me right as I was about to start recording my podcasts. I can only imagine if you have a partner and children, or a chronic illness, or any other circumstances that you can’t control.
But it’s key that our trust in our own commitments to ourselves is ironclad with a clause of force majeure. That means the systems I laid out in this post are meant to help you make things easier when life feels blah, but it’s not the kind of blah where your health takes priority over the fact you said you’d do something.
Showing up on Social Media
Starting small is most likely to help you keep at something, as is not doing things just because you feel you have to. Energetics matter, and if you force yourself to make videos for IG from a place of obligation people will feel it. But if you make a commitment to show up to IG every day you can always fall back on the relatable and intimate vibe of stories.
Personal branding is shifting in 2024, people are getting over the “value content” that is just focused on educating or worse, selling products. People are looking at content from a place of getting to know you to know if you are the person for them.
We’re spoiled for choice, with multiple competitors, and hyper-niching will become the norm before long. It’s time to rethink our approach to our brands before we find ourselves at the back of the curve.
Here’s some questions you can ask yourself to build an intentional personal brand.
