Stop Posting and Praying! Here’s Why Visibility Without Branding Fails

If you’ve been posting on social media, sending out emails, maybe even running ads, but you’re still not landing the clients you want, it’s not your strategy. It’s your brand.

This is the piece most coaches and consultants miss. They think they need to hustle harder, post more often, or tweak their offers. But the truth is, without a strong personal brand, you’re invisible. 

And invisible brands don’t get clients.

Why Visibility Without a Brand Doesn’t Work

Being visible is important, but being visible without clarity is dangerous. You could be showing up every day, yet if your audience still doesn’t know what you do or what you stand for, they won’t buy. In fact, you’re just blending in with the noise.

A personal brand isn’t about your logo or color palette. It’s about the message you repeat, the values you stand for, and the trust you build over time. It’s what makes you the obvious choice in a crowded market.

The Real Cost of Being Invisible

Here’s what happens when your brand isn’t clear:

• You’re constantly hustling to prove your value.
• Referrals are slow because people don’t know how to explain what you do.
• Collaborations don’t land because you’re not top of mind.
• You end up competing on price instead of positioning.

If any of these feel familiar, it’s not because your business is broken. It’s because your brand is.

Consistency Is the Secret to Being Remembered

Think about the coaches and leaders you admire. They’re not memorable because they said one clever thing once. They’re memorable because they keep saying the same thing over and over and over again.

Here’s my tip for you – at about the time you feel like you’re boring yourself by repeating your message, that’s the moment your audience is finally starting to remember it. 

Consistency in your message is what builds demand.

How To Show Up When Fear Holds You Back

One of the biggest reasons coaches hold back from building their brand is fear. Fear of judgment, fear of rejection, fear of saying the wrong thing. But the harsh reality is, you’re going to be judged no matter what.

The only way to stand out is to stand for something. When you share your values, your perspective, and your expertise, you attract the right clients and repel the wrong ones. And that’s exactly what you want.

If hitting publish feels terrifying, outsource the button push if you have to! What matters is that your voice and your message are out there.

Why Brand Equity Creates Real ROI

Building a brand isn’t about instant ROI but about cultivating demand over time. The return on investment of branding can’t always be measured in a neat little formula of “$1 in, $2 out.”

Sometimes it looks like a $2 moment that turns into hundreds of thousands in revenue because you created a brand people trust, remember, and talk about. 

Strong brands shorten the sales cycle, increase your prices, and attract clients who already want to buy from you before you even make an offer.

Standing Out in a Sea of Coaches

There are thousands of people who technically do what you do. On paper, you all look the same. But your brand is what makes you the obvious choice. It’s the voice, the vibe, and the values that magnetise the right people to you.

If you’re tired of blending in, tired of explaining what you do over and over again, and still getting blank stares, it’s time to make your brand unforgettable. Because when people finally get who you are and what you stand for, sales get easier, faster, and a whole lot more fun.

CONNECT WITH SAMANTHA RILEY

CONNECT WITH LEON FLITTON

TRANSCRIPTION

Samantha Riley  00:00

You don’t have a demand problem, you have a brand problem. That’s what we’re going to talk about today. Leon, are you ready? Absolutely. I’m really looking forward to this one. I’m Samantha Riley, and welcome to the business growth lab, where visionary entrepreneurs come to experiment, evolve and expand what’s possible. This is something that I think a lot of people need to understand, because there’s a conversation that a lot of people have of like, why can that person do it? And I can’t. And I think that this piece is a really, really big piece, because when you’ve got no brand, you have no demand. Let’s start off by setting the context of what I actually mean. So going back quite a few years ago, I was doing a six week launch with a group of clients. I want to keep the privacy of these clients, because that’s what I like to do. I don’t so let’s call one John, and let’s call one Sally. Okay, so John had a very clear brand. He had an audience that was his ideal clients. They knew exactly what it was that he did and what he helped them to achieve. He had a reasonable sized list. It wasn’t that big, but it was engaged, and it was warm. He was always speaking to them. So that’s John. Then on the other side, we’ve got Sally. So Sally had had her business for many, many, many years. She had a huge list. She had a list. I couldn’t believe that her list was this big. I thought in my mind, I was like, this is going to be a cinch. To help her to get this launch done, she got crickets, zero clients. What I found out was she’d never once emailed any of those people on her list so they didn’t know who she was, and she never, ever, ever showed up on social media to talk about what she did. There was people in her world that didn’t actually know what she did. So we had one John that had a really tight brand. He did a $20,000 launch because people knew who he was and what his offer was, essentially. And then we had Sally, who had a huge list, but people didn’t really know what she did. It meant that she got zero clients.

Leon Flitton  02:19

Yeah, actually, I remember this situation, and, yeah, I think you’re right. I think it was remember at the time, going, Yeah, that size list that should be an absolute shoe in, should be no issues at all. But like you said, like, it just wasn’t what we expected. And it wasn’t until we look back at, you know what had happened there the finer details, which were, you know what you said, there was, if it hadn’t emailed the list, and there was no brand recognition, and it just didn’t do what we thought it would do. So it was very interesting.

Samantha Riley  02:47

Yeah, totally. So let’s talk about what happens when you don’t have a personal brand, you are constantly hustling to prove your value. I mean, that’s if you want to actually be making sales, right? You constantly hustling to prove your value. Referrals are slower. People can’t refer you if they don’t know what you do. The other thing is, it’s very hard to get referrals when you’re not top of mind.

Leon Flitton  03:12

Yeah, absolutely. And I think it’s definitely for sure, like, if you aren’t top of mind, you just cannot get the referrals because you’re just not in front of anyone,

Samantha Riley  03:22

simple as that absolutely and then that makes collaborations hard to land as well, because you’re not in front of people. And when you’re in this situation, you’re competing on price and you’re not competing on positioning, which is exactly what happened in the story that I was just talking about with John and Sally. So how many other people offer what you offer? Think about? I mean, you could probably think of a few names right now, but the reality is, it’s most probably 1000s of people around the world that are doing what you do. And I know what’s going on in your head right now. Yes, but no one does it like I do it. I know they don’t, but on paper, it looks like there are 1000s of people that are doing what you’re doing, and that’s why you need to have a brand, because it’s your brand that makes you the obvious choice. So Liam, why don’t we start to talk about or why don’t we touch on what a personal brand actually

Leon Flitton  04:20

is, yeah, just before we get into that. So I know we to start off this episode, and I’m just thinking, we’ve been planning conversations with people over the years where we go. I don’t need one of those. Yes, this keeps coming from my mind. You know, unfortunately, they probably, they probably changed their ways by now, but those conversations that definitely come up. And why do you need one of those for So, which brings about, though, you know what actually is a personal brand. So it’s put it this way, the intention you set when you show up so the audience sees you is kind of where I kind of started with this. So I think, and that’s how you show up, is. Is the start of it, but it’s bit more than that as well, because when you’re showing up, it’s what are they seeing. So what are the values that you have that are being portrayed by you as you show up? So even it shows up, what your expertise is and those kind of things, so it’s how you show up and what you look like. I suppose you could say,

Samantha Riley  05:21

can we talk a little bit about when you started your podcasting business and you didn’t have a brand, because you’re a brand, exactly. But let’s talk about what happened so that people really understand. So when you started your podcast business, a lot of people knew you as my husband, but they didn’t know you as the podcast guy, right?

Leon Flitton  05:47

Yeah, yeah. I was pretty backstage, so to speak. You were, and you got not, pretty much I was,

Samantha Riley  05:54

you were, and your first few clients came from me talking about what you were doing. But there had to be a change. There had to be a line in the sand where you had to show up. Do you want to talk about what we did differently?

Leon Flitton  06:07

Well, I think the biggest thing for me was consistently posting, but we also had to actually decide how we were going to show up. So I think that by deciding how we’re going to go to show up and then show up consistently with the same message, was where it it really changed. So, and I say change because I think we picked up. I think it was probably added another, maybe it was something online, so, you know, another 10k per month, you know, recurring revenue, or something along those lines at the time.

Samantha Riley  06:35

So, but by showing that happened in like, a couple of weeks,

Leon Flitton  06:39

yeah, yeah. But if I didn’t have that, if I didn’t have that brand, and show up as me, I don’t think that would have happened. So, you know, to your point before, about, like, you know, the other people out there see other people that are doing similar things, but I think you need to show up with your values and your personality and your expertise and and I think that’s important, but it made a big difference.

Samantha Riley  07:01

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So it’s not just about the color of your website. It’s not your logo. However, I do want to say that it’s those things are actually still really important. You know, a lot of people say, Oh, it’s not your brand colors and it’s not your logo. Well, here’s my take on that. If I took the tick off pair of Nikes, it’s not going to have as much desire. If we took the three little lines off your editor sambas like they’re not going to have the same desire, right? If your colors aren’t consistent, or if your branding isn’t consistent, people won’t realize that you’re showing up as much. So it is still really important. It does need to be consistent. However, it’s so much more than that. If you don’t get your brand voice just right, you will sound like every other coach or service provider, and that’s the fastest way to disappear. And I think that the reason this is so important now more than ever is because of AI, because we’re already seeing it. Heaps of people coming out and using chat GPT to write all of their you know, website and social media and emails, and the problem is, is that chat GPT takes all of the conversations of everyone around and kind of mashes them together, so you’re essentially losing your voice, or it’s sort of vanilla. It sounds like everyone else’s

Leon Flitton  08:36

Yeah, it’s like you’re not authentic, because you’re just the same as everyone else, because it’s all just everyone else gelling together, and it is actually, you know, what is same as everyone else, because that’s what the pool is drawing from to actually develop whatever you’re asking it for is the same pool that everyone else is drawing from to create these whatever it is you’re creating, you know, so whatever content you’re going to create. So, yeah, unless you want to sound like everyone else, but I sure as I don’t

Samantha Riley  09:03

exactly. The other thing is that you need to be visible, and it means that you need to be showing up. And this is a really important piece, because this is where a lot of people fall off because, or fall off the bandwagon, because, I think there’s a lot of fear around showing up.

Leon Flitton  09:21

Yeah, I think that’s something I had from coming from corporate over to entrepreneur land, if you want to call that, and just showing up and because you know

Speaker 1  09:31

you judged, but yeah, you’re going to be judged anyway, though, right?

Leon Flitton  09:35

But how else to be how else your shop is different from everyone else, unless they can judge you as being different Exactly. So you have to be judged anyway, though, right? I

Samantha Riley  09:51

actually want to share something. I didn’t tell you I was going to share this, but I think that in the absolute truth you. Could be going through people’s heads. Let’s share this. When I said to you, Leon, you need to get your stuff out there. Our team created some fabulous content. You gave them the content. They created some fabulous images, and then you were too scared to push the publish button. Were you that fear of judgment was big. So I’m not saying you’re like a little Scaredy mouse, but there was you were afraid of, like, putting yourself out there. So if you’re in this scenario, I can tell you what we did for Leon. Just get someone else to push the publish button. Yeah,

Speaker 2  10:36

that works, yeah. Just get someone else to push the publish button.

Leon Flitton  10:41

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, at the end of the day as well, if you stand for something and you post what you believe in, and then someone’s not going to like it. And I think you need to, just need to be okay with that. And yep, get someone else to push the button

Samantha Riley  10:55

for you. Exactly, exactly. Get easier. Yeah. So visibility, this is things like engaging with your email list, actually speaking with them, showing up on social media. Could be paid, could be organic, probably needs to be both, not. Probably it does speaking. So this could be in person, speaking from stage. It could be podcasts. It could be virtual stages where you’re sharing your expertise, like an online summit or speaking at an online networking group, but they’re all ways that you can show up and be visible and talk about what Leon mentioned before, about sharing your values. It’s about sharing your expertise and sharing your personality, because people don’t buy coaching, but they do buy coaches, they will buy from people that they feel connected with. So it’s really important that people get to know that these values, that energy, you know, your vibe, that magnetizes the right people, and if you’re not showing up, then people won’t feel that it’s actually a feeling, even if they think it’s through logic, it’s a feeling first,

Leon Flitton  12:06

yeah, we’ve come across, you know, over the years, when I started out with podcasts as well, I was looking at different trainings from different coaches and who they were, you know, because we’re always trying to develop ourselves, and some of them I just didn’t resonate with I was like, No, I’m just not going to work with them, because I just don’t resonate with them. Yeah, and whether it was, you know, what their beliefs were different to mine, or it’s too different, maybe just wasn’t in alignment, but I just wasn’t going to work with them.

Samantha Riley  12:35

Yeah, it’s really important. Let’s talk about the visibility, for the sake of visibility, because if you’re being visible and you haven’t intentionally created your brand, it will create confusion. Now here’s another vulnerable moment. I know this because this happened to me. So back in 2011 I was working with startup business owners, and it didn’t take long for me to realize that this wasn’t something that I wanted to continue to do. I am big for people starting their businesses. I support people starting their businesses, but I didn’t want to coach startup business owners. It was I found it not very exciting, you know. So what I did was decide that I’m going to work with all business owners. And I know, I know we all laugh at it now. We all laugh now time. So anyway, I just actually helped a company. It was a company that was in coaching in the wealth and investment space, and I just done a rebrand with them, and the rebrand went amazing. I’d helped them fill a couple of really big rooms for enrollment events, and they invited me to speak on this stage with their actual clients. They’re like you. We really want you to speak. What you did was incredible. This is where it went downhill really fast. So I’m standing at the back of the room. The conference host is on the stage, and he’s like, now, you know, I want to introduce you to our next speaker, and Samantha Riley, and she’s amazing, and she’s just done this huge rebrand for us, and it was brilliant. He goes, this is the bit where I just wanted the world to swallow me up, he says. But I can’t really tell you what she does, because I don’t actually know. And I’m standing in the back of the room, I was pumped to go up, and all of a sudden I was like, oh my goodness, this is the worst introduction ever. However, I’ve become very, very grateful for that introduction, because, you know, they say when you know, when you’ve got a back to the wall, or when something feels really awful, like you make a decision to change really fast, that was that moment. It’s a

Leon Flitton  14:51

bit of a mood killer,

Samantha Riley  14:52

absolutely. But I it happened for me, not to me. I walked out of that. I had a great time on stage, really good. I. Afternoon, did a really great workshop with these people, and walked out there, and the next day, really started to go, Okay, what is my brand? And started to really be more intentional about creating a message that made sense, really helping people to understand what it was that I did, because I was super visible, but I didn’t really had a brand that people understood. They didn’t know what I did. They didn’t understand my offer. They didn’t understand my promise, all of the things. So if you’re posting content, you’re showing up, you’re showing up in your stories, maybe you’re even running ads, but people aren’t sure what you do. You’re still invisible, even when you are visible,

Leon Flitton  15:42

only how you get those turning points so where it makes a big difference to what you continue to do to get forward. So that must, must have been a bit of a odd experience to know what she does.

15:56

Yeah, exactly.

Leon Flitton  15:58

So just before we were chatting about, you know, like Nike, and if you didn’t have a Swisher on the side of the sneakers, would they still sell? We were asking this ourselves, this question. So, but what is it that gets remembered? So if you want your brand to get remembered, what is it that you need to be doing?

Samantha Riley  16:15

You need to have a message that is consistent. And at about the time, you are absolutely so bored of telling people what you do because you’ve said it over and over and over, people might be just starting to remember it. It needs to be super consistent. There needs to be consistency in your voice, the kind of things that you’re talking about, like when you’re putting your flag in the top of the mountain, like this is what I stand by. It needs to be consistent. Your message needs to be consistent. Your mission to help your audience turn into loyal fans. It needs to be repeated over and over and over again, and then that’s what will have you remembered?

Leon Flitton  16:56

Yeah, I think people feel like when they doing that, repeating it and repeating it, they’re going everyone’s bored with it. But I think you gotta remember with social media that you don’t see all the posts, you don’t hear all the time, and there’s other people out there posting as well, so it’s not just your post they’re seeing. So that’s, to me, a reason why you need to keep saying it, because you need to keep being in front of them. So I suppose that’s how you make it memorable,

Samantha Riley  17:20

absolutely, because demand doesn’t just happen. It’s actually cultivated. I was like, what is that word cultivated? It doesn’t happen by accident. I you really need to be intentional about it. And actually, let’s talk about something that happened a couple of weeks ago. Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock. You probably know that Alex and Layla Hall mosey just pulled off a pretty epic book launch. I know that he broke a Guinness World Record. I haven’t seen the number of books. It’s it varies with every single person’s got a number, so I’m not going to commit to a number? I don’t think anyone really knows, but it was big and it was epic. And I foresee in the near future that people are going to be talking about this launch or trying to recreate this launch. However, this launch was so big because of the four, five years, six years work that is put into creating his brand. Him and Layla have created these insane brands where they are everywhere, and they have been relentless and they have been consistent, and it’s that brand work that they’ve put in that made this launch what it was. It wasn’t putting $4 million into ads that certainly helped, but it wouldn’t have got the leverage that it did if they weren’t as intentional as they were about creating their brands.

Leon Flitton  18:50

Yeah, I think as well that people talk about like ROI and investment, and don’t think they realize how much the investment is the two of them made in that brand, 100% that needed to go 100% they were aiming big, though they were going for it. So while they might not have necessarily seen on everyone that posts an ROI from that particular post, the ROI for the long game, was

Samantha Riley  19:18

phenomenal. I want to talk a little bit about that ROI, because I remember Gary V saying years ago that people want to know what the return on investment is like. What they want to know is be told, if you put $1 in, you get $2 out. But it doesn’t work exactly that way. And I remember he said, so if you’re a little child, like, what’s the return on investment of your grandparents spending time with you? It’s not a you put $1 in and get $2 out kind of equation. There’s so much that you can’t see. And I want to share a story on this. So back in the early 90s, we had some. Retail stores that sold dance wear, and we sold fabric, a lot of fabric, and for a lot of Dance Moms, calisthenics mums, they have to work normally to be able to put their children through these dance classes or calisthenics. It’s very expensive to put your children through these extracurricular activities, which means that they’re often cutting costumes after hours. Now this is back in the day where we actually had landlines and white pages. Okay, so just keep that in mind when I’m telling you this story. Super old school. Super old school. So there was this one Easter weekend, and in Australia, we have a four day weekend for Easter. Good. Friday, Easter. Saturday, Easter, Sunday, Easter, Monday. So Easter is a time where a lot of these parents would be taking time out to get a lot of costumes cut. If you were like a looked after, like a whole team, they would cut the costumes for the whole team. So anyway, there was one parent who had, she had multiple teams. So she’d been cutting for, you know, three days straight, and it got to, like the Easter, Monday, and she was 20 centimeters short on a piece of fabric. And she’d bought something off, like, 20 meters off us, and she was like, 20 centimeters short. I don’t know what that is, is in feet and inches, just know she bought a real lot of fabric, and she ran out by a tiny, tiny little amount. She looked me up in the white pages, and she rang and she’s like, I know it’s a public holiday, but is there any chance you could come unlock the shop and sell me 20 centimeters worth of fabric? I went look, if you can understand that I’m actually painting my house and I’ve got no makeup on, and I just like, come in with paint in my hair, then I can do that. She went, I don’t care how you show up. Can you like, if you can do this, this would be amazing. So I did. I went down, I cut her the 20 centimeters of fabric, which I think at the time, was like $2 so on a public holiday I’d left time I had been painting the house for a $2 sale, and had taken a fair whack of my time. What happened after that was because that mum had gone back and not just told the parents and the coaches at her club, she also told the people that were on the committee at the Association for our state, and we ended up picking up the contract for all of the fabric for the whole state, because I went down and sold $2 worth of fabric. So there’s not always a return on investment that you can see at the time. You never know what that return on investment is going

Leon Flitton  22:36

to be. Yeah, I love that story, and what a great story that she told everyone would have just buzzed around like, Oh, do you know what Sam did,

Samantha Riley  22:46

amazing, yeah. And we had those accounts for years, like that $2 sale turned into hundreds of 1000s of dollars.

Leon Flitton  22:56

Yeah, yeah,

Samantha Riley  23:01

that was the brand that we’d created, that we knew our customers by name. We knew their husbands by name, even though we’d never met any of the husbands. They don’t come into dance shops generally, you know, we knew their children’s names, what club or dance school they went to. We knew their pets names. We knew where they worked like we treated our customers like they were friends, and that was that was part of our brand, and that’s a story of, like, how deep the brand goes,

Leon Flitton  23:27

yeah, having a strong brand, and that connection that was made from the story and the brand that you created and the little $2 sale and what it meant for the business. But I think if we look at, you know, the world we’re in now with this industry, having that brand makes things like, you know, referrals, or if you’re being being pitched on a podcast, or whatever it is, makes it so much easier to actually to get those things done. So again, a great story, and that you can see, like the strength of a good brand, absolutely. And one of the other things that it does, which I think is really cool about having a stronger brand, is things like shortens your sales cycle. It makes the potential clients, the leads, makes them more the less come to you. They come to you because they want to buy from you, and the last thing he wants to do is a hard sell anyway. But then, you know, as well, you can have increased prices and potentially, you know, attract a better fit client, so your champagne client. So I

Samantha Riley  24:29

think Richard Branson did this really well, or does this really well, like he was the, you know, he’s the entrepreneurs entrepreneur. He’s a down to earth guy that he straight out, says that jump off the cliff and build a plane on the way down. And most entrepreneurs like really resonate with that. And I think in Australia, until virgin sold recently, most entrepreneurs that I knew flew virgin, even though it had sort of nothing to do. With him. Personally, we love the values and we love the personality that was kind of behind that brand. Obviously, now in Australia, it’s been sold, and I know people aren’t, oh, well, I don’t know. I know we’re not as loyal as we used to be. Ha, which is interesting, right? Because we were buying on that brand. But you know, think about the brand of Oprah Winfrey. You know what she stands for? You know what she’s like. You know her personality. You the same with Brene Brown or Gary V or Alex or mosey, or anyone else that’s got sort of that big brand. You generally are like, well, I align with this, or I don’t, and that’s more what a brand is.

Leon Flitton  25:41

Yeah, I think that’s what I was. We chatted a little bit before about that with you got to stand for something. You have to stand for something

Samantha Riley  25:48

absolutely, absolutely. So if you are thinking, I really need to audit my brand, really need to take a look at it so that people really associate with my brand, like I said, In this world of chat, GPT and AI, it’s something that we really need to focus on right now, more than ever, you really want to make sure that the right clients are being attracted to you and you are consistently creating and intentionally creating your brand, Leon, thanks so much for joining me today, and thank you for listening to this episode of business growth lab. Look forward to seeing you all next Tuesday on another episode you.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai