3 Tips for Reframing Self-Promotion with Margo Aaron
Branding with Friends | Episode 25
Featuring Expert Guest: Expert Writer and Author, Margo Aaron
Watch or listen to the video interview below or scroll down to read the transcription.
Meet Margo Aaron, Expert Writer and Author
Annie: If you are nervous about self promotion, putting yourself out there and you just don't know how to approach it in your business and you don't., you're going to love today's episode with Margot Aaron. My guest today Margot Aaron is amazing. Thank you for being here. Margo.
Margo: Thank you for having me.
Annie: Margot has taught thousands of students how to sell ethically, market honestly, and use words to inspire action through her Skillshare courses. She's the co-host of the popular internet talk show Hillary and Margo YELL AT WEBSITES. I just love that title. And her work has been featured in Thought Catalog, Entrepreneur, Thrive Global, HubSpot, Think Growth, Growth Lab, Copy Hackers, and Inc. She's a proud graduate of Emory University, Columbia University, and an MBA where she won the prestigious Walker award. Her website that seems important, was named one of the best websites for solopreneurs by One Woman Shop and one of the best websites for writers by the right life. Margo, thank you for being here. You sound like you have such an incredible background, where you had to learn how to self promote,
Margo: I joke that I never had a job I was qualified for. So you learn really quickly how to advocate for yourself.
Annie: Absolutely. And today, Margo is going to share three tips for you to put more self-promotion into action in a way that is not sleazy and is not going to feel awkward or awful to you. I'm really glad to have her on. This is a topic that comes up all the time with self-promotion, because branding is a bit of self-promoting. It's about putting yourself out there saying you are a confident expert. And we're going to talk today about why that is so important. Margo, we just heard a little bit of your story and how you yell at websites and do these wonderful things. But what role has self-promotion played in your journey to the work you do today?
Margo: Let's start with the disconnect there is between what we know how to do and when we have to do it for ourselves. That is where self-promotion comes in. And I found in my work as a marketing consultant, and as someone with a background in psychology, was fascinated by this disconnect that we can intellectually understand what we need to do, what we should do, what we want to do, what the best practices are, when it comes to putting our feet on the ground and taking action, but it's so hard to follow through. And so some of these things that I'm going to tell you, you're going to look at and go, well, yeah, obviously I know that. But we keep ourselves held back because there are some sort of, I don't know, transformation that happens when if I'm doing for example, if I'm doing marketing strategy, which was what I used to do for a client, I'm like a genius, right? I can come I can sit down, I know exactly what all the blind spots are. I can plug that funnel, I know exactly which tactics not to touch, which ones we need to go harder on, I can see the whole thing, right? But when you ask me what my strategy is for myself, I blend into a puddle on the floor, I want to crawl in a hole and die I have no idea what I'm doing or not doing. I think I've done all the things I should be doing. I will either get super defensive or avoidant, like all of a sudden it gets personal. And self-promotion, I put in a separate category from marketing for this reason is that there are these psychological barriers to actually doing what we need to be doing that are based on invisible scripts we carry with us from our conditioning. So some of us have that conditioning of people like me, don't do things like that, right? It is arrogant, it is annoying, and God forbid, especially as women, we inconvenience someone, or we'd be loud and annoying, don't do that, right? That's taught, that's your conditioning. And you really, you are forced to face these invisible scripts, when you are interacting with self-promotion. And when your brand or your sense of self is on the line. It's in meshed in the two because no matter how objective we are about our brand being sort of separate from us in a lot of ways it is us I mean, we have businesses where many of us are the face of our brands and of our business. And so our reputation on the line, our sense of self is on the line, our worthiness intertwined with this. And so when you have all of that wrapped up, it is so hard to be objective. And so what I put together today is a few tips that we use in my courses and that I've worked on with clients that sort of helped put this in perspective and can really write and address those invisible scripts with a new script.
Annie: Yes, let's write a new script, let's write a new story. That's what it's all about. It's something you said about, hey, I can do this for a client. I think that it just comes. I always think about this passage I read in Give and Take by Adam Grant, which is a book that's all about your reciprocity style. So there are givers, takers, and matchers, of how you give and receive in a workplace setting. And there was a part about it, where it talked about how women did not negotiate. Well, we know this, most women don't negotiate as well as men in this particular study. But when women were negotiating on behalf of someone else, they were better than the men and I think that that is often the trick I use with my clients to help them get over this hump to recognize that it's not really about you. And to kind of put yourself in the mindset of what would I do if it were a friend? Or in your case, what would you do if you're a client? But I know you've got these great tips. So let's start what is the first thing we want to keep in mind about how to do self-promotion without feeling sleazy about it?
#1 Action TIP
It’s not annoying when you’re the market
Margo: Let's talk about that barrier of I don't want to be annoying. I don't want to be that person who's in everyone's face. And this is so annoying. So we tend to, as a result, undersell where we think we've been clear, because to us, the emotional experience is we've been really bold. We've asked for something. We have mentioned something once on social media, we have called one lead, we've done the bare minimum of being like, I did the thing, check. And it's that fear that is running the show. This first tip is it's not annoying when you're the market. So here's what I want you to think about. Do you remember being 13? Does anyone remember?
Annie: I do.
Margo: Were you into Backstreet Boys, NSYNC, or New Kids on the Block?
Annie: I was a Backstreet Boys and then NSYNC. I didn't like pick a camp.
Margo: You didn't pick okay. We were house divided. You were the Backstreet Boys and there are NSYNC. I was very Backstreet Boys. And so at the time, there was not enough Backstreet Boys swag that I could have in my life, I could have 27 of the same poster, but they're wearing a different shirt. And it would still not have felt like enough, right? So they could have emailed me every single day, they could have sent me tons of direct mail and I would have felt so seen. So heard, so understood, and so grateful for them.
When you think about promoting to your market, I want you to think about them as an NSYNC or Backstreet Boys fan, you at 13, the people that you were selling to want, what you have, presumably they have a problem that you can solve. Otherwise, they wouldn't have opted into your list, they wouldn't be paying attention to you. They're not listening to you at all of the people who are listening and paying attention. The people who are your market who have the problem, you are holding a key, you are the solution to what they're suffering from. And so you have an obligation to let them know and to tell them and here's the thing, you have to tell them repeatedly because human beings are cognitively lazy. Another way of putting this is called toilet email. So most of us, okay, go on the toilet, right? Like we're checking our email on the toilet, or we're in the subway, or we're inside of a meeting where we should be paying attention. And we're reading our email and we're like, oh, yes, I would love those shoes. And then someone says, Hey, Margo, and you're like, oh, shoot, I'm supposed to be paying attention. You put your phone down. You forget about the shoes, right? You are in the toilet, you realize, oh, shoot, I'm supposed to be making my kid breakfast. I can't enjoy this alone time anymore. You put the phone down. So we forget, we don't come back. So when you email again, when you promote, again, when you remind someone of what you're doing, you say hey, remember those shoes you wanted? Here they are. If you click here, you can have them. You are actually helping me. You're helping remind me of something I already wanted. But I couldn't get to it because toilet, right?
Annie: Because backstreets back, all right.
Margo: That's right. So the thing that I want to drive home here is that to the market, what they're feeling when they receive your promotion is gratitude. They're going Oh my God, thank you for the reminder. I did want that. Yes, it's not annoying when you're the market to everyone else. It will feel annoying, so I'm not going to blow smoke up your ass here. Are we allowed to curse? I'm sorry. Because I think it's in vain to say you're not going to waste some people. You probably are those people by the way. Never gonna buy from you that badly or annoying or the friends on your list. They're your mom. There's the person that used to be your that, that why are they still on your list. They're trying to stop what you're doing. They're never buying from you. The market never finds you And and I challenge you to, to look at this, like, go look at your buyers and then go look at who you get feedback from.
Annie: Yeah, that's 100% true. And that's something I go through in so many different facets with my branding clients, because it's things like, don't show your logo to everybody. Show it to people that are ideal clients that you know, and not hey, what do you think of this logo? But like, does it intrigue you? Which one makes you want to talk to me? It's always about the positioning and everything is how you tell the story. I think there's a lot of permission in what you said. And it was like a masterclass, honestly, it's self-promotion. I'm like, yes, I need to listen to this over and again, myself. Because I think growing up, we've all been conditioned, like, don't bother people, right? I hear that from a lot of people - I don't want to bother people. But what we're really doing in that case, where we're like, oh, we don't want to be annoying. We're protecting these people on our lists and in our world that like, are not interested in working with us. Why are we catering to them? Is it because we've been conditioned to be nice? Nice doesn’t pay the bills. Nice doesn't build a successful business. What does is selling and selling it, you can sell in a genuine way. But selling has to happen with confidence. And it has to happen through some degree of self-promotion, because to your point, it's not annoying when you're talking to your market. But you have to be brave enough to be what one person loves another person's going to hate. And that's about standing for something, not just being so vanilla, that nobody cares about you.
Margo: This is a really good point. I'm glad you brought it up. Because I think it's more than just being conditioned to be nice. I think when people throw around words like patriarchy, message, conditioning, no one knows what that means. So let me break down what Annie’s saying a little bit. And why I'm bringing up those words, is that if you are particularly for females, but also for people who are genuinely good people, oftentimes you are conditioned in a way where your worthiness and your currency in the world is linked to your ability to accommodate others. You're making sure you never inconvenience someone, making sure that you are basically invisible, and that you martyr yourself so that you have no needs. Also, you should be pretty, but not too pretty, because you don't wanna be intimidating. So there's these, like I said, invisible scripts, these are the invisible scripts. And so a lot of us operate, especially if you have a corporate background, under the constraints of like, this is how I'm supposed to be in the world, and self-promotion challenges that it says actually, you are going to inconvenience some people you are actually going to make it, you're not going to accommodate everyone, someone is going to see this and they're not going to like you. And that is all real. And so when people say like there's no risk, you could do anything like there is a risk, there is a risk, you might lose these invisible scripts, you might have to encounter them, someone might not like you. And that is actually real. And so when we say it's only, it's not annoying if you're the market. That requires a level of focus. And that requires sort of a tunnel vision only on the people who matter. And we are trained and conditioned to care about what everyone's opinions of us are not just the market. And so we actually have to do an enormous psychological like jujitsu to, to be able to even endure that it takes a lot of emotional labor to be able to go, Okay, I only care about these people, I care about my specific people with this specific problem, and I can help them and I need to matchmake them with my solution. And I need to tell them about it. And to them, they're very grateful.
Annie: And that's, I think, what keeps so many people who are amazing at what they do from actually selling it and making that connection is offering it, talking about it, feeling like getting past this, I'm going to be bothering or annoying people kind of thing. Like I think you really delve into like why it's so powerful, why we grew up with these limiting beliefs and these invisible scripts, but how we can kind of flip the script, right? So what is the next thing if we want to embrace the fact that it's not going to be annoying to our market, and we have to be Backstreet Boys going forward for the Backstreet Boys to our 13-year-old bands, what is the second thing we need to keep in mind?
#2 ACTION TIP
Customers, Not Colleagues
Margo: I call this one customers, not colleagues. In order to have that tunnel vision to know that it's not annoying to your market, you have to know who your market is. But most of us have all these internalized voices in our heads, where we tend to cater to the loudest one, we cater to our former boss, because we know he's reading our stuff. We cater to our mom because for some reason she's on our email list. We cater to our mean, third-grade English school teacher who said that we were no good at anything, we have something to prove to her. There are these people, these ghosts that live in our mind that tend to hijack the way we show up in our self-promotion and the way most of us show up, to be honest with you. I see it in a lot of people's messaging. I see it visually but mostly I see it in language, We get defensive. Right? We get defensive, we start self-protecting, or we start buffering or we get avoidant completely. And we disappear. And we meet people with the wrong message. We lose that ability to empathize with our audience and be able to meet them where they are. We can take them where we want them to go. And so we start pandering to our colleagues, and I say, colleagues, not customers, that’s where our customers get lost.
So a great way to think about this from a branding perspective is I like to use the example of my friend, Peter Wynn, who has a blog called The Essential Man. He is a personal stylist, he has a background in high fashion, he's a designer, he graduated fit, he's amazing. But currently, he does coaching, personal styling, and teaching in a domain that is not high fashion, right? He talks to average guys, mostly in the startup space, mostly founders, and all dudes, the way he called it, all dudes. And it's like, it's a unique niche, and, but the way he shows up in it, almost everyone who was an editor at Vogue would reject him, like, hey, would be like you, we can't take you seriously, as a designer, this is below us, right? The invisible scripts of that industry, are that you need to be a little snooty, you need to be a little unapproachable, you should really understand the mechanics of design and fabric, and to appreciate like a higher level aesthetic, and maybe man repeller outfits and like all these different unspoken rules, and instead, he writes very colloquially, and he writes about dating and he uses like, jargon about action movies, and he needs his people where they are, directly to them. And as a result, his messaging, what he chooses to talk about, just even in his promotion, like he'll write about graphic tees. Do you know how slaughtered you would be, if you talked about graphic ties, write it like Fashion Week, you can't. And so he had to risk being ousted from those circles, in order to reach and penetrate his market. And now he has such a loyal fan base. And finally an after many years, GQ actually reached out to him, right, so it comes full circle, but how many years of being made fun of and being ignored and being, you know, diminished? So I'm not saying that you have to do that. But I'm saying that there are risks to being able to have that hyper-focus on your market? Because had he been talking to the high-end market, his messaging would be totally different. And he would never have reached the average guy.
Annie: I love that story. And I think you keep saying there is a risk. And it's what I point out in Permission to Try, which is my first book. I talk about the idea that everything is a risk. Sticking with the status quo is also a risk versus making a change, pushing, putting yourself out there. If you're not putting yourself out there, you're not making sales you're not getting, that's a choice you're making, right? And business, as I'm coming around to seeing is all decision making every single day, all you do all day is make decisions. I want to talk to this person, not that person, I'm going to do this logo, not that with this color, not that color. I'm going to click this off on my to-do list, you're choosing to do something by choosing to do one thing, you're choosing inherently not to do something. So there is no version of being in business that is safe in the harbor. And I think that that is a myth that people kind of cling to, kind of hang out in their dinghy with an illusion that the dock.
Margo: I want to build on something you said about sort of visual assets and being able to make decisions because I want to bring this back to branding. For people, one of the mistakes we make in branding is asking the audience. If you usually take you know everyone in your category, everyone in tangential categories, you look at their branding, you see how you can stand out, you do like a blue ocean strategy, we've all done it. The problem is your competitors are not actually who you're competing with. And here's what I want you to understand, you're actually competing with inertia. And when you start looking over your shoulder at what your competitors are doing, you create a copycat brand. And that's why you see a million websites in one demographic all looking a certain way or in a certain category. Now some of that is important, I think any you can speak to this better than me. But some of that is important to indicate trustworthiness or to credibility, or just to demarcate this is the category I'm in, right? I'm in the category of fitness, I'm in the category of coaching, I'm in the category of business I'm in this is for serious people. This is for fun, this is you know, we are always communicating something. But when we default to the status quo, or when we start comparing ourselves to our colleagues, we remove that deliberate decision making and we just start plugging into what already exists. And then we start competing, like, can we be better than them at their game? When we need to be playing our game and asking ourselves, what does our customer need to hear? What branding do they need to see? What brand, what messaging needs to go out? What visual assets are going to communicate that they are safe here that they are trustworthy? And that we know how to solve your problem? That we are the thing you're looking for, that we can speak in your language that you can see yourself in us?
Annie: Yes, absolutely. And I think that's spot on. And I just think that I don't know, I think that this is really powerful, right? It's the voices in your head and letting that go. And really, I think there's just so much about self-promotion that is tied to permission. Yes, permission to give yourself. One of my favorite entrepreneurs who I've been interviewing for my upcoming business book, she said, your only competitor is yourself. And I think I love the inertia quote, but I also tend to think of that one too, which is like, you know, we're all our own worst enemy. How do we get out of our own way? And I think that that's very true in business. And if you start to see it that way, like, we look at competitive analysis, like when I work with a client, we'll look at their prior couple key competitors, because we don't want to have the exact same tagline, for example, that somebody else has. But then we kind of put it in the drawer where it belongs to that point, right? Because it's not about like, oh, we got to get what is the competition doing? It's like, how do we differentiate? How do we make sure that you are the right choice, and it's clear and consistent, and that you feel really confident in how you're reaching out to your clients. So I love that customers, not colleagues. If you're new, to Branding with Friends, you know we save our third awesome tip for the end. But before we wrap up our conversation and get to the third and most juicy point today, I know that Margo brought something along for us to talk about that she's been working on. So what is that thing that you want to make sure that Branding with Friends listeners and watchers know about?
Don’t miss this special opportunity for “Branding with Friends” fans…
Join Margo’s new Workshop: The Copy Workshop
Margo: If you guys are enjoying this conversation, we talk a lot about self-promotion and messaging in my new workshop with Kimbo - it's called The Copy Workshop, you can find out about it on my website, get on my email list, or you can head over to kimbo.com get on their email list. And they will announce we are live. January 24th, I believe, is the next session. So if anyone is interested in learning live with me about more of these things and improve your messaging specifically how to use words to inspire action and meet people where they are. Come check it out.
Annie: Yes, The Copy Workshop - simple and clear. And I still love the name of your website, That Seems Important. It seems like it's important. And if you want more help getting bring more clarity and consistency to your brand, that's what I do. I'm a branding consultant. And I also do branding services, you can always grab a free consult with me at greateststorycreative.com there's a big red button up at the top. But Margo, you've been giving us so much wisdom. And again, I know I'm gonna go back and listen to this myself because I always need that. I always definitely conditioned I'm always fighting that conditioning about self-promotion. So you've talked to us about you're not being annoying to your market, we got to be that Backstreet Boys to our 13 year old fans, we got to say customers, not colleagues and let go of trying to be fitting in with our you know, our contemporaries and really reach people where they are and what is that third thing that you think is so important about this question?
#3 Action Tip
Creative Allies (the underrated cure to Imposter Syndrome)
Margo: This is how to sort of skip over having to learn new, new scripts and trick your brain into going quicker. And I call this finding creative allies. So we are really susceptible as humans, to the people around us, their opinions, their impressions, the way they work, how they think, and what they normalize around us. If you find people around you ever, if you surround yourself with people who are also committed to self promotion, who are also in the arena, getting their ass kicked, and throwing out offers, you are going to get better at this because you won't be able to help it, you are going to be able to see things you couldn't see before. This is especially true for anyone from a corporate or creative background, or academic. That was my background. I was surrounded by academics. And so it was considered very boastful and uncouth. And it wasn't until I got myself some business friends who were just out there throwing out offers that sometimes didn't work. And I was like, that's the thing you can do. And they're like, he literally did the thing. Get on stage and sometimes they throw out a joke and they look at the audience doesn't laugh and they don't respond. They just go oh, y'all didn't like that one, huh? And and then they move on. And you're I'm always bewildered by this because I was like, oh, that is such healthy detachment like you understand the creative process, you understand that you just throw out an offer and it's up to the market what they do with it, it's not a reflection on you and you're going to do it differently. You're going to learn you're going to figure out what worked and what didn’t.
Annie: Well that's the difference right? It’s when people say, I put out that one post or I put up that one email and you know, we know from marketing psychology that it takes seven touches, nine touches, thirteen I've heard as much as that for someone to work with you. There's got to be more than one touch point but you have to be willing to get up and dust off your you know your knees and try again and do it again. And it's the people who hang in there. Brene Brown didn't come become herself overnight. They keep working at it and not giving up on it. And that's the thing. You try it once and it was scary. Oh, it's not this again, easier, it's just that it's those are the people who hang in there. They stay in the arena to your point.
Margo: Well, and that's this is why creative outlets are so important because most of us, I'll use myself as an example here. I had a huge blind spot about this, like, I saw that I was doing that, like if you had said that, I'd be like, that's what I'm doing. I'm getting myself back up. I'm doing it and it took having those creative allies. My friend, my co host, Hillary Weiss, who does Hillary Margo, Yell at Websites with me. I'll call her up. And she'll be like, Margo, love. You sent one Instagram story and one email. That is not a campaign you did not promote. You told it once. And then you disappeared. And I'm like, Well, my brand is strong enough. And I had all these excuses.
Annie: She just became Hillary yells at you.
Margo: We did series we do with each other, because she'll also have, you know, an imposter syndrome breakdown. And I'm like, sweetheart, you have your prices, and you priced it wrong. Try it again. Go either, you know, try it at $250, then try it at $3000. See what happens. And I love it. I can't that's a betrayal if I do it $3000. But I've already sold it for $450, then people are not going to trust me. No sweetheart, no one saw that. No one saw it. You know, one time, that's what it was then. And that's what it is now. And that's what is now. And guess what you're the CEO, you get to change your mind. And you get to change pricing. So like a big part of is also stepping into that power of knowing that you can show up in this way and that you are allowed to change your mind. And you're allowed to change products and you're allowed to change services. And you can do it because you want to, like my toddler, that’s the beauty of it.
Annie: Yes. Yes. That's the beauty of being in business is getting to make this you know, decision making can be scary. But decision-making can also be really freeing, you know, to that point? Have you ever heard the saying that like, or I think it's been proven that you are that you make about the sum of the five people you spend the most time with salary wise, or income wise. I don't know the source of this, but they talked about, there's a book that talks about how you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. So be careful about your relationships. But then someone I think has gone on, or, you know, a company or university has done the study that like you actually make about the average amount of money of the five people you spend the most time with. So to your point about creative allies, and that's something that I've been investing in is being around more people who are six figures, multiple six figures, seven figures, like getting around people like that rubbed off. And it's that accountability piece, the encouragement piece, and I think, honestly the possibility of seeing what is possible. I agree.
Margo: There's so much to be learned from the modeling. Like even like my friends in this space. And I call them creative allies differently than friends because friends sometimes just they will support you, they will enable you. I want to call up my friend and I want to have a pity party and I want her to be like yeah, f*ck that guy. You know, like, that's horrible. I can't believe the market said that. What a troll. You should never write again. You know, like your, your friends say that. And you have your creative allies go, okay, so when are you going to do your next launch, or okay, so you're mad at WordPress, cool. You're SEO didn't work. Okay. And it's like, it's to some degree. It's a minimization, but it's also putting it in perspective of this tiny thing in the bigger scheme, and you get to watch them work. So I watched Hillary, like, go on social media, and she just sale, after sale, after sale, after sale, after sale, and it works. So you can see the market go, oh my gosh, that's so annoying. She's constantly selling and then I can see her bank account and go like, no, she's constantly selling because people are constantly buying. Like, that's what's happening. That's what you get.
Annie: It’s the complete picture that you don't get with other things. And I think that you know, so many people talk about how entrepreneurship is so lonely. So I think, you know, recruiting your allies. I love that word ally because it's like really about working together, and partnering together, supporting each other. To your point. It's not just the friend who's going to be like, oh, did your like, thing not work? They don't know. The people who are in literally in their arena and in the trenches with you doing similar things, so you kind of cheer each other on? Totally. I love it.
We need to know we know that it's not annoying if it's our market, we're gonna think customers, not colleagues, and then we're gonna get some creative allies.
Margo, thank you for this excellent masterclass on self-promotion.
Margo: Thanks for having me. This was fun.
Annie: I'm so glad! I hope you guys enjoyed get another episode of Branding with Friends.
“Branding with Friends” Episode 25
Show Notes + Resources
Here are 3 key tips on how to self-promote to grow your service business:
It’s Not Annoying When You’re the Market
Customers, Not Colleagues
Creative Allies (a cure to Imposter Syndrome)
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To learn more about Self-Promotion or to seek Margo’s help:
•Visit Margo at thatseemsimportant.com
• Youtube: Hillary and Margo YELL AT WEBSITES
• @margoaaron on Instagram
• Join The Copy Workshop: https://akimbo.com/cpy/rfrmha
