To grow your business in a sustainable way that makes an impact you have to create deep connections with your audience and prospective clients. A great way that you can do this is by opening up and being vulnerable and authentic in your marketing. It’s important to open up as an entrepreneur and as a brand. One of the best ways to make sure that you are fulfilling your mission is to put yourself out there and be willing to be transparent.

Something that is currently very popular and that people are starting to expect from brands is more vulnerability.

Your audience wants you to show up being real, raw, and open with them. Being vulnerable is very important and can make your marketing so much more effective. I don’t want to necessarily talk about using this as a strategy since there are a lot of people out there using it without the best intentions in mind.

I know that you want to change the world, make an impact, and that you have a bigger message and mission in mind. Since I know this about you, I feel more comfortable sharing why vulnerability is so incredible and beneficial in business and marketing. Being vulnerable with others is about sharing stories from your personal life as well as your business experiences. Share things in your life with your audience that are relevant to your industry, and also share things that aren’t always 100% relevant.

On Facebook, we see the highlights of peoples lives, and it’s very easy to start comparing our lows to other peoples highs.

When we start comparing our lives to others based off of only the things they want us to see, we may start to feel unhappy, depressed, and like our lives are somehow lacking. How are they so successful and happy when I’m hustling so much and still where I am right now? Having these thoughts does not feel good for anyone.

Being a leader in your business gives you the space to be real, open, and share the hardships that you face throughout your journey. Share specific stories that may not always be comfortable to share, and might not even necessarily be 100% relevant to your business. There’s always a way to connect a story to what you’re doing or to use it as a metaphor.

If you want to connect with your audience profoundly, and you want to make a huge impact, sharing yourself is going to be extremely instrumental to your growth.

If you think about it, we don’t usually follow people or influencers that are perfect and seem to have no problems in life. Using the Kardashians as an example, we see all of the highlights of their lives through social media, but through their TV show, they show their hardships as well. Showing personal struggles with the world is a pretty vulnerable thing to do. The Kardashians have mastered this act of vulnerability through using story, and that’s their way of marketing.

They’re getting more followers and customers through being themselves and not necessarily filtering what happens to them in their lives. So, how can you use this in your own business? Think from the perspective of serving your current and prospective clients. Is there a particular story that happened in your life that made you into who you are today? The answer is yes - your entire life has made you into who you are today.

The different events that have happened in your life, whether good, bad, seemingly irrelevant, have contributed towards creating the person you are today.

I want to share an exercise with you that I shared with some of my clients when I did my Authority Launcher live event in Chicago. A lot of people had amazing break throughs around how they wanted to show up with their audience. This exercise is about the experience of sharing stories and figuring out what to share. Start thinking about ten events that have happened in your life (feel free to go further and think of more, but start with ten).

I don’t necessarily mean major events like getting married or having a baby. Just think of random situations that have happened, positive or negative, and list them out and write about them. Ideally, five of them would be business or industry related to what you do, and five of them would not be related. When you list these different events, I want you to start thinking about the common threads throughout each situation as it relates to your business.

Is there a theme or a lesson you’ve learned from one of your life experiences that you can share with your audience?

Discover how to tie your stories into conversations about your industry or what you’re trying to teach your clients. Sharing stories in your business marketing strategy is solid gold and can help grow your audience and increase the likelihood that people will buy from you after a pitch. Always ask yourself, how can I tie this into my business? I invite you to start thinking about the different things that have happened in your life and find ways to relate them to your audience - they will love you for it!