In this episode of Beer with Darren, I spoke to Jemma Lea Bevan from Social Jems about social media marketing, lead generation and all things LinkedIn.

Social Jems is a training, content and lead generation company. If people want to increase their online presence but don't know where to start they can either be trained or have it done for them.

We've seen people buy from people, not products so building a personal brand and showing people who are you and what matters to you is key in generating sales. The way people are buying has changed, they no longer want to be a number, they want to buy from someone they trust and like. By building a personal brand you show people who you are and essentially generate those leads.

Jemma started by selling payroll to recruitment agencies but could not understand why she spent all day on the phones when LinkedIn had the message option. So her wholesales career has been utilising LinkedIn by posting and building her own personal brand. But the majority of leads Jemma generated from LinkedIn were people asking for help with their own LinkedIn profiles, something the company she was working at didn't offer. The demand was there and her skill set so she started Social Jems.

At the beginning of the pandemic, everyone panicked and cut their spending on marketing. But come May time, everyone realised with most people working from home, traditional sales methods like cold-calling won't be enough to secure new business so they had to add the social media element. Social media allows you to be visible to potential customers sooner, for warmer calls when they come.

Typically the smaller companies or companies with one-person marketing teams rely on outsourcing a lot of marketing efforts which come across extremely formal. When in actual fact people just want to see real.