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How to Build Your Multi-Platform Digital Voice for Your Business with Bobby Umar Ep 121

• Brenda Meller • Season 1 • Episode 121

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Ever wondered how to amplify your business's digital presence without breaking the bank? Join us as Bobby Umar, a renowned TEDx speaker coach, shares how to master the art of growing a multi-platform digital voice from scratch. This talk was delivered at the SHIFT-LIVE-A-Thon event, "How to Build Your Multi-Platform Digital Voice for Your Business."

Bobby takes us on his inspiring journey of leveraging social media platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube to propel his speaking career and personal brand—all starting with zero budget.

Listen to learn about the benefits of a multi-platform strategy, including reaching diverse audiences, driving cross-platform growth, and repurposing content effortlessly. Bobby also shares the latest trends in thought leadership, the power of human-anchored opinions, and why video and storytelling are non-negotiable in today’s digital landscape.

Get ready to transform your digital presence with actionable insights from Bobby Umar. He breaks down the six essential steps to crafting a digital voice that genuinely resonates with your target audience, stressing the importance of showing care, delivering value, and anticipating audience needs. Learn how to make your followers feel understood and valued while getting a sneak peek into Bobby's TEDx Mastery Intensive program, which offers personalized coaching calls to help you elevate your game.

We wrap up by highlighting ways to connect with Bobby across various platforms and an invitation to explore his business offerings. Don't miss this opportunity to enhance your thought leadership and grow your digital voice with proven strategies and practical tips.

Watch the video playback & get the resources from Bobby:
https://www.mellermarketing.com/shift

LinkedIn "Power Hours" (Single Session, x4, x12)
Each package includes: 

  • LinkedIn consulting / coaching, personalized to your needs and focusing on your questions.
  • Review of LinkedIn profile / company page to provide guidance / advice / recommendations

https://www.mellermarketing.com/powerhour 

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My name is Brenda Meller. I'm a LinkedIn coach, consultant, speaker, and author. My company is Meller Marketing and I help business professionals get a bigger slice of the LinkedIn pie.

Visit mellermarketing.com

Let's connect on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/brendameller
(click MORE to invite me to connect and mention you listened to my podcast)

Speaker 1:

We've got Bobby Umar joining us and, bobby, we're going to be talking about how to build your multi-platform digital voice for your business. Before we do that, sir, why don't you take a minute and introduce yourself? You're muted right now, so you'll need to unmute as you do that. There you go.

Speaker 2:

Can you hear me we?

Speaker 1:

can loud and clear.

Speaker 2:

Great, okay. Hey everybody. My name is Bobby Umar, but I am now a TEDx speaker coach to help people land a TEDx talk to elevate their personal brand and build thought leadership. So I'm ready to get going, brenda.

Speaker 1:

All right, awesome, I'm going to pull myself in the audience and I'll be back in about about 10 minutes here. Okay great.

Speaker 2:

So let's start talking about how to build your multi-platform visual voice for your business, and for me, it's all about thought leadership.

Speaker 2:

What are you doing to build your credibility, your reach and influence that's going to lead to business results for yourself? Okay, and when I started out, I realized that I want to build something across multiple platforms. So I started doing Twitter. Of course, I had a Facebook fan page, I had a newsletter, I had LinkedIn and YouTube, and at the time, I had zero budget for social media, like most of us who are starting out, but I, who are starting out. But I started working on it. Now, what's interesting is that Twitter was the first one that took off. I got 5,000 followers in about six months and all of a sudden, I got my first speaking client. I was like, wow, this is really interesting. Okay, let me invest more into Twitter. So I started building Twitter and soon I got to 100,000 followers within another year and things just really started taking off on that platform and I even started getting. I got three more TEDx invites from that during that time period. To me, twitter was the first place where I started building my influence and getting business for my speaking career. Then I moved over to LinkedIn to try to build that one up and it originally had 8,000 connections, grew that to 20,000. And then my company page went from in over a year and a half grew that to 22,000 followers. So I started building that one as well, and so what happened was I started building up everywhere LinkedIn and Twitter and all the other places. I started building some really strong traction Half a million followers on Twitter, 70,000 on LinkedIn with my personal and my company page. Did that really help me? Absolutely, it helped me. I was named one of the Inc Magazine's top 100 leadership speakers, alongside Richard Branson, bernie Brown and John C Maxwell. I got five TEDx talks as well as three other TEDx talk invites that I declined. I was named the top 75 links to influential voice alongside Gary Vaynerchuk and, of course, now I'm a LinkedIn top voice just this year, which is a cool thing, a nice surprise that I got, so I was pleased about that.

Speaker 2:

I want to talk briefly about thought leadership trends because it leads into what I'm going to talk about. One of the things that's happening with thought leadership trends is real human anchored opinion, so they want people to have a voice that's more human, that's less formal, so that's something that's going to drive your visual content. Also, content strategy matters most, so we need to invest in video. I'm a big believer in audio rooms as well as storytelling, so that, to me, is a big part of it, as well as storytelling. So that, to me, is a big part of it.

Speaker 2:

And the third one is the multi-platform portfolio balance. The reason why we do this is because you reach new audiences. There's cross-platform growth. You can repurpose content and leverage automation and AI tools to actually go on different platforms. Why multi-platform? You'll know that I'm on all the platforms that are out there. I've tried them all and I built it up mostly because there's a diverse audience.

Speaker 2:

You never know who's going to be on Twitter that's going to like your stuff, or who's going to be on Instagram that likes your stuff, and so it goes a long way. And the other thing that happens is sometimes people get caught. They get cut out. So my friend Carlos got shut out of Facebook for a year and then he had to rebuild his business. Melanie, my friend Melanie got cut out of LinkedIn for a couple months and she had to rethink where's my business going to be, building a business that's also on your own platforms, as well as on the rented space we have on LinkedIn and other platforms, is important to understand. And then you never know what's going to take off.

Speaker 2:

When Clubhouse showed up, I started building there and next thing you know, the Thought Leads Brand Club built into a community of 36,000 members and followers. When I did my first Twitter space, we had a thousand people show up. I was like, wow, this is crazy. You never know what's going to happen. So you're trying, you're dabbling in different things. I know a lot of people from my LinkedIn connections are now like Joel Algec, for example. He's huge on Twitter or TikTok. Now he's doing TikTok more than he is LinkedIn and is driving business there. So you don't know what's going to happen. You have to evolve with your audience and the platforms.

Speaker 2:

Now a lot of people ask me the question how many do I start with? And the OG big three back in the day was Facebook, linkedin, twitter, and they were for these three different reasons community, biz, development, thought leadership. But what we found now is that now they're all interchangeable. You can build on any platform, whichever one you want. And now there's three more to think about TikTok and Instagram and YouTube. There's six big ones and there's lots of other smaller ones that can help you build your business. So you have to think of where you're going to start with.

Speaker 2:

For me, my general rule is what is your primary and what are your secondary?

Speaker 2:

So LinkedIn is my primary 80% of my time and energy spent there and then they have to decide where do I want to spend the other ones that are part of your time period, right, how much time do you have, how much time you got and what can you repurpose?

Speaker 2:

So what do you do with there? So, for me, linkedin is my number one, and then I look at the other ones and how I want to spend time there. But the truth is, if everyone you target is in a platform, you need to be there too. So what that means is so if you're really good at video, if all your people, let's say, you're in real estate and they like video and imagery, then Instagram and TikTok are good places to talk about real estate. You have to think about that thing. You also want to plan your strengths. So if you're really awesome at video, then TikTok and Instagram should be part of your strategy. If you're really good at imagery, then maybe it's going to be Pinterest. Trust me, there's people who build business on Pinterest. So these are things you have to think about. Go where your target audience is and also play to your strengths.

Speaker 1:

And like I say, your brand is everything.

Speaker 2:

You have to be different, greater, first, and the good news is, if you're not first, you can still be different. You can still be great In terms of getting started. What do we do here? If you want to build your digital voice, question number one is what is your primary objective? Are you trying to? I'm trying to get promoted in a new job. I'm trying to build my business. I'm trying to get clients for TopicX. I'm trying to get TEDx clients. I'm trying to get speaking gigs. I'm trying to get book deals.

Speaker 2:

Think about what your primary objective is for using digital to build your brand voice and build that business. That's something a lot of people don't take the time to really think about, because they're doing three or four things as opposed to what's the one thing. In fact, I was just talking to a client this morning and he had three things to do and I was like what's the main thing you're doing? Because I feel like you're all over the place. He's like I want to do number three. Great, then let's focus you who you serve, how people experience you and feel you. The personal brand model is something I'm really big on and most of us are in the design phase. We're constantly designing and planning and strategizing our materials, our tactics and things like that. But what we don't do, we don't take the time to figure out and dive deep into the brand and do that hard work to get really real clarity, purpose and focus and direction on where you want to go. And I'm a big believer in this. I talk about it all the time. If you're not going to invest your personal right for clarity, you're going to be all over the place.

Speaker 2:

Number three who is your target audience? And again, it can't be everybody. It can't be everybody. It can't be all men or all women. You got to get real. The more in niche you go, the better off you're going to be for your business, because then you're going to start getting really. You're going to be like for me, for example, I focus on just C-suite and large scale business owners who want to get a TEDx talk. So that's more specific, because not everybody wants a TEDx talk and not everybody is the C-suite level, not everybody's at. And I'm also focused on the US as well. Get down to a stronger target audience. Make sure you're clear on who that target audience is.

Speaker 2:

Then the other question would be is which platforms and which is your primary. Here's LinkedIn, twitter, instagram, tiktok and YouTube. I want all five of them, but again, linkedin is my primary. You'll notice I do a lot of videos. Those videos naturally go to Instagram. Actually, they go to all the other platforms. I put them on everything, so that's something I would do. And the imagery. Now TikTok's even asking for images. So now I'm putting images on TikTok, but for the most part, linkedin is my primary. Know what your primary platform is and then know what the other ones you're going to work on.

Speaker 2:

And then the question number five is how you build relationships on whatever platform you're on, because people matter, and so there's a whole idea of building ROI and ROR. Return on relationship. Content is a great driver, but so is a clear brand and niche target. It takes time and patience. You have to take the time to build it. And let me actually dive deep into this a little bit more.

Speaker 2:

How do you build relationships? It doesn't matter what platform you're on LinkedIn, twitter, instagram. One of the ways to build relationships is to create content. That includes creating content and commenting on other people's posts. Those are both forms of content. It could also be an audio room, like a Twitter space or a Clubhouse room or a LinkedIn audio event. It could be a live stream like this one and content creates conversations and branded content creates more online conversations and, ultimately, transactions.

Speaker 2:

Step two you engage in comments. So on Twitter, you're replying and retweeting people. On LinkedIn, you're commenting on their posts and you're engaging people and you start having conversations there. Same with Instagram. Commenting builds engagement. It builds your brand and amplifies conversations. And step number three you go into DMs with engagers. So when you start DMing, dms are where the magic happens. On every platform, save threads, because there are no DMs. But on TikTok, on Twitter, instagram, linkedin, getting DMs going is where you start to really build a trust and they start to know who you are.

Speaker 2:

And pretty soon what happens is you start and you can also use voice memos on multiple platforms too. It's a great way to create that connection. Then what happens? You finally transition to an in-real call client and start talking to them about potential opportunities to explore and maybe solve some problems.

Speaker 2:

And then question number six is can you ask for business? Okay, so now you're on the call If you want to build your business. This is part of your digital voice too. Can you speak in your digital voice, I say, look, I'm going to help you get a text talk. Here's how I do it. What are your challenges? What are your pain points? Okay, do you think I can help you? Okay, great, here's the price point. What do you think about that? Do you want to work with me or not? Like, these are things that I might ask people and this is a 2% mindset, because a lot of people don't realize how hard it is. So you ask for help and you can also offer to help and then follow through and again, you're trying to give value. All then eventually build the business and that's your business.

Speaker 2:

Okay, and this is where this is how I help people with my thought leadership branding model. Everything I work on personal branding, tedx, relationship building, digital presence this is how I help people grow and build either the delilah tedx talk or to build a thought leadership brand, either individually or with the thought leadership brand club. And, of course, my gift for today, as people are asking, is I have a one hour video training on how to build a winning mindset in my Networking Mastery Program. You'll get a copy of that by going to the link, which is great. I know it's really short and sweet guys, but I'm doing everything I can to give you as much knowledge as possible. Some final thoughts for my talk. Again, the big part of your digital voice is how you say it, showing a little care, making sure it's clearly valuable to your target audience and their needs and your brand.

Speaker 2:

And then ultimately, if you make someone feel like you meet their needs without them having to verbalize it. Man, that's cool, they love that. They love that. Wow, you just answered the question that's on my mind all this time. Hopefully, I've did that for you in terms of the six steps to building a digital voice for yourself, and you don't have to be great at the start to be great. Put the effort in, put the time in, and I will definitely help you get there. Other people help you get there. This is me. You can follow me across all different platforms because I'm on every platform and if you want to learn more about my businesses, I run a TEDx Mastery Intensive. A is a monthly membership program for coaching calls per month for $30 a month. So that's me, guys. Thanks so much for being in it asking questions, following me, and I hope to see you there. Thanks, brenda.

Speaker 1:

Awesome, and you've got so much great information in there. I love that you incorporated your closing in at the end too, because then my next next question would be how can we work for you and what are the resources? And you've incorporated all of that, all right, thank you bye.

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