top of page
ipad-ebook--1-.png
FREE 7 STEP PLAN
Get Our Simple (Yet Effective) Plan To Start Getting Results From Social Media And Content Marketing.

How To Get Started With Social Media Marketing – An Interview With David Trotter

Herbert Innocent

Getting started with social media marketing and helping online business owners create beautiful, engaging social media in 5 minutes a day.



Hi, everyone, and welcome to How to get started on social media. An interview with David church.


My name is Herbert innocent. And today, I am talking with the social media expert, David Totter, about how he got started with social media and helping online business owners create beautiful, engaging social media marketing in five minutes a day.


So welcome, David. Thank you so much. Great to be with you. I'm glad to have you.


David Trotter is a well-known expert on the subject of social media marketing and has graciously consented to an interview to share his extensive knowledge and experiences so that every virtual entrepreneur that we have here with us today can understand and rise above your biggest barrier on how to reach your goals and your social media audiences.


So thank you again, David, for joining us today on this live interview.


And what we are going to do is we're just going to jump into the interview so that you can get started on sharing with our audience, what they can learn and apply when it comes to social media marketing is all right, David. Great, it's great to be with you. Okay, perfect.


Now, there's a little bit of a lag between myself and you over there. So I'm sure some of the entrepreneurs will pick this up when they're listening. And that's perfectly all right. And basically, my set, first set of questions is going to be on your background and experiences in the field of social media marketing,


So that the entrepreneurs in our audiences can understand who you are, where you're coming from, and how you got started.


Then we'll jump into your thoughts about what you would do if you had to start all over again when it comes to social media, and so that our audience can understand how they can apply what you've learned in your situation in the world of today. And


So could you tell us a little bit about yourself in terms of your background, education, and experience in social media marketing?

Absolutely. Once again, it's great to be with you heard and, you know, my background is really unique. I actually went to school, undergrad, and I went to seminary to be a pastor.


So I was a pastor in a Christian church for over 10 years. And I was part of an effort called church planting. And that's really an entrepreneurial aspect of being a pastor, where you start with just a handful of people, and you create a whole church, you create a whole community of people.


And so I mean, when you're just starting with a few people, and you're trying to create an entire community, it's kind of similar to creating your own online community, but you're doing it right in real life with people locally. And it has everything to do with vision casting, and strategy and goal setting and relationships and communication and marketing, and human resources and hiring.


I mean, it's, it's a lot. It's I did that over 10 years. And unfortunately, I was a workaholic. During that time, I was wanting to make more and more of an impact.


But what I was really doing simultaneously was trying to fill a hole of not-enoughness with and me.


And so I thought, Man, if I could impact more people grow the church larger, would feel enough. And that led me to burnout about 13 years ago, and kind of a rock bottom breakdown experience. And I had to reorient my life, I had to kind of relaunch my life. And so I started a marketing studio marketing company here in Southern California, where I helped businesses right here locally, with branding, web development, videography, photography, social media, and so forth. It's a six-figure business that I've run over the last dozen or so years.


And I ended up simultaneously wanting to make a difference around the globe on some social justice issues that were very important to me, right that that heart of a pastor was still inside me wanting to make that impact. And so I had done about, at that time, about eight or nine trips to India, helping with orphans, and water wells, and all sorts of humanitarian projects there.


So I ended up with a buddy raising a few dollars and getting a cinematographer and a translator in order to shoot a documentary on orphans in India.


So we spent two weeks in southern India following a group of about 25 orphans living alongside a railway kind of living as like a family, they were from age three to 23, we featured them slept on the street with them one night, which was just absolutely insane. And that film ended up getting picked up for distribution and was on Netflix for two years, 2012 to 2014. And so I ended up really falling in love with this whole idea of using film to communicate.


So I wouldn't necessarily say like, I'm this passionate filmmaker, I like to just make a difference in the world. And I can use any medium, whether it's film or book, or social media, or websites, or whatever it might be. So I ended up doing three more films, one on sex trafficking in the United States, another one on kind of a Christian cult, another one as well.


So the challenge with those films, though, Herbert is that they take about a year or two years to produce direct and get out to market.


And they take so long. And so I told my wife in late 2018, I've got all this experience, kind of in the entrepreneurial world, whether it's ministry or marketing or movies, and I want to start making a difference on more of a day-to-day basis in people's lives.


We started talking about what it would look like for me to move more toward business consulting because I had people who always wanted to pick my brain on business or marketing or entrepreneurial type stuff because of my kind of varied background. So then I started thinking, you know, I'd love to do a podcast along with that kind of because I think that would go together well, and so of course, who is this for? Who is this?


You know, before I go over those 25 years of ministry, marketing and movies, and saw that the group of people that I most resonated with and I had the most impact on we're actually women kind of aged 30 to 60 years of age.


And so she enterprising about two and a half years ago, and we feature female entrepreneurs and leaders and tell their stories and dumb and access we've had over 200 and also started the Rise Up Business Academy to help kind of soul-inspired coaches and online educators to start and grow their business. and adjust in the last year, I was finding that so many of our clients were struggling with social media because they're going, what do I post?


How do I create a following? What do I do to grow my business?

And so we ended up creating a resource called Rise Up Creatives, which's an online membership, where we have created a content creation platform where they can create content, we provide them with 31 lifestyle images every month, that is really geared toward more of a female audience 31 customizable captions every month.


So customizable captions can be used for any business. And then also hundreds of graphic design templates that are on our own proprietary graphic design platform, which just drag and drop similar to Canva.


It's our own platform with content really geared toward our target audience. So anyway, that's a little bit of my journey of kind of how I've gotten here. And but my heart and passion is just to help soul inspire kind of soul-oriented coaches and online educators to just get their start. And that oftentimes is primarily women. Okay, okay.


So I see that from what you say, that really gives us an in-depth and how you got started. And in terms of your experience, and what you've done into the social media that is relevant to our audience. And I think from a lot of our audience right now, here, they can really see how you know, your journey has taken you from where you started into where you are today.


Now, what I'm going to do is, I'm going to jump into one of our set on one of our questions that is a lot of entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs will have experienced with this, which is, what roadblocks did you face early on? And how did you overcome them? Are you talking about me personally, or the people I coach? So I suppose when it comes to this, it's more of you as in your journey from you know, starting your own online, your own business, helping those coaches, those female leaders, you know, take their message and really share it to the world, because the whole idea here is really positive impact, make it big, make it count. Right? Right. Right, we want to know how you face those challenges and how to overcome them so that all the other intrapreneurs around the world can see. Okay, so there are strategies around all these big problems.2 Of course, you know, for me, the biggest challenge has been my ideal client or my dream client and really honing in on who I am best suited to work with.


So in the beginning, I would say it was female entrepreneurs. And I was very deliberate in saying that on my website, and social media, and so forth. I'll tell you, Herbert, I actually got some pushback on that, because as a man, there were some women online that would say, why are you trying to tell us what to do?


Why, why are you like, this is just one more aspect of the patriarchy trying to you know, like, tell us exactly what we need to be done. And I'm like, oh, man, that's not my heart at all. That is not why I'm doing what I'm doing. I'm here to help. I'm here to support I'm here to champion I'm here to encourage.


And so part of it for me was finding ways to articulate who I love to work with and signaling to them that I'm in a safe place to be able to process and connect and learn and grow together.


So that's one.


The other is honing down on this, you know, when you talk about female entrepreneurs want giant people.


And so I found the people to me, are generally as I mentioned before, soul-inspired coaches, and online educators, I use that word soul-inspired, because there's something in them that is spiritual, but their business isn't just about spirituality. So I have a lot of holistic medical workers, people that are healers, people that are doctors of Eastern medicine, people that are into holistic medicine, that love to work with me. And they're really coaches, right? They're coaching people on their health.


They're obviously medical professionals, but they're really focused on that. So for me, I've had to hone in on that ideal client. And I would just tell, I mean, I tell that to all of our clients that I work with, you got to get honed in on that now, it can change over time, and you will refine over and over again.


But you'll start to see who you naturally attract, and who you naturally are in love with working, you know, right who you love to work with. But that's one of the biggest ones that I would say that I have had to overcome.1 Okay, I see. Yeah, it really, it really does make sense. Even from my own personal experience, I can understand what you mean. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs are starting this idea that you pick a client, but then the more you go towards them, the more you realise, you need to take turns and twist to get rise to who you really resonate with when it comes to the serving. So we really that's a really powerful message there.


And I think just I suppose why the thing that I'm sure myself and a lot of our listeners, entrepreneurs would love to hear is,


Is there one particular story or example you'd like to share that really sums up your early experience in social in the social media world?

In the social media world, okay, I've got a funny story. Several years ago, when I was just getting started in this business, I wanted to outsource some of this social media effort, right, and have people communicating on my behalf on behalf of our brand.


So it was actually on behalf of our podcast. Alright, so it wasn't my personal account, it was our podcast account. And I had hired a virtual assistant in Pakistan, to help me with this. And he said, Okay, I'll do the graphics. And then he had another buddy that we had hired to do some of the social media, some liking, some commenting, and so forth.


So I had given them parameters on who my ideal target was. And they started going after it. And after about the second day, I woke up one morning, because they work when I'm asleep, right, I woke up. And this guy had posted on a picture of little kind of young boys.


Alright, young boys, that were my target audience, you know, would be the mom. And it was a picture of these young boys. And he had posted these boys look so sweet and beautiful. And oh, my gosh, in the United States, we would anywhere in the world, right?


You just want don't say that about? Somebody is little kids, right? You wouldn't say that about a little girl, as a man to another woman. And I was just mortified. Because I know, because I've been to India many, many times, and Pakistan and India, although there, you know, different in a lot of different ways. They're similar in the fact that they have a certain language that they talk about people. And in India, it's very common to say, a little boy, sweet or beautiful.


Like that is just a common thing. In the United States, or I would even say in the West, all of a sudden, I'm a pedophile Herbert, Oh, my gosh, I'm freaking out. And I'm like, delete, delete, delete, delete, right? I'm deleting these comments. And he had made a couple of other comments like that. And he had no idea he thought he was doing a great job.


And that was the moment I was like, Okay, I can't outsource this to anybody. I have to do this myself. And if I do outsource it, it has to be someone who is my ideal client, who is actually, you know, speaking on my behalf, to my ideal client. So Ah, and he, you know, he was liking a picture of like, a woman in a bathing suit. And I'm just like, No, no, no, no, no, I can't be doing this.


This is not appropriate. So you just have to be very aware of what's appropriate to outsource and what's not. And also, when you are outsourcing be extremely explicit, and what your expectations are.


So what Herbert if you had woken up? By I mean, what would you have done? If you would have seen that?

I think the first thing there is really, it's a, I think there's a lot of panic in trying to shut it down. Because really, it's it's a, it's the public image of the message you're trying to communicate. And as a business owner, I can't think of anything that was scarier than the message you're giving to your ideal clients?


Because that's a lot. Yeah, I can imagine that. That is a very, yeah, that is a very scary scenario to wake up to. As far as and, and I think I understand because, myself, I come from a diverse, I've traveled a lot. And I understand coming from a very different background to where I am now in Europe, I understand there's a lot of cultural differences. And one thing may be so perfectly correct to say, in English in the same words, exactly.


But they will translate to a completely different meaning in a different place.


And that is something that as entrepreneurs working in the online platforms, we need to be conscious of this because sometimes it goes unnoticed, right. And then one thing that I remember one of my mentors was talking about was that the idea that one of their clients was asking, Are all other people in the US I was shouting in the videos, is that common? Why did they always do that?


And he had to explain to him, No, it's not that they're shouting. It's just that when you've created a video, the when the video is being delivered, you know, to the audience is, there is this level of energy drop. And so we need to be able to bring the energy dropped, keep the retention, and so it's created intentionally. And so there's all these things that just translated.


So I completely understand that and I think that's a very powerful, valuable lesson. And with that said, what I'm going to do is, I have a lot of questions for you, I think there's a lot of stories you could share.


But what I'm going to do is, I'm going to, as in, it's very obvious that you, you know, you've been around on the block. And what you can do is we, in terms of social media, we're going to jump into a few different set of questions. And my next question is, essentially, I want to switch gears so that we can move into the present where your audience are, if that makes sense.


And so the kind of result that we achieved, and what I'm going to do is I'm going to ask the next series of questions that will, I suppose, bring us to help us understand if you're starting from scratch, and we are striving to duplicate the results, maybe even for yourself, if you want to duplicate those results from the past, I want to focus on how you have done that maybe how you've done different.


So with that said, essentially my first my next question is,


If you had to start all over with social media, from scratch, in today's world, with today's tools, and the time constraints, and all these other factors, what should you do? Suppose very, very differently?

Hmm. Well,

I would first of all, tell people that the shortcuts that are out there are oftentimes not worth it. So a shortcut of hiring someone to, you know, do your social media in terms of liking or commenting or something like that overseas, I found that is not worth it. Definitely, utilising any sort of bot, to like or comment or follow or unfollow is definitely not worth it, I definitely would not do that.


Those are two big things that are probably common among people that are wanting to take shortcuts early on, and I see something advertised at 5000 Instagram followers, and they, you know, it, just it none of that is worth it, it will not help you in the long run.


And so the thing that I would begin with, is recognizing that every single person that you are connecting with on social media is a real person, it's a real person. And so seeing them not as a like, or as a follow or as a number, because the more you focus on that, the more you d humanise the social media process, the social media experience. And so it's a one, it's just, I would encourage people to see, this is these are people, you know, in the, it's almost like, in your area, my guess is you probably have farmers markets, like some sort of market that pops up one day and then goes away, because people bring their, you know, fruits or vegetables, or also their other handmade products or something like that we have those all over the US.


So I would encourage them to see social media, like a meeting in the town square, like a farmers market where everybody's coming together to an ad that yes, there is buying and selling. But there's also you're bumping into each other and you're seeing a friend and you're you're exchanging small talk, and you're getting to know people, right?


It's the crossroads of culture.


And so if people can see social media as the crossroads of culture, and really, really, really hone in on that these are real people with real challenges with real pain points with real desires, and how can you see them not as a project, not as someone to try to sell, but as a person, that you are there to get to know and serve?


that mindset is a tremendous shift so that when you open up your phone, or when you go on, you know, your computer or laptop, you're thinking, not how do I check the box to get my post done for the day?


Or check the box of how many posts I need to like for the day? or comments or whatever? How do I go onto this platform with a heart and a mindset of service? I am there to serve, I am not there to check boxes, I am there to meet people in the crossroads of culture. This is the farmer's market of the world. And I'm going there to share who I am, what I'm all about and how I could be of service. Right? That changes the mindset. And now all of a sudden those shortcut tactics all of a sudden become distasteful. Like why would I want to do that?


I would want to just be there to be with people and get to know people now, are you going to have something of value to share? Of course, you will, of course, but it's based on relationship, not based on you trying to yell and scream and get you know, people's attention.


Right.


So that's the beginning is that it starts with these are real people with real challenges. And then the second becomes, alright, how do you view what you're doing through the lens of your ideal client through the eyes of your ideal client, so you're not doing it through your own eyes at Trying to make yourself the hero of your story, the hero of the, you know, you don't walk into the farmers market and go, Hey, look at me, I've got all the answers. I'm awesome. You know, you walk in and you go,


Hey, how are you doing?


What?


What do you need?


How can I help you?


I'm here to just be with and I'm here to serve. And so now you're looking at things through your ideal clients eyes, that includes what you're posting, how often you're posting, where you're posting all of this. So these are real people. And how do you look at this experience through their eyes? Those are two foundational elements. Okay.

Yeah, I think that perfectly sums up.


I think what to the biggest takeaways here, I think it's really is a human, you're doing business. And you're being service to you bringing services to people, and not just to, you know, interfaces, and all these other things that you're using. And what I want to say is, I want to thank you, because I have a lot of questions, and we will keep going.


But I'm realizing that the recorded episode has certain limits. So what I'm gonna do is have one more question.


Can you tell us very quickly, where can our entrepreneurs come and learn more about you, David?

Absolutely.


Two places.


One, if you want to listen to great podcast episodes, Inspiration Rising is the name of the podcast episode or a podcast itself. It's on all different podcast apps, inspiration rising.


And then if you're interested in learning more about Rise Up Creatives, and how that can help you create content, we have a seven-day free trial, if you'd like to check that out, go to rise up creatives comm slash free trial. So it's rise up creative, comm slash free trial, seven-day free trial, it's absolutely free of charge.


If you like it, it's only 25 US dollars a month. If it's not a good fit, you can cancel and it's no charge at all.

Oh, perfect. Perfect.


So thank you so much, David Trevor, this has been a very great interview.


And I'm sure our entrepreneurs and audiences all over the world, be very happy, you know, to get a lot of value from you.


I'm sure they're glad to have learned a lot based on how you got started on social media, and how they can use that in their own situations, wherever they are, in whatever stages, they are in the business.


So thank you very much for sharing your experiences and expertise. so graciously with us.


And also thank you to the entrepreneurs, in the audience for joining us on this episode of the virtual entrepreneur.


And for more information, and where you can find the Notes for this episode, all you have to do is go to herbertmarketinghelp.com


And by scrolling down, you have to see the newest updates they post every single day, all the notes from the podcast that we have recorded.


And so what I'm going to do is I'm gonna thank David of the script here, and then we'll be joining you guys on our next episode of The Virtual Entrepreneurs.



So David, thank you again, and I'm very, very grateful for you to share your time with us today. It was a learning experience, even for me.


And I'm going to put a lot of information that we have discussed here, including, I suppose a link to some of the content that you offer on our website, so that if our viewers ever come to see your profile, you know, they can see who you are, learn a little bit more about you and that way they can get more from you if that makes sense. David - So obviously great. Yeah, it's great to be with you.



Comments


bundle-social.png

Learn The Exact Step-By-Step Process Our Team
Uses To Help Our Clients Get More Leads & Sales.

bottom of page