Sounding like everyone else is what gets you skipped

Hey, so there's a sentence I say on Clarity Calls that it almost always gets the same reaction from the women I speak to. First, there's a little bit of silence. And then, no, that's me. So here it is. You don't have a problem with reach, you have a problem with sameness.

Hello everyone, I'm Gina Dunn, and this is Morning Cup of Brand Spark season three, The Real Work. Here you're gonna get one episode, one true thing, about brand strategy for founders. The exact way I say it in a room to a client I'm with right now. So let's get started with this episode. So let me show you what this looks like because I keep meeting the same two people. The first one.

The first one is doing everything right on paper. She pretty much posts twice a week, sometimes more even. And she does it consistently. She's super professional. She shows up. Her posts get a pretty decent handful of likes. And even so, her inbox is completely quiet. It's been a year of this.

And when I look at her content together with her, I read her posts back to her with a question attached to each of them. Which of these could only have come from you? And we go through them one by one, and the real serious answer is that almost none of them can. Five tips to better entrepreneurship. Yeah? Why consistency matters?

Lessons from a busy quarter, roundup from the year. They're all true, they're all fine, and all of it could have carried any of 200 other names attached to them. She has not been invisible, let me say that, but she's been interchangeable. People saw her every week, and then remembered nobody when it was time to contact. And then there's the second founder I want to tell you about.

That founder made one single change. And I've watched this change work more than one time. She stopped writing the template posts and started writing more specific posts that come from her, her story.

Content that could only come from her. I'm talking about things like the moment the client surprised her, that actual story.

or the thing that she believes that half of the industry argues with her about. Or the way she actually makes a decision with the messy middle left into that whole process. Her posting volume didn't actually go up. Actually, I watched her volume go down. But I watched closely what happened with engagement, because roughly for her, it doubled.

The comments they change character. You saw less generic, ooh, super cool post

You saw much more. awesome post. How did you do this? And that's the comment that turns into a call for that client. It's the same platform. It's actually the same effort. Actually, it might be less effort because it's a story that's coming from you. So you can it off. If you're asking AI, that story is coming from AI and you are polishing the shit out of it.

It is the same algorithm on LinkedIn, but it's a very different signal that you're putting out to the world. And there is a third place that this pattern hides. And it's one that most of us never actually check. It's referrals. So ask yourself how someone would refer you at the dinner table. And if the answer is she does marketing,

Or she's a good coach, she's really good. You're really hard to pass along because there's nothing specific they can repeat, nothing memorable there. The founders who get referred most often and most consistently have handed people a sentence. She's the one who fixes your pricing. She's the one who says, your website, it should wait.

A nameable difference that travels rooms that you're not in, and that is key here. And a generic reputation that stays in the room and it dies right there.

So, what's going on here? Let me give you some more context around it. So, your LinkedIn feed, it is full of competent ghosts. They're really solid professionals, they've got really good skills. They are likely posting consistently, steadily, but they're reading like slight variations of each other.

And it's gotten so much worse in the last two years because AI made competent writing free and easy and take one single click in 10 seconds. That means that anyone can produce a clean, sensible, well-structured, it makes sense post in 20 seconds. And that means clean, sensible, and well-structured is the new baseline, no matter what.

It's what the noise is made of. And AI, it didn't flatten your brand, so you can't blame that. Sameness flattened your brand. AI just made the sameness faster, cheaper, and easier to do. And your buyer, I'm talking about the woman who, the woman deciding who to call.

She's not reading the feed like a judge scoring quality. She's skimming your feed, don't forget that. She's a skimmer. Everyone, human on LinkedIn, is a skimmer. Her brain files people into two folders, same as the others, and ooo, that one's interesting. There pretty much isn't a third avenue or third folder there.

So when your content reads like the whole category, you go in the first folder. And that first folder never gets a call. she or he doesn't call the 10th best generic post. That person calls the one they remember on the drive home who said something that resonated and actually was a story and human. So here's what I want you to really get with this episode.

Being remembered has almost nothing to do with how much volume you post. so all of this advice for post one time a day, even on the weekends, it doesn't do what you need it to do. It comes from a named difference and repeating that same difference. So one really clear point of view, said in your own voice, over and over.

Until you're not just a profile to people anymore. You're the one who says the thing. The thing that made sense to them. Tactics can get copied and they do fast. But your voice doesn't. It's the one asset in your business that people can't rip off. And most founders leave it in a drawer.

Because a template or an AI piece of content feels safer and cleaner. And that, my friend, is the sameness problem. It is not a punishment for bad content, it is the natural result of playing it safe in a room where everyone was given the same definition of safe. And I know the objection that's forming in your head right now, because I've been there too.

And I hear this on calls. But won't I get boring if I keep saying the same thing over and over? So let me take that one head on. It's not true. You will get bored of your own point of view far long before your audience even notices that you have one.

You live with your message all day. They see it for three seconds on a Tuesday, if you're lucky, between a vacation photo and a job announcement. And remember that reach on LinkedIn is now down to about 2%. That means 2% of your audience, sometimes less, will even see that post. Talk about statistics here.

So by the time you're tired of seeing it, the market has just started to connect it to your actual name. It feels like it though. Repetition doesn't wear your difference out. Repetition is what installs it. every founder you can describe in one sentence got there by repeating that sentence past the point where it felt comfortable to that person. But we all have it.

There is this fear of repeating ourselves and the fear of being specific. They're the same fear, by the way. Both are asking, what if I commit to this and it's wrong? And I understand it, I really do. I get it. A template can't be wrong, that's the whole appeal. It also can't be yours if it's a template. And that's the trade-off. And not many people talk about that when they hand you the actual template.

AI definitely doesn't tell you that. So here's one small move to make this week, just one. Take the next post you were going to publish on LinkedIn. And before you like slam that publish button or schedule button, run my question on it. Could this have come from anyone else in my field? If the answer to that is yes, don't throw your post away. Add some context to it, add some nuance and some story.

Add the one thing only you could add from your experience. Maybe it's a real client moment, blinded, right? Or it's advice. The number you actually saw, something that actually made you stop in your tracks. Put your opinion in it, one that you would defend on a call to a customer. State it as yours.

One specific per post, that's all you need to do. And let me make that concrete. Say your draft opens with consistency is key for building trust with your audience. Yep, 100% true. And 200 people posted it this morning. The specific version of what happens in your work that taught you that.

So try something like a client wanted to quit posting after six weeks of silence from her audience. On week nine, three incoming inquiries in five days, all from people who'd been reading the whole time, but quiet. Now that's the same lesson.

But now it has a body, a timeline, and it has your actual fingerprint on it from an experience that you had. And nobody else can post the same thing as true. And that is the difference between stating the truth and owning the truth. So use your own real moment. Obviously, you have more of them than you think. They're sitting in your client calls, they're sitting in your messages, maybe they're in your WhatsApps, they're in your transcripts.

You'll feel the resistance when you do this because the specific version feels far more exposed than the template version does. And that feeling that you're getting when you do that, that is the point here. That exposure is the signal that you're putting out into the world. It's the part that can't be swapped for someone else's name. So you don't need more reach.

You need to stop being swappable. And that starts with one specific thing said in your own voice this week. If this made sense to you and resonated,

Go ahead and check my newsletter where I go far deeper into this on a bi-weekly basis. it's called Brand Strategy for Founders, and it comes out every two weeks on LinkedIn. And it's the longer version of what I would tell you in a room, straight to your inbox. The link is in the show notes. Come join me and you'll feel seen.

And that's the real work for today. New episodes when there's something worth saying. And go out there and leave your brand mark. I'll see you next time.