Meet Rebecca Bonnington. Rebecca is a business consultant and her company Tricres has an online platform full of training courses and support for small business owners. On the podcast today, we talk about how to get your business out there without having to become a social media expert and how Rebecca hired a digital marketing agency.
Today’s episode is sponsored by my Instagram masterclass, brand new for 2020. I’ll be delivering live master classes in Edinburgh, where you can come and learn about Instagram strategy from an expert. To find out more head to the whin.co/igmasterclass, I look forward to seeing you there.
“The business owner feels they’ve got a coach in their pocket that they can consult anytime of the day or night because let’s face it as an entrepreneur, it’s usually three in the morning that you kind of want to learn about stuff.”
Combine an online course with your consultancy business
Rebecca explained a bit about Tricres and what she does. They put a series of models and frameworks that can add value to businesses onto a platform. The idea is to democratise business consulting and coaching because most small to medium sized enterprises can’t afford it, but really need it. You can use their unique model every day to grow your businesses. They’ve put everything all on one platform so everybody, no matter where you are, can access it for just £17 a month.
Rebecca’s day job is very much working with businesses. She mainly works with large companies and usually works with the founders and their board or senior team. When businesses grow they’ve usually grown without much of a plan. The founders have got a vision of where they want to go and what they want to do, but they’ve not really thought about the nuts and bolts, the structure and how to get where they need to be. Rebecca goes in and does a bit of a MOT, she helps them understand how to make sure that the good positive stuff they’ve put in, keeps going as they grow and scale. She’s passionate about releasing the potential of people and business.
I was curious to find out how her insight and expertise translated to benefit people via the online platform. She explained it was launched at the end of April 2019 and they are developing an intuitive and interactive app to go along with it. They have fantastic training courses that will walk and talk you through everything, models, lovely shiny PDFs and answers to lots of questions. You can work through everything at your own pace. Rebecca recommends spending 10 minutes a day doing something from the platform, this will get those grey cells working in a way that means that your business works better.
Podcasting and other ways to increase brand awareness
I met Rebecca at a networking event, she was the guest speaker. After hearing her speak I knew she’d make a wonderful guest on my podcast. I asked her what other ways she gets the message out about the training platform.
They’ve just starting a digital marketing campaign. Before that she was doing lots of blogs and she’s going on a research trip to Silicon Valley with FutureX. They’re doing lots of publicity around that. It’s a great idea to join in with things that other people are doing, and they do lots of publicity for you. Recently she’s been reading “Start With The Why” by Simon Sinek book , and agrees what you need is the passion and you need to understand the purpose of what you’re doing. People will then begin to follow you because they believe what you believe.
She uses LinkedIn a lot and is always on the lookout for opportunities. Through the Scottish Business Network she got to do a one minute pitch to a big audience in London. She did a free hour of coaching for Entrepreneurial Scotland for some of their members. Again, they both put publicity out there for her. Rebecca likes giving back anyway so the publicity is a bonus.
I think it’s a great a marketing strategy that allows you to practice what you already are good at and show people that you’re awesome.
She does her own podcast called Tricres, it’s on all the platforms. She talks to very ordinary entrepreneurs who are in the thick of it, who are still building their businesses, some of whom have failed spectacularly, some of whom are succeeding, some of whom are literally in month six. It’s about their journey and what gave them the inspiration. Like me she loves doing the podcast and finds it an effective way to keep broadcasting her message.
“When you know what path you’re on, those opportunities just light up like this big neon sign.”
Finding a digital marketing agency
Rebecca is about to launch a digital marketing campaign for the platform, naturally I was interested in the process. They’re going to focus on LinkedIn, primarily, because that’s where their audience hangs out. Then feed it into Twitter and Instagram.
Rebecca believes people buy from people and this was important when meeting digital marketing agencies. Because of the ambitions she’s got for the business, she needed a digital marketing agency that was much bigger than her company. They’re not hugely expensive, but they’re not cheap either. She recognised it was going to be a big investment for the business but worth it. She realised last year that digital marketing is a complex science. The agency she chose has separate departments and specialists in each of the different areas and that’s why she chose them. She was really impressed with their professionalism and they didn’t promise to get a zillion subscribers. They’ve stressed it’s a learning curve that will take some experimentation to get the formula right. She knows there won’t be instant results, but they will get results and they’ll be the right results.
Get connected
If you would like to get in touch with Rebecca you can contact her on LinkedIn. You can also find her on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Find out more about her amazing platform on the Tricres website.
