Adriana Gentile on Strategies for Online Visibility and Engagement

Adriana Gentile, CEO & Founder of Wealthy Living Academy

Can you share a bit about your business and how it has embraced the digital landscape for growth and visibility?

Wealthy Living Academy is a quantum business mentorship & consulting business, our mission is to help wealth get into the hands of good people. We focus on helping the spiritual / mindfulness community build their business and brand with the guidance, strategy plans, and aligned action steps they need to bring their gifts to the people who need them. As well as we help already wealth abundant clients work smarter, not harder, by understanding quantum field energetics and the general and special theory of relativity (Einstein's discoveries of warping spacetime). We have a heavy focus on the digital landscape for our client acquisition. The internet and social media have become blessings to the business world if you know how to navigate through them.

What specific strategies have you employed to enhance your online presence and engage with your target audience?

Utilizing social media marketing (not just typical google ads) and leveraging platforms like Instagram, TikTok, LinkdIn, and Pintrest have extreme value for exposure, engagement, and building a trusted community. First, no matter if you are a small or large company, your person brand is very important. It's easy access in 2024 to find who is behind brands and it matters, people care. Having an intentional personal brand could make or break someones purchasing decision when up against your competitor. For both your personal and your business accounts, you want to make sure you have optimized your bio with easy to understand verbiage of who you help and how you help them as well as easy to follow links that drive people to your lead magnet. Your lead magnet is free value that showcases your authority in the space and gives knowledge to your target audience which according to the Law of Value, "your true value is determined by how much you can give with no expectation to receive." By giving first, you WILL receive, that's just how energy works! Now that you have a value driven lead magnet, you want to make sure there is an information gathering prompt BEFORE they receive it. A heavy emphasis with a section for their emails. Doing this allows you to now create a nurture a community through weekly or monthly email campaigns. This is how you can continue to drip on an audience who volunteered their information and are genuinely interested in your offer. Once you have a valuable lead magnet with an email gathering prompt, it's time to use paid ads to your advantage. Paid ads do not need to cost a lot and now a days they are very seamless to create. The magic of being able to target your ideal audience and choose if you want the person to either visit your website, social media page, or straight to your landing page offer, the power is in your hands! This may take some time to a/b test what works but know that paid ads DO work, you just need to be persistent and patient.

On these social media platforms, you want to collaborate with influencers and other brands who already have your target audience. This is the era of collaboration over competition. Social media LIVES are a great way to share the each others audiences and help drive new followers to your accounts. When you make save the LIVE or make a post, be sure to "collaborate" with a creator so that your post is permanently on their page. Offering free workshops and masterclasses together is a great way to bring free value in real-time to both of your audiences and gives the opportunity to have a "special limited time offer" for being present on the webinar. Implementing referral programs to your chosen influencer that either gives them a commission on sales made and/or a discount code to give their audiences incentivizes people to both sell and buy. Repost tagged photos / reels gives third party validation of your product users or when you make a story post, tagging your collaboration partners so they repost and share it with their followings. Sharing testimonials both written and video proves there are people being impacted by your product or service.

An unexpected turn for enhancing your online presence is community presence in the flesh. Being able to either create or be part of events brings people into your energy and builds a deeper relationship in a shorter time frame. From here, it is crucial to be intentional by networking and bringing people to your social media pages right then and there. It's not weird or awkward to ask someone for their social media handles so you can support them. They will gladly share their social pages and in return, they will follow yours, and from there, it is only a matter of time before they become a customer of yours through your daily posts, free lead magnets, workshops, and masterclasses.

Can you provide an example of a digital campaign or initiative that significantly boosted your business’s visibility or customer engagement?

We've done many campaigns as we are constantly creating new free and paid value to serve our community, it's a combination of all of the above. The method we like to use is called "whisper, tease, shout". When creating a campaign you want to "whisper" that "something is coming". Get people excited about a count down or curious about what new project you're working on. "Tease" is when you are creating it; share a glimpse of the new course, service, or product you're bringing to life. Once it's created "shout" it from the rooftops! Collaborate with influencers (both micro and macro) by giving it to them for free in exchange for story and feed posts. Gift your new project to 5 new clients / customers in exchange for testimonials. Then, create a free lead magnet that gives information relative to your new offer. Finally, run a targeted ad for both your free lead magnet as well as paid offer. This method has worked 100% of the time since we've been able to learn it through many failed attempts and learning curves.

The digital world is constantly evolving. What challenges have you faced in maintaining an active and effective online presence, and how have you overcome them?

A challenge I've found for both myself and my clients is sticking to our niche / target audience. With the ever changing landscape of opinions and new information, it's hard to not want to appeal to the masses and showcase everything you can do. However, that form of "appeal to the masses" marketing is old and does not work anymore. Now, it's about speaking to that one avatar. You're trying to have the metaphorical effect of a mother in a busy room filled with people and noise. If their child walks into that room and says "mom!', the mother looks and knows it's her baby. You're trying to create that same experience when someone is scrolling on their social media pages. When they're mindlessly scrolling they stop on your post or ad and feel like you're truly speaking to their soul. The big challenge is knowing you are multi-faceted yet making sure to stay within your niche of who you help and how you help them to convey a clear message.

What tools or platforms have you found most effective for building your online presence and engaging with your audience?

A couple tools I've found to be helpful are ManyChat and Meta Pixel Helper. ManyChat is an approved third party host for social media platforms that delivers automated responses which you create via key words on either your social media stories, LIVES, or posts. You can choose the response time (immediately or perhaps a 24 hour follow up), you can create quizzes or polls to engage (example: "what's your favorite flavor: grape, orange, blue raspberry), or drive to an external link / website. It's extremely helpful to ensure no messages or post interactions go left unmonetized as well as a huge time saver! The Meta Pixel, also known informally as the Facebook retargeting pixel, is a snippet of code you can insert into the back end of your website. Like other tags, it helps drive and decode key performance metrics generated by a particular platform. The Meta Pixel Helper in specific is a web browser application that shows the real-time activity from your paid ads such as "page viewed, check-out clicked, purchase made" etc. It acts as a tracker for you to know that your pixel(s) are working. It is such a helpful tool!

How do you measure the success of your digital strategies, and what key performance indicators do you focus on?

We measure our success on three metrics, new followers, booked appointments, and new client acquisition. New followers assures we are consistently growing our target audience. A KPI for this is ensuring you are present on social media via feed and story posts every single day with quality content that either inspires, educates, or entertains. A KPI for booked appointments is community engagement via comment or inbox responses. It's important to have automated responses so no engagement slips through the cracks however you can also hire a virtual assistant to respond to community members or even new cold or warm reach-outs with the intention of booking a new appointment. This way, you're leveraging both AI as well as real people to continue conversations going. Running ads and making sure booking or product purchase links are easily found on your page or given instructions are important.

A KPI for new client acquisition is setting the intention of having X amount of booked appointments per week, making sure on Sunday's that the week ahead has scheduled meetings with new potential clients. Making sure you have created an irresistible offer with low, medium, and high ticket options so that the potential new client isn't deciding if they're working with you or not, they are choosing which option would be best for them (guaranteed sale!). As well as being vigilant with your follow up process. Do you have a time frame you follow before following up with your previous meetings to face objections head on? If you're a product based business then I would double down on your email campaigns, making sure to be sending out valuable content with easy to follow purchase links within the copy.

The digital landscape is always changing. How do you stay up-to-date with the latest trends and technologies, and how do you decide which ones to adopt?

How I stay up-to date with the latest trends is by always remaining a student as well as a consumer. Even though I help people build their brand and businesses, I am still paying attention to what other "competitors" are doing with their own digital presence, trends, and technologies. I go through people's links, I watch their lead capture videos and written material, I pay attention to ads that are targeting me and how the brand is conveying their message. I stay out of my ego of thinking that I have everything figured out, I remain curious and research something I see that I don't understand quite yet. I like to learn things first before finding someone else to do it for me. This way, I can remain on the cutting and competitive edge for myself, my community and clients.

What advice would you give to businesses that are just starting to establish their online presence and engage with customers digitally?

I would encourage them to remain consistent and persistent, don't become discouraged if a post or sales strategy doesn't take off right away. I advise using engagement style posts on client's social media pages like questions or polls, people always love giving their opinion. However, every brand starts somewhere and usually it's at the bottom. If you make a post where you ask for engagement but you only have 3 people respond, the first feeling may be defeat or discouragement however you must remain consistent and try again. You're training the culture of your digital presence and it will be impossible to have those 3 people turn to 6, 12, 24, 100 etc if you don't continue posting engaging content so that your audience starts to understand "hey, we engage with this account and it's fun to do so". As well as remaining grateful for the support you DO have. A devoted, quality customer / client is who we all want. We must nurture our communities to increase the numbers of those devoted, quality customers. This also flows into responding to comments and inbox messages. You want to create a personal touch with each one. Imagine being a brand who takes their time to connect with each person that engaged with your digital presence. You will oversell your competition every single time when propped beside one another when you've created a personal connection with your community.