Welcome to the Six Figure Personal Stylist Podcast, the ultimate no-BS business podcast for ambitious personal stylists ready to build a six-figure and beyond personal styling business.

You won't hear the typical snoozefest business advice that most personal stylists get told all of the time. Nope. Instead, I'll be sharing business-building strategies that will help you create a killer personal brand, a cult following of loyal personal styling clients, and make a ton of cash while creating lasting style transformations for your clients.

I'm Nicole Otchy, your host and a former personal stylist of 14 years who built a lucrative styling business in three major cities, but only after spending years trying to crack the six-figure styling business code without burning out. And now I'm here to tell you how to do exactly the same. Let's get into it.

I am so excited this episode has finally arrived because I've been thinking about it for weeks. This is probably one of the most important topics that I could talk to you about. So I'm very excited to dive into it today.

We're going to talk about why your marketing isn't converting because I know how painful this is. I know how exhausting it is. I know that it can really be the thing that takes a toll on a stylist's mindset and their confidence and I don't want that for you.

What's fascinating about marketing is that it has become something I have basically become obsessed with because I struggled with it so much when I was a stylist for a very long time. Even once I was making pretty good money, I still struggled because I had a real visibility block.

That is a piece of this puzzle that I'm not going to get too deep into. I've had to do a lot of work around that. I really just did not want to be on the internet and I had a lot of reasons. But mostly, what they boiled down to was fear and some past experiences I had in my life that were getting in the way.

Once I solved that, I realized I had spent so much time not wanting to market and making up excuses because of the visibility block, which I see with a lot of stylists I work with, I had no marketing skills.

What's so interesting is that we start businesses and we think, "Oh, I want to be a stylist,” and what we don't realize is that if you want to be a stylist, you have to be an exceptional marketer.

But that is often the thing that we resent the most, we put last, or we just really don't think of as a skill. The best news I can give you is that because it's a skill, you can get better at it.

But what I think is uncomfortable about that fact is that you do have to do it publicly in order to get better at it. Unlike styling where, yeah, sure, you got to get better at it, you have to develop your eye, you have to understand your processes and services and how you're delivering that, all of that's true but it's usually in a much smaller container, so there's less visibility, it's you and the client, and most of you are a few people.

But when you are marketing, it's you and all the people that you're talking to. So that's really, really difficult. It's not necessarily difficult, but it's very difficult in our own mindset.

What I want to give you today is the tools to see why your marketing efforts are probably not converting. All of that predicated on the obvious point that I will just say for the sake of it is that you actually need to show up consistently in order to get results in your marketing.

Really the studies in the data show that about 90 days of consistently talking about the same thing over and over, which I know so many of us are nervous about and afraid of because we don't want to seem like a broken record or bore people, is what's going to be the thing that converts them.

This fact alone is something that when I learned it, changed everything for me because you really have to think about what your main differentiating point of view is as a stylist and get really good at learning how to talk about that many, many ways.

But most of us skip over that and go to things like educational content and resharing other people's stuff or putting in pieces of our personal lives that don't necessarily make sense for your brand.

That particular topic is something I'm going to cover in more depth in another episode because I feel very strongly about the fact that I see stylists working really hard on their marketing and then sabotaging it with throwing in things their audience just doesn't care about because they don't understand that people do need to like you and they do need to feel connected to you, but in a professional way, not in a personal way, the way that you need to feel like that around people that you want to be friends with. It's not the same.

Like, know, and trust in the professional world, and like, know, and trust in your personal life are very different concepts. That will probably be another podcast episode.

Let's talk about the things you can stop doing immediately and what you can start doing instead to start getting results. The first thing is you need to rethink about what the purpose of marketing is in your business.

The purpose of marketing in your business is that it is a way to train a potential client, a follower, a subscriber, into your ideal client. Yes, your marketing is to train people how to work with you.

I cannot say it enough. It is not to educate them. It is not to give them a behind-the-scenes just for the sake of it. It is not to get them to like you as a person. Of course, that should be a side effect. It is not to make them trust you as a person, it's to make them trust your expertise. It's to make them like what you stand for as a stylist.

This is important because when you get that, it becomes much clearer what the connection is between marketing and sales. As I talked about in the last episode about overcoming plateaus in your business, a lot of stylists don't understand that there is a difference between marketing and sales and that you can't really get good at sales until you start to have a lot of sales conversations.

But in order to get on the phone, get on the Zoom, or whatever with clients or meet with them to see if they're a good fit and have that sales conversation, you need to become a good marketer.

That episode if you haven't listened is incredibly important to this conversation. But putting up some slides on Instagram and saying, “I have availability,” is a marketing message. It's not a sales message, usually, in the way that most people think about it.

It's just a point of reference. It's a point of information, and it will not do anything to sell them to the next step, which is the sales call, the sales conversation if your marketing has not trained them and gotten them thinking about being your client.

What’s really important here is to remember that your marketing isn't about you and it's not for you and it's definitely not for other stylists which is why you need to mute them if you're following a lot of them and finding yourself in comparison because I understand that when you're in a comparison trap with other stylists because of how you're seeing them market, you're thinking, “Oh, I'm not doing good enough. Their graphics are so great. They always look so good. They're so well-spoken,” whatever your thing is, they always look so busy, you are not focusing on what matters, which is your clients.

You're focusing on you and your feelings, and that is not what anybody is here for. I'm sure you're not saying these things out loud on your social media, but the energy that that comes with, the energy that that comparison breeds in you absolutely goes over to your marketing and to your potential clients.

Important for you to remember that your marketing isn't for you. It's to train and it's certainly not to educate people, it's to get them to, if you want to even think about educating them at all, it's on how to be your client, it's not to educate them in the sense of a Pinterest DIY, here's how to edit your closet kind of thing.

Can you do that? Sure. Is it the worst thing you can do? No. But it will lose people's attention because—we're going to talk about this point later—the market is so oversaturated for styling content that the world needs a hell of a lot less of it, and how people make buying decisions has changed since the pandemic, which we'll also get into, which is why when I say that you need to look at your marketing this way, you really do. Because people are much savvier and if they're following your accounts, they know you're a business and they're trying to figure out if you're for them.

The second point I want to dive into here is that you could be using very outdated sales messaging and just industry messaging that is so incredibly prevalent that it has now become white noise that nobody hears anymore.

When we first dive into the styling world, we tend to follow a whole bunch of other stylists and look at other people's websites, and that's normal, that's natural, that's just a thing that people do. But what people miss when they are building a styling business is there's a point in which you have to shut that off.

I've been very open on this podcast and on social media that it took me a long time to get with the program when it came to business as a stylist. But this is one thing I was really good at and it was protecting my energy and not focusing on other stylists, even though I was teaching other stylists in other programs.

I always look at my competition just in terms of doing a SWOT analysis, like I did with this business, but then I just don't look anymore because it absolutely impacts your marketing and your messaging. It's important to have that in the back of your mind of like, I want you to support each other. I want you, and I'm sure I'll say it a million times on this podcast, I want you to be an open and generous person and I also want you to think about your clients.

Following a ton of other stylists on social media both fucks up your algorithm and shows you more of the people you follow so you're not getting in front of your ideal client. It's also showing the content that's being liked the most by a stylist to more stylists, not to your ideal clients.

From a strategic business point of view, it's not the best choice. Follow them on a different account, a personal account, or don't interact with the content because it will show you more of it, which then puts you in the cycle of seeing too much of it.

You're a human being that can't help what you do on a subconscious level, which is now that messaging and the messaging I'm going to talk about right now gets into your brain and it ends up being something that you unintentionally start saying.

Here are some of the phrases I hear people using all the time that have to stop immediately, not just because so many stylists are using them, but because they're being used so often in the industry by influencers and even by brands, because now this idea of personal styling has become so normalized that everybody's hopping on the train because it's something people want.

It's an aspiration people want. They want to have a developed style so they're using the language that stylists have been using for years, and now that there are more stylists and there are more people using it, nobody hears this marketing messaging anymore. It's just like a throwaway content.

The first one I hear, just about 90,000 times a day as someone that's following a lot of stylists, is “If you have a closet full of clothes and nothing to wear, you should get on a sales call with me. You need my services. I'm going to change your life.”

I agree, you probably will change their life. But you won't change their life if they're not hearing you because your marketing content is not slapping. It's just bad. What does that even mean? It's so general. I understand what you're trying to say. People do have too many clothes. They get overwhelmed. But there are some people that that's not what the problem is, they just don't know what their style is so they have a lot of clothes.

So instead of starting with “Do you have a closet full of clothes and nothing to wear?” why don't you start with giving them the reasons why they don't have anything to wear even though they have all those clothes, because I mean some people again, just don't identify with having a lot of clothes being a problem. They just don't, they're just like, “Okay. Well, I have all these different clothes. I should be able to use them."

You then going in and saying, "Well, then you should hire me," makes them think, "Okay, why would I hire someone to help me get more clothes if I have all these clothes and I don't know what to wear?" So you need to talk about your process. You need to talk about why they have all those clothes and nothing to wear.

You're just telling them something that may or may not even be a problem in their world because I work with clients that have massive wardrobes and it makes them feel good. I mean, it makes them feel good about themselves if they know how to use those clothes, which means that you pointing out how much clothes someone has or doesn't have, because again, we just had a Marie Kondo movement, which means people at a certain economic point became obsessed with organizers and throwing things out, minimalism is actually linked to people that have higher income levels, it's a privilege to get rid of things if you know you have the money to get more of them.

So you're probably talking to the wrong crowd, first of all. This crowd that really can pay for hiring personal styling services means you're not charging $50 an hour. You're charging hundreds and thousands of dollars. This crowd knows that being organized and having less things is and has been a signifier of a certain level of social achievement, if you will, which is also why these people tend to come to stylists, but that's another story for another day.

My point is that your marketing should reflect that the reality of those people's lives, and I'm not seeing examples of people walking around in normal life thinking, “I have a closet full of clothes and nothing to wear,” and then thinking, “And that means I should hire a stylist.”

If anything, it's antithetical to hiring a stylist because they all think that stylists, which we'll get to in the next point, most people, most normal people that have not worked with stylists before, think that stylists are for people that are rich and so you're going to help me buy more clothes because it's for rich people. That's what they do.

Whether or not people are wealthy or economically well off doesn't mean they see themselves that way. Something to consider. If you're not explaining to them why you're going to help them use more of those clothes, then that's probably not a phrase you want to use, period. It's not helping the problem and too many people are using the phrase, so it means nothing.

The next one, that is rough, it's rough out there, this particular one is like nails on a chalkboard, stylists aren't just for celebrities. First of all, if you're new to the field and you're saying these types of things, I'm not judging you because we all start somewhere.

I just want to speed this up for you. No one thinks that. No one thinks that stylists are just for celebrities. People think they are for very wealthy people. Honestly, I think we can all agree that if you can't pay for food or your rent, then you're probably not the right demographic for stylists.

A better use of your words in your marketing airtime would be to explain that not every stylist that works with people wants to pull you $2,000 shirts because I did some market research among my friends, my business coaches, and just different people that I've worked with and known over the years who are really good demographic for stylists, they would be people that would hire stylists.

Again, this was all women, but I think that this would be accurate for men in the same socioeconomic and social bracket. They were like, “Yeah. I mean, I guess I don't really think it's just for celebrities because you can get a ‘personal stylist’ at Nordstrom, Stitch Fix, or whatever.”

Again, people are very familiar with the term. It's not like that. This idea that it's just for celebrities is something that would make these terms being used in stores and stuff make zero sense. Just a reminder that these terms are very ubiquitous.

Personal styling is not something like having your own costume designer or something. People know that there are people that have these jobs that are just normal people, which means we all understand it's not for celebrities.

But what they all said was, “My concern with hiring a stylist, because I've thought about it before, is that if it's not someone through a store, they're going to make me spend really, really high amounts of money on each item of clothes, and I just can't afford that.”

Your job to do as a stylist marketing your business is to explain to people that, yes, it is an investment in having a personal stylist. I have no interest in anybody that's listening to this podcast being a budget personal stylist, like, absolutely not because you're just going to burn yourself out.

Do you have to be charging $30,000 a month? Absolutely not. No. Depending on where you live and if you're virtual or if you're in person, these are all conversations and strategy points I go through with my clients, because somebody in a rural area with very little shopping that is doing it in person with people and someone in LA or New York, they shouldn't be charging the same amount.

But if you're virtual, that is different. It opens up the world. What you want to be explaining to people is that the big investment is in your time, your expertise, and your services and that you spend a client's money based on their preferences.

That is the marketing message that matters, not helping them overcome the belief that stylists are just for celebrities, because they can, again, walk into a mall and see the word “Personal styling available here at Chicos in middle America.” No one thinks it.

I know you hear other stylists using it and you think, “That sounds such a catchy genius phrase.” Let me tell you as someone that's following hundreds, if not thousands of personal stylists on Instagram and TikTok, nobody thinks that anymore. Yes, people are using it, that doesn't make it right.

The styling industry is the Wild West. It is the Wild West. Even in groups and programs where people are teaching these things, there are not a lot of people who have done deep market analysis or have done a lot of business strategy work. They're just showing people how to build a personal styling business. That's so important.

But the reason I don't teach people how to build them from scratch is because the real deficit in the market is understanding the business model, is understanding the business strategy, and that includes understanding, “I also need to be clear on how people's perception of personal styling as an industry impacts the way that we message and the way that our services, the way that we show our understanding of the market in our messaging, in our services.”

The way that this world is evolving needs to be reflected in personal styling businesses because there's just a lack of updated modernity and just a sense of what is actually happening in the marketplace.

There are a lot of people that will teach you how to build a business, and that's great. And there's a huge disconnect between that and what people's perception of this experience is and what people's perception of things like luxury and retail and getting dressed and our identity, all of those things are relevant to how you need to be competitive in this industry.

If you're using marketing that everyone else is using, but it's very unspecific, like, “Lots of clothes and nothing to wear,” and “Stylists aren't just for celebrities,” but you're not helping people understand who you are for, what this experience actually looks like, how this impacts their real life, how they get a say in this, how the amount of money they spend and the way that money is spent is a reflection of deeper analysis and work that you do with each client, if you don't talk about that, you are not educating them to be your client. You're throwing out talking points that nobody hears.

The last one that I'm going to quickly throw into this messaging conversation is using the words regular and average to describe your clients. Nobody thinks they're average, trust me. If you've ever gone on school interview tours or something like that and you are with groups of people, people don't even think their two-year-old is regular or average. No one's allowed to be average anymore, especially not in their own minds.

I'm on these tours with people for daycares and people are talking about how their kids are baby geniuses because they scribbled ones. I'm like, “Please, get out of here with that nonsense.” If that's what they think about a two-year-old or people think about their kids, can you imagine what they think about themselves? There's that aspect. No one wants to be thought of that way.

I know what you're trying to say. You're trying to say, “I'm not just for rich people. I'm not just four celebrities.” But the problem with that is that deep down inside, everybody wants that lifestyle. Everybody wants to work with a personal stylist because it's an aspiration.

Nobody goes to a personal stylist and says, "I want to be and look like the most put-together average person, regular person you've ever met." They want to be seen as an individual. That's why personal style and personal styling is having a moment.

While I totally understand that stylists that use that language are trying to signal, “If you're a teacher, you can work with me. If you're a doctor, you can work with me. If you're not making a million dollars, you can work with me,” use that language, don't use regular because that indicates “not special.”

What everybody wants and what really is true luxury right now, and we're talking about this in another episode, what's really seen as luxury is being made to feel special and for you as a stylist to take that knowing that the ability to see people as special in whatever way that's unique to them and then express it in their clothes.

If you're not helping them tap into the aspiration of who they want to be because you're trying to signal “I don't just work with rich people,” you're also undercutting the reason people go to personal stylists to begin with and everybody, no matter how much money they make deserves—they don't deserve a personal stylist, that's not a basic right—they deserve the ability to think of themselves and their future self in an aspirational way.

Maybe they're going to do it through your services. Maybe they're going to do it by buying a Chanel lipstick. It doesn't matter, but everybody deserves that. So your marketing shouldn't take it away.

It should have opportunities for you to express how to participate in that feeling, regardless of their budget, if that's true, because you should still be being paid no matter what you think of what everybody deserves.

Because just a quick reminder, if you really want to help more people that can't afford it, then you should be charging more and then giving away your services for free. You shouldn't be trying to negotiate with the person that's like, “Hmm, I wonder if I should buy an $8,000 vacation package to Europe or I should hire you.”

If that's what we're doing here and you want to think that that's where you need to prove that everybody deserves to feel something, that's misguided. Take the money from those people and then go to a woman's shelter and style those people for free.

That is actually helping people, which again, this is probably another conversation, but again, I see what you're trying to do in your marketing if you're using these words and I totally get where your heart is, but you're also taking away something important from people, which is the belief that they are special and that this service can help them tap into that.

All of these points that I'm making are in service to a larger point, which is that if your marketing isn't converting, you're not helping people understand that you are the stylist for them, which means you're probably going too wide, and too general, the way that I just broke down how these phrases are too wide and too general that people use in their marketing too often, and you're not going deep enough.

What I've talked about in the transformational versus transactional series of personal styling is that when that happens in your marketing and your messaging, and you're very general and broad, you are unable in any believable way to talk to people about the amazing transformation, the depth of the work, because nothing about the way you're talking about style is interesting, distinctive, or deep.

That is a problem. What it does is it undercuts your credibility because it's hard to say, “I create deep and lasting style transformations. I help you,” if this is stuff you say, you don't need to say it, you can be a transactional stylist and not say this, but if you are saying, again, as another throwaway point, “I'm going to give you this deep confidence because we're going to go into this transformational experience,” and you're not speaking to how specifically it will transform their daily experience of life because you're using these generalities that other stylists are using, you're losing them, and you're certainly not training them to decide if they're going to be your ideal client.

You're not helping them shift their mindset to get into the place to be that person. This is why educational content, like three ways to tuck a shirt, what shoes to wear with this specific boot is problematic because it doesn't bring anybody closer to the idea of if they're the right client for you, because what you're not doing is tapping into their heart and their mind, and that's how people buy.

People buy using their belief system, which is why using statements like, “You have a lot of clothes and nothing to wear and you're average and I'm here for the normal person,” their belief system doesn't align with that. They don't necessarily think it's a problem to have a lot of clothes. They think it's a problem they can't figure out why nothing looks good on them.

They think it's a problem that there's an entire chair full of clothes in the corner every freaking day when they're trying to rush around and get their kids ready for school with clothes piled up on it and then they look in the mirror and they feel like they look terrible, but they gotta get out the door so they go with the thing that will do.

That's what they care about, not how many pieces of clothes are in their closet. That's how I want you to think, what is the specificity of the lived experience that you can speak to in your marketing that will help them think, “Oh, my gosh, yes, I do have an entire chair full of clothes I have to deal with every night when I get home and I'm too tired, so it just gets building up and building up because I'm running out the door and the kids need their breakfast and I have a meeting at nine so I just put on the same boring outfit.”

That person needs you to make every aspect of their life better, including getting breakfast on the table for their kids faster. Everybody's worrying about talking about a closet edit and their marketing. I feel so passionately about this because people need you. So your job is to become an expert in the right client for you so that they can become the ideal client for you.

That is your job now. If you want to style and you want to be an exceptional stylist, stop saying, “I have to outsource my marketing. What marketing program should I go to? What template is going to fix this?” There isn't one because great marketing comes from really knowing your clients. Great marketing comes from being in the minds and the hearts of people that want to work with you.

It's about changing their thought process to get them there. It's about being so in love with your ideal client that you know what books they're reading, that you know what shows they're watching, that you know what the lived impact beyond confidence, which is something 90% of people don't even know what that means because they've never experienced it, it has to be the lived impact beyond that.

It has to be the details of their day. It has to be the thoughts that pass in their mind that are impacted by the fact that they don't feel like their style reflects them. If this seems like a lot of work, I promise you, it's the best and most important work you'll ever do because it makes you a better stylist.

Being a great marketer and being a great stylist are connected. You cannot be a great stylist if you don't learn to listen to people at the level you need to to also be a good marketer.

The good news is you're killing two birds with one stone because both of these things are so important to your business being successful and to you being able to do the work that you were called to by becoming a personal stylist.

I hope this motivates you to be thinking about “Where can I get more specific? Where can I make a deeper impact? How can I stop doing the easy thing, which is here's five ways to tuck a shirt and start doing the thing that hurts my brain a little, but helps my income, my reach, and the transformation that I can actually make in people's lives because I'm doing the thinking, I'm doing the work?”

This is all going to require you to think, but it's not rocket science and it's not hard. If I can learn it, you can learn it. “How can you become a better marketer by becoming an expert in your ideal client?” is the question I want you to be thinking about between now and our next episode. Thanks so much for being here.

Thank you so much for hanging out with me. It turns out that social proof is actually pretty important. So if you could help me out, I'd so appreciate it. If you just had a quick free moment and could leave me a rating or review on the podcast app, that would be killer. And even better, if you wanted to share this episode on Instagram and tag me, that would totally make my day and it would bring so much more awareness to the podcast and would help other stylists just like you who are looking to build lucrative styling business because the better each of us does, the better all of us do. Thanks for hanging out with me and I'll chat with you next time.