Let me paint you a picture.
You open LinkedIn. You scroll for approximately 45 seconds. You see:
“Excited to announce…” “Humbled and grateful…” “Here’s what 10 years in business taught me 🧵” “I almost quit. Then this happened.”
Sound familiar? It should. Because these posts are everywhere, and they are doing absolutely nothing to help anyone stand out. Not the person writing them, not their business, and definitely not you when you inevitably feel the pressure to copy the format because “that’s just what you do on LinkedIn.”
Here’s the truth: the reason most small business owners and founders look identical online is not because they are identical. It’s because they have never sat down and done the actual work of figuring out what makes them different. They’ve jumped straight to posting without a plan, a strategy, or a clear sense of who they are and who they’re talking to.
And before you ask: no, this is not just a LinkedIn problem. It shows up on your website, in your emails, in your sales conversations, and in your proposals. Everywhere.
So let’s fix that.
First: Why You Look Like Everyone Else (And It's Not Your Fault)
When you’re running a business (especially if you’re rebuilding, pivoting, or starting something new later in life), the pressure to “show up” online is relentless. Someone tells you to post three times a week. You panic. You write something vague and motivational. You hit publish. You do it again next week.
This is panic-posting. And panic-posting is the enemy of standing out.
Standing out isn’t about being louder, posting more, or mastering the latest algorithm trick. It’s about being clear. Clear about who you are, who you help, what you do differently, and why it matters.
That clarity comes from one place: a marketing strategy that actually reflects your business.
The Real Reason You Need a Marketing Strategy Before You Write a Single Post
Think of your marketing strategy as your GPS. Without it, you’re just driving. You might be moving, you might even be moving fast, but are you going anywhere useful?
A proper strategy answers these questions before you touch a social media platform:
Who are you talking to? Not “small business owners.” Who specifically? What keeps them up at night? What have they already tried? What do they actually want? (Hint: it’s rarely what they say it is on the surface.)
What is your positioning? In other words, why you and not someone else? This is where most people get wobbly. They know they’re good at what they do, but they struggle to articulate it in a way that lands with the right person.
What is your brand voice? Are you the warm, reassuring expert? The straight-talking no-nonsense type? The enthusiastic guide who genuinely gets excited about your clients’ wins? All of the above? Your voice should be consistent whether you’re writing a LinkedIn post, sending a proposal, or having a discovery call.
What do you actually want people to do? Scroll past? Follow you? Book a call? Buy something? Every piece of content should have a purpose. Even if that purpose is simply “stay in my orbit and remember I exist.”
Get these things sorted first and suddenly, content stops feeling like pulling teeth.
The Framework Marketers Use (That Most Small Business Owners Have Never Heard Of)
Before we get into the practical stuff, I want to introduce you to something that underpins almost everything in professional marketing: STP. That’s Segmentation, Targeting, and Positioning. It’s been a core marketing framework for decades, and it’s the reason some businesses communicate with laser precision while others shout vaguely into the internet hoping something sticks.
Here’s what it means in plain English, and why it matters for you.
Segmentation: not everyone is your customer, and that's fine.
Segmentation is the process of dividing the market into groups of people with shared characteristics. Those characteristics might be demographic (age, career stage, income), psychographic (values, mindset, motivations), or behavioural (how they buy, what they’ve already tried, how they make decisions).
The mistake most founders make is refusing to segment. They worry that narrowing down means missing out. In reality, the opposite is true. The more clearly you can define the distinct groups within your potential market, the better you understand who you’re actually dealing with, and the more precisely you can communicate with them.
For example: “women who run businesses” is not a segment. “Women in their 40s who have left corporate careers to start their own businesses and are now overwhelmed by marketing” is a segment. Can you feel the difference? One is a demographic. The other is a person.
Targeting: deciding who you actually want to work with.
Once you’ve identified your segments, targeting is the process of choosing which one (or ones) to focus on. You’re not obligated to serve everyone in the market. You’re looking for the segment where your skills, your experience, and your offer are the best possible fit.
Good targeting asks: who needs what I do most? Who am I best placed to help? Who do I genuinely want to work with? Where is there real demand that isn’t being well served?
This is where your ideal client profile comes from. Not from guesswork, but from genuinely thinking through which segment of the market you are the right person for.
Positioning: owning a clear space in your ideal client's mind.
Positioning is perhaps the most misunderstood of the three. It’s not your tagline. It’s not your brand colours. It’s not even your “why.” Positioning is about how you want to be perceived relative to your alternatives, in the mind of your target customer.
In other words: when your ideal client thinks about getting marketing support, where do you sit? Are you the experienced safe pair of hands who gets it without a lengthy explanation? Are you the ethical alternative to the slick agency that over-promises? Are you the straight-talking expert for founders who are done being talked down to?
You don’t get to pick your positioning arbitrarily. It has to be credible (based on what you actually deliver), relevant (something your target segment genuinely cares about), and distinctive (different enough from what everyone else is saying to actually register).
When STP is done properly, everything else in your marketing becomes easier. Your content has a clear audience. Your message has a clear point. Your offer has a clear reason to exist. Without it, you’re posting into the void and hoping the algorithm does the heavy lifting.
It won’t.
The Foundations of Standing Out: Five Things That Actually Work
1. Nail Your Positioning (This Is the Big One)
If your website or LinkedIn headline says something like “I help businesses grow,” I say this with affection: that tells me nothing.
Your positioning should be specific enough that the right person reads it and thinks, “Oh, that’s me.” And specific enough that the wrong person reads it and thinks, “That’s not for me.” Both responses are correct. Both are useful.
What do you uniquely bring? What’s the combination of experience, perspective, and approach that nobody else has? For some people, it’s sector-specific expertise. For others, it’s a distinctive methodology or set of values. Often it’s the combination of lived experience and professional skills: the thing you’ve been through that now makes you exceptional at what you do.
Your positioning is the foundation everything else is built on. Get this wrong and all the LinkedIn tips in the world won’t save you.
2. Know Your Audience Deeply
Not surface-level “they’re a woman in her 40s running a business.” Deep. What triggered them to start looking for help? What have they already tried that didn’t work? What are they secretly worried people think about them? What do they actually want their life to look like in two years?
When you know your audience at this level, your content stops being generic and starts being magnetic. People read it and feel seen. They share it. They reach out. They say, “I don’t know how you knew, but you were describing me exactly.”
That’s not magic. That’s the result of doing the research and thinking deeply about the person you’re trying to reach.
3. Build a Content Strategy, Not a Posting Schedule
There is a big difference between “I will post on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday” and “I have a content strategy.”
A content strategy starts with your pillars: the three to five core themes that reflect your expertise and your audience’s interests. Everything you create lives within those pillars.
For example, if your pillars are experience, ethical marketing, and mindset for business owners, then every post, email, blog, or podcast episode connects back to one of those themes. You’re never staring at a blank screen wondering what to write. You’re never posting something random that confuses your audience about what you actually do.
Pillars also build authority over time. When someone consistently shows up talking about the same things from their own distinctive point of view, they become the go-to person for those things. That takes time, but it absolutely works.
4. Develop a Point of View and Use It
This is the bit most people avoid because it feels risky.
Having a point of view means sometimes saying things that not everyone agrees with. It means being willing to say, “Actually, I think the conventional wisdom on this is wrong, and here’s why.” It means talking about what you believe, not just what you know.
Points of view are what make you interesting. They’re what gets people leaning forward. They’re what creates real engagement rather than polite, forgettable “great post!” comments.
You don’t need to be controversial for the sake of it. You just need to be honest about how you see things. That alone puts you ahead of the majority of people who are hedging every statement to the point of saying nothing at all.
5. Show Up Consistently in the Right Places
Notice I didn’t say show up everywhere. One of the most useful things you can do for your marketing is decide where you are not going to show up. Trying to be on every platform dilutes your energy and usually means you’re mediocre everywhere rather than excellent somewhere.
Figure out where your ideal clients actually spend time. Focus there. Do it well. Do it regularly.
Consistency isn’t about volume. It’s about showing up reliably, in a recognisable voice, with content that serves your audience, again and again over time. That’s what builds trust. That’s what builds an audience. That’s what eventually builds a business that works.
A Word on LinkedIn Specifically
Right. Since we started here, let’s be direct.
LinkedIn works brilliantly when you use it as a place to have genuine conversations, share actual expertise, and connect with the right people. It works terribly when you use it as a broadcast channel to shout into the void about how passionate you are about your industry.
A few things that make a real difference:
Your headline is not your job title. It’s a positioning statement. Use it to tell the right person what you do and who you do it for.
Your “About” section should sound like you. Not like a formal bio written in the third person. Not like a list of bullet points. Like a human being having a conversation with your ideal client.
Your posts should give something. A perspective, a useful idea, a story that teaches something. Not a humble-brag dressed up as a lesson. Not vague inspiration. Something that the right person can actually use.
Engagement is not optional. LinkedIn is a social network. If you post and disappear, you’re missing the point. Show up in the comments. Start conversations. Be a person, not a broadcasting service.
The Bottom Line
You will not stand out by doing what everyone else is doing. You will not stand out by posting more often, using better hashtags, or finding a cleverer way to say what everyone else is already saying.
You will stand out by doing the work upfront. By getting clear on who you are, who you’re for, and what makes you the right choice. By building a strategy that reflects that, and then showing up consistently, in your own voice, with genuine value.
It takes longer. It requires more thinking. It’s less satisfying in the short term than just posting something and hoping for the best.
But it’s what actually works.
And if you’d rather not figure all of that out on your own? Well, that’s rather what I’m here for.
If this has landed and you want help getting your marketing foundations in place, a Power Hour is a great starting point. One focused session, real clarity, and a clear path forward.
