My Honest Opinion About Faceless Marketing

Faceless marketing has been gaining momentum in the online business world, but is it truly the next big thing or just a passing trend?

Join me in this episode as I break down five reasons why I believe faceless marketing is more of a trend than a sustainable strategy for online businesses. From the lack of human connection to the oversaturation of this market, we'll explore the nuances of this approach and uncover alternative paths to building authentic and sustainable brands online.

Listeners will learn:

• The drawbacks of faceless marketing in building authentic connections with your audience.

• The challenges of standing out in a sea of faceless brands.

• The importance of embracing human connection in online business.

• 3 small ways to get comfortable showing your face online.

Click “play” on the podcast player below to tune in or scroll down to read the article.

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google or Spotify.

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Resources Mentioned

The Content Batching Blueprint - Mini course to help you batch 1 month of content in 1 day

Story Sprint - Mini course to help you batch 1 month of Instagram stories in 1 day

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Article

Faceless marketing: It's been gaining momentum in the online business world, with many saying it’s the next big thing.

But here's the thing—I have some reservations.

Today, I'm going to break down five reasons why I believe faceless marketing is more of a trend than a sustainable strategy for online businesses.

I want to preface this by saying that if you love it, do it! I’m not hating on you or saying it’s “wrong.” I’m just sharing my opinion on it, from the perspective of someone who’s been an online entrepreneur for 11 years and has seen many trends come and go.

1: Lack of human connection

When you remove the human element from your brand, you risk losing that authentic connection with your audience. People crave authenticity—they want to know the faces behind the brand, especially in a day and age where so many people are skeptical (rightfully) because there are sketchy people selling sketchy products & services online, and making sketchy income claims. Faceless marketing can feel impersonal and detached, leading to a lack of trust and loyalty from your audience.

Humans do not trust other humans very easily if they are hiding their face because hidden faces = hidden identity. And if buyers can’t be sure who is on the other side of the brand, or be sure they truly have the credentials they say they have, they perceive buying from you to be a high risk.

2: The only successful faceless brands I see are teaching faceless marketing.

Since most of the faceless brands we see are SELLING us faceless marketing, does faceless marketing really work that well for the majority of businesses that sell something else?

I think this is the biggest problem.

3. Long-term Sustainability.

Faceless marketing may yield short-term gains because it’s really popular right now, but what about the long haul? Building a sustainable business requires more than just hopping on trends. It demands a solid foundation built on trust, transparency, and genuine human connection.

I’ve been an online entrepreneur for almost 12 years so believe me when I say that you need to think long-term and not short term if you want to be successful online. I try not to follow too many trends. When everyone turns left, you turn right. It’s a very simple way to stand out in the market!

4. Limited Differentiation

In a sea of faceless brands, it's challenging to stand out and carve a unique identity for your business. Without a distinct personality or voice to set you apart, you run the risk of blending into the background and becoming just another nameless entity in the marketplace. I can’t tell you how many times each day I see a beige reel of someone stirring a coffee, or how much I see the same stock market videos.

The market is oversaturated with faceless brands. Which begs the question… if the simplest way to stand out these days is to show your face and be yourself, then why not?

5. Missed Opportunity for Connection.

One of the beauties of entrepreneurship is the ability to build meaningful connections with your audience. Faceless marketing robs you of that opportunity. By hiding behind a veil of anonymity, you miss out on the chance to forge genuine relationships and foster a loyal community around your brand.

Community in the online space is everything.

It’s what will keep your business alive and thriving for years. I have people buying from me who have followed my brand for 8+ years!

All you need is 1000 true fans. People who connect with you, your personality, your values, and need what you offer. 1000 true fans is all you need to run a thriving business for years. Because even if only 100 of them buy from you each year at $1k, that’s $100k a year.

But in my opinion, faceless brands will struggle to build that because people crave real 

Why is faceless marketing so trendy in 2024?

I think the reason so many people gravitate to faceless marketing is because collectively, people are tired. And showing your face online in your content requires energy.

There are other reasons too of course. You might feel insecure about how you look, or feel that your race or religion would stop people buying from you.

Here’s what I’d like to say:

• If you just don’t have the energy to make face-to-camera reels, don’t. You don’t HAVE to talk to the camera (I rarely do in my reels), but you can still show your face in some content. The trick to doing this without it feeling draining is to batch your content. Then you don’t have to physically muster the energy to do your make up and record a reel or story every day or week, just do it once a month.

My Content Batching Blueprint and Story Sprint will help you with this! They teach my step-by-step system for batching 1 month of content or Instagram stories in 1 day.

• If you don’t want to show your face because you feel no one will buy from you because of your race or religion, let me ask you… do you really want to serve clients and customers who wouldn’t buy from you if they knew who you really were? I know I wouldn’t. I’d rather those people see me so they can go and buy from someone else. There are more than enough clients & customers in the world who will buy from you, regardless of your race, religion, gender, background, etc.

• If you’re shy or you don’t want friends and family to see you posting, I feel you. Block friends and family. (It sounds harsher than it is but this is your business account, not a personal account!) Then start small with your profile photo and real first name on your bio.

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About Nesha

Hey there! I’m Nesha, 11-year traveling entrepreneur and host of The Simple Business Show. I teach women how to build a $5-10K/month online service business working just 3 days a week, so they can have the financial and time freedom to live the life they dream of.

Looking for more ways I can help you? Here they are:

1:1 Coaching: Work with me on an intimate level to take your business from where it is to where you want it to go.

Group Coaching Program: The Simple Business Builder: Learn to build a $5-10K/month online business working 3 days a week.

Organize & Automate - Join 1200+ students and learn how to organize your entire online service-based business in just two weeks (on the side of your regular routine!) so you can stop stressing and fall back in love with your business.

Simple Sales School - Learn how to get a consistent flow of clients so you can build the income & financial freedom you desire.

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More Episodes

5 ways to make an emotional connection with your target market

Branding.

That word is thrown around the blogsphere a lot these days, but many people misunderstand what it means. Some people think branding is just a visual brand identity made up of a logo, color palette and type combinations. But that's only a part of what your brand truly is.

'Branding demands commitment... Striking chords with people to stir their emotions.' - Sir Richard Branson, CEO of Virgin.

'Your brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room.' - Jeff Bezos, Founder of Amazon.

There are so many ways to define branding, but I like to think of it like this: your brand is what people think of when they hear your brand name. It's how people feel when they think of you, visit your website, hire you, learn from you or walk into your shop.

How your brand makes someone feel can often be the difference between booking a client or losing them to a competitor. {Click to tweet}

Clients and consumers are almost always willing to pay more to the brand that makes them feel something, and that should always be your brand. {Click to tweet}

Story time

Last year I went shopping for a leather jacket. I looked in standard high street shops like Topshop and found decent jackets for £40-80. These jackets were perfectly adequate. Even though they weren't real leather, they looked great!

But then I walked into Allsaints. Ah, Allsaints. The shop front is distressed and rustic, and the inside of the shop has vintage mannequins everywhere, red-brick walls, copper and steel furnishings and the coolest-looking staff you will ever see. You feel sexy when you walk into Allsaints. You don't care that their leather jackets cost £300+ because they make you feel like a badass that just walked right out of a Fast & Furious movie when you're wearing one.

My point?

I splashed £300 on a leather jacket when I could have purchased a similar jacket, albeit fake leather, for 1/5 of the price. I purchased from Allsaints because of the way they made me feel. I wasn't shopping for a leather jacket that day, I was shopping for a feeling. Allsaints gave that to me.

Nowadays we're bombarded with brands all the time; so many that our brains can't handle it! In order to stand out and get our potential clients to listen to us, we have to make an emotional connection through our brands and our website presence. But that's easier said than done, right?

5 ways to connect with your target market

1. Brand style. As you read about my experience with Allsaints, their brand style played a big part in why I chose to purchase from them instead of Topshop. Allsaints had a brand aesthetic that immediately made me feel cool and sexy. Their brand has a unique style that stirs certain emotions within their customers.

When you're trying to emotionally connect with your target market, you'll never form a true connection if your brand style isn't cohesive or isn't an authentic representation of you. 

Ask yourself- how do you want people to feel when they come into contact with your brand? What emotions do you want to stir within your ideal clients? Does your current brand identity convey these emotions, or is it failing to connect with your target market in some way? Maybe you need to invest in a rebrand, or maybe you can make some small tweaks to connect with your audience more?

If you need help creating a cohesive brand experience that will make sure your ideal clients fall in love with your brand, check out the free bonus at the end of this article!

Related post: How to build a strong brand on a small budget

2. Brand voice. Your brand voice goes hand in hand with your brand aesthetic. Your brand voice is how you talk and write; how your words make your target market feel. Small businesses that write in a friendly and 'human' voice usually connect easier with their target market because they seem real! People don't want to do business with someone who talks to like a robot and has no sense of personality, they want to do business with a real person. 

3. Use of words. When you research what your target market wants from you (usually within a survey), it's important that you use the words and phrases they use. It will make a much better emotional connection when they come to read about your services! For example, this year I wanted to buy a book on money mindset. I found a woman who specialized in this field but her product page used robotic 'professional' phrases that I would have never used to describe what I was looking for. Then I found another website that described my struggles and my desires exactly how I would describe them, in a casual and understandable way. Because this website used words and phrases I'd use- phrases I understood and completely resonated with- I didn't hesitate to purchase from them and not the other woman.

Related post: 10 tools and apps I use for freelancing

4. Brand consistency. Is your brand cohesive and consistent across all areas of your web and print presence? It's important that your brand style stretches across all areas of your brand, not just your website. The look and feel of your website needs to be the same on your Facebook, Twitter and Instagram pages, your business cards, your shop front, your client documents and more. When your brand is perfectly consistent, your target market sees you as a strong brand that really knows what they're doing.

5. Keep your business simple and streamlined. Even if you build an emotional connection through all of the points listed above, that connection can be broken instantly if your business processes are not simple and easy for your customers/clients. What exactly do I mean? Well, a potential client may look at your website and feel totally connected to you; eager to start working with you. But if they contact you and your processes are sloppy, your reply times are slow and your system isn't clear then that connection will immediately break. Keep your customer connected by streamlining your systems. Make doing business with you feel like a guilty pleasure!

I recently enrolled in Leah's course, Stress Less & Impress, and it totally transformed my business systems and processes! I was already doing a lot of what she suggested, but her tips and videos helped me refine my process even more. I highly recommend checking it out if you need help streamlining your business!

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If you're interested in rebranding your business, I'm now booking clients from November 2015 onward! Just check out my services and get in touch if you'd like to set up a time to discuss your needs. 

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How to create a brand board

After spending the last few months working on my course, Organize & Automate, and recording lessons to help designers automate their design process, I thought I'd share a snippet from the course! So here it is.

Let's dive into brand boards and why you should be creating them for your clients- and how!

A brand board is an at-a-glance document containing all your brand elements- from your main logo to your color palette. You may have seen them floating around Pinterest but not understood what they were. Or, if you're a designer, you may want to start creating brand boards but you don't know where to start. 

Let's start with why you should create brand boards. 

Brand boards show the client every element of their visual brand- all together in one neat document. They're important because they help convey a brand’s values, attributes and personality in one glance.

When you’ve designed blog graphics, prints or anything else for your business (or for your clients), its helpful to look at the brand board and check that what you’ve designed is in line with the colours, fonts, graphics and overall identity that is on the board.

That isn't the only reason brand boards are important though. If you're a designer like me, have you ever thought about what you're going to do if one of your clients comes back to you for work and you're not available?

You'll need to refer them to another designer. If you made a style guide for them, their new designer will be able to use that to expand on their branding without ruining all the hard work you put in to make it look so damn gorgeous in the first place. 

Clients benefit from brand boards because they can easily find their color codes and font names on them.

Would you be a very happy client if you went away from the project with lovely branding, but no idea what fonts and colours were used? No idea how what to use to create additional brand materials in the future? I wouldn't. 

Brand boards are totally different to style guides, so try not to confuse the two. 

Style guides include instruction on how to use your brand elements, such as how much spacing a logo should have around it, or what backgrounds your logo can and can’t be used on… I prefer to think of style guides as identity guidelines. They can be pretty complex, but brand boards are simple boards that only include your brand elements — not instructions on how and where to use things.

(Psst! I talk all about creating style guides, moodboards and other time-saving templates in my course, Organize & Automate.)

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Here's what I include in my brand boards:

1. Main logo

The main logo is used on the client's website, on their stationery and usually on PDFs etc.

2. Logo variation

This is another version of the main logo, with a slight difference. It could be a vertical version, it could have a shape around it, it could be in another color, or it could be textured...

It's a good idea to offer your clients a logo variation because you never know when they might fancy changing things up. Clients don't want a basic brand- they want a brand that's cohesive, but still interesting! 

3. Sub mark

A sub mark is another element that is pulled from the main logo. It's usually smaller than the main logo, and is often used as a favicon or profile picture.

Sub marks are especially helpful to brands with long business names because they provide a simple alternative to their main logo. Sub marks also make great watermarks because they're usually in a circular shape and fit nicely in the corners of photos. 

4. Main color palette

I create a main color palette that consists of 5 colors. These colors reinforce the 'vibe' of the brand.

For example, a feminine brand may choose pastel colors to help add to their romantic brand vibe, and a corporate agency may choose dark or bold colors to give off a feeling of power. 

On your client's brand board, make sure you include the hex codes for their colours. If you want to be even more helpful, you can provide the RGB, CMYK and Pantone values!

5. Supporting palette

A supporting colour palette is a set of extra colours that compliment the main colour palette nicely. These colors can be used in blog post graphics, social media posts and other brand graphics to inject more variety while still remaining cohesive. 

6. Supporting pattern

A pattern is a nice way to add to the aesthetic of your brand. For example, a feminine brand could strengthen their girly vibe with a polka dot pattern! Patterns are usually used on print design, social media designs and PDF designs. 

7. Fonts

Fonts have to be chosen very carefully when creating a visual identity for a client. Just like a color palette, fonts can make or break the brand vibe you're trying to give off.

Script fonts are often used for feminine brands, whilst chunky sans serif fonts could be used for modern brands. Whatever the font, make sure you include all font names and their uses in your client's brand boards. Tell your client which fonts should be used for paragraph text and headers. 

These elements make up a visual identity, but there's also so much more you can add! Once you have the basics in place, you can create social media branding, PDFs, print designs, course designs and more.

Brand boards contain the very core of your client's brand identity. They guide every visual decision your client will make, so make sure you include one in your client's final files. 

Do you have a brand board of your own? If you're a designer, what is your favorite part of the design process? Leave a comment and let me know!

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