Adviser of the Month: Kristian Downer

Congratulations to our Adviser of the Month for September, Kristian Downer, director of DowSocial.

Kristian has football to thank for his now widely successful career in digital marketing.

Back in the day, like with any hobby, he started a blog and Twitter account that covered football. By his own admission, it was a "terrible website" at first, but the more he learnt, the better it got. It even led Kristian to secure a freelance deal writing for the Metro about football.

He says:

"The football website still exists but not with the same intensity as I'm very busy now. We would get 150,000 views a month and I was also writing for the Metro and got invited to events with the Guardian and other publishers.

"The website wasn’t the business but gave me the skills and knowledge needed to build my business."

What brought about the decision to start your own business?   

I have a business degree. However, when I graduated, I  didn't know what I wanted to do. All I knew was I wanted to start a business but didn't know how to make it happen. I got a corporate job for about five years and started writing and content creating on the side.

A few friends asked if I could help with their businesses. It took off from there and got to the point where I was earning as much from the side hustle as I was from my day job. So, I quit and worked on my business full-time in 2013. 

What is the biggest misconception about social media strategy? 

The biggest misconception still is that you must do everything and you must do a lot. 

Take TikTok as an example. There is a school of thought that you need to do three or four videos a day. That's the misconception; people get confused between content creators – people who create content as their profession – and the role of social media in business. 

For a business, it is about creating a reputation, getting your key messages out there and building relationships. Whereas for content creators, it's about volume, playing with the algorithm, getting attention and driving their revenue from their content. They’re not driving their revenue from a service or product.

A lot of what we do is tell clients to do less but focus it on people who want to hear from them. 

How can you support small businesses? 

It is through strategy, coaching and training. This covers what you want to do and who you’re trying to reach, then putting together a strategy and training them on how to do it. 

One of my favourite quotes is: ‘Training without implementation is just entertainment’. 

I find most entrepreneurs are time-pressed, so having someone to be accountable to through mentoring or coaching is quite useful. Working with small businesses or large teams, what I always find is that if you can give them consistent contact, then they're more likely to succeed than if you just dump information.

Digital marketing is getting more complicated with all the new platforms, short-form video, privacy, AI – everything is getting more complex. So, my role is to simplify that so people know what they need to know and can create a plan that keeps it manageable and drives meaningful growth and profit within their business. 

We're not doing these things just to do them. We need to ensure that they understand how all the marketing elements fit together. 

Although social media is where I started, I want to help businesses on their journey to understand how this very complex and scary idea of digital marketing can be condensed and to find a path that works for them.

Biggest lesson you've learnt since becoming self-employed 

Under promise and over-deliver. The biggest thing I see from self-employed people is to give the client what they want, not what they need and to appreciate your value. 

For example, we don’t negotiate when we are quoting a service. If a client wants a discount, we ask them what part of the service are they willing to lose. It’s remembering that you have the power because you have the skill or service that company wants to hire you for. 

As self-employed people, it is about focusing on your skills and not stretching yourself too far. It can be easy to say yes to everything, but people hire freelancers for specialist knowledge. So, you need to ensure that you are really delivering that expertise, setting expectations and being an independent voice. If they wanted someone to agree with them, in my opinion, they should hire someone in-house.

Watch this webinar for best practice when it comes to implementing your social media strategy:

Joining Enterprise Nation as an adviser 

I was referred to Enterprise Nation by a fellow adviser, Minal Patel, about seven or eight years ago. 

Enterprise Nation and I have the same objective – we want to help people grow their businesses. It was a natural fit.

I have participated in a few Enterprise Nation campaigns like the She Means Business Meta campaign (I was one of two male trainers), Lunch and Learn, business.connected and even spoke at the StartUp Show. I have also delivered four Google Digital Garage sessions so far and by the end of the year, there will be quite a few more.  

If I wasn’t an Enterprise Nation adviser – I wouldn’t have had the opportunity or the exposure to two of the biggest companies on the planet – Meta and Google. 

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