Document, Don’t Create: How Sharing Your Process Strengthens Your Brand

Everyone loves a good success story, but what really builds trust and connection is sharing the process. In this episode of Not Nice, Clever, we’re diving into why taking your audience behind the scenes—the struggles, the breakthroughs, and the little wins—creates deeper engagement and loyalty.

We’ll share our own experiences, like Kat’s venture into vlogging and Candice asking for new mom tips, to show how documenting instead of creating can make your content more relatable. We’ll also cover how to celebrate small wins, be real about challenges, and even involve your audience in the journey to build anticipation for your big reveal.

🏁 Connect With Us On Instagram!

• Not Nice Clever
• Candice Carcioppolo
• Kat Torre

📣 Amplify by Not Nice. Clever. is the ace up your sleeve. It's a hands on, workshop style delivery full of replicable frameworks, and actionable strategies that you team can put in place right away.

Find out more HERE.

🎙 Book Kat and Candice to speak at your next event, summit or workshop HERE

Chapters

• 0:00 Sharing the Journey: Building Community Through Process
• 3:38 Honesty in Struggles: Sharing Scars, Not Wounds
• 6:05 Celebrating Small Wins: Engaging Your Audience
• 8:30 Building Anticipation: The Bigger Picture

Transcript

Hi, I'm Kat, marketer turned brand storyteller. And I'm Candice, educator turned entrepreneur. And you're listening to Not Nice, Clever. As CEOs and leaders, it's your job to always have the answers. But sometimes you need a little help. Leverage, if you will. We get it. This is the place for you. So wherever you're listening, 530 AM Club at the gym, on your way to your next meeting or putting out today's fire, let's get into it.

In today's mini episode of Not Nice Clever, we are talking about how you can share the process and not just the outcome. Because if you want to really build a community and build deep relationships with your audience, you have to be able to take them along for the journey. So today we are sharing tips on how to do just that. It's going to help you to build loyalty, build trust, build your engagement, make people feel like they are part of something.

that's bigger, that they were there from the beginning. And we know that you guys like to be there from the beginning with us. So we're going to teach you some of the ways that you can bring your people along.

Yep. So the first thing is a strategy, but really a mindset too. When it comes to content and putting content out there, we want you to think about documenting where you are in your journey at various stages, rather than just creating something that looks super polished, super perfect, because everybody loves a comeback story. Everybody loves an underdog story. Everybody loves seeing those like before and after transformations. And I'm

feeling this more so now than I have in the past with launching my Week in the Life vlog on YouTube a couple weeks ago, maybe a month ago now at the time like this episode's going to come out. But actually just taking a moment here and there throughout the day every day to capture and share what I'm doing and showing the behind the scenes. It's been

really interesting for me. It's definitely been pushing me out of my comfort zone because I typically don't like to show all of that, but I have been doing it and the response has been great so far. highly recommend document it. Don't just like whip it up. Take people behind the scenes, pull back the curtain, let them in on the process, what's happening because they're going to be even more invested in the outcome when you do that. So that's super important. The next one is
also on here, we have, yeah, there's a note here that I need to talk about. So recently I went on my Instagram story and I was just like, Hey, so it's the weekend and we are clearing out this extra room that we have to make it into a nursery. I'm a new mom and I don't know what I need in a new nursery. So, drop all of the things. And I had people

dropping all kinds of things that I needed. Definitely at the top of the list was a great recliner, rocker, glider type thing that was at the top of the list. Everyone was telling me just like splurge, if you're gonna splurge on anything, splurge on that. Yeah. Cause they're gonna be spending a lot of time in it apparently. So, but yeah, just being able to take people along for that journey. So when I do something else to the nursery, I will probably talk about it on my Instagram stories again. And

you know, get to start a conversation with my people. take people along. The next one is be honest about the struggles.

Huge. Yeah. Huge. Yes. okay, so here's my rule of thumb when it comes to being honest about the struggles. Because I feel like we get this question a lot in client sessions. They're like, okay, I'm building a personal brand. I want to be personable, but I don't want to be like that cringy TMI oversharing type of person, right? That doesn't showcase me as credible or authoritative or relatable. So my caveat for this is

share your struggles, but not when you're in the moment and you're in it and you're like emotional, like you're crying. I've, I've seen people share reels or stories of them like crying, like recording themselves crying. And I get that that's a strategy. It's just not one that I want to adopt. I don't think it's the most helpful to share it in the moment. I would recommend that you share about and be honest about it after you've moved past it, after you have worked through those issues, you have developed.

solutions and you're in a better frame of mind to speak to it from a place of perspective and wisdom. Yes. That would be my recommendation. What I tell clients is, and I learned this somewhere, I didn't make this up, but share scars, not wounds. Oh, that's good. Right? So you don't want to share while that wound is open because there's too many possibilities for it to get infected.

Okay, there's too many possibilities for things to come in. after the fact, and Kat and I do this all the time, we're like, oh, when we started, this happened, or we share things that have happened in our entrepreneurial journeys, but I'm not getting on my story and being like, no one hired me this month and I made $0. Like that doesn't feel helpful, and it's not encouraging the next person to want to work with you, right? So it's making sure you are sharing.

not wounds, but scars. So when you've healed, when you're out of it, right? That's what my recommendation is. Obviously, it's going to be different probably from client to client and business to business. And you always get to decide what you want to share. And that's like the beauty of building a personal brand. You're always the driving force. But if there's a general rule of thumb, I like that.

The next one is really important and I feel like something that is underrated. So celebrating the small wins can really help keep your audience engaged, excited, your community rooting for you. You don't need to achieve the top 1 % or to go viral or to, you know, reach whatever high in the sky type of goal is that you have mine aimed for that, strive for that.

But I celebrated the fact that I even just got my first vlog out. Like I did it in the midst of moving, which in hindsight was a very interesting decision on my part, but I made it happen, you know? And it was a huge thing for me. And I remember I shared with Candice before we were recording one day. I like, yeah, I thought maybe like eight people would watch it, nine, 10. It now today, the first one has over a hundred views.

And I was like, holy shit, really? Like I was so surprised, but like grateful. I was like, my gosh, like even if the view was only like for 30 seconds or for a few minutes or whatever, celebrate that. Like I have not gone viral. I've not gotten brand deals, client business from it, whatever, but that doesn't matter. The win was completing it and getting it out there. Yes. And sometimes that is the win is just doing it. That's, that's it. That's the win. That's the thing you celebrate. and if you can do that publicly, like,

That's great. It's going to help your audience to also see that they're doing things that they should celebrate as well. So yes, celebrate the small wins. The next one is make it interactive and get your audience involved. And my favorite way to do this is using engagement stickers on my Instagram story. So I'll talk on my Instagram story and then use those like that sliding scale or a poll or a little question box.

and get people's opinions and thoughts. And that starts conversations. And you can even ask them like, we ask our audience regularly, hey, do you have a topic that you want us to make a podcast about? Let us know. We ask via email. We ask on our podcasts. We will ask in our Instagram stories. Not great at that yet, but we will be. We're getting there. Yeah, we're getting there. So just starting the conversation and giving people a way to get involved. Yep.

People want to join in. People want to cheer you on. And if they don't... like they're part of something. Yeah, they do. Part of something bigger. All right. This last tip here about sharing the process, not just the outcome, is to actually build anticipation for the outcome. Like, what are you working toward? What is the larger thing that you are striving for, that you are keeping on your vision board, that you are reviewing on a monthly or a quarterly...

basis. So to carry the example of the vlog, I'm going to do the weekly vlog for six months, and then I'm going to assess and analyze and see if it's something that I want to continue doing, see its impact on my business. But I am working toward that. That is the challenge in my mind for this initiative in my business. It's a new type of content. It's something that I'm creating intentionally for a new platform. So we'll see. That's what I'm working toward. But

And it can be something even smaller, like maybe a 30 day goal that you're working toward. It doesn't have to be huge, but share the people about like what the larger picture, the larger purpose is. Cause I guarantee you it's on their minds and they want to know. They want to know. Yeah. So don't be afraid of sharing the process. We actually are going to enjoy watching the process way more than if you just do the reveal. Like that's why we used to love to watch things like

the biggest loser. wanted to see going through it. We didn't just want to see the after results. We want to see where they started. Right? Or you can think about any of those reality TV shows that take you on someone's journey. always want to know the story. amazing race. We want to see the struggles. We want to see the ups and downs. And that's going to help us to build deeper connections. show it all. And if you haven't already, leave Not Nice Clever a five-star review.

See you soon.

Thanks for joining us on Not Nice Clever. Remember to follow Not Nice Clever wherever you listen to audio. And if you haven't already, drop that five star review. Share your takeaways. Tell us your story. We love to hear it. Signing off, you're not so nice, but so clever besties that mean business. See you soon.