Community Highlights: Meet Dee Wilson of Deep Marketing LLC

Today we’d like to introduce you to Dee Wilson.

Hi Dee, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
At the beginning of my social media marketing training sessions, I always start with, “When I first started in property management, I used to get my hand slapped for being on Facebook all the time; now I get paid to do it.” As a young mom, I wanted to return to school, but I still had a responsibility to care for myself and my child and prioritize quality time with him. I was working for the Tennessee Education Lottery when one weekend while lying by the pool, the leasing professional that leased me my apartment told me I should get into property management. We had discussed my desire to return to school, and her selling point was that the office is open seven days a week, allowing me to go to school and still work full time. I was sold, and I immediately started sending out my resume to apartment communities. I finally got someone to take a chance on me by telling them I’d happily work every weekend so I could go to school during the week. Weekends are the least desirable days people want to work, so it was a win-win for us.

My career path changed when I started at my fourth apartment community. I no longer saw a future in marketing. I decided the most realistic goal was to focus on an industry I had already excelled, and I would focus on moving up the ladder in property management. At that time, as a 24-year-old single mother, I looked like working myself up to an Assistant Community Manager to Community Manager, best case scenario ending as a Regional Manager. One day while at my fourth community in Nashville, my boss announced our management company was merging with another, and we would be renovating and rebranding the community as a whole. This opened up a new position for a Marketing Director to assist with the rebranding and marketing of the renovations, and I jumped at the chance.

After 8 years in the same community and assisting in a successful rebrand and renovation, I was promoted to the Corporate Director of Training and Marketing. As the Director of Training and Social Media Marketing, I saw a major need for social media marketing assistance in multi-family property management. After becoming a nationally certified trainer, I started to offer training opportunities at the local Apartment Association and speaking at National Conferences. Being a millennial that grew up with social media and training on how to use it for marketing communities quickly became my favorite training topic. Anytime I complete training, I would say, “I would love to have my own company one day where I could do just this,” and from there, a seed was planted. Finally, after joking about it for years but focusing on the many “what if,” one evening, I told my husband I knew I had a 100 percent chance of failing if I never tried. He immediately agreed and then looked at me and said, “well, you should try” That was pretty much all I needed to hear to decide to take a massive leap of faith and leave that company I had been with for 13 years to start my own business.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall, and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
One of the best things that came out of leaving the corporate world and starting my own business was the empowerment I felt by taking my future into my own hands. I mean, as scary as that sounds, because it can be so hard to trust myself, sometimes I realized I trusted myself more than I trusted others to make good decisions on my behalf. Humans feel more confident when they see that other people also have confidence in them. This is why employees do better when they are trusted and empowered to make decisions instead of micro-managed. The same thing happens when someone tells you that you aren’t ready for your next step when you believe you are.

My personality has never been one that is stagnant. I always want to keep moving, growing, and going up, I don’t want to make lateral moves, and even though I have, it doesn’t mean I will continue to. I realized I had put every bit of my future and success into someone else’s hands. Every training I did represent the company I worked for. Any promotion I received or didn’t receive was at the discretion of someone else who would look at me and tell me they were making decisions for the best interest of my future. It was a shot at my self-confidence whenever I wasn’t allowed to do something I believed I could do. When I started my business, my self-confidence was at an all-time low. I was struggling to control the narrative of my decisions. I felt people were disappointed in me for choosing myself. I heard a lot of pessimistic opinions on how hard it is to be a business owner. Most days, I questioned my sanity for doing what I was doing.

Thankfully the people I needed to believe in me did, and that was all I needed. We hear many voices and opinions without realizing that not everyone has our best interests. Sometimes people make decisions for their best interest, like keeping this person in this position makes my life easier, so I’m going to keep them here for my benefit. So I focused on weeding everyone else out and being intentional about the information and opinions I received. On top of everything else bringing me down, I also struggle with anxiety, depression, and PTSD, so this was my biggest obstacle. The negative voices were much louder than the positive ones, and the noticeable behavior change was more apparent than the extra love I received from my people, which kept me questioning.

For the first month after launching, I barely left my house and worked on my business and myself. So I stopped talking to many people, stopped looking at many things, stopped hearing things that didn’t serve me, and took control of everything I was receiving. I was looking at every social page, every post I was reading, every person I had a conversation with, and every human I spent time with. I spent time with my family and close friends and did things that brought me joy instead of listening to what anyone else had to say or think. In doing this, I realized one of the things that caused me the most anxiety was feeling like I couldn’t be my authentic self, and I wasn’t doing that anymore. By the time I facilitated my first training as a business owner, I was a different person. I wasn’t struggling from the anxious thoughts that were ruling my life before, I was optimistic about my future, and most importantly, I had completely given up believing in myself 100 percent.

Thanks – so, what else should our readers know about Deep Marketing LLC?
During my time as the Director of Social Media Marketing, I worked with many companies that offered social media assistance, and it was always the bare minimum. The content was hardly ever customized, their captions didn’t represent our brand voice, and they didn’t create content to expand exposure and reach. I decided I wanted to offer all the things they didn’t do. I wanted to provide a customized service that would be as good as that business having its marketing director. I spend time getting to know my clients, their mission, brand values, and voice. My company allows team members to get back to what’s truly important- their customers. For a social page to be successful, it takes more than just posting consistently. A page has to offer its audience something to come back for; they have to be more than pictures and captions. The page has to tell a story, educate its audience on the services they provide, engage its audience, and be a resource, a reason they follow this page. I offer an authentic social strategy to help businesses reach their goal and can customize a package to anything the business needs, including SEO, website management, review management, lead conversion, and so much more.

What’s next?
I’m just excited for the future. I look forward to seeing where we are one year from now. I look forward to offering my training sessions to other associations and companies and hopefully speaking at more events and education conferences.

I look forward to helping other young mothers that might join our company in the future have a job that allows them to choose their schedule, make a good living and still have plenty of time with their children. I hope to be an excellent example to my children and empower them to take their future into their own hands.

Contact Info:

• Website: deepmarketingllc.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/deepmarketingllc/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DeepMarketingLLC