Justyna Seniuta: ‘People buy from people; they need to know who is behind the brand’

The most common issues with marketing strategies, according to Justyna Seniuta,  is that “they lack clarity, because quite often they just create a business, not out of a deep desire, but just to earn some money, which is fine, but you can quickly burn out if you push something just for money.”

“What kind of impact do they want to make in the world? Who do they want to help? They often don’t understand who their client is, their client’s desires and what solution their clients are looking for,” she says.

When she first arrived in Ireland from her native Poland, she felt like it was ‘home’. The trip was a five-week vacation from an administration and HR role in a Polish bank in Warsaw, but it was the start of her life in Ireland; she just needed to go home and make a plan.

Seniuta had always dreamed about living and working in an English-speaking country, so six months after her initial trip to Ireland, she moved to Dublin in 2005.

“I just felt like I’m at home,” she says. Warsaw had begun to feel like it was becoming a rat race with encroaching skyscrapers; Ireland was like a breath of fresh air.

“When I landed in Ireland, first of all, I was shocked that I could see the sky, and I could see clouds that I could almost touch. The lower architecture in Dublin was very welcoming. And the people, everybody on the street talked to me – in Poland, if somebody who doesn’t know you started talking to you on the street, you would wonder what they wanted from you!”

“My English wasn’t great back then, and I was hoping to get a job in a bar to start learning the language more. But I started applying for marketing jobs because I had just graduated from marketing and management, while working in Poland. The first job I applied for, I got. A marketing assistant in a company in the construction sector.”

Seniuta was travelling between Clonmel and Dublin as the Tipperary-based company, Sepam, had opened a new division in Dublin. But after a year, they decided to close the Dublin office and she didn’t fancy the move to Clonmel, having built up a life of friends and social activities in Dublin.

Again, the first CV she sent out bagged her a job as a marketing executive in an electronic data interchange company, Celtrino. “It was a really interesting company to grow with as a marketeer,” she says, explaining that it went through a rebrand during her nine years at the company she says felt like family.

With only positive working experiences in Ireland, it came as a literal shock to her system when Seniuta moved into a marketing position in another company in the fintech space. It led to a burnout, something she didn’t see happening to her until her circle questioned it.

“Have you noticed how you breathe?” my sister in law asked me. My close friends, when they saw me or my photos on social media, said “something is wrong with you – there’s something really bad going on”, so my closest environment started noticing something wasn’t right,” she explains.

“It was interesting at the beginning, but then they broke me,” she says about her experience. “The ending of it was very difficult. It was really heavy.”

“I didn’t realise how heavy it was until it took me two years to recover from the burnout. There were times when I couldn’t get up from bed, I couldn’t move my finger. I’d never had this situation because I’ve always been full of life, a very optimistic person, very positive. And then something like that happened and my body completely closed. I was in such a stress mode that my body completely shut down,” she says.

But from her lowest point, her next career move began to flourish. All along, she had been helping friends and contacts with their marketing strategy or social media strategy, usually in exchange for a service, but she hadn’t charged money before. People encouraged her to start charging for her services and so her life as a solopreneur began.

“I’ve been specialising in social media. Social media is a really difficult part when you run your own business, because when you start running your own business, you’re starting to face yourself – your limiting beliefs, your fears, everything. When you work for somebody, you can put a mask on, you don’t need to be vulnerable,” she says.

“It’s not that people will judge you directly, but when you run your own business, you’re the face of your business, the face of your brand,” she adds. “It’s really hard to create connections and to sell, if you don’t, because people buy from people; they need to know who is behind the brand.”

Seniuta faced all these things herself when she started her own business as she struggled with knowing how to price things, or to ask for money up front – there was a whole lot of people pleasing done.

“I started working with my mindset to understand, okay, what are these limiting beliefs? What are the fears? How can I reframe it to use it as my superpower?” she says.

Having availed of the services of Dublin’s Inner City Enterprise to get her own business off the ground, she was invited by them to host marketing workshops and mentoring sessions.

Tapping into her superpower, Seniuta is working with the nervous system to address psychological barriers that prevent entrepreneurs from effectively promoting themselves. As the nervous system can create feelings of panic or shutdown when facing new experiences, it can often impact those when doing such things as going ‘live’ on social media.

Her approach involves:

– Training the nervous system to feel safe in new marketing situations

– Helping entrepreneurs recognise that past negative experiences (like being laughed at in school) can create current marketing hesitations

– Showing that it’s safe to show up online and share content

– Expanding the nervous system’s comfort zone gradually

Seniuta’s goal is to help business owners grow their marketing efforts by “honouring the body” and its protective mechanisms, rather than pushing against them.

She is not only delivering this as part of her individual work with clients but has begun hosting workshops. During the summer, she ran a workshop during a retreat in Mallorca and later she held a women-only in-person workshop in a garden in Tallinn, Estonia, where participants tapped into their nervous system, found their blockages and learned a little something about what might subconsciously be holding them back.

Burnout didn’t hold Seniuta back. She has used what she learned from that dark period of her life to put a bright light on the lives of her fellow solopreneurs. She now splits her time between Ireland and Estonia.