Interview With VoyageMichigan
*This article was originally published on VoyageMichigan
Today we’d like to introduce you to Hannah Jenae.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
Ever since I was little, I’ve been a creative person. That creativity has manifested itself in a variety of ways over the years – drawing, painting, writing, and now, photography.
After graduating from Hope College in May 2018, I realized I was missing something: a creative outlet. In school, I could always take an English or art class or get involved with the school newspaper, but as a graduate, I didn’t have those opportunities anymore.
Then at my first job out of college, I was introduced to what would become my creative outlet. My role? Influencer marketing. Every day, I was researching influencers, pitching, negotiating, managing collaborations with talent, and utilizing the content they were contracted to create in a social strategy. It was while I was looking at an influencer’s blog that I got the idea to start my own. A blog would be my creative outlet! However, I wouldn’t get to invest my creativity, time, and money in a blog for several more months. With time, I found my niche – self-care – and I finally created my blog, hannahjenae.com.
I went into blogging with zero expectations. I used social media to market what I was talking about on my blog, but I never thought that I would become an influencer myself. The main goal of my blog launch was, and still is, to create content that delights and speaks to others. It’s been over three years since then and now I do consider, and call myself, a microinfluencer. I have built a community of 3,600+ followers who believe in the power of self-care and self-love as much as I do. You can find me on Instagram and TikTok at @hannahjenae.
In addition to my personal social media pursuits, I am also a professional freelance digital marketer. I have four years of experience in this field, and I love what I do! My specialties include social media management, content creation, and email marketing.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back, would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
It certainly has not! But what is life without its challenges?
My biggest challenge has been combating and then working through burnout. I like to tell others that I made self-care and self-love my focus because I often put myself last. I can now say from experience that when you neglect yourself like that, you also ignore your body’s warning signs. I firmly believe that if you do not choose a time to rest your body, your body will choose it for you…that’s what happened to me.
Burnout hit me hard. It took a lot of time, energy, and conversation with my therapist to help me get back on my feet and get back to doing what I love: creating. And now that I am back to creating, I’m very open about sharing my struggles with my community. I’m certainly not perfect, nor do I have everything figured out. There are days where I still put myself last, and the way I view myself is not as loving, but the more I continue to work at it, those days are fewer and farther in between.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I will sooner call myself a creative, but as a microinfluencer, I am a business owner. I think that’s been one of my biggest learning curves – giving microinfluencing the business treatment. And unfortunately, I think those outside the influencer marketing sphere also fail to see it as a business. However, as talent, I am treated like any other contractor: A brand will pitch me for a campaign they have in mind, I will negotiate based on the set of deliverables, and I’ll take the campaign brief and shoot and edit the content before the outlined deadline. What I do is very much a service.
Within content creation, I am known for curating a feed of creative lifestyle photos that I have taken and paired with inspiring messages of self-care and self-love. All of my content is thoughtful and relates to content pillars that resonate with me and my audience. And while I do edit each photo to enhance colors, I never retouch my body. I am firm in showing my audience a realistic body, which includes rolls, blemishes, dimples, and wrinkles.
One of the things I am most proud of is an ongoing photo series called #RewriteYourSelfLoveJourney. It began with one photo, but in the last two years, it’s expanded to seven photos of various body parts – legs, arms, bellies – that have inspirational and resilient messages of self-love painted on them. I’m very humbled that this project has resonated with thousands of people and has been shared worldwide by fellow creators, businesses, and publications, like Shape and Self Magazine.
