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Sneak Peek: A Chapter from Chasing Simple Marketing
It is officially July, which means we are mere DAYS away from the Launch of Chasing Simple Marketing. Right now, I am eating, sleeping, daydreaming all things book launch, so I thought it would be fun to come back in with another read of a chapter.
Way back in January, I read from the first chapter of the book, but today I’m going to take you into the heart of the book where I’m explaining how you decide what your marketing strategy should be. Because let’s face it – there are a LOT of different strategies out there, and marketing strategies can become convoluted very quickly.
Links and Resources Mentioned in This Episode:
- Really quickly, before we dive into this episode – I just HAVE to share something I’m really excited about with you. My book, Chasing Simple Marketing, is launching this July. I wrote this book for the business owner that stumbled into entrepreneurship because they were following their passion. But without that Masters of Business Administration (MBA) or background in business, they find marketing overwhelming and frustrating. Throughout these pages, I’m going to take you on a simplicity-focused journey to improve your content marketing and you’ll walk away with an actionable plan to simplify your marketing, so that you can fit your marketing into your business, without it taking over your business. To learn more about how to grab your copy, and even potentially get on the launch team head over to amandawarfield.com/book/ See you there!
- Episode 145: How I Got Started Batching My Content {BOOK SNEAK PEEK}
- This week’s action step: Preorder the book!
- This week’s book recommendation: Chasing Simple Marketing by ME! Amanda Warfield.
- Find me on Instagram and tell me you completed this week’s action step: @mrsamandawarfield
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Rather Read? – Here’s the Transcript!
*Just a heads up – the provided transcript is likely to not be 100% accurate
It’s officially July, which means we are mere days away from the launch of Chasing Simple Marketing. Right now I am eating, sleeping, daydreaming, all things book launch, so I thought it would be fun to come back in with another read of a chapter. Way back in January in, I believe, episode 1 45. I read from the very first chapter of the book, but today I’m going to take you into the heart of the book where I’m explaining how exactly you decide what your marketing strategies should be.
Because let’s face it, there are a lot of different strategies out there, and marketing strategies can become convoluted very quickly. You’re listening to episode 167 of The Chasing Simple Podcast, and I’m your host, Amanda Warfield. This episode was brought to you by my book, chasing Simple Marketing, and you can grab your own at amandawarfield.com/book.
How do I find time to create content without overwhelming myself? Where should I even be showing up in my marketing? How do I come up with fresh content ideas? Where should I be focusing my marketing efforts? What is lead generation anyways and how do I do it? Our launch is still a thing, and most importantly, how do I put it all together to market my business strategically?
Can I really grow my business without spending all of my time marketing? These are some of the questions that float around in your head when you think of marketing. Welcome friend. This is Chasing Simple Where Practical Marketing Strategy Meets Simplicity. I’m your host, Amanda Warfield, simplicity focused content marketing and launch strategist, speaker educator, and author of Chasing Simple Marketing.
I traded in my classroom lesson plans for helping creative entrepreneurs sustainably fit marketing into their business without it taking over their business. So that they have time to grow their business, take time off and live the life they dreamed about when they first decided to go out on their own.
When I’m working, you can find me working with one-on-one clients, such as the contract shop and Rebecca Rice Photography on their marketing strategy and copywriting, or helping my students simplify their marketing and launches. And when I’m not, you can find me spending time outside with my husband, Russell reading in our hammock watching Gamecocks boards traveling or forcing our cats to snuggle me.
If you feel overwhelmed by marketing, you aren’t alone. Many entrepreneurs find marketing frustrating, overwhelming, and simpy and obligation. They know they need it, but. They don’t enjoy how easily it can suck up their time when what they really wanna be doing is the thing that they started their business to do, which is why I’m here to help make marketing simple and less time consuming so that you can spend less time on your marketing and more time growing your business and doing what you love.
Each week offer you transparent conversations, actionable steps, and judgment free community to encourage and equip you. So grab yourself a cup of coffee or whatever your drink of choices, and meet me here each week for love, support, practical tips and advice on uncomplicate, your marketing and business.
Let’s do this entrepreneurship thing together, shall we? Really quickly, before we dive into this episode, I just have to share something that I’m really excited about with you. My book, chasing Simple Marketing is launching this July. I wrote this book for the business owner that stumbled into entrepreneurship because they were following their passion, but without that Master’s of Business Administration or that background in business, well, they find marketing overwhelming and frustrating.
Throughout these pages, I’m going to take you on a simplicity focus journey to improve your content marketing, and you’ll walk away with an actionable plan to simplify your marketing so that you can fit your marketing into your business without it taking over your business. To learn more about how to grab your own copy and even potentially get on the launch team, head over to amanda warfield.com/book.
I’ll see you there. I was going through a marketing course I’d bought with my calendar printed out in front of me and my rainbow of pins laying beside my computer so that I could color code my plan by platform. I was feeling so proud of myself for making an investment in my business, and I was on top of the world.
I was finally going to get my marketing together. Up until that point, I’d spent hundreds of hours researching and trying to mimic what other entrepreneurs were doing in their content. While reviewing content plans on Pinterest, the plans that came up were full of International Donut Day and Wacky Sock Wednesday.
Absolutely none of which helped me to grow my audience, build relationships, or make sales. I was ready to finally figure out this marketing thing and decided that investing in a course from an expert was going to solve all of my problems. Only as I sat there and I watched the course, I felt confused.
The instructor was giving all kinds of information, but it felt like there were just these giant holes in the information given. I was told that I was supposed to use a theme for each month of content, but how, what was I supposed to do to determine, said theme, and what was the purpose of theming the month?
How did, how did that help? I’d spent all this money and still felt like I had no idea what I was doing. I internalized that clearly. I wasn’t meant to be good at marketing because I didn’t get it. Friend. If you’ve had these thoughts, please know that I am wrapping you up in a virtual hug right now because they just aren’t true.
The problem isn’t you. It’s a lack of foundational teaching on where to begin, what a strategy is supposed to even look like, and the why behind your marketing. All too often in the online business space, the terms content strategy and content plan are used interchangeably, but they aren’t the same. And unfortunately, we believe that our content plan.
Is our strategy, hence the disconnect I was feeling with this marketing course I took, I thought I was getting an education on strategy, but all I was learning about was creating a plan. A content plan is simply outlining what you’re going to talk about and when it’s, when you pull up your digital calendar, or if you’re old school like me, you print out a blank calendar and start using that pin rainbow to mark what’s been posted throughout the month.
You assign each platform of color and you decide how often you’re posting each platform. You take that platform’s color and you start marking every time you’ll post a said platform by writing its name on each assigned square, and then you go back in and you assign random topics to each piece of content throughout the month by pulling them out of thin air, rotating from a list that you pop together.
That’s a content plan. It showcases when and where you’re posting and what you’re talking about. When you do post a content strategy, on the other hand, is your overarching guide to what you’re going to create based on data and goals. You have to have an end in mind before you can create your strategy, and you need to understand where you currently sit with your business and your marketing.
For example, maybe you have an offer or product that you’re wanting to sell. You’ll want to have that in mind as you create your content strategy and then content plan. In order to use that information to create your content strategy, you’ll need to understand the action that you want your audience to take.
Purchasing your offer, and you’ll need to understand your messaging in order to guide them through the customer journey that they’ll need to undergo in order to be ready to purchase Chapter nine. We’ll discuss the customer journey in detail, but can you see how there’s more to deciding what to post than just rotating through a list of topics?
You can think of your content strategy as a building support and inner structure while you think of the plan as the design elements of the building. The plan can be beautiful, but without the strategy, the content you put out isn’t likely going to stand up for your business. A strategy is the blueprint and a plan is how you execute said strategy.
But all too often we start with the plan and skip the strategy. So what we’re executing doesn’t mean a whole lot to our businesses, and it doesn’t increase our sales in revenue. It’s important to note that there should always be two parts to your marketing strategy, your nurture strategy, and your growth strategy.
In chapter one, you were introduced to my client, Elise, who was consistently putting out content to nurture her audience, but she wasn’t doing any work to get in front of new audiences because she only had a nurture strategy. She wasn’t seeing growth in her audience size. Both are necessary for a fully functioning marketing strategy.
We’ll start with the nurture strategy is this is where content marketing comes into play with this strategy. The focus is to spend time nurturing your current audience, which means showing up for them consistently, getting value in education, and leading them into your sales processes. Because remember, sales and marketing aren’t the same things when you’re creating and publishing content.
You’re building relationships with your audience members. We’ve talked about the importance of building the no like and trust factor, and building those relationships through your content is a critical piece of every marketing strategy. All of this is critical to your nurture strategy. Within your nurture strategy, you’ll also want to keep in mind that every piece of content you create should have a few things.
One, a purpose. The four main are educating, entertaining, building relationships, or connecting and selling. It’s likely that any given piece of content will have more than one or, or even all four purposes within it. But if it’s not doing any of the above, It’s probably not worth creating for your business.
Two, a strong hook. Our attention spans are short. You’ve got to learn to grab your audience’s attention right from the beginning by making them want more. For example, this book’s very first sentence. I started batching my content because a dog had peed on our carpets. That’s a hook right from the beginning.
It made you go, huh? And wanna keep reading. Three, a call to action or a cta. Every piece of content needs to be created with a specific goal in mind. The key is to choose your call to action before you ever begin writing your content. That way you ensure that you’re writing content that will lead toward that goal.
In order to determine what each of those key pieces of your content strategy should be, you’ll need to know what your goals and purpose are for each piece of content you put out. How do you know what that is? Well, this will vary depending on where you are in your business journey and what your current business goals are.
At first, it may simply be to educate, get your ideas out there and build relationships. Then as you become more concrete in your business and have offers to sell, it’ll be to sell that offer later. You’ll be focused on scaling and really getting people into your email funnels. If this seems overwhelming and we’re unclear right now, don’t worry.
We’ll be covering this in depth in chapter seven, eight, and nine. Not to mention that as you get further into your business, things naturally just become clearer. It doesn’t all need to come together from the beginning, and you don’t need to fully have your strategy mapped out for all the years to come be patient and take things one step at a time.
As we saw with Elise, content marketing cannot exist in a bubble. It’s only one half of a marketing plan. You must also have a growth strategy that gets you in front of new people and brings them into your audience so that you can nurture them. And no content Marketing should not be your growth strategy.
Can it grow your audience? Sure. Virality happens, which brings in new faces. Your audience might love a piece of content and share it, which will lead to growth, but that growth is a byproduct, not a strategy. If you cannot guarantee that a piece of content will be getting you in front of new faces, it’s not part of your growth strategy.
An exception here would be when you’re a first adopter of a new platform, like we talked about back in chapter one. When you hop on early, your likelihood of seeing virality is much higher due to lack of competition. Megan, being an early adopter, a potential growth strategy. What are some other examples of growth strategies?
Well, we covered growth strategies extensively in the last chapter, but as a reminder, some examples would be Pinterest guesting on other podcasts or YouTube shows, guest teaching in membership communities, attending events or conferences where your ideal client is attending, participating in bundles. The common denominator on the vast majority of these, connecting with others in your industry and using those relationships to get in front of their audiences.
Then the goal is to bring those audiences into your own audience so that you can build relationships with them, with your nurture strategy. So how do you determine what your strategies should be? Well, your strategy will look different for each phase of business that you’re in. There are a lot of marketing strategies out there, but they don’t all make sense for every phase of business.
We want to ensure we focus on efforts that will be most effective and worthy of our time, so we can simplify. Therefore, we must look at the three phases of business and determine your strategies based on those faces. And that my friend is where we are going to stop. If you would like to read the rest of chapter six and the remainder of the book where I go in depth about various marketing strategies and how to use them based on where you are at in your business, be sure to head to a mantle warfield.com/book to pre-order chasing symbol marketing.
You can also head straight to Amazon and search for it there and be able to pre-order it there as well. When you pre-order tracing civil marketing, you’ll not only get the first chapter sent right to your email so you can go ahead and start reading, but everyone who pre-orders is also going to get my KPI spreadsheet That will help you track all of the data and information you need to make sure that your content is connected towards your goals and actually moving you towards those goals.
So your book recommendation for this week is Chase and Simple Marketing, and your action step is to go ahead and pre-order by going to Amazon and searching Chase and Simple marketing or heading to amanda warfield.com/book. And until next time, my friend, I hope that you’ll go out and uncomplicate your marketing and business.
Thank you so much for joining me here today, friend. You can find this episode show notes as well as all of the resources you need to simplify your marketing over@amandawarfield.com. If you liked what you heard here today, be sure to subscribe to the podcast so that you never miss an episode. And if you could take a moment to leave a rating and review, it would truly mean the world to me.
Ratings and reviews are the number one way that you can support a podcast and ensure that it sticks around for many more episodes to come. I’ll see you next time, not go out and uncomplicate your marketing and business.
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