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Content Marketing

Episode 157: The Feast and Famine Marketing Cycle and How to Avoid It for Consistent Clients

April 25, 2023

Chasing Simple Marketing

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I'm  Amanda — simplicity-focused content marketing strategist.  I'm here to help you fit your marketing into your business.

Meet Amanda

The Chasing Simple Content Planner

Marketing strategies to help you get (and retain) consistent clients to keep you out of the feast or famine cycle.

Marketing Strategies To Help You Get Consistent Clients

You’re bringing in clients, doing what you love, and frankly, feeling a bit frazzled at the end of each week after seeing how much of your to do list didn’t get worked on. Including? You marketing.

You’re so busy serving your clients and students well that each day your marketing tasks get pushed to the next day, and the next, and then the next … only for you to realize that you’ve been ghosting your audience completely.

And in comes the guilt.

BUT you don’t have time to do anything about it, so you’re pushing the guilt aside and saying you’ll worry about it later. Only, later doesn’t happen until all of a sudden you start offboarding clients and realize you have no one to onboard next … because you haven’t been marketing yourself.

Don’t worry. I’m here today to share 5 things you can do to get out of the feast and famine marketing cycle, and keep that pipeline full.


Links and Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

  • Need help with your content strategy? Book a 1:1 Content Marketing Strategy call
  • Are you looking to improve your content without spending a ton of time and mental energy doing so? Whether you’re looking for help knowing what to talk about, setting up content systems, or improving your launch strategy, the Chasing Simple Shop has something for you. From A Year of Content Prompts broken up by type of content, to my Launch Strategy Mini-Course – the Chasing Simple Shop is the quick and simple way to take your content to the next level. And you can get 10% off any item by using the code LISTENER at checkout! Just head to amandawarfield.com/shop/ and again, that code for 10% off is LISTENER!
  • This week’s episode is brought to you by the Chasing Simple Content Planner and you can grab your own at amandawarfield.com/planner/
  • This week’s action step: Create a content plan for the next month. And then, I want you to slash it in half. Use that to get started showing up and consistently bringing in those leads.
  • This week’s book recommendation: American Royalty by Tracey Livesay
  • Find me on Instagram and tell me you completed this week’s action step: @mrsamandawarfield

Did you love this episode?

Don’t forget to subscribe so that you never miss an episode! Also, if you would be willing to leave a review on Apple Podcasts, it would mean the world to me. It’s such a small thing that can make a big difference in helping me spread this message of simplicity to other overwhelmed women.

Have a comment about today’s episode, or a topic you’d like to suggest for a future episode? Shoot me an email over at hello@amandawarfield.com!


Rather Read? – Here’s the Transcript!

*Just a heads up – the provided transcript is likely to not be 100% accurate

You’re bringing in clients, doing what you love, and frankly, feeling a bit frazzled at the end of each week after seeing how much of your to-do list didn’t get worked on, including your marketing, you’re so busy serving your clients and students well that each day your marketing task get pushed to the next day and the next, and then the next.

Only for you to realize that you’ve been ghosting your audience completely. And in comes the. But you don’t have time to do anything about it. So you’re pushing aside the guilt and saying you’ll worry about it later. Only later doesn’t ever happen until all of a sudden you start off onboarding clients and you realize that you have no one to onboard next because you haven’t been marketing yourself.

Don’t worry. I’m here today to share five things that you can do to get out of the feast and famine marketing cycle and keep that pipeline full. You’re listening to episode 157 of The Chasing Simple Podcast, and I’m your host, Amanda Warfield. This episode was brought to you by the Chasing Simple Content Planner, and you can grab your own [00:01:00] at amanda warfield.com/planner.

How do I run a successful business from my home? How can I possibly wear all of the hats? Am I the only one that struggles with staying organized? What am I supposed to do about work-life balance? How can I create a solid schedule and routine? How do I even stay productive? And the biggest question of all.

How do I manage it all? And can I really create a business that I love without being chained in my laptop? Welcome to The Chasing Simple Podcast, where hard conversations and actionable education meet simplicity. I’m your host, Amanda Warfield, time management coach, online educator, and crazy Cat Mama. My mission is to help overwhelm biz owners get more done and less time so that they have more time and energy for what matters most.

If you feel overwhelmed or occasionally lost in the rollercoaster. That is entrepreneurship. I want you to know [00:02:00] that you aren’t alone. Those things you’re feeling, you aren’t the first or the last to feel that way. The hard things you’re going through, someone else has already been there too each week offering you transparent conversations, actionable steps, and a judgment free community to encourage and equip you.

So grab yourself a cup of coffee or whenever your drink of choice is and meet me here each week for love support. Practical tips and advice on simplifying your biz. Let’s do this entrepreneurship thing together, shall we?

Are you looking to improve your content without spending a ton of time and mental energy doing so? Whether you’re looking for help, knowing what to talk about, setting up content systems. Or improving your launch strategy. The Chasing Simple Shop has something for you from a year of content prompts broken up by type of content to my launch strategy mini course, which will teach you my entire strategy for launching your upcoming online course.[00:03:00] 

The Chasing Simple Shop is the quick and simple way to take your content to the next level. And you can get 10% off any item just for being a listener of the Chasing Civil Podcast by using the Code Listener at checkout, just head to amanda warfield.com/shop. And again, that code for 10% off is listener.

What is the Feast and Famine and marketing cycle and how does it differ from the content marketing hamster wheel? If you’ve been around, you’ve been a listener for a while, you’ve probably heard me talk about the content marketing hamster. More than once. And the content marketing hamster wheel, if you haven’t heard me talk about it, is when you start creating content and then you never get to a place where you feel like you can stop.

And so what you’re doing is every day, all week long, at some point you’re creating content and it’s just a nons. Hamster wheel that you’re running on of constantly creating new content. And that hamster wheel is [00:04:00] preventing you from being able to make other moves in your business. It’s preventing you from being able to set up your website to set up your honey book or ddo to actually bring in new clients.

It’s preventing you from being able to market in other ways that can help grow your audience. And so you end up stuck in this place where alls you’re doing is creating content, but because you’re not moving the needle in any other area of your business, you’re not actually seeing any growth in your business.

And so you’re not making any money and you’re just constantly putting out. Content that you think is going to and hope is going to grow your business, but in reality, it’s got to be a given a take. Yes, marketing and showing up consistently is really important, but if alls you’re doing is marketing and putting out content, you’re not able to actually grow your business.

And so that’s the content marketing hamster wheel. But how does that differ from the feast and famine marketing cycle? [00:05:00] Well, the biggest difference is that when it comes to the feast and famine marketing cycle, It’s an on and off, on and off type thing instead of constantly showing up, you’re showing up and then you’re not, and then you’re showing up and then you’re not.

And that’s the biggest difference. What the other underlying difference tends to be is that more often than not, if you’re stuck on the content marketing hamster wheel, you’re a newer business owner, you may see content as your business at this point, and you may not frankly be making much money at.

Whereas the feast and famine marketing cycle, you are bringing in clients. Your marketing is working, you’re seeing that growth, you’re moving the needle in your business. But what ends up happening is that you do your job and you market really well, and that brings in some clients. And you get to a place where, oh my gosh, I have so many clients right now that my market.

it just falls to the [00:06:00] bottom of the to-do list. I’m not prioritizing it any longer because my plate is so full. Can’t take on any new clients anyways, and whether it is a conscious or subconscious, you know, thought process, it’s usually subconscious. But what ends up happening is you’re so busy, you’ve got so much going on, you just don’t have time to market.

So it falls to the bottom of the to-do list, and you’re just focused on client work. Well, however long your client process is, you get close to the end of that and you start to realize, oh, my client pipeline is dry. I had all these projects and I’m starting to wrap them up where I’ve wrapped up some and now I have more time.

And oh no, I don’t have another client to onboard. There’s no one on my wait list. There’s no one waiting to work with me. So you go back and you market, market, market, market, market, and you get more clients. . And the same thing happens. You, you get so focused on client work, and then once you kind of bring your head up, you go, oh no, there’s no one else to work with me.

[00:07:00] And so what’s happening on the marketing side of things is you’re showing up. You’re showing up, you’re showing up, you’re not showing up at all. You’re ghosting. You’re showing up, you’re showing up, you’re showing up, you’re ghosting. And what we don’t want is. To be stuck in that cycle. What we want is to be able to continue to show up consistently.

Just like for those that are stuck on the hamster wheel, we wanna show up consistently so that we have a consistent path, pipeline, wait list, whatever you wanna call it, of clients. You’ve consistently got people coming in and saying, I wanna work with you. So how do we do that? How do we avoid that cycle?

And the answer for. Is the same. It comes down to simplifying your content, simplifying your strategies, simplifying your marketing so that you can show up consistently without. Burning yourself out and getting stuck on that hamster wheel without not having the time, without having to [00:08:00] ghost. So the first thing you wanna do is you wanna make sure that you’re creating a plan and a strategy each and every month.

If you think that you’re gonna wing it with your marketing and you’re gonna, oh, I gotta record a new episode for tomorrow, so I’m gonna. Decide today what that podcast is gonna be about. If you think, oh, I need to post an Instagram post today. Let me decide today what it’s gonna be about. One that causes all kinds of problems with cohesion and the strategy and all of that.

But two, if you don’t have a plan, it’s gonna stay at the bottom of your to-do list. If you don’t know what you need to create and what you need to say, when you sit down to create it, it’s not gonna happen. You’re gonna look at that and go, Ooh, that’s really overwhelming right now. I don’t have the time or energy for.

So each month set aside some time to create that plan and strategy for yourself. The second thing I want you to remember and to do is to create less content that’s better quality. Don’t worry about best practices. Don’t worry about showing up when everyone says that you should show up if you only show up.[00:09:00] 

Once a week on social media and once a month on longform content, that’s okay, as long as you’re really intentional about making sure that the quality of the content you’re putting out. is strong. And what I mean by that is that you have that plan and strategy and it’s well thought out, and that it’s actually moving the needle for your business.

If you don’t have that plan and strategy and you sit down at the beginning of each month and say, what’s my podcast episode of the month gonna be? You’re not gonna put out high quality content. You’re just not. It’s not gonna be well thought out. It’s not gonna be something that you know your audience wants and needs from you.

It’s just gonna be, let me pull an idea out of thin. So make sure that your content is quality by having that strategy and plan, and you can create less of it so that people still wanna show up and listen to it, or read it or watch it, or whatever the case may be. They’ll still wanna do that, even if you’re not putting out content as often as you would like.

But showing up consistently less often, but consistently than you would like to [00:10:00] show up is better than ghost. The third thing you wanna do is to make sure you’re repurposing and reusing content. This is especially great if you’ve been in business a few years and you have, and your messaging has been consistent ish for a few years.

Because what you can do is each month when you plan your content, and this is a whole section inside of the chief and civil content planner, right? But each month when you. Sit down to plan your content. You can go, okay, it’s March. I’m planning for March. What did I talk about last March? And you can take that content and repurpose it and reuse it, and no one has to be any wiser. You can say, okay, well this was a podcast episode that I put out last year. Let me take the main points of that podcast episode and turn it into an email for this month. And then that way you’ve already got content. It just has to be tweaked a little bit, and it takes way less brain space and way less time to use it.

And then you can show up even more consistently, right? If you [00:11:00] say, okay, well I’m gonna continue creating the same amount of content, I’m gonna show up. Once a month on my podcast and I’m gonna create one new pod or one new email each month, and I’m gonna show up on Instagram once a week. Well, if you look back at old content, you could still create that one new email a month, but you could add a second email based off of old content, or you could just repurpose old content and that’s your whole email for the month too.

And that’s okay. No one’s gonna remember it. But repurposing and reusing content you’ve already created is going to make showing up so much easier. The fourth piece of advice I have is to batch your content. You knew this was coming. If you’ve been around for any amount of time, you knew this was coming, but batch your content.

If you give yourself a day, two days, three days a week, depending on how much content you’re creating, if you set aside that time each month to batch your content, it’s going to make cohesion better. Your strategy’s gonna be better, and you’re not gonna have [00:12:00] to worry about that content. So, It basically allows you to feel like you’re in the feast and famine marketing cycle, but your marketing is actually working for you.

So you’re able to say, okay, I’m setting aside this. Two or three days. At the beginning of each month, I’m gonna create all my content for the month, and then for the rest of the month, I only have to show up for my clients. Marketing is at the bottom of my to-do list. It’s not even on my to-do list. Alls I’m doing is showing up for my clients.

But in the background, your marketing is bringing in those new clients. It’s bringing in the new people to your. It’s nurturing the people that are in your audience so that they will want to work with you. It’s doing the work for you to keep that pipeline full without you having to constantly be creating content and to be worrying about creating content each and every week.

And then the final piece of advice is, Hire help. If you’re not in a place to do this, that’s totally fine. Stick to creating less content, better quality, showing up consistently, [00:13:00] but not showing up constantly. But if you are at a place where you want to make sure that you’re bringing in clients and students, and you just don’t have the capacity to do the marketing yourself.

it’s probably time to bring on some help. You can bring on a VA who can take the plan and strategy that you create and implement it. You can bring on a marketing strategist like myself who can create the plan and strategy that you can then hand off to a VA or do yourself, or you could. Work with someone that does the strategy and the copywriting, which again, I can do for you, but you wanna work with someone who has a full service author that can do both.

That will create the content and the actual strategy, and so that you can just say, okay, take my money. Implement my strategy for me, however that looks best. However that works best for you. There are so many different options out there [00:14:00] for getting help with your marketing, and you don’t have to do it alone.

And so if you wanna make sure that you can just focus on serving your people really, really well, bring in some help. But your action step for this week is to create a content plan for next month, set aside a day and create that plan. And then, then what I want you to do is to slash it in half, go through and erase half of the long form content pieces you put on that plan.

Erase half of the emails, erase half of the social media. and then use that plan to get started showing up and consistently bringing in those leads so that you’re not stuck in that feas and famine marketing cycle. Now, this week’s book recommendation is American Royalty by Tracy Lipe. I might be saying that wrong.

I think it’s geared supposed to be like a hairy meets Megan type, you know, premise where you know, American or UK print, London, prince England Prince, whatever. Clearly, I know nothing but [00:15:00] royalty meets American girl, fall in love, blah, blah, blah. But in this scenario, the girl is a rapper from America. Um, and it just, it, it, it’s so good.

It’s really real well written, but it’s also such an interesting storyline because not only are there cultural differences, there are race differences, but you’ve got. I mean, I guess this is a cultural difference really, but just this like proprietary proper prince and then an American rapper. It’s just, it’s really fun.

It’s a, it’s a interesting juxtaposition. So American Royalty by Tracy Lovee, and I will link that in the show notes for you if you wanna check it out. But until next time, my friend, I hope that you’ll go out and uncomplicate your life and biz.

Thank you so much for joining me here today, friend. If you loved this episode, it would mean the world to me if you’d leave a [00:16:00] rating and review. This is a great way to help spread the word about this podcast. Help other wonderful women like yourself find it. You can find this episode show notes as well as tons of other great resources over@amandawarfield.com.

And if you aren’t following me on Instagram yet, I’d love to connect with you over there. I’m at Mrs. Amanda Warfield. Shoot me a DM and tell me what you love most about this episode. Thanks for being here, friend. I’ll see you next time.


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