Episode 224: The Most Important Thing to Remember About Your Marketing

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The Most Important Thing to Remember About Your Marketing

If there is nothing else that you ever learn from me, the most important thing that I hope I can share with you is that your content is part of your business, but it’s not your entire business.

Not sure what I mean? I’ll explain more in just a moment.

Links and Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

Want even more help simplifying your marketing and business? Love the Chasing Simple podcast? If so, I want to invite you to join me on Monday evenings at 4:00 pm Pacific time/7:00 pm Eastern time for my weekly YouTube Lives. Each week I’ll have a topic for the week, but after my short 5-minute teaching, you’ll have the chance to ask me questions about your marketing and get an answer from me in real time. Until now, the only way to get this kind of access to me was through my membership, courses, or 1:1 services. But now, all you have to do is show up live with me on Mondays! You can find my channel by searching for my handle on YT – @mrsamandawarfield or by heading to amandawarfield.com/youtube/ – I hope to see you Monday!
Gaffin Creative: https://gaffincreative.com/podcast-production-management/
This week’s action step: Start doing an informal tracking of your time and look at how much time you’re spending on marketing compared to other aspects of running your business.
This week’s book recommendation: Just for the Summer by Abby Jimenez
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

If there is nothing else that you ever learned from me, the most important thing that I hope I can share with you is that your content is part of your business. But it’s not your entire business. Not sure what I mean? I’ll explain more in just a moment. You’re listening to episode 224 of the Chasing Simple podcast, and I’m your host, Amanda Warfield.

This episode was brought to you by Gaffin Creative.

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? Are launches 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 Gamecock Sports, 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 simply an obligation. They know they need it, but they don’t enjoy how easily it can suck up their time when what they really want to 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 I’ll bring 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 choice is, and meet me here each week for love, support, practical tips, and advice on uncomplicating your marketing and business. Let’s do this entrepreneurship thing together, shall we? Hey, sweet friend. It seems like I attract a lot of introverts with my marketing and if that’s you and you have been throwing around the idea of adding long form content to your marketing plan, you might have been thinking about a podcast.

Podcasts are great for introverts and just for those of us who want the easiest possible route for creating long form content because you can do it In your pajamas, you can do it no matter what you look like, and alls you need is, honestly you don’t even really need a microphone. I suggest you get one, but you just need something you can record on.

And, if you’re gonna go that route, you need a great editor. Now, whether you are thinking of starting a podcast or you’ve already started a podcast and you know how overwhelming the production side of having a podcast is, I want to introduce you to Gaffin Creative. Gaffin Creative is a podcast production company dedicated to empowering creatives like you and like me to use your voice and grow your brand.

They’re not just another production company, though. They’re your partners in creativity, community, and success. I have been working with Haley Gaffin and her team for, gosh, years now, and it is the best thing I spend money on in my business every single month. I love that I can hand off what I’ve recorded, and I know it’s in good hands.

I know that I can fully trust them With all of the audio aspects, they are so aware of how to improve your audio, but then they also do things like, hey, if you make this tweak while you’re recording, it’ll sound even better. And they’re just, they’re really dedicated to quality. And I knew that, but I really discovered it when I had them edit the audio book for my book, Chasing Simple Marketing.

They were just so dedicated to the quality, and they were so committed to that project. Honestly, more than I was. And it was just such a reminder of how amazing they are to work with. I know that when I hand over my content each month, that it’s going to be wonderful, and that you, as a listener, are going to get a great experience because of them.

So, whether you’re launching your first episode, or you need some ongoing support, they are on a mission to turn dreamers into doers. The founder of Gaffin Creative, Haley, actually, she joined us on episode 93, where we talk about cheering other women on in life and business and episode 202 to discuss visibility and podcast guesting.

So if you want to learn more about Haley, those are two great episodes to go check out. And if you’re ready to take your podcast to the next level, visit gaffincreative. com and discover how they can help you bring your podcast to life. What is your Largest roadblock when it comes to content marketing. I know that for me for a long time, it was the fact that I could not get ahead.

I would be sitting there on a Sunday night as I was. You know, working part time, trying to get this business up and running, this was my side hustle. And I was working part time, but I was working multiple jobs so that it meshed into a full time job. Or full time hours, I should say. But my main job at the time was teaching preschool.

And so I would sit there on Sunday nights, Because my blog post was supposed to go up the next day, and I would be so frustrated because I had this blog post to write, it wasn’t finished yet, and I didn’t want to do it. It was late, I wanted to go to bed, I knew that, you know, soon enough my alarm was going to go off and I was going to need to Get up and go teach a whole bunch of four year olds how to read and get along and sit for an age appropriate amount of time on our carpet for circle time.

And here I was trying to figure out what in the world to say in this blog that I had come up with a topic with but not written anything else for. And I’d finish the blog, it would not be great, let’s be real, because it’s the middle of the night. And then I’d go to bed and I’d be like, okay. No more. This week I’m gonna get ahead.

I’m not gonna fall behind on my content again. And I would promise myself that on Sunday night. And then you go for the week, and all of a sudden I’d get to Sunday night again, and I’d be in the same position. And I’d be like, what in the world is going on? I swore this was gonna be the week that I did not do this anymore, that I was gonna actually get my ish together and put my content up on time so that All I was doing, it felt like, and I didn’t want this to be the case anymore, all I was doing, it felt like, was creating content.

That’s it. That’s what my whole business was at that point, was just creating piece of content after piece of content after piece of content. But I knew that this couldn’t be it, right? Because all I was doing was creating content, which means I wasn’t seeing growth, I wasn’t seeing sales, I wasn’t seeing clients, I wasn’t seeing growth, right?

Growth in my email newsletter or my Instagram followers or anything like that. And mind you, when I started my business, I knew I wanted it to be an educational based business because teacher. And so when I started my business, I knew that I needed to be creating content in order to educate. And so I didn’t necessarily have, I wasn’t trying to get clients at the time.

I really wanted to focus on passive. We all know things aren’t really passive at this point, right? But I wanted to create more educational based things like workbooks and courses and things like that. That’s what I wanted to do. But all I was doing was creating content and I wasn’t doing anything to grow my business and it took me a really long time to figure that out.

Now the other side of that, if you’re someone who, you know, either started to start freelance, decided to start freelancing because you had skills or you Knew you want to start a business, but you saw right away, like one to one is the most profitable way forward, which it is right, because you can charge more for one on one clients.

If you want to get profitable quick, one on one services is a way to do it. If that is where you landed when you started your business, maybe what ended up happening for you is you were, you were doing all you could to serve clients, right? But then outside of serving clients, you were focusing on content.

And so no matter which way it fell, whether you were starting with clients or not, if you’re spending all of your outside client time or all of your time period just creating content, that’s a big problem. Because here’s the thing, content is part of your business. But it’s not your business and if all you’re doing outside of working with clients is creating content, you’re not doing anything to grow your business.

You have to make sure that you’ve got that nurture side of your content going out there, right? Because when we show up consistently, We are building the know, like and trust factor with our audience. And so that content, it’s so important. Don’t mishear me there. It is really important to be showing up with our content, but we also have to make sure that we are working on growth marketing as well, that we’ve got some sort of growth marketing tactic.

And maybe that means that you are writing guest blog posts for other websites. Maybe that means that you’re really focused on your SEO. Maybe that means that you are focused on getting on podcasts. Maybe that means you’re focused on ads, whatever it is that you’re doing to get in front of a new audience, that’s your growth strategy.

Here’s the thing. A lot of times. When it comes down to our marketing, we either, A, we don’t have time for it, period, or we think we don’t have time for it, period, and it falls to the bottom of our to do list, right? We’ve got clients to worry about, an inbox to check, all those things, and just, who has time for marketing?

That’s one way that that often ends up. But, the other thing that can end up happening is that, When it comes to marketing, we fall back on that nurture marketing because it is free or really low cost, right? It is free to start a YouTube channel and to just start going live on YouTube or putting up YouTube videos.

It’s free to, it’s not fully free to start a blog because in order to start a blog you typically need a website and most places you’ve got at least pay for hosting. But there are some, there are some website hosts that you can do for free, right? So, very low cost to start a blog, very low cost to start a podcast.

I think I pay 17 a month or something for my podcast hosting, and that’s it. Um, and I, I think I have to step up also, I don’t even have the lowest form. And so you can do all of your content marketing for really, really low cost, right? Social media, you can just start up an account and start posting away.

So we love content marketing because it’s free to low cost. I love content marketing because it’s free to low cost. It’s a great way to market your business. But it isn’t going to do a whole lot for you in terms of growth if you’re not actively working on that growth. Right? So YouTube is great for seeing growth, but also nurturing, but you have to actively be working on that SEO.

It’s not going to just happen accidentally. Right. We tend to fall back on that content marketing, right? The inertia marketing, because it’s free, it’s low cost. It is quote unquote easier because of those reasons, because we know, well, it builds my portfolio. It builds my space. It builds all of my things.

It’s free. I don’t have to put a lot of money into it, right? However, it is so important that we have that growth marketing as well, but when we fall back and our go to is always the nurture marketing, the content marketing, when that’s always our go to, we tend to not have time for the growth marketing.

As it is, it’s hard to find time for content marketing, right? Let alone finding time for growth marketing. How are we supposed to do that? The key to doing that is to making sure that you have a strategy and a plan in place. And content strategy and content plan are two very different things, and I can link to a video I’ve already done about that in the comments in the description later, but those are two different things.

But you’ve got to have that strategy or plan to make creating content so much simpler. I’ve got my content planner and within it I’ve got my plan for the whole month written out way ahead of time. It’s, what, it’s June 17th as I’m recording this and this is my July 2024 plan. I already have that written out so I can batch my content.

If you aren’t someone who batches your content you can at least have that plan ready to go and then, okay, well, as You find time in your schedule to work on marketing, you know, okay, this has got to be done next. Here’s the next email that goes out. Here’s the next Instagram post. You’ve already got it written down, having that plan in place.

How many of you have not created a plan for June content yet? And the reason I ask that is because often what we end up doing is we go, I want to create a plan for the month, but I don’t have time to do that right now. Let me just figure out this week and today and here and right now. And then what ends up happening is our content gets scattered all over the place because we end up talking about this topic on this week and then this topic on the next one and this topic on the next one and there’s nothing cohesive.

Now your action step this week is to start doing an informal tracking of your time and look at how much time you’re spending on marketing compared to other aspects of running your business. I think that what you find is going to surprise you. Your book recommendation for this week is Just for the Summer by Abby Jiménez.

If you have heard me talk about any of her books before, you know that I am, they are always five stars, they are so great. And this one is so fun because it starts off with this guy who, every single time he dates a woman, the very next guy she dates is the guy she ends up with forever. It’s a Reddit thread, which I, I don’t know, sometimes the modern elements make me so, it’s so fun.

Um, and this other girl finds it and she has the same problem and they start connecting and they have this whole idea to fake date and yada yada yada. Anyways, it’s so fun. Highly recommend Just for the Summer by Abbey Jimenez. As always, we will link to that in the show notes if you want to check it out.

And until next time, my friend, I hope that you 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 at 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 podcast. And ensure that it sticks around for many more episodes to come. I’ll see you next time. Now go out and uncomplicate your marketing and business.