Using a Different Lens When Consuming Content

Stop trying to do it all! You do not have to be in “all of the places” to market your business effectively. And too many business owners sit paralyzed because they don’t know what to create, where to publish it, or how often.

If you’re a solopreneur or just trying to get a better handle on your content and marketing, it might be time to take a step back and focus on the most important parts of that visibility and marketing.

On this episode, I’m sharing the five (plus two!) things every business owner should think about (and publish) at a minimum. Yes, I said “should.” That doesn’t mean you have to, but I’d highly recommend it!

Tune in now!

Mentioned in This Episode Podcast

Transcript:

Abby Herman 0:09
Hey there, and welcome to episode 242 of The Content Experiment Podcast, a podcast for service driven business owners who know that content is important, but there’s also so much more to marketing and business growth. Here we talk about showing up for your audience in a way that they want to hear and in a way that sustainable for you. That might mean publishing a weekly podcast or blog. But it also means paying attention to your email list, leveraging other people’s audiences, building relationships, and getting over the limiting mindsets that often hit when we’re reaching for the next level in our business.

Abby Herman 0:44
I’m Abby Herman, fractional Marketing Officer, content strategist and podcast manager for business owners who want to make their marketing feel easier and more streamlined, so they can get back to serving their clients and making those sales. I’ll show you how or I can do it for you while you do business in a way that works for you. I can help by supporting you through building and implementing a content and marketing strategy, taking care of the podcast management for you or giving you the tools and resources to take this on yourself.

Abby Herman 1:14
This week, I am re releasing a popular episode from last year, we’re talking about minimum viable content marketing, it’s so common to want to jump on the latest bandwagon. And right now that bandwagon is threads, and to be everywhere, that’s not necessary. And frankly, it’s not practical either. So I want today’s episode to serve as a reminder of that. In the past, when I’ve re released episodes of rerecord the entire episode to make it more timely, I’m not doing that this time. And I’m just gonna let the entire episode run as is. I’m asking you though, to listen with the idea that there is a new tool out there pulling you in and wanting you to engage, as you listen, think about whether that’s a good idea or not. For me, I logged into threads grabbed my name connecting both my personal account and my business account. And aside from a few scrolls here and there, that is all I’m planning to do. For now. I see people sharing their threads posts to Instagram and Facebook all the time already. And that makes me really wonder how long the shelf life is on threads. Maybe if it sticks around a while I’ll do an episode on it down the road, we shall see.

Abby Herman 2:34
Anyway, here is a rerelease of Episode 154, about minimum viable content marketing enjoy, I don’t need to tell you that being a business owner is a lot right, you are creating the deliverables, managing the projects, balancing your books, doing all the outreach and connecting with prospective clients. And you’re also supposed to take care of the back end tech and marketing to of course, if you have team members, some of them can help take some of this off your plate. But and if your business is at the stage, where you do have team members, you have other problems to think about too, like team dynamics and personalities, payroll, and benefits and so on. I have been in this online business space since 2007. And I’ve seen countless business owners overwhelm themselves with all the things that need to be done. And let’s be honest, I’ve done it to myself to the thing that I have seen slide the most though, again, both with myself and other business owners is the marketing. It’s a lot of work. And it’s often work that you feel isn’t quote unquote worth it. Because you’re not getting the feedback or traction that you want from it. And even as someone who works in marketing, I have been there more times than I can count. So what happens if you stop doing it? That’s usually the first thing that people set aside when they’re feeling overwhelmed. Because Holy cow, I have too much to do already. I don’t need new clients right now, or it’s not working anyway. So I’m just going to market myself in a different way. Today, we’re going to talk about the fact that you don’t actually have to do at all, you don’t have to be everywhere to make your marketing effective. Whether you are hiring somebody inside your business to help you with it, or you are doing it all yourself. In fact, I don’t even want you to try to do it all. It’s too much. It’s not necessary, and it can start to feel redundant because it is.

Abby Herman 4:36
Instead we’re going to talk about what the bare minimum is when marketing your business. If you were only to do just a few things, what should you do? Essentially what’s going to give you the best bang for your buck or time when it comes to marketing your business or outsourcing that marketing. And yes, I recognize that there are things that you’re doing to market your book Since right now, that may not be working, it’s important to address that too. And I will make sure that you’re subscribed or follow this podcast, because I’ll be addressing this in a future episode. So there’s a few things that you need to do before you make any decisions about the bare minimum for your business. These are really important steps that will help give you directions so you’re not wasting your time when we get into the meat of things. So there are three things I want you to do. First, number one, know your goals and what is coming for you. Your content is meant to market your business, you need to know what you want to sell in order to actually generate some interest around it. So know what the goals are what you want to do, it could be that you’re launching something or you want to generate more sales around a particular area of your business. Maybe you’re focused on growing your email list or getting in front of a certain group of people. Knowing your goals is incredibly important before you start planning out your content and marketing strategy. Number two, before you start planning out is ask your audience. Before you can make any decisions at all about what content you should create or where to create it. You need to know who your audience is and what they actually need and want from you survey them. This goes well beyond posting those polls that you know, you’re posting in your Instagram Stories, you need to create an actual survey, asking specific questions of a really specific group of people. I talk about this more in Episode 57. We’re a share about making your content about your audience and not you. And also in Episode 134, with Marcus Sheridan, author of the book they ask you answer, and also Episode 144, where I argue the six big, big reasons of why it’s important to get audience input around your content. And you can get links to all of these episodes in the show notes. You can also go to the content experiment.com/ask And take the asker audience challenge. It’s in Evergreen mode right now. So you should be able to access it and go through the system where I actually walk you through creating your own audience survey. Alright, so number three, that you need to do before you decide what the bare minimum is for your business is know your zones of genius. Do you know what topics you can talk about for ever and ever without ever running out of things to say we’re talking big picture topics and ideas here. For a business coach, this might be pricing or mindset. For a health coach, they might be nutrition and building muscle for a social media expert sense of genius might be around the specific platform you work with, or engagement or content creation. These are your zones of genius, and you’ll want to know what yours are. So you can sort through your audience surveys. And so you can brainstorm content ideas around them. Trust me when I say that it’s much easier to develop content ideas when you have boundaries around the topics you’ll use. If you go to Episode 63, I talk about staying inside your zones of genius, and why it’s important to only talk about things that are in your expertise instead of trying to talk about everything. And in Episode 138 titled knowing your zones of genius, I talk about how to determine what yours are and what to do with that information. Okay, now that we have those foundational pieces out of the way, let’s talk more about the minimum viable content marketing that you should have for your business. Are you ready to take some notes? Don’t worry, I will review all of these at the end. So the first thing you should have is one to two pillar opt ins based on your zones of genius.

Abby Herman 9:04
Ultimately, you want to build your email list. Every business should have an email list where you collect email addresses from people who are interested in what you do and what you stand for. And yes, every single business should have an email list. I don’t care what you’ve heard elsewhere, it is so important to be able to access your audience the people who are interested in you outside of social media and outside of your traditional email. The size of your email list matters. But only as far as understanding that businesses that serve one to one clients need far fewer clients to make a profit and therefore do not need a huge list. When you serve clients in a one to many capacity, you’ll need a much bigger list because you’ll typically have a lower price to offer and need to make more sales to make a profit. So if you’re a one to one service provider or one into one offering or you have a really high ticket offering, you don’t need as many people on your list. So how do you grow your list? Well, one way is to create that opt in that I just talked about a free offer that you give away for free in exchange for an email address. If you listen to episode 150, I give you some more opt in ideas and on episode 152. I talk about how to promote that opt in which is really important, but it’s often overlooked.

Abby Herman 10:33
Okay, so minimum viable content marketing, you’ve got your pillar opt ins, the next thing that you need is a welcome sequence. What happens after someone opts into your email list if they’re just sitting there waiting for you to get around to sending weekly emails or regular nurturing emails, you need to have a welcome sequence to a welcome sequence introduces you to your new subscribers gives you an opportunity to gather some information about them by asking them questions. It gives subscribers some additional value and it can even help you to spotlight some of your introductory or low cost offers. As I was prepping for this episode, I realized that I did not have an episode about welcome sequences. Oops, I will definitely get on that. But in the meantime, you can access my one week to your welcome sequence challenge out to the content experiment.com/welcome where I walk you through how to put together your own welcome sequence for free. It’s a little outdated, but you will definitely get the idea. Okay, so you have your opt in, you have your welcome sequence. The next piece of your minimum viable content marketing strategy is your nurture emails, where you’re nurturing your subscribers with regular emails. There is a reason why people join your email list. Yes, they want your freebie they want to see value, they want that value in what you have to say. So don’t leave them hanging after they get that freebie and have gone through your welcome sequence. Staying in front of your audience with a regular nurturing email that delivers value entertainment, and links to your new content is essential. I’ve said before that everybody’s business needs an email list. But you also need to do something with that list. All right, so you’ve got your OPT in your welcome sequence, you’re nurturing your audience with emails, next piece of that minimum viable content marketing strategy is to publish content on one pillar platform. And in that content that you’re creating, send people to your email, opt in. So your pillar content platform, this could be regular weekly, or bi weekly blogs, or it could be like 1224, Cornerstone pieces that you repurpose, and that’s a topic for another episode. But it could also be a podcast or videos on a YouTube channel. The important thing is that this is pillar content. This is content that you own. You own your blog, because you’re publishing it on your own website and you’re paying for the hosting. You own your podcast content, because while it publishes on platforms that you don’t own, like Apple podcasts and Spotify and Stitcher, your host which could be Libsyn or SoundCloud or Simplecast. This is something that you are paying for your you are paying for the hosting. So you own that podcast content. Now, your YouTube channel, you don’t actually own that it’s hosted by someone else, and you get to publish content for free. However, YouTube is a search engine and its reach is huge. So I consider YouTube a pillar platform. It’s content that stays around forever. So which type of pillar content will you publish a blog, a podcast or a YouTube channel. And a side note about all the other video platforms out there, your reels, tiktoks, IG TVs, Instagram Stories, Facebook Lives, LinkedIn lives, etc. Those are not pillar content. Those are social media content. So you should have one place where you’re publishing pillar content, a blog, a podcast or a YouTube channel.

Abby Herman 14:24
Alright, so you’ve got your opt in, you have a welcome sequence, you nurture your subscribers with emails, you publish to at least one pillar platform on a regular consistent basis. Now we get to talk about social media. So you should be sharing that pillar content and other content too, for that matter, on one or two social media platforms. Whether you’re just getting started or feeling overwhelmed by the sheer number of places you can publish on social media. It’s a lot. Let me give you permission to not you do not have To be everywhere, you do not have to publish on all the social media platforms. Heck, you don’t even have to post to the most popular social media platforms. Back at the beginning of this episode I shared about how you need to talk to your audience about what they need and want from you. Well, when you’re doing that, you also should ask them where they want to consume content, find out where your audience is hanging out and publish your content there go where they are. All right, so that’s what you need to create for you and your audience. But that’s not the end of the minimum viable content marketing strategy. content isn’t just about publishing and pushing out information to people it’s about relationships, and building new audiences. Also, here are two additional things that will round out your minimum viable content marketing plan. Number one is engage with others content. When we engage with other people’s content, we become a resource for their audiences. We build connections and relationships, we support our friends, clients, audience members, and others, and we get in front of new people and so much more. Engaging in other’s content includes commenting on their posts sharing pillar content with sharing their pillar content with our own audience, whether it’s through a post or individually, sending direct messages, like video and voice messages and text to but I love the video and voice message options. sending those DMS to share takeaways from their content, we can reply to their regular nurturing emails that they send, we can reply to comments on our own content, and so much more. Make time in your week to do a few of these regularly. I know it’s hard to add one more thing to your plate. But this is so so so important. And number two, way to round out that content plan is to leverage other people’s platforms. If you’re not finding ways to connect with others and lead leverage their platforms and audiences, you’re missing big opportunities big ones. I can’t tell you how many times someone has told me they found me on someone else’s podcast and vice versa. And I’ve found loads of great connections and podcast guests, because I heard them on someone else’s podcast first, you’re not going to build a big following by only publishing your own pillar content and publishing on your social media platforms, relationships and getting in front of other people’s audiences is key. Some opportunities around leveraging other people’s platforms include being a guest on podcasts, doing a joint webinar or workshop, teaching in someone’s membership community or group coaching program being a part of a giveaway, speaking at a summit sponsoring a summit and so much more. All right, I feel like you might be listening to this thinking Minimum Viable content marketing is a lot. But I want to assure you that it might feel like it is listening to this. But I’ll bet you already have a lot of this in place. So I’m gonna do a review of everything that I talked about. Know your goals before you start planning out anything, talk to your audience, so you know what they need and want from you and where they’re hanging out. Know your zones of genius. So you can put some boundaries around the types of topics that you talk about.

Abby Herman 18:39
Once you have this in place. Have one to two primary opt ins to share and grow your list. Have a welcome sequence after people opt into those freebies, nurture your audience with regular value driven emails, have one pillar platform or you publish your content, at least one that’s a blog, a podcast or a YouTube channel, and then publish to one or two social media platforms, you do not have to be on them all. And to grow your audience and to build relationships. Make sure that you’re engaging with other people’s content and leveraging other people’s platforms in a non sleazy way. Okay, like make sure that you have established a relationship with these people. It’s possible to do this well without feeling overwhelmed or like you’re on a never ending content hamsterwheel If you’re stuck or need support, ensuring that you’re doing all of this in a way that best supports your business and your goals.

Abby Herman 19:38
Reach out let’s talk you can book a call with me at thecontentexperiment.com/contact. If you found value in what you learned here today, be sure to share it on social media. I would love it if you would take a screenshot of the episode on your phone and share it over on Instagram stories. You can tag me @thecontentexperiment, the more you share, the more we can get this podcast into the hands of more business owners just like you who need to hear the message that they are not alone. Until next time, take care.