🌈 How to create a fun, feel-good marketing plan to grow your business

[0:03] Off the Grid is a podcast for small business owners who want to leave social media without losing all their clients. I'm Amelia Hruby, a writer, speaker and founder of Softer Sounds podcast studio. On this show I share stories strategies and experiments for growing your business with radical generosity and energetic sovereignty.

Download your free leaving social media toolkit at softersounds.studio/byeig and join us as we do it all off the grid.

[0:32] Music.

[0:34] Hello and welcome to episode 4 of Off the Grid, a podcast about leaving social media without losing all your clients or customers. I'm your host Amelia Hruby. I am a writer, a speaker and the founder of Softer Sounds podcast studio, a feminist podcast studio for entrepreneurs and creatives.

And I am so excited that you tuned back in or tuned in for the first time to our fourth episode of this podcast!

I started Off The Grid because I have my own journey of leaving social media and launching a business without any social media presence, or at least not actively using social media and I guess after millions — that's an exaggeration — after dozens, quite literally, of people asked me how I did it, I wanted to create a really rich resource to help other people follow my path along the way if they wanted to.

So that's this podcast! Off the Grid is a podcast that's going to help you leave social media behind and grow a thriving feel good, business in the process.

[1:42] If you're just tuning in, we've already had some great episodes. In our first season, I kicked us off in episode one by breaking down four common myths about social media marketing for small business. I talked a lot about how Instagram purposely makes us feel like shit, how other social media platforms don't do much better, and I wrote one huge permission slip for us to leave any social media platform that feels bad or that we don't want to be on. So that's episode 1.

In episode 2 I talked about my journey leaving social media — how I got onto the platform, how I got off of the platform. And I shared my five-step plan for leaving any social media platform. So if you want to know how to exit, episode 2 is for you.

In episode 3 — our last episode — we started looking at what comes next once you leave social media. How are you going to market your business? Because I am not over here recommending that you leave social media and then just don't do any marketing.

[2:44] That will not give you a thriving feel-good business. I want to be very clear when you leave a social media platform or all social media platforms you need to create or come up with or start doing new marketing and sales efforts, so that you can continue to grow your business.

So in episode 3 we talked about my list of 100 ways to share your work and life that are not social media and got in a really beautiful expansive — I called it our imagination station — space thinking about all of the different sorts of things that we could do to build and nurture community in and around our businesses. So that's episode 3.

[3:25] And now here in episode 4, we are going to talk about how to create a fun, feel-good marketing plan to grow your business and replace anything you might be doing on social media, or if you haven't been on social media we're just going to talk about what you can start doing now.

I launched Softer Sounds without a social media presence after shutting down a business with my previous social media presence, so you know I've kind of done both. I've shut it down and started fresh without social media. Wherever you are, today's episode is going to start to take that expansive vision we talked about last time, and turn it into an actionable step-by-step quarterly plan to build your marketing strategy over time.

Are you excited? I'm excited. Here we go! We are going to dive into episode 4.

[4:17] So if you've been tuned into our episodes so far you’re probably following me along this journey of making the decision to leave social media, dreaming up how you're going to share your work off social media, and now your question is like — Amelia, how do I do this?

That's what today's episode is going to tell you. So here is how we create that fun, feel-good marketing plan that's going to grow your business off social media.

The first thing that you do… you can start right now whether you left social media or not is create a menu of Creative Marketing ideas, and add to it every time you see a cool ad or think of something new that you want to do to spread the word about your business.

This is one of the three tools in are Leaving Social Media Toolkit that I created to go alongside this podcast. So in that toolkit you’ve got your five step plan from episode 2, you've got your list of 100 ways from episode 3, and then you've got this beautiful — if I may say so myself —Creative Marketing database.

[5:15] Now what you do in that database is you write down all of the things that you can think of doing to market or share your business.

Start by thinking about okay what did I like that Amelia share din the last episode. Oh yeah I wanted to make a playlist. Oh yeah I wanted to send a care package. Oh yeah I really like postcards. Oh I love stickers I'm going to make stickers.

Every time you think of an idea or you see someone else to something really cool and you're like — oh I love that off the grid is on YouTube and it's a podcast, I want to do that. I want to start a YouTube channel. I want a vlog I want to whatever. Every time that you have an idea or see something cool that someone else is doing you put it in the database, your Creative Marketing database.

So really at this point if you do not have the Leaving Social Media Toolkit yet I highly highly suggest you head to softersounds.studio/byeig

[6:20] Drop your email at that link and I will send you the Leaving Social Media Toolkit, which is a free Notion dashboard that provides all of the tools we've been talking about so far.

And this Creative Marketing ideas dashboard is really like in my mind kind of the hallmark tool off the Toolkit. Everything else is going to share good ideas and reflection questions but this is like the thing you can use in your business all the time.

[6:46] And it's free! So like I feel like I'm pitching it or selling it to you but like literally it's free .99, y'all. So you can just go download it and in this Creative Marketing ideas database you're just going to track ideas.

And I've set it up so you can do that in a lot of different ways. You can put an idea in there. You can kind of notice what type it is. Is it an ad? Is it an affiliate thing? Is it a referral? Is it a discount? Whatever.

You can put a link if it's something you saw someone else do that you really liked. And then I've got lots of ways for you to kind of track how it falls into your energetic capacity or your timeline for your business. I've got a little column for how much energy is required based on one two or three coffee cups. I've got a column where you can put what type of goal is attached to what quarter you want to try it.

This database is really just a great place to start building this menu of Creative Marketing ideas and that menu is the foundation of how to create your fun, feel-good marketing plan to grow your business.

I really probably should shorten the tagline for that, but it's also important, right? We're here to learn how to create a fun, feel-good marketing plan to grow your business off social media.

And the foundation of that is going to be this menu of fun, feel-good marketing ideas.

[8:06] Now if you are coming out of a place of burnout or exhaustion or like you are so sick of social media that you feel like you have no new ideas — that's okay.

You might need a break. Creating this menu, filling out this database it's meant to take time. So I want you to think of it almost like an artistic practice. I’m not here to say that marketing is art but it can be, right? Like we can have fun doing this.

So my advice — if you look at that database and you feel like I don't know where to start and I'm exhausted even thinking about trying. I'd say start with the list of 100 Ways. Pick 10, put them in there, fill it out with your goals and with your energy required and all of that.

And go from there.

And then just start noticing what other people are doing. Or ask them. Do you have a friend where you’re like you do really cool stuff on the internet tell me about how you share your work. Just ask!

Or ask me. Actually you don't need to ask me because you have this whole podcast of stuff that I'm doing, and I'm going to share in a few weeks a step-by-step breakdown of all the ways that I do the things at softer sounds for our how I create our fun, feel-good marketing plan and what's on it. But you know ask people around you.

Get the support that you need and rest and have that time to get excited about spreading the word and sharing your work again. I want to be honest, like that's a part of this — acknowledging that we need to respect our energetic capacities.

[9:31] So, the first thing to do in creating your fun, feel-good marketing plan to grow your business off social media is to build this database, this menu for yourself.

Then what comes next?

Every quarter I would suggest you choose 2-4 marketing ideas to try out.

Go through the menu — again like I said for my 100 Ways list, this is not a to-do list. Your menu is not a to-do list, at least not a pressing one because you're not doing it all at once.

But every quarter at the start of the quarter, choose two to four things on that list that you're going to do that quarter.

And then make an implementation plan for how they're going to happen.

So say I pick make a playlist, great. What am I going to use to make that playlist? I’ve got to find a service that I'm going to use for it. I have to figure out how I'm going to share it with people. And then I have to share it.

So I can make that plan and I say okay I'm going to do this in a quarter and a quarter is 3 months long. So I'm going to find my service in the first month. I'm going to make the playlist with all the songs in the second month. I'm going to share it in the third month.

Easy breezy, there is one Creative Marketing experiment that you're doing!

And I want to emphasize the word experiment there. We are just trying new things.

[10:52] I am not here to tell you that any one thing is the Magic Bullet that's going to grow your business really fast and be the one thing you do forever.

You can pay a lot of people a lot of money to to give you Magic Bullets but in my experience they rarely work.

I always want to empower people to take the time to find what feels fun and good to them and what works well for their business and their ideal clients or customers.

[11:18] So experiments. We are having fun. We are doing cool things.

So I just used the example of a playlist. That could be one marketing idea. Maybe another thing you want to do is create a commercial for your top three products, or you want to partner with a friend of yours to do like a bundle of things from your shop and have them have an affiliate code and try to set it sell it to their audience. That could be great.

Pick two to three things and make a plan for how you'll do them that quarter.

Some things are going to be a lot of work, right? Like if my thing is I'm going to set up SEO on my website that might be the one thing I do that quarter. SEO is a long-term game, so I might want to pair that with something that's like feels more like a quick, win for sales. So I say maybe in Q1 of the next year I am going to set up SEO on my website, and I'm going to have a huge clearance sale to try to clear out back stock and bring in some money in the meantime. That's great.

Pick your things and make a plan for your experiments then follow your plan over that quarter. And at the end of the quarter assess how your experiments went.

This is basically the scientific method, y'all. Did you have the results that you wanted? Did your hypothesis prove true? Did it work? Did it not?

[12:39] Assess your experiment and adjust. You may decide that you want to keep doing something or you may say that is not for me, never again.

That's how I feel every time I'm on Twitter. Like this is not for me. Granted this is a podcast about leaving social media but when I was doing marketing experiments and I was still on social media, Twitter was always just not for more, like it works great for other people but it does not work for me.

So that's the whole plan. I recognize this is not revolutionary. I've just told you to make a list of things you want to do, pick a couple each quarter, do them, reflect, and start over.

[13:14] Again I'm not here to give you a Magic Bullet.

What makes it a fun and feel good marketing plan is that you create a menu and choose things that are fun and feel good to you.

Or you find ways to make things that seem challenging or not fun feel fun and good to you, right?

I used the example of SEO. Most of us probably do not relish the idea of doing SEO. But there are ways to make that fun and feel good.

You could do it with a buddy. You set up like a coffee date once a week and you do it together. You could take a class with someone you really admire and you're like oh my gosh I’ve always wanted to work with them and taking this class that will make it more fun for me. You could build a playlist and like that's your SEO playlist. Or like have a treat that you get yourself.

There are ways you can make things feel good, even if they're not the most fun things that you're doing in your business.

Okay. That's how to create a fun feel good marketing plan to grow your business! But I do have some advice for what to do before and after the experiment, after this break.

[14:13] Hi Off the Grid listeners.Amelia here interrupting our conversation today because I want to share with you one of my favorite marketing tools.

When I left Instagram I invited all of my followers to subscribe to my mailing list in order to keep in touch with me, and I promised to send them monthly-ish notes on a lot of the themes I used to talk about on social media.

I've used many email service providers in my day but my favorite of all of them is Flodesk.

Flodesk is a gorgeous, easy-to-use email service provider that helps you create beautiful, thoughtful emails. And even better it's really set up to help you create easy to use landing pages so people can join your list, and workflows so you can automate sending messages to folks who sign up through different pages.

Flodesk is how I run all of the welcome sequences and lead magnets at Softer Sounds. It's also how I run the Leaving Social Media Toolkit that you might have downloaded after listening to this podcast. I'm surely not sending those emails out myself manually Flodesk is doing all of that auto-magically.

If you'd like to give Flodesk a try, please use my affiliate link below in the show notes. You'll get a discount, I'll get a kickback, and we will all send more beautiful emails together.

Again check out the affiliate link in the show notes. For now we're going to get back to this episode of Off the Grid.

[Music]

[15:45] Let's talk about three questions to ask before you start each marketing experiment.

So if you see the Creative Marketing ideas dashboard you might have noticed that in the goal column I've given you three different options for goals. These are the things that I am thinking about every time I do Creative Marketing experiments.

So before I implement any marketing or sales strategy I'm asking myself —Is this thing growing my audience, nurturing my community or selling my offerings?

I'll say that again — is this marketing strategy growing my audience, nurturing my community or selling my offerings?

[16:27] Let me break each one of those down.

So is it growing my audience — what does that mean?

Is it reaching new people?

Is it bringing more people in to the community of folks who are paying attention to what I'm doing in my business?

Is it growing my audience?

The second question — is it nurturing my community?

I think of that as keeping in touch. Once people are in I need to keep nurturing them. I need to keep up with them and tell them what we're doing. I need to let them feel close and connected to the business so that they are in the loop.

Is it nurturing my community? Am I keeping people in the loop?

And third — is this marketing strategy selling my offerings or products?

[17:12] I run a service-based business so I normally use this language of offerings or services, but it's the same with products.

Is this marketing strategy selling my products AKA is it closing the deal?

Ideally every quarter you would be doing at least one thing that is doing each of these. So you’d be doing one thing that's growing your audience, one thing that's nurturing your community, and one thing that selling your offerings.

By thing, I mean one marketing strategy or a marketing experiment that is growing your audience, one marketing experiment that's nurturing your community, and one marketing experiment that selling your offerings.

Let me try to give an example of each one and try to break that down. I'll use Softer Sounds as an example. I'll unpack this more in a future episode but we can go through it really fast here.

In any given quarter at Softer Sounds we are growing our audience through Pinterest marketing. Making new pins, pushing our lead magnets, you know our free resources I'm doing that to grow our audience.

This podcast is also growing our audience, right? The Off The Grid podcast is a marketing strategy that's growing our audience.

For nurturing our community, it’s the emails that I send out. My email list, my regular newsletter that's a marketing strategy that's nurturing the Softer Sounds community.

To some degree this podcast is also nurturing the community. Things can do both. I’m not trying to say it can only do one thing.

[18:33] Now selling our offerings. One thing I do to sell our offerings is I advertise them in paid newsletters, or I will send a series of emails just pitching a new course that we have.

In my normal newsletter I might mention some things for sale, but elsewhere I might have it whole sales sequence selling our offerings

For instance you know when growing our audience with those lead magnets that I'm sharing on Pinterest, after the lead magnet there's a whole nurture sequence that nurtures the community, and then sells them something.

So that is one extended marketing strategy that hits all three of these categories.

It can take some time to figure out, but I want to be clear that it's not important that you get it “right”. I'm not here to be like oh well that's actually nurturing your community not growing your audience. That's not the important thing.

The important thing is that as you're planning your marketing experiments for the quarter or the year you are reaching new people, keeping in touch with the people you talk to, and closing the deal and making some sales, selling some products.

Sometimes not all the time, right? Nobody likes an email list where they to sell to you all the time. That's exhausting. People unsubscribe.

The same way nobody likes an email list that like treats you like you're brand-new every time. If I've been on somebody's email list for over a year I don't need them to like tell me who they are at the start of every email.

[19:55] So we want to make sure that the way we talk to people also recognizes — are they new? are they getting to know us? are they buying from us right now?

[20:05] Now I want to be clear that I did not invent these three questions. This is a pretty common way to think about different marketing strategies. I've learned it from Michelle Pelizzon at Holisticism and Tara McMullen at What Works and different places so I'm not here saying that I invented this. I'm just saying it's a really helpful way to think about the different marketing strategies that you might do.

And it's also just helpful to know like sometimes we're doing a ton of marketing and wondering why is no one buying anything…

And then you look at these three questions and you're like — oh because I'm just growing my audience I'm not actually selling anything to them.

I'm not doing that thing that closes the deal not telling them about the product or offering a discount code or having a sale that brings them in and makes them close.

So as you look at your different marketing strategies, I encourage you to use these three questions before you start the experiments, so that when you end the experiment you can say — Did I grow my audience? Did I nurture my community? Did I sell some things?

And my final point there — I know I just keep adding to this — but it can also really helpful because then you can have metrics aligned with that.

If a marketing strategy was meant to grow your audience, look at how many followers you had or how many views you got on this pin. Like how many views does it have between the start of the quarter and the end of the quarter?

If the goal is to nurture your community — how many replies did you get to your emails and that quarter? Maybe you want more,

If the goal is selling your offerings, you can look at your sales numbers and see if they reflect any additional effort that you put into marketing.

[21:35] So those are your three questions to ask before any marketing experiment to help you set goals for the experiments that you do. We're not experimenting to no end here, right? Like it's your hypothesis. You have your goal — like this will help me grow my audience and at the end did it help you grow your audience? Again scientific method. I truly didn't think I'd be talking about that on this podcast but here I am.

[22:00] Our last point for this episode is to talk about what do you do after the experiments. I had three questions for you to ask before the experiment. I've also got three questions for you asked after the experiment.

So after implementing any marketing or sales strategy, after doing an experiment I ask myself — was it successful? was it easy? and was it aligned with a core value?

[22:22] I picked these questions because they are aligned with my core values for my business. They may not resonate with you and I would encourage you to pick three questions of your own. The important thing is that you have questions to reflect with every time.

So our first question — was it successful? To me that's just asking, did it get the business closer to its goals?

That goes back to those before questions. Like did it grow the audience, or nurture the community, or sell something? I'm just measuring if it did the thing I set out to do.

Success is a very loaded word, and I know that. So I want to be clear that you should be clear what it means to you when you ask that question.

But for me it just means — did the thing accomplish the goal? And the goal is one of those three questions I asked before the experiment — growth, nurturing, selling. That's all I mean by success in this instance.

[23:17] My second question — was that experiment easy?

Now I believe in doing hard things. So I'm not saying everything has to be easy. I have spent many months working on SEO for my website. I have done hard things for marketing.

But what I'm really trying to get at with that question is — how much time and energy did it take and did that feel like aligned with how much time and energy I or the business had that quarter and the results that we got?

Sometimes you have to put in a ton of work up front and then you get results for a really long time.

Sometimes something requires no effort at all and it does great or it like does okay but that's fine because it doesn't require a lot of work.

So with the second question — was it easy? I'm just doing an energetic check-in like how much energy and time did this take the business or me, if I was doing it?

[24:05] And the third question was — is it aligned with a core value?

Sometimes I do things in my business because it really exemplifies one of our core values.

There are many offerings at Softer Sounds that maybe aren't super successful and don't feel very easy but I do them because they fit our mission of making audio accessible.

It is so important to me that Softer Sounds be a place that people can go to learn about podcasting for free.

And if that's you, if you want to learn about podcasting for free just head to the free resources part of our website. There are blog posts and checklists and workshops all for free.

Some of that stuff was really easy to make and it was a really successful. Some of it was not. But to me it was always a success because it served our mission.

So those three questions asked after each experiment —

Was it successful? Was it easy? Was it aligned with a core value?

In other terms — Did it get you closer to your goals? How much time and energy did it take? Does it serve your business’ mission?

[25:12] And that's it! We haven't even hit half an hour yet and now you know how to create a fun, feel-good marketing plan to grow your business.

I would like to cheer right now!

And then I want you to create a menu of marketing ideas that is full of things you want to do.

Work to your strengths. Work to your pleasure. Work to your joy.

[25:45] One of the core reasons that I left social media is because it didn't feel good anymore. And I refuse to spend so much of my time doing things that don't feel good.

It doesn't mean that I don't do hard things. It doesn't mean that I'm not showing up to be accountable. But it does mean that when I can make a choice to leave something that is not aligning with my values and makes me feel like crap — I leave.

[26:07] And now I do all sorts of marketing things for my business that align with my values because they're fun, because they feel good, because they help me talk to people, because they're easy, because you know on and on and on.

And that's what I want for you. That is always what I want for you.

[26:25] So head to softersounds.studio/byeig and download your free Leaving Social Media Toolkit.

Get that Creative Marketing ideas dashboard.

Once you've done that, send this episode to a friend who you feel like could use all of this goodness as well.

And y'all that's it for today.

I will be back next week with more resources to help you create the thriving feel good business of your dreams off of social media.

That's what we’re all trying to do here isn't it? Have a wonderful rest of your week. I'll see you Off the Grid. Bye for now.

[27:05] Music.

Thanks for listening to Off the Grid. Find links and resources in the show notes and don't forget to grab your free leaving social media toolkit at softersounds.studio/byeig. That’s softer sounds dot studio / b y e IG.

This podcast is a Softer Sounds production. Our music is by purple planet and our logo is by n'Atelier studio. If you'd like to make a podcast of your own, we'd love to help.

Learn more about our services at softersounds.studio. Until next time we'll see you off the grid.