Make Marketing Suck Less

Dr. Michelle Mazur (00:00): How much time are you spending on social media each week? And I don't mean time doomscrolling or mindlessly looking at cat photos, but time creating social media, creating the visuals, researching the hashtags, writing the captions, engaging with other people with purpose, answering your DM, sharing other people's work, responding to comments. Last year, I did a time audit and I realized I was spending about five hours per week on my social media creation. That's 20 hours per month, 240 hours per year, which is equivalent to about six weeks of work. That's one and a half months of my working time. And when I realized that, it led me to ask the question, is this even worth it? If it is, is it working? What else could I be doing with that time? And that's what we're diving in on this week's episode of the podcast. So let's do it.

Dr. Michelle Mazur (01:18): You're listening to the Rebel Uprising podcast. This podcast is dedicated to helping passionate business owners become recognized leaders who make more money and impact the world by turning their messy, complicated ideas into thriving thought leadership businesses. I'm your host, Dr. Michelle Mazur, and I'll be your no-BS guide in the art of building a business that gets noticed. Each week I share strategies, tools and insights on how to turn your complicated ideas into great messaging and solid business structures. Are you ready to create an uprising in your industry? Let's do this.

Dr. Michelle Mazur (02:00): This month we've been talking about how to know if your message is working. And you'll remember how you know if it's working is that it is leading people to work with you. It's leading to sales because your messages' main job is to persuade people to work with you by building an argument for your work. And in episode 271, we talked about how social media is not really the best place to figure out if your message actually works for that purpose because social media success is so much about the followers, the likes, the shares, the comments and the engagement that it's really hard to tell if it's leading to sales. And we also discuss the fact that sometimes you can have a huge social media following that doesn't actually translate into people wanting to do business for you. Now I'm not advocating that you throw out social media all together. And as you will recall in episode 272, which was the last episode, social media can be a part of your grow phase of your marketing strategy. That phase where you are getting new people to discover your work.

Dr. Michelle Mazur (03:26): But here's the deal. Throughout the years, social media experts have made a very compelling argument that your business needs to be on social media. So in order to market and sell, you have to have a social presence. The argument usually goes something like this. There are 1.38 billion active users on Instagram. Your people are definitely there. So all you need to do is learn how to sell on social media and boom, you'll be in the money. And that argument, that's enticing, right? It's compelling because clearly there are so many people using Instagram or other social media apps who don't know you yet. So it makes sense that the next person who wants to hire you is probably on social media. Now I believe that social media can be excellent for a lot of different kinds of businesses. However, if you're a service provider selling something that is more high value, you've got to question if social media is filled with your buyers. And that's what I want you to question with this argument.

Dr. Michelle Mazur (04:53): You might be thinking: Yeah, all of my clients are on social media, but are they on social media because they are looking for your services or are they on social media for a different purpose? So in my business, my clients are on social media, but they're there to sell their own services. They aren't necessarily looking to buy stuff. Sure, they might be looking at cat photos, dog photos, wombat photos, or maybe that's just me with the wombats. But they're not there looking for their next coach. Once again, in my life, I love looking at jewelry and cat toys on social media, on Instagram, but I'm not really there looking for a business coach or business services. That's not the place I go to when I'm in the market to buy. So here's the action I want you to take. Ask your clients what are they doing on social media. Are they looking to buy something, looking to learn something, or are they doing something else all together? Because that social media is great for your business. Argument falls apart when your people aren't there to actually buy, they're there for other reasons.

Dr. Michelle Mazur (06:24): So now that we've kind of looked at this compelling argument, it's time to ask yourself the next question. How much time are you spending on social media? And once again, this is in the actively creating content, engaging, getting your message out there. And you don't have to do an official time audit. I've done those time audits before. They can be a little tasky. But you can make an educated guess. I was gutted when I saw six weeks of my working year, which I only work 48 weeks, so six out of 48. That's almost 13% of my year was dedicated to social media. The reason this just kind of depressed me a bit is I was reading a book called What Tech Calls Thinking by Adrian Daub. And in it, he argues it is the person who makes the platform who becomes a billionaire. The person who provides the content, be it reviews on Yelp, the self-published books on Amazon, your own car and waking hours through Uber is a rube distracted by a glittering, but pointless object.

Dr. Michelle Mazur (07:40): And I'm like: Wow, social media is really setting us up to be the rubes because it is not there. Social media is not there to promote your business, my friends. Social media is there for you to create content for the platform to make more money. So we get into this cycle of constant creation to feed the algorithm and hopefully the algorithm shines on us and gives us new followers and grows our brand, but it's not there for us to build a business around. And I don't want to be working hard for Mark Zuckerberg. I want to be creating content that leads people to the work I do. The fact for me was when I looked at the hours and I looked at the division of labor between the social media companies and its users, the fact was that social media really wasn't working all that well for my business because most of my clients find me because of the 3 Word Rebellion book.

Dr. Michelle Mazur (08:47): They get recommended by a friend or a coach, or they see an ad for it on Amazon. And that leads them to buying the book and to working with me. Or they hear me on another person's podcast and start listening to my podcast. I very rarely get clients who first discovered me on social media and then ended up working with me. There was always another discovery mechanism in place. And social media wasn't even really growing my list. So what if I spend less time on it? I'm not arguing that you abandon social media all together. I'm arguing that maybe you do less, because what could you create if you cut the time you spent on social media and creating for social media in half? When your message works? When it's leading people to your business to working with you. You get to create marketing assets.

Dr. Michelle Mazur (09:56): And this should be a big huzzah and a sigh of relief because marketing assets are something you build once and refine over time, but those assets work for you in leading people to sales because rebel truth, there's this misconception that we have to be the ones stewarding our message at all times, but momentum comes when other people are the messengers of your message. And in order to do that, you need to have some marketing assets to give them, whether it's a book, a podcast, pillar blog post contents, a signature talk or webinar, a new lead magnet, a quiz. It doesn't really matter what the marketing asset is, but you get to decide what you could create. If you spent half the time on social media and instead really worked on dialing in that message and then creating assets that other people can share and promote for you.

Dr. Michelle Mazur (11:10): So don't fall into the trap of one and done. You create something once, you put it out there, and you never think about it again. Create assets that you can promote over time. Here's another little piece of rebel truth for you. All of those social media posts that you've been creating that have been putting money in Zuck's pocket all these years, they can actually be assets for your business if you repurpose them. Last summer, I took Kelly Diels' Feminist Social Media course, and it's all about creating a system. And I have a lot of content so that I can automate and repurpose and reuse my social media. Sure, I'm still going to show up and interact, but I'm cutting down on the content creation, which for me is probably where I spend the vast majority of my time.

Dr. Michelle Mazur (12:11): My challenge to you after listening to this episode is to stop treating your content, your creations as disposable. Social media has trained us to do this, trained us to post something once and then forget about it, but let's not do that. Cherish those creations. Figure out how they can do some of the heavy lifting of getting your workout into the world. Get those marketing assets in the hands of other people so that they can talk about it and help you spread your message because the bottom line is we can't do this alone. We need each other to make the impact that we most want to make in the world with our work.

Dr. Michelle Mazur (13:07): Thank you for listening all the way to the end of the show. Your support means the world to me. Did you know the Rebel Uprising podcast has a quiz that can help you pinpoint the number one way to build an audience of super fans while staying true to your unique personality? We do. And it's called What's Your Rebel Roadmap to Exponential Impact and Influence? And you can take it at therebelquiz.com. If you're loving the podcast, do us a favor, rate and leave us a quick five-star review wherever you listen to your podcasts. It helps more people like you find the show. Until next week, remember: your ideas matter. And now get back out there and cause an uprising in your industry. You got this.