Madeleine: Hi, Lindsay. I am so excited to have you on The Succeeding Small Podcast. I have known you for several years. You are such an authority in the social media strategy space, and I could not wait. I’ve been planning this episode for years.
So, I’m thrilled to have you on to talk about social media for our audience—service-based businesses—because social media is hard, and it’s time-consuming. We pour so much energy into it, so to actually learn from you, a strategist, about tying those marketing efforts to the desired outcomes we’d love to achieve with social media is just such a gift.
Thank you for being here today.
Lindsey: Thank you for having me! I’m so excited to be here, and you know I love talking strategy. It’s a huge passion of mine, and I’m very excited to help connect the dots. We don’t talk enough about strategy, right? We just discuss social media and how overwhelming it can be to show up.
But the strategy is really the why behind it all, right? And how we’re going to show up based on that why.
Madeleine: Yes, absolutely! That’s one of the many reasons I love you—your pure passion for this space brings such a positive attitude to what can feel burdensome for service-based business owners when it comes to social media. I’m really excited to dive into it.
We were planning this episode together and discussing what we really wanted to bring to the table regarding what we see service-based businesses doing on social media. We know that social media is free, accessible, and a great marketing tool, so we use it. We go and post things like discounts on our services or stock photos saying, “Call us now” or “Contact us for a quote,” those sorts of things. We’ll post when we’re closed or when something has happened. So it’s very much that type of content that we end up producing as service providers.
We really wanted to discuss what that strategy looks like in terms of content creation and content planning. How do we actually put forth a solid strategy that connects the why you mentioned to ensure our efforts drive impact?
Lindsey: Yeah, so, first things first, I would love to dive straight into content strategy. I promise you, the majority of this episode will focus on content strategy. But I’d be remiss if we didn’t talk about the foundational pieces that lead us to discussing content strategy.
So, off the top, we’ll talk about SMART goals really quickly. Setting SMART goals for your social media and understanding the outcomes you’d like to see from your social media efforts is crucial. When we talk about tracking and measuring those efforts at the end of the strategy, we want to know what to track and measure.
Inside those SMART goals, if you’ve never heard the acronym before, it stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. We’re specifically looking at the measurable, obviously, to know what it is that we’re measuring. But we also want to look at the attainable and the time-bound as well. The time-bound aspect helps us know how often we’re checking in with these goals, and the attainable aspect lets us know the action steps we need to take to get there, which is really important as well.
Having all those things in place first is essential, which leads us to the next step of understanding your ideal client personas and building them out for your specific services or products. A lot of times, I see people with general personas in place. By understanding the pain points your ideal client has for each of your services, alleviating those pain points is the next level in understanding your ideal client on a deeper level, right? And understanding how to specifically help them.
From there, we go into creating your strategy. My motto is that we pick a primary platform to create for and then choose a secondary platform where we repurpose that content. Any more than two platforms, and we’re kind of tripping into content creator territory.
We need to talk about switching the job title a little bit, right? It’s true—we’re showing up on so many platforms and creating for so many platforms that it’s exhausting. You’re not a content creator; you’re a small business owner, and that can get misconstrued a lot.
Along with identifying those primary and secondary platforms, I always like to remind people to consider those other marketing efforts as well. Those other marketing efforts really help us understand how we’re tying social media into our bigger overall marketing plan.
So, are you blogging? Are you emailing? Are you doing in-person networking? What are those other efforts, and how can we use your social media content to support them? We’ll get to that in the plan; I promise. But that’s something to think about, right? How can I tie it all together?
Lindsey: Because so often, we see our marketing pieces as separate instead of one big holistic plan. Finally, before we get into content, we need to talk about auditing and optimizing the profiles. If you have something in place already, we should go through it and ensure that what you’re doing is working.
Do your logos match across platforms? Are the SEO capabilities of your platforms being utilized, whether that’s your name, line, bio, or anything like that? Those are all really important pieces to have in place first.
When we were first planning this episode, I was very, very conscious that we needed to have a quick conversation about those foundational elements. If we dive into the content strategy without those pieces in place, it becomes like climbing Mount Everest instead of just a little hill we can easily get over.
The content strategy becomes much easier once we have those things in place. I just needed to caveat that before we really dive into what I like to call the messy middle of content creation, which is really just getting in there and figuring out how to create content that keeps us consistent on these platforms.
That’s where we start to see the best engagement rates, ROI, conversions—whatever you’re looking for inside of your subscribers, followers, or whatever your goal is, your SMART goal, right? We want to make sure that we’re working toward that.
Lindsey: So, do you want me to just dive into content strategy?
Like, how should we approach this?
Madeleine: Yes! Well, no, I’m so excited. I’m so glad you covered those foundational pieces because they are so important. And honestly, there could be an episode dedicated to each one of those foundations. They’re so necessary before we dive into content. I would love to.
So, I want you to spend a little bit more time on the concept of your ideal client personas because I think that dramatically increases the type of content you create and then the message you share. So, I would love to be able to dive more into that and get your secret sauce for identifying those.
And then I want to kind of add to that conversation because we do this a lot as marketers: identify who we are talking to, and it changes very drastically. One of my very painful lessons I learned as a beginning marketer was when I just started my company and began doing social media content for my clients (a service we no longer offer). But as I was doing that, I was in the mindset that social media equals great conversations, and teenage me thought that was all I knew.
So, I ended up working for an apothecary business that does a lot of herbal remedies, and the owner is a very sophisticated woman. I presented this content plan, and one of the ideas was just a little meme about lavender. I can’t even remember what it was, but I thought, “That’s what social media is; it’s fun, it’s funny.” She had to be the one to tell me that her audience is very educated and mature, and that a meme would probably offend them.
It really humbled me—teenage me—to think about this and ask, okay, who am I talking to? What problems do they really have? Who are they? What are their demographics? That is like step one—the easiest thing you could do when it comes down to buyer persona. But like, what age range are they? What platforms do they engage in? How do I need to appeal to them? Are they story-based? Are they emotionally based? Are they logic-based? How do I need to communicate with them to build that know-like-and-trust factor and create effective marketing messages in my social media marketing?
So, that was my learning lesson—a kind of wake-up call among many, many others—diving into the world of content creation as it relates to ideal client personas. What tools do you give businesses to identify those? What kind of questions can people ask to get to the root of who they serve? Share some expert advice on that topic.
Lindsey: Yeah. So, I think the biggest thing that we do in our industry that’s a little bit different—there are two things. One, as I mentioned before, we gear the personas toward the service or product. So whether you are service-based or product-based, right? Because sometimes even service-based businesses have products, like digital products or something like that inside them.
So, no matter what you have, we want to build those personas for those services. A great thing to do is to make a list of all your services. It can be 20 pieces of services or products that you offer, right? Then we want to, of course, circle the top four or five that we’re currently focusing on.
If you can narrow it down to two or three, that’s even better. But I know sometimes when you have a long list of things that you do inside your business, or if you have à la carte services or something like that, it can be hard to narrow it down. So, the first thing is really just making sure that those personas are geared toward those services.
I would even say, besides outlining the services, really talk about and figure out what transformation or pain point deviation that service addresses. That will tell you a lot about what your ideal client is experiencing in pain points and how that service is going to help them.
That’s always the first step that we have people do that would be considered different. And then, I guess there actually are three things. The next thing would be, we don’t focus on age ranges or income level ranges or anything like that; it’s very specific because what a 25-year-old is going through and what a 30-year-old is going through—although only being a small distance apart—is drastically different.
So, we just want to make sure that we’re getting super close with those ages and understanding, you know, not just a generation that you serve. Like, yes, I serve millennials, but there is a specific part of millennials that I serve, right? It’s things like that—being able to understand that even though you might say something generally, you need to understand specifically where inside that generation you are targeting.
Now, looking at generations, right? One end of the spectrum and the other can be very different, especially for those cusp babies, as we like to call them. So, that’s another thing—just making sure that we’re getting super specific with income levels, age ranges, and things like that, which usually have a differentiating number inside of them.
And then, not only focusing on demographics, as we talked about here, but psychographics as well—motivations, goals, desires—really getting into the nitty-gritty buyer profiles. You might even have, I think nowadays we’re moving more towards understanding people as a whole differently.
So instead of just saying, “Oh, Tom is an impulse buyer,” understand that when it comes to digital products, Tom is an impulse buyer. But when it comes to high-ticket offers, he needs to be nurtured a little, right? So, like understanding that it’s situational and things like that.
I always outline those things first. The process I take people through is understanding the attributes you currently have in your clients that you love. Write those down. Those are great things to be able to take into those personas.
Then, be able to understand things. For example, if there’s an income threshold to work with you and they need to be making a certain amount in their household. Then that number can be the baseline for that, right? Things like that are things you need to take into account.
Also, doing data analysis. Wherever you feel comfortable doing that—Answer the Public, Statistica—even utilizing something like ChatGPT-4.
Just being able to infuse that data in there. And then, like I said, going in and building those personas out in depth. You want to understand this person on such an intimate level that you would be able to identify them in a crowd full of people.
You want to be able to—not necessarily physically, but just emotionally hear buzzwords and say, “That’s my ideal client right there because she’s struggling with this, and I need to get in front of her.” The more you can know, the better. And this isn’t to chain you or keep you in a box or make it hard for you to find this one specific person. But to help you really understand what your 10 out of 10 dream client looks like.
That’s the other thing I always like to remind people: this is a 10 out of 10 dream client scenario. This is what we’re aiming for, but sometimes we get a seven out of 10. That’s still really great, right? It still has a lot of attributes.
That’s what I would consider our secret sauce—making sure that we’re being really intentional with making sure that it actually relates to your products and services. You want your attributes to be specific, and make sure that you’re looking at psychographics as well as demographics because we need to understand not just what motivates them to buy, but their dreams, goals, pain points, frustrations, and what’s holding them back—things like that.
It can be a great thing to understand all of that.
Madeleine: Yeah, that’s what I would consider our secret sauce behind it. I love that. Thank you so much for sharing. One of my favorite questions to think about is, what keeps this person up at night? What are the things that really bother them related to your products and services?
Applying this to service-based businesses as a whole, people don’t want to buy your services. They don’t want to pay thousands of dollars for a new furnace. They really don’t. That is something that people do not want. But what they want—and what keeps them up at night—is making sure that their kids are warm while they’re sleeping and that they have a comfortable house. That they’re not concerned about pipes freezing; they don’t want to suffer the consequences of having a cold house.
So, that pain being able to drive them towards the purchase of a new furnace—that’s what they want. And so, being able to separate yourself from, “This is what I sell,” and “This is what I offer,” and get people to want to buy what I offer versus, what are the psychological benefits that they get from buying my product and service? Thinking about that as it applies to the buyer persona:
- what keeps them up at night?
- What do they want to achieve in life?
- What do they want to have as that product?
Base level, psychological, physical safety that they need to be able to survive and therefore thrive, and be able to continue to evolve into the best version of themselves and achieve their goals—that sort of thing.
I love being able to think of consumers in that psychology-based way. It helps your marketing message completely transform from, “Hey, we’re running a promotion on a furnace inspection,” to, “Don’t be in the cold this winter. Make sure that you are prepared. We do this to keep you safe.” Targeting those different aspects of what your customer truly desires is a game changer when it comes down to content creation.
Lindsey: Absolutely. And just to be clear, we’re not outlining pain points to do fear marketing tactics, right? What you just mentioned was not a fear marketing tactic. I just want to really caveat that really quick. But, you know, sometimes people can be really confused on why we’re even pulling pain points and don’t want to go in that direction.
It’s not to do fear marketing, but it’s again, to do exactly what you’re talking about: bring safety to their fears and know that your company is the one to go to if something were to happen, right? So, yes, absolutely. I do think there is that confusion. I get that a lot. I’ll get questions like, “Why would you pull pain points?” when I’m like, “That’s what we’re trying to alleviate here though, right?”
That’s the whole point.
Madeleine: Exactly. Yes, there’s data behind how people work, and people are more likely to run away from pain than towards pleasure. They really don’t want to experience pain way more than they want something fun and something that can add to their lives.
They want to escape pain more than they want to move toward pleasure. So, it’s a really powerful marketing message tool that does not need to get into the fear tactics space, because that is a really dangerous place to be in. And I think it borders on unethical in a lot of cases.
But how you can transition is: we understand you. We know what you’re going through. We empathize with it. We understand your pain. So much so that we have built a business around solving it. And here’s how we can solve your pain.
That can be your message that you drive, being able to relate to them—to get to their core where they read that and they say, “Yes. That’s me. I have that problem and I want that solution.” That’s where the magic happens.
Lindsey: Absolutely. And again, having that in place before going into the content creation process dictates a lot of what you’re talking about. Because you don’t know what value to bring to the table if you don’t know what pain points your ideal client has.
Madeleine: I love that. Awesome. Let’s dive into our messy middle when it comes down to content creation.
Lindsey: Yes. So, there are two parts to content creation. There is the planning side of things and there’s the executing side of things. And so, really quick, I just want to focus on the planning side because the planning is what makes the executing—whether batch creating or one-off creating, whatever it is that you’re doing—that much easier and that much more excitable to show up to, right? When it’s already planned, it’s ready to go; you know what you’re doing and how you’re doing it. It just becomes that much easier to show up to. Trust me.
So, on the planning side of things, we want to start out by outlining our core topics in our business. These are big overall themes of our business that either relate to our services, our products, what we do, or who we are. If we’re location-based, I always recommend having a location core topic in there, just because the community is going to be such an important part if you are location-based.
Being able to showcase that inside your content is going to be really important—especially if you’re a realtor or a professional service of some kind. If you’re a realtor, you’re going to be touching on community events, schools, and all kinds of stuff.
That makes it important to have inside your core topics. You want to have no more than five core topics—five is really pushing it, in my opinion. I like to keep people to four. But again, if you’re location-based, put that one as the fifth. I get it; you don’t want to waste a core topic on that. Just add a fifth one.
And then from there, we go into subtopics. We break down topics inside of there as small as you can. So, just to give you an example inside of my business really quick…
I don’t want to speak for anybody else, but I will speak for myself. Our core topics are social media strategy, target audience personas, content creation, and then organic engagement strategy. Those are all things we talk about inside of our business. And then underneath those are SMART goals—how to build smart goals.
What is the “S,” right? Like, very broken down, piece by piece, in those subtopics, because that is going to be your content, your value, your evergreen content that never changes. There are two different types of content.
There’s evergreen content that stands the test of time that you could post now, you could post four years from now, and it would never change.
And that’s due to two different things. Either one, the value inside of that is never changing, right? Or the language inside of it allows it to be evergreen. So just as an example for the language, right? Instead of saying, “We’ve been in business for six years,” say, “We’ve been in business since 2018.”
The “2018” is evergreen, right? It lasts a long time. You’re able to use that over and over again and not worry about it. Whereas if you were to say, “We’ve been in business for six years,” you’d have to re-record that every single year, right? So evergreen can be in two different ways: it can be value or language-based—whatever that looks like for you.
But starting with that evergreen content is so important. And so, that’s why we want to go through the core topics and the subtopics to be able to get all that evergreen content, because if we film evergreen content first and focus on that, then we can move into the other side of content, which is the timely content. That’s data analysis, answering people’s specific environment questions—even things inside your industry that change.
Going back to the realtor example: market rates change, houses on the market change—all that kind of stuff would be timely content versus how the real estate process works. Who is your first step in buying a home, right? What do you qualify for? Things like that, that are just evergreen content, can stand the test of time because the process is, knock on wood for realtors, always the same.
So when we focus on evergreen content first, that overwhelm of social media goes away because we start to build a database of content that can always be tapped into.
So if you’re going on vacation for a week, if you’re sick for a week, if you just don’t feel like showing up this week, you have this database of content that you can plug and play from, and it just becomes that much easier inside of there. I know the trending content is so appealing. I really do get it. I get the trends, the, you know, the seven-second videos.
I get that all of that stuff feels like a shiny toy that we want to move towards, but we got to focus on the evergreen content first because then, in the long run, we can be focusing on more timely content because we have this evergreen content to plug and play with in between the timely content that you want to show up for.
It’s a lot of front-loaded work. Social media—I never lie to anybody—I never say it’s like the diet industry where you can just take a pill and in eight weeks you’re going to have a great social media account. It’s not like that. It’s a lot of front-ended work to be able to have that consistency on the back end. So, I just want to acknowledge that really quickly. I know it’s a lot of work; I really do get it.
From creating subtopics, we then take those subtopics into what I like to call a content outline. So, however you want to do this—Notion, Google Sheets, you know, something where you can kind of have a table and hold this content with links and stuff like that—you want to build that out and be able to have a place to outline that piece of content.
What you want to be outlining is obviously the talking points, right? Things that you want to say in that piece of content, what it is that you need to be able to film that content. So, are you doing it at home with your webcam sitting at your desk? Are you using a little pocket DJI Osmo? Are you using your phone? All these things are important to be able to understand what you need.
And mainly, it’s because if you’re using something external like your phone or even something like the DJI, you want to make sure that it’s charged and ready to go because there’s nothing worse than having time to sit down and batch create and not being able to because something like that wasn’t ready to go.
So, we want to make sure that we’re outlining all of those different pieces and that we are looking at anything that we need. Like, are talking points not enough for you? Do you need a full script to be able to throw it inside of a transponder to be able to read off of?
There are plenty of really great apps and programs to be able to do that with. Do you know, what is it that you need to be successful for this? I even go so far as to outline what props I am going to be using. What outfits do I need? Because if I’m batch creating content, I’m going to need multiple outfits or if I’m trying to, you know, be in my brand colors or something, right?
I want to make sure that I’m being very intentional with the look. A curated background is not what it used to be, right? It doesn’t always need to be so perfect like it used to have to be. But it is, you know, a lot of thought and planning goes into these pieces of content.
Once you have all of that outlined inside of wherever is comfortable for you—I’m not going to sit here and guide; it doesn’t matter where you do it as long as you’re doing it. As long as it’s happening, it doesn’t matter how it’s getting done.
It should be organized. That’s just the Type A in me to tell you that, but I’m not going to sit here and be like, “You should have it in Notion,” or “You should have it here,” right? Like, wherever you already have a system in process—if you’re using Trello, if you’re using Asana, whatever program you already have—you can incorporate a database into that very easily.
Once we’re done outlining this piece of content, now we understand where we’re showing up, how we’re showing up. You have your primary platform, you have your secondary platform, and then you have these other marketing efforts as well. So now we can start to create a consistency plan of how to show up consistently inside of your business for social media.
So, for the sake of the rest of this example, I’m going to use YouTube as the primary and TikTok as the secondary, just so I can kind of explain through how this can look. And I’m also going to use my other marketing efforts, blogging and email marketing.
So, you would start out by batch creating your videos, right? Sitting down, making it as easy as possible. Personally, I film my YouTube videos on Loom. I try to make it as simple as possible. Again, we’re not videographers; we’re not content creators. We should just be showing up to this as best as we possibly can, but the value should be what’s shining, not the cool things, right?
It should be us, and it should be the value that’s shining. Now you can eventually build cool things. I’m not saying don’t have the cool things—like, absolutely, we can get there. But I think so often people get frozen by not having the cool things from the beginning, and it’s just kind of like, just get your first hundred videos up, keep falling on your face with those first hundred, right? Like, just get it up there.
So, creating from the video, you know, we create a video from there.
You can pull the transcript and be able to make a blog post, an email, an article for LinkedIn. You can put that transcript into ChatGPT and have it spit out captions that are using your diction and verbiage and tone inside of it.
When we start with that video and kind of move down from there in the repurposing, it can get a lot easier. So, we can take that video and clip it down into TikTok clips, right? Anything like that. We can take the audio and create a podcast. You can do audiograms over B-roll footage.
And we’re not even talking about graphics and all that kind of stuff. There’s just so much that you can do. So, I just want to encourage that even if you don’t plan on using the video per se to film video, because the repurposing from video can just be a lot better and more authentic coming straight from the horse’s mouth, if you will.
When we’re making a strategy, I just want to say that you want to be taking a look at these pieces that you’ve put in place and try to create a content plan from that. Like, how can we make this as easy as possible to show up in multiple different ways with only having to do it one time?
Because I think so often we sit down and we go, “I have to make this YouTube video. I have to write a blog post. I have to send an email. I have to think of a presentation next week for this. It can all be the same thing. It can absolutely all be the same thing, right? Like, the graphics for the video can be the presentation, the transcript from the video can be repurposed into a blog post and an email newsletter. The sky’s the limit with content these days.
Often we just think this is one thing and we don’t realize how we can stretch it. And just to be clear, I don’t mean stretch the value; I mean stretch the formats.
Like, how can we? Because the value is still there, no matter how it’s being presented. But what I always like to remind people is just because your content consumption type might be one thing doesn’t mean your ideal client’s consumption type is the same thing.
So, personally, I love a good video. But I know a lot of my colleagues who’d rather read a blog post or an article or something like that. So, by having both of those available, you’re able to hit multiple of those target audiences, like we were talking about there at the beginning.
Once you start executing, sitting down to batch create the content should be a lot of fun. You should want to show up to it. Whether it’s the content that you’re talking about, you’re really passionate about, and you’re excited to be able to bring value to your ideal client, or you just love creating content.
It’s just a fun thing for you to be able to do. I know personally for me, I would rather create social media content than cold call or DM any day of the week. And I’d rather put out something that’s going to attract somebody to me than knocking on hundreds of doors every day to get really impolite things back.
So, it can just not be fun, cold calling, right? I always tell people if you have cold calling or DMing inside of your marketing plan, consider putting more output into your social media content and attracting somebody who actually has the pain points of what you’re trying to alleviate.
Creating content needs to be fun, right? And we want to make it as easy as possible. So, like I said, whether it’s Loom, whether it’s Zoom, whether it’s any of the “ooms,” you want to make it super easy for yourself to show up for it. And then there are incredible platforms like CapCut and Descript that have transcript-based editing to them. This is a godsend. I love AI so much for this; the way it has transformed, you know, the people I know’s lives create content is unreal.
Inside of these platforms, if you don’t know, transcript-based editing is where you put in a video, and AI scans the video, pulls the transcript from you, and when you edit the transcript on the left-hand side of the screen, the actual timeline of the video changes.
So, in Descript, you can actually have it pull out specifically filler words and stuff like that. And inside of CapCut, it will read for you hesitations, double mentions, stuff like that. And it will pull all of that out for you. The amount of time you will save on the video editing side of things, doing a video transcript editor is a game changer. You’re not a videographer; you’re a small business owner. And I’m just going to keep reminding you that. Yes, you wear a lot of hats as a small business owner, but it’s not up to you to wear every hat to a 10 out of 10 level. And so, if there are little ways like this that you can save time and still have a great output, take it.
As for the execution side, I just wanted to say that there are incredible ways to be able to show up to creating content without having to spend hours and hours and hours every week. And then from there, just get it out. It can always go up again. It can always get repurposed. It can always get revived, right?
But just get it out. See how your audience is vibing with it and with the value that you have to bring, and then make changes from there. But I’ve seen so many people perpetually trying to make something perfect, and there is no room for perfectionism in social media.
I hate to burst that bubble, but there’s just too many variables to go wrong. From the shooting process to the editing process to even the posting process. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve posted a video and been like, “Why did this compress like this? I’ve got to take this down and redo.”
Anyways, all that to say is the execution should be fun. You should be able to have softwares and things in place to make it easier. Again, because I don’t want to be a liar here. Descript and CapCut do cost money. The pro versions of those to be able to do them. I believe both of them are under a hundred dollars for the year.
So it’s not an insane subscription fee and it’s the one time fee for the year. But I’m telling you, I would pay more than that. Don’t listen to this CapCut, but I would pay more than that because it saves me so much time for me, for my clients, for everything. And so I just can’t speak highly of it enough.
Madeleine: I do have a question going back to the very beginning, talking about pure video content. What are your thoughts on choosing that as the primary avenue to build out this evergreen content?
Versus text-based, because I think still a lot of small businesses go that text-based avenue. The video’s intimidating to start. And so, do you really encourage people to go all in on that video creation for that core content? And why?
Lindsey: I do. So, two things: if you have an outgoing personality, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be on social media. I’ll just say that right now. But, if you’re networking, if you’re doing in-person networking, and if you’re somebody who is considered a social butterfly or moving around the room, you should absolutely be on there.
The other side of things is if you’re on Zoom for any capacity, whether it’s networking, meetings, whether you yourself are a remote business and you’re on Zoom, it is no different than sitting on a Zoom call with a client. If that’s the case, it’s easier because I’m by myself, in my office, and I have my talking points.
I’m able to deliver my lines, right? Like, deliver my talking points, give my things, look over, see if I got what I needed to get, deliver it again, right? And all that dead airspace goes away. Like, gone are the days of having to do everything in one cut, right? Like, live from my bedroom, right? It doesn’t have to be that one take anymore.
And I think that’s where a lot of people get hung up on video. They think to themselves, “I have to get this first take. I can’t mess this up. I can’t say an um, uh, uh, uh.” And that’s why I mentioned transcription-based editing, because it takes all of that out: dead airspace, filler words, anything, right?
Now, again, this is where I say you have to listen through again and make sure that it didn’t take out an important part. I start all my videos with “hiya,” and sometimes it takes out the “ya.” I don’t know why, but sometimes it does, so I have to check, because it can sound weird.
You want to make sure that you’re checking. But I understand the fear of showing up to video, and that’s why I say make it as easy of a process as possible. Make it fun to show up to, because there’s no reason to not be doing it. It’s such a great way for you to be able to connect with your audience or your community, whichever one you’re building.
Lots of times, we are making these connections with our clients. We’re having these discovery calls, whether they’re in person or on Zoom or anything like that. We’re having these connections. We’re giving this value every day to our clients.
By just recording a video of it and posting it to your social media channels, you could be attracting that many more people into your business. And if growth, whether that is bringing in more team members, whether that be you having more clients, whatever that looks like for you for growth—if that’s something that’s a goal for you in any capacity of your business—then it’s kind of hard not to be on social media.
Now, I don’t think it should be the first marketing tactic someone puts together, but I do believe that with the right marketing pieces in place—website, SEO, you know, blogging, emailing, in-person networking—these things as a whole, as your marketing plan with social media, can be so impactful. But I think to put so much effort on one of them is hard, because they should be all working together to bring you the most visibility and help you get in front of your ideal clients.
It makes me sad to hear that people are still averse to video. And then, once I start having conversations with them about it, it’s very apparent that it’s just a fear around being perceived.
Can I give a book recommendation for that, actually?
Madeleine: Yeah, that’d be great.
Lindsey: Okay, I actually have it right here. This is because I keep it, because this is how much I recommend it. I just… it sits right next to me. So, it’s called “Followed” by Amanda Bucci, and it’s “The Content Creator’s Guide to Being Seen, Facing Judgment, and Building an Authentic Brand Persona.”
It is so good. She was a fitness influencer on YouTube and then has gone through all these social media changes over the years. And she just talks about facing the bad parts. The trolls, the comments, the things that you’re afraid of. You can face it in this book safely and work through it and be able to just feel better about showing up online.
Because a lot of the time, I really do think it’s a fear of being perceived. And I’m not a therapist—let me just asterisk that. But the more conversations I have with my clients, it really just comes down to a fear of being perceived. Cancel culture is at an all-time high.
Everyone’s got their pitchforks. Everybody is ready for that. So, I get it. One little slip-up can feel like the end of the world. But I think if we stick to the core topics, I think if we stick to what it is that your business does, the value that you provide, of course, uphold those mission statements and core values inside of your business and you’re showing up, then there is no fear around being on social media.
If you’re just sharing your business experiences, the values for your industry, and your clients’ journeys, there’s no fear because it’s all your truth, your example. So, just a little fear alleviating there around that. That’s what I see the most around not wanting to get on video.
It’s not usually about technology, because then I’ll say to them, like, “Oh, well, there’s these programs that can make it efficient.” And then it really starts to come out like, “Well, I don’t really want to get on there.” I’m like, “Oh.”
Madeleine: No, that is so helpful and such a good reminder. Like, if you are showing up authentically, you are going to attract the same level of energy. Like, no one is going to judge you as a massage therapist, as a landscaper. Like, just be you and lead with that concept of authenticity, and the rest will follow.
Lindsey: Absolutely. Nobody gets more than me that it is nerve-wracking to show up to that. But again, I think if we’re consistent in building evergreen content and showing up in that capacity and building that database, the overwhelm goes away. Knowing that you have value to be able to offer and just standing in your truth of, “I’m here to provide for my ideal client.”
Our social media channels are not for our friends and family. They are for our ideal client. So, it is all great and fine that our families want to follow and support our businesses. But if your thought process is, “How is my friend or how is my family member going to feel about this post?” then you need to remove them from your social media because it is not about them.
Now, again, we don’t want to be getting political or anything like that on our business pages. If you’re feeling uncomfortable showing up on video because of how people are going to perceive you or you’re thinking to yourself that they’re thinking, “Who do you think that you are?” then we need to remove that because that’s not helpful for us.
We have so much value as business owners to provide to our ideal clients or even people who are interested in what we do, right? And there’s no reason for us to be held back based on somebody we know, right? Like, that is just so silly. And if they’re not cheering you on and supporting you and making you feel like the absolute professional that you are, then it’s time to remove them from our social media platforms.
Madeleine: I love that. So, the thing that I want to be able to tie this in is, what is the impact that this has? Can you paint the picture of what success looks like doing all of that front-end work, being able to really identify those goals, those buyer persona profiles, being able to have a solid content strategy that you have planned and executed? What can happen?
What is the rainbow at the end of this? What paints that vision of success? Why should we go through all this effort, and how beautiful can it be when it comes out at the end?
Lindsey: Yeah. So picture this: it’s six months from now. You’ve been working incredibly hard on creating not only a strategy but a plan for that strategy and building that content database. You have 50 videos and other pieces of content formats at the tip of your fingers inside of a database of evergreen content that you’re able to just plug and play from. You’re able to show up effortlessly and not feel so chained to it. You’re excited about your Friday block for content creation and showing up to that, whether you’re filming this week, repurposing this week, or scheduling this week, or whatever that looks like.
You’re excited to show up to those things because you’re connecting with your ideal client. You’re speaking directly to them and they’re coming to you without having to do paid ads or anything like that. Paid ads have its place, but let’s wait for like 60 days, at least before we start doing that.
But you know, it can be so beautiful. You’re not overwhelmed; you’re not worried about what you’re putting out there.
A plethora of content to be able to tap into, whether it’s about you, about your business, about your core topics, or about your services. You know, you’re able to just tap into that. And then you can just have a Tuesday night wine sesh where you’re answering your reply videos with a glass of wine or over a cup of coffee if you’re a morning person, right?
Like, whatever the brand is, do it right. But you have more time to be sitting down and engaging with your audience or community and showing up for them where they need you to be. So it can just be so beautiful putting this stuff in place because it’s effortless. You want to show up for your clients, you want to show up for your audience, and you want to be there to support them and help them through their questions about the content that you’ve been putting out or their specific situation that relates to the content you’re putting out.
So no matter what you do, no matter who you are, you absolutely have value to provide. You can have a thriving audience or community six months from today if you just start today on building the strategy and the plan and getting consistent.
And the other thing I want to say about that really quickly is, when you’re building, build for the future. So you want to have a month’s worth of content ready to go before you start posting so that you can be ahead of the curve creating and not chasing your tail creating. So, a lot of times I will see people, you know, just be creating like a week’s worth of content and then starting to launch.
And really we want to make sure that we have a big, robust database of evergreen content before we dive into that. So if the 30 days is on a smaller platform where you’re doing clips, make sure that we have all those clips. And if your primary platform is something larger like YouTube, just make sure that we have that, you know, weekly video, whatever that looks like for you.
And again, make sure it works for you and your schedule. You can always build up, but scaling back can be hard, and you’re setting the tone with the algorithm about how much you’re going to be showing up.
So anyway, I got a little tangential there; I’m sorry. But there are so many points in there that—I mean, we talked about this. I could talk about social media forever. Like, this episode could be so long. And so this is why we had to outline what we were going to talk about.
Madeleine: Oh no. Thank you so much, Lindsay. You are such a wealth of knowledge. And like I mentioned before, you just have such a passion for what you do, and it is so beautiful to be able to see that and learn from you.
So tell us a little bit about your company, who you are, and where people can find you.
Lindsey: I’m TTS Marketing Agency. We are based in Southern Colorado, but we work remotely with all kinds of clients. We mainly work with service-based businesses, but I’ve never turned down a product-based business yet.
And we are just overall—no matter what part of your business you’re at—we have a product or service for every level of small business owner. So whether you’re looking for a digital template, a course, or full-blown management, we are here to help you through your social media.
We are currently on TikTok and Instagram. I am actually launching the YouTube channel in like five days. I can’t believe I’m saying that; it’s so scary. But I have 30 days of content ready to go, and that’s what’s important. So, we’re going to be getting on that platform here very, very soon.
And yeah, we are all over the place.
Madeleine: Wonderful. Well, thank you again. I am so excited we finally got to do this episode. I cannot wait to bring it to the world and give it just this beautiful new side to social media and what it is capable of for your business. So thank you again, Lindsay. Thanks for joining us today.
Lindsey: Thank you for having me.
