Transcripts
1. Intro: Can you run a creative business today, without social media. Without the stress of constantly sharing and promoting app
checking and algorithm hacking. Can marketing your
creative business actually feel calm and authentic
and still be effective? Hi. My name is Louise. I'm an artist and a writer
and a longtime creative rep. I've been in business for
myself for over ten years now in various shapes and forms? I've sold everything from creative services to digital
and physical products. In this class, I'm
sharing my time tested, calm, and effective approach to marketing a
creative business. There is no shortage of marketing courses
for creatives today, and I'm sure you've probably taken some of them
by this point. And if you're anything like me, many of them might have left you feeling a bit overwhelmed
and exhausted. Like you have to
do all the things and be on all of the platforms, and it's never enough, and you're not getting
results and you're not actually enjoying
running your business. And maybe you're wondering, Is there something
wrong with me? Like, why can't I keep up? Am I not business material? Should I just quit my business, I and a lot of other
creatives like me are proof that you can build a calm and successful
creative business without social media, with your personality and
your integrity intact? There is no one way to build
a successful business. There are as many ways
as there are people. This is just my philosophy
and my way of doing things? There are no gimmicks and no new platforms
that you have to jump on or tactics to follow? Only time tested,
solid business advice. I will not tell you what to do, but how to think
like a marketer, how to pinpoint your ideal
customer and figuring out the best places to
find them as opposed to endlessly posting on social media and
hoping to get noticed. This is a fairly quick class, but once you are done with it, you will have gained
a lot of clarity around what type of business
you actually want to run. Who you want to serve and what types of marketing
activities are right for you. You will have designed
your own custom made marketing plan, something that you
can keep up with for years and still enjoy.
That's my goal for you. I'm not guaranteeing
quick results or quick and easy growth, because honestly, those promises that you might hear out
there are very misleading. There is no ethical
way to quickly build a profitable
business It takes effort, and it takes time, but
that time can be spent doing our hard work and
enjoying every step of the way. I think that's the best way
to build a business slowly, calmly and while actually
enjoying ourselves. If you agree, then
let's get started.
2. Why social media isn't a great marketing tool: Social media has felt like a sinking ship for
quite a while now. I don't actually think
it's just a feeling. I think there has been something happening with social
media now for a few years. To begin with, these
social platforms are becoming very crowded
right now, over saturated. So it's harder to get noticed
just for that reason alone. But there's also the
increasing influence of the algorithm dictating who
gets seen and who doesn't. Our feeds are overrun
with ads and bots, and what I like to call
fast food content, the type of fast paced, shallow, short video clips that
don't really provide value, but that maximize watch time and are therefore profitable for
the platforms to promote. Everyone's in a rush.
Everyone's really distracted. There isn't much real
socializing going on anymore. Most of the interaction is
short and feels superficial. And for businesses, there's
almost no organic reach left f. Very few of our followers
actually see our content, and we have to pay
to reach them. So it's like a big
slot machine almost. Not to mention the
precariousness of relying too much on these
platforms in your business. Accounts get hacked or
taken down all the time, often for no apparent reason and careers get
destroyed this way. It's a never ending stressful time suck to produce content for
these platforms, to compete, to play the game. And we get far
less in return for our work than we used to
just a few years ago. Social media used to be an effective and fun way of building an audience and
promoting your business. Now it's a game of
diminishing returns. Now, it's a very ineffective way of marketing yourself
and your work. I've seen a lot of
professional creatives, even ones with huge
followings say that social media drives a
very small percentage of their traffic and sales. Add to that, the more
personal downsides of being on social
media all the time, like comparing ourselves with the polished facades
of influencers and other creatives
who might be more talented or seemingly more successful than
we are constantly feeling left behind
and invisible, inadequate and exposed to predatory advertising and scams. Social media just isn't
a great place to be. Not for us and not
for our businesses. But regardless of how
much we would like to get off it, can we really? Do we not really miss out on
anything by not being there? That used to be my biggest fear when I left social
media the first time. I was afraid that my business was just going
to crash completely, that I would not get
any more subscribers or clients and that I would lose valuable
opportunities or relationships. My view and my experience with
this is that we are likely not missing out on as much as we think by not being
on social media. And the few things that we
might miss out on are probably worth missing out
on because of all of the focus and energy, and extra time that we free
up by not having to be there. I promise you you will reach
your business goals without social media and you
will probably reach them faster and
with less stress, more energy, and
your sanity intact. Is a better way. There is a calmer way to market
your creative business, and that's what this
workshop is about. I will give you the framework
that I have used to grow my business from
absolute scratch a few years ago to now having a growing list of engaged
lovely subscribers and consistent sales coming
into my business without social media and in a way that suits my personality
and my business.
3. What is calm marketing?: Calm marketing to me, it means sharing your
personality, your philosophy, and your work with the world, in a way that lights you up
and provides value to others. The key mindset shift
that we need to make when leaving
hustle culture and creating a calm
marketing strategy is that more is not
automatically better. More followers or
subscribers or traffic, don't automatically translate
to sales for your business. You can have 10,000 Instagram followers who barely
see your content and who just follow you
kind of casually or who follow you because they're
colleagues or competitors, although I don't like
the term competitor. But they're just curious
about what you're doing. They have no intention of ever
buying anything from you. You can have half 1
million YouTube views that lead to very little
traffic to your website. And you can have an e mail
list of thousands of people, but they're the wrong
people for you. They're there for
the wrong reason, and so very few of them
even open your e mails. Simultaneously, you can
have an e mail list of just 100 highly interested, highly engaged people who
really want to stay in touch and who are prime candidates for whatever
it is that you sell. Depending on what you sell, you could make a
comfortable living off an e mail list of just
a few hundred people. A lot of businesses do this. We have to stop
idealizing and striving after large followings
and likes and comments and watch time and other online vanity metrics that don't mean anything
in a business context. What matters in a
business context our sales and quality
relationships? Today, more than ever, we crave substance, we crave
real personal connection. These things are
growing increasingly difficult to find online, especially now with AI. We're swimming in empty, fake, shallow fast food
content everywhere, or content that looks
like carbon copies of what thousands of other
creatives have already made. How do you stick out in
an environment like this? How can your little creative business make a
difference and be successful by doing the opposite of what everyone else is doing. By offering substance and real personal connection
in a way that only you can by growing a small but deeply aligned and engaged audience
of your people, the people who are here for what you have to say and offer.
4. Defining your ideal customer: Building a stable business, a business that grows and makes consistent sales means
knowing who we serve, our people, our ideal
clients and customers. With a creative hobby, we usually start with ourselves. We have something that we love making and
would like to sell, and we might make a
small occasional income, selling what we make
to other people. This hobby becomes a
business when we shift focus from ourselves
to our customer. We start to really
pinpoint who are ideal or most likely
client or customer is, and we brainstorm strategies of reaching them
and serving them. Not all creative hobbies can or should get turned into
businesses, by the way, we might not want to
have to appeal to an audience with our art or even think about
the audience. That's totally legit. That's the way I feel
about my art and why I've decided to keep it as a
hobby or at the most, a no pressure side gig
because I realized that I want to paint what I want and not worry
about selling it. There are other parts of my creativity that
I do like to sell, and those are the skills and the passions that I've
built my business on. You might need to do a
similar inquiry if you feel uncomfortable with
the thought of focusing your art on
a specific audience. Ask yourself if you're
truly ready and willing to turn this particular creative craft into a business. And if you're not,
that's totally okay. You're no less of
an artist for it. In order to build a stable
business that can sustain us, we have to focus
on our audience, our clients and customers. And the more we
can pin them down, the more specific we can
get when imagining them, the more effectively
we can market to them. I recommend visualizing
a single person in your mind's eye and writing down some typical characteristics
this person has, what they do for a living, what their background is, what their life looks like,
what they dream about. They struggle with, what
their sense of humor is, their taste in music
and entertainment. The more like a close
friend this person feels, the easier it will be for you
to communicate with them. It might even be
a close friend of yours or a previous
client or customer. That's even better because
then you can picture them clearly in your mind's
eye when you write or speak. It doesn't matter that most
of your actual clients won't match this ideal
person you're imagining. Might be a partial match, or they might simply enjoy the voice and the personality that comes out in your content, thanks to you visualizing
this ideal person. Just having this
person and letting them inform what you
write or talk about and how you write and talk about
it will help you avoid that trap of sounding just
like everyone else. That bland appeal to everyone
and therefore, no one style of
content that makes up 90% of the content
online today. Because most people
like you and me, are scared of excluding people in our marketing
and we're scared of offending someone with
our sense of humor and we're scared of not
looking professional enough. But if we want to stick out as creatives, as business people, we must dare to be ourselves
because that's the only way we can be remembered and create real
connections with people. And we must dare to exclude
people to turn some people off because that's
the only way that we can turn some people,
our people on. Makes sense. Being fully yourself in your marketing
will draw your people, your ideal clients towards
you like a magnet. And that's the first part of our calm marketing framework. But we still need to reach
our ideal person somehow. We need for them
to discover us so that they can be drawn towards
us in the first place. And we do this by reverse engineering the
relationship so that we can reach our
people when they are most easily reached.
5. Finding your ideal customers: Think about what you
would do if you were looking for someone just
like you and your business. What would you search for? Where would you
look and what would convince you to hire
someone or buy from them? Or if you sell something that people don't know they want yet, where would you be
the most likely to stumble upon them
online or offline? And what would appeal to you and make you want
to buy their stuff? Let's take an example. What would make me want to hire a brand photographer
for my business. I would probably start
by searching for the term brand photographer
in my area on Google. I would visit the first, maybe ten to 20
websites that came up. I would look at the photos on those websites and see if they match my vision for the photos that I want
from my business, the bigger their portfolio, the easier it is
for me to do that. Then I would go to their about section and
read about them. What's their story? What's their personality like? Is there a photo of them, so I can see if
they look friendly? Do they feel like a person
I would like to work with for a whole day and be vulnerable and
awkward in front of? I would read everything I can find on their site
about how they work, what the process is like, what they've done
for others like me. Their tips for how to get the most out of a
brand photography session, how to prepare for a session, Maybe they even
have videos showing me exactly what to expect
from working with them. Then I will look at
their pricing info to determine if I could
afford to hire them. And if I've already gotten a really good impression of them and their work, guess what? I probably wouldn't
care if they're more expensive than
some other person. I'm going with the
one who gave me the best experience
before even hiring them, the one who gave me substance
and a personal connection. Let's say I didn't Google directly after
a brand photographer. Maybe I Googled something
like DYI brand photography or how to take professional looking photos of myself because I intend
to do this myself. And then this person has an in depth blog post or
a video about that topic, and maybe an e
mail newsletter or a free e mail series sharing their best
photography tips with me. And the more of their
content I read, the more I realize
that actually, I might just want their help instead because they
made me realize all of the fine nuances that
go into their work and they seem very skilled and
they seem fun to be around. So maybe I'll just
hire them instead. This story is played out
online all the time. This is how small businesses
and solrepreneurs, like you and me get
clients and customers, despite not having large
followings or ad budgets or social media managers by providing substance and
personal connection, showing up at the right places and having a solid business
infrastructure in place. Let's look at all
the things that needed to be in
place in order for me to discover and hire this imaginary
brand photographer. Number one, they
had a website that was discoverable thanks
to some basic SEO, search engine optimization
that you don't even have control over if
you don't have a website. They had a body of work, which they put
front and center on their site and made it
easy for me to view. They showed me their face and personality and
story on their site, creating a personal connection. They gave me tons
of free content that answered all
of my questions and objections that let
me get to know them and made me trust their
knowledge and skills. They gave me the opportunity
to stay in touch with them and get more free
resources via e mail, and then they continued to prove their value and offer
me their services. Until I was ready
to buy from them. This process will look
different, of course, depending on what you
sell and to whom, but the basic
principle is the same. Stand out from the crowd by offering substance and
a personal connection. Show up where it's
relevant and timely. Give the right people a way
to stay in touch with you. And then continue to show up, B of value and offer your
products and services, can this be done
with social media? Absolutely, but not in a stable, secure, effective or long
term sustainable way. Social media is like the shotgun approach to
finding your people. It's like standing by the
side of a busy highway, yelling and throwing flyers
that oncoming traffic, right next to millions of other people who are also
yelling and throwing flyers. And if your business
is all about art and storytelling and
creative expression, personal development, You'll have an even harder time because you're standing
next to people who are yelling about losing 30
pounds in four weeks or getting rich with cryptocurrency or some
other sensational nonsense. A calm, creative business
demands a calm marketing style. That's suited to who we are, to what we do, and to what
our people are looking for. That's why the majority of the people who buy original art. They do it in the calm and
exclusive environment of a gallery or after meeting the artist and seeing
the art in person. They don't do it
in their chaotic, distracting Instagram feed. Most people who buy
books do it because it was recommended to them
by someone they trust, not because the author was
pitching it to them on TikTok. So how can we create this calm, ideal buying experience
for our people online by knowing exactly
who we're talking to, by being there
when they need us, having the infrastructure for inviting them in and
staying in touch with them, and then offering substance and personal connection
on a regular basis. If you do this calmly
and patiently, you will have a
successful business. It might take six months, it might take a year
or even two years, but you will get there, and your business will grow
exponentially during that time. Your happy clients and customers will tell their
friends about you and share your content and hire you again or
buy from you again, and your body of work and library of content
keeps growing, keeps getting discovered, keeps attracting your people to you. But in order to make this a stable and hustle free business, it needs that infrastructure
that we've talked about.
6. Building your calm business infrastructure: What does a good business
infrastructure look like? Probably some version of this, a website with something
for sale on it, preferably. An e mail list and some free resource or
freebie for new subscribers. First of all, why a website? I've hinted at this already, and I'm probably preaching
to the choir here, but it's worth repeating. Your business needs
a stable home. It can't be built on the chaotic and
earthquake prone land of a social media platform,
where at any time, the algorithm can change, your account can get
hacked or taken down and you have no control over the look and feel
and functionality. Website also lets you
work with SEO to help people who search for what
you do or sell find you. And by having all of
your stuff in one place, your bio, your portfolio, your products and services, your content, you will
get found easier, and you will provide
a more calm and cohesive experience
for your people. I personally use square
space for my websites, and I have done that
for many years now. For precisely this reason, they let me keep all of
my assets in one place, my blog, my art shop, my gallery, my portfolio, my online courses, my client booking system,
my website analytics, all of it, and it's
easy to manage and easy to design beautifully. I really can't recommend it warmly enough. Why
an e mail list? Mail isn't perfect, but it's the most reliable form of online communication
that we have right now, and it differs from social
media in a few key ways. The first one being an e mail is always seen, pretty much. It's not filtered away by
an inivisible algorithm. If your e mail lands
in someone's in box, you are guaranteed to
have their attention for at least a little bit. Email communication
is also one to one, or at least it feels that way, even if you send the same
e mail to lots of people. Reading an e mail from someone usually feels a
lot more calm and intimate than reading
something they've published online for any and all to
read and to comment on, and most importantly, you
own your e mail list, and therefore, you
own your audience. It's not being held hostage
by a social media company. You can segment
your audience into different interest categories or different
geographic locations, and you can take your e
mail list with you whenever you want to try a different
platform or service. Email marketing have proven time and time again that it's
the most effective, the most profitable communications
medium in existence. Just a simple Google search of e mail marketing statistics, 2024 or whatever year you're at. We'll give you some fresh stats often compared to other mediums and platforms like social media for the vast majority
of businesses. Their e mail list is
the most important, most valuable asset they have. And that's always been
my experience as well. After over a decade of running multiple different
creative businesses, I've rarely ever
sold anything that wasn't prompted by an e
mail that I had sent. I've never had a
huge e mail list, but I've still made good and consistent sales
from my e mails. And the more my list grows, the more consistent
my sales are. And finally, why a freebie? Why should we offer free
resources for new subscribers? Getting someone's e mail
address isn't easy nowadays. It used to be a lot easier, but we've all gotten a lot more discerning and
cautious about handing out our contact details because it's being abused
by so many companies. Including small businesses who take our e mail and then
mostly end up spamming our inboxes with
boring useless content or too many sales messages. A freebie, sometimes called a lead magnet is a free piece of content that you offer to new subscribers in return
for their e mail address. It's not a necessity. Sometimes simply offering a really helpful regular
newsletter is more than enough. But in my experience, also offering something
more targeted can really boost the growth
of your e mail list. Freebie can be a great way to start off your relationship
with a new person. Not only do they
get something for free that's valuable
and useful to them, but they also get to know you and to trust you a bit more. And that's a great starting
point from which you can then continue to offer substance and personal connection to them.
7. Growing your audience: Okay. Okay, so how do we actually grow an e mail
list without social media? It's not enough to just put up an email list sign up form
and let it sit there? We need to drive
traffic there somehow. And for many businesses, the standard approach is to use social media to drive traffic to their newsletter and
their free resources, which isn't a very effective
method, by the way, because most people
on social media would like to stay on social media. But it's better than
nothing, I suppose? If we want to do better than better than
nothing, what can we do? We can create searchable
content instead and make use of other people's
audiences to grow our list faster than
we could on our own. In my experience, the
two most effective ways to get discovered online
and to grow our email lists are regular content creation and getting in front of
other people's audiences that are similar to our own. This could mean getting interviewed in
publications or podcasts. Interviewing people yourself,
writing guest posts or doing collaborations with other creators in your niche, how much of either of these that you want to do is
entirely up to you. You could create some
content and then mostly do these PR activities
to expand your audience, or you could rely mostly on your own content to
drive traffic over time. The best is probably
to do some of both. I myself am a bit shy, and even though I know my
business would grow faster, if I did more PR activities, I'm much more comfortable
with creating content. So for me, writing blog
posts and posting videos on YouTube has been
my primary drivers of growth for my e mail
list and business. For someone else, it might be their podcast or
just their blog, maybe in combination
with Pinterest, which is a search engine,
not a social media. Your strategy should be
built on whatever formats you enjoy creating the most because that's where
you can really shine. So what does it really mean
then to provide substance, to create good content? It can be helpful to first define what the
opposite looks like, the ineffective type of content. Ineffective content might look attractive at first glance, but doesn't provide much real
or lasting satisfaction. It's more about seeming
helpful than actually helping. Ineffective content
isn't serving your actual intended audience and likely won't even
reach them because they're not even on the platform
to any great extent. Ineffective content will be
lost and forgotten after a few hours or days and likely
never discovered again. It relies on quantity
to be effective. It likely won't be as relevant
in a few years time or even a few months
because it relies heavily on current
trends or events. It's completely devoid
of your personality. Or it's only about you and not about your
intended audience at all. It just scratches the
surface of a real concern, leaving a feeling of confusion
and dissatisfaction, or it oversimplifies
the problem and solution in order to squeeze it neatly into 30
seconds of video. Compare this to
effective content, which is truly helpful, not just the same
top ten tips that everyone else is
sewing. It's original. It has your personal touch, your perspective, your opinions, your voice in it. It's searchable and evergreen. It will be relevant and
discoverable for years to come, and it relies on
quality over quantity. A few questions I like to ask myself when I'm
planning content are, what resource would I
really have wished to have found when I was in my
ideal client's situation? Or what is the advice
that I would have most needed to hear when I
was in my client's situation? Or what would be a resource that I could keep sending
people to for years to come that would maybe answer some common questions or help
them do a certain thing. Then we have PR leveraging
other people's audiences. This is a great way to kick start the growth of
your e mail list, if you're new, if you're
a new business owner. Once you have your business
infrastructure set up and not before because if something
you do gains traction, you better have a website
and email is there to capture the influx of new
people checking you out. So once you have that in place, Start mapping out
some relevant places, publications, channels, and collaborations that
might suit your business. Who else out there
already has an audience, similar to the one
you're trying to build. And what could you offer that
person and their audience? Maybe a new perspective, a powerful story,
some helpful advice, If you sell services, some powerful drivers of business growth for you
might be guest posting, being a guest on podcasts, doing public speaking, asking previous
clients for referrals, networking at events, or simple word of mouth from doing
a really great job. If you sell products,
it might be going to markets or
fairs or events. Licensing your
designs to companies, getting your product into stores or getting your art
into public places. If you're not sure where to
start or what to focus on, think about where your
ideal person is most likely to discover
you and arrange your options by
order of importance. Go for the most
impactful one first. No overwhelm, no need to hustle. This is Calm marketing, where we have a
long term strategy and work slowly and
deliberately in that direction.
8. Avoiding overwhelm and burnout: How many lists
have you read with 133 ways of marketing your
business without social media. Do they alleviate your feeling of burnout because they don't, for me, I just tend to feel even more like
I'm not doing enough. I think it's important
to remember that just because we don't
use social media, doesn't mean we need to use every other strategy there
is to grow our business. In fact, we can do fewer
things, but better, more effective, more deliberate things to get better results. If you're feeling overwhelmed
in your marketing, remember that A, you don't need to do all
of these things. You shouldn't and B
view your marketing as something you set off maybe
one to two days a week for, and then forget about it
the rest of the time. Focus on your work
and your craft. There are too many
businesses out there who seem to think it's
all about being seen. As long as they're seen, the actual business will
take care of itself somehow. Which is not the case. We have to remember
that our work, our craft, our art comes first. That's the stuff people buy. And being really good at what we do is a form of
marketing in itself. There is a workbook companion to this video that you
can download below. And in that workbook, I lead you through this whole
process of pinpointing your ideal person
and figuring out the best places to reach them
and then crafting your own. Calm marketing strategy
from that based on the activities that you enjoy and that you are the best at. My current marketing
strategy consists of making content regularly in channels where I can get in
front of new people. I call them my
discovery channels. And then nurturing that audience
via e mail once a week. My discovery channels are my
blog and my YouTube channel. My blog posts and articles
bring me traffic from search engines and YouTube has organic reach and
traffic built in, since it's a search engine, too. So the content I create
will continue to get discovered and seen
for many years to come. And it acts like a snowball. So the more of my
stuff is out there, the quicker my audience grows. What works for me might not work for you or
even appeal to you. You need to find your own way. Usually, that entails doing some amount of experimentation. Don't be afraid to try something out for a while and
then abandon it. There's no shame in that.
It's the only way we can figure out what works for us and what
doesn't work for us. I recommend choosing one
main discovery channel, some kind of outlet
where you can share your work and have it be
discovered by new people. So maybe a blog, Pinterest, YouTube, podcast, et cetera. And then one nurture channel, which is usually an e mail list, but could also be
something like Patrion as long as you have control
over your contact list, and there's no algorithm
between you and your audience. Then develop a weekly
or monthly rhythm of doing your work, creating your content, nurturing your audience and doing PR as much or as
little as you want. And that's it. That's what
calm marketing can look like. You get to decide the pace, you get to decide
what you work on, what you create,
how you created, and the rest is just
patience and persistence. You will know your marketing
works well for you when you are enjoying doing these
things and not dreading them. When it feels like you are
steadily building a body of work as opposed to running
in this hamster wheel. And when every week,
some new people discover you and subscribe to you or
maybe even write to you, saying thank you for
something you have shared.
9. Final words and class project: As your graduation
assignment for this class, I will lead you
through designing your very own marketing strategy using the principles that
I've just taught you. In the projects and
resources tab of this class, you will find a
link where you can download a PDF. It's a workbook. And you can print it out,
you can fill it out by hand, or you can fill it in digitally. The choice is yours. The first part of this workbook
is all about pinpointing your ideal customer and reverse engineering that relationship, the
way I've shown you. Think about who you really want to serve with
your business, who actually buys or
will buy what you make, where they hang
out, and what would possibly grab their attention. What you could provide them that will set you apart
from everyone else. The second part is where you
take all of these insights and you turn them into a
concrete marketing plan, which marketing
activities to focus on what types of content to
create and about which topics, what your e mail sign up
pitch might look like, what potential freebie you could offer for new subscribers, and how you might
eventually turn that e mail relationship into
a customer relationship. All of these questions are
essential in order to design a marketing strategy that
will actually deliver you results and not waste your
time or burn you out. It's by knowing these
things that you can safely ignore all
of the gimmicks and the tactics and the well meaning advice that
might work for other people, but won't necessarily
be right for you. There is no formula. There is no one size fits
all in business. You personality and
your preferences and your specific calls are what should dictate your
marketing strategy. And I hope that this
class has given you some clarity and some
reassurance in that. If you want to, you
can upload your filled in workbook as your
class project, and mine is already
there as an example. Thank you so much for
taking this class. If you enjoyed it, feel free to leave a review that would
make me really happy. If you want to stay in touch with me and
get more support, check out my teacher page where you can find all
of the relevant links. I have a newsletter and a
podcast and a YouTube channel, and I wish you the very best
with your creative business.
Louise Stigell, Artist, writer & creative coach
