161 | Unplugged and Running an Online Business? Marketing Tips For The Digitally Mindful

Ever felt the urge to unplug and rediscover life beyond the screen?

Today, we're discussing how a wave of screen time consciousness is reshaping our lives and businesses. From personal choices like "Wi-Fi free Wednesdays" to influencers carving out phone-free sanctuaries, the episode uncovers a cultural shift towards intentional digital consumption.

Plus, of course some marketing tips, including holistic marketing, building relationships, high-quality and email list growth so you can walk away with a plan to grow your business in a sustainable way.


In this episode, we cover:
✨ the impact of screentime awareness [0:06]
✨ the importance of holistic marketing [5:03]
✨ email list growth and community building [15:12]

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:06

Welcome to Market Scale Grow. I'm your host, anzea, and this is a Saturday Strategy Session. Hello, hello. Today we are going to be talking it might get a little ranty, but we are going to be talking about the potential impacts that the rising awareness of the negative impacts of social media and screen time, what the impacts of that might be on your business. So I think we've all come to realize that increased screen time, increased social media use, has negative impacts, and so it's important to realize that, as people become more and more aware of these negative impacts that social media and screen time have in their personal lives, that there will be impacts on our businesses, our online businesses, and I think that more and more people are becoming aware of how addicted they are to screen and they're trying to do something about it, and they're also trying to be role models for their children, and one of the teachers that works at the school that I'm at, she and her family have implemented something they're referring to as Wi-Fi free Wednesdays, and so her partner, I believe, works from home, and so he actually plugs the computer into, like hardwires it into the computer at three o'clock or whatever, and then, when my coworker and her children get home from school, the Wi-Fi is off for the rest of the day, and so her kids are middle schoolers so I'm not 100% sure exactly where, but like in the fourth to seventh grade kind of age range and they have access to cell phones, they have access to iPads, they have access to computers, right. So they're a fairly well connected family and they've decided that on Wednesdays they are going to have no Wi-Fi. And so coming back to their roots, if you will, picking up hobbies, doing things together as a family and really reconnecting and disconnecting from the internet for that one day a week. And it's been really interesting to reach her story. She's been posting about it and the progress that has happened and how initially everyone was kind of like digging their heels in, and now they've settled into a routine and the energy is a lot more positive. So that's one story.

Speaker 1: 3:04

There's also quite a few bigger named influencers out there who are doing things like no phone for the first couple hours of the day, or they're putting their phones to bed quote, unquote when they're done for the workday and so they don't have access to their phones from like 4pm until 10pm or whatever. And just the increase of people who have do not disturb on, or they turn airplane mode on or whatever it might be is increasing and putting those no phone times into routine is just becoming more and more common. I even have that I finish up my workday around three o'clock, when it was when my daughter was waking up from her nap. She no longer naps, but I still try to maintain that like three o'clock timeframe until eight o'clock. When my kids are in bed I try to be phone free and some days it's really easy and my phone doesn't move off of the table or the pocket that it was in. And then other days I find myself scrolling social media or sucked into a game or whatever it might be. But I do try to use, like, limit my phone use from about three o'clock until eight o'clock. So just to part of it. For me is modeling that healthy relationship with screens and with social media for my children. They're still pretty young there are three and four, almost four and five, which is why I had to think about it, and so I'm trying my absolute best to model those healthy relationships with the screen, because I know that they see everything and they pick everything up and they are aware of so much, and I, because of, like, how old I am, when I turned 16, I got a phone, but nobody.

Speaker 1: 5:03

I think I was the first one in my family to get a phone, right. Like my mom didn't have a cell phone, my sister probably got one about the same time I did, and my brother definitely didn't get one. He's four, five years younger than I am Four years younger than I, am sorry and so he definitely didn't get one until like probably a year, maybe two years later, right so? And back then it was like pay per text and pay per minute, and it was. I was on a pay as you go plan, so only at like $25 a month or whatever my mom was willing to spend, and social media just did not exist in the same way it did it does now. Like I remember I paid $7 for a Tetris game and I was so excited I felt like it was the best $7 I'd ever spent. And now I don't remember the last time I paid for a game on my phone, right Like free, it's all I do.

Speaker 1: 5:54

Times have just changed, they've just changed, so there is a lot of those kind of movements that are happening, right so, from my friend who has those Wi-Fi free Wednesdays to business owners that aren't touching their phone for the first two or three hours of the day and that they're locking them away to bed at like five o'clock when they're done for the day. To myself, who has those afternoons family times with no phones. This is becoming a bigger and bigger trend and I think that we're just going to see it rise even more, and so I don't think social media is going anywhere. I really don't. I feel like Facebook and Instagram and TikTok are all here to stay and there will definitely be new ones, like threads came as it gone. Yet I'm not really sure Clubhouse came and went. You know there will always be new ones, but I don't think it's going anywhere. It's my whole point there. I feel like I got off track and rambled a little bit and I lost my brain, but it's okay.

Speaker 1: 7:04

So social media is not going anywhere. It should probably still be a part of your plan, but what I think that this all underscores is that it can't be your only plan. It can't be the only thing that you're doing to grow your business, nurture relationships and maintain contact with your audience. It really underscores the importance of having that holistic marketing plan in place and if you know me then you know that I'm talking about content marketing, email marketing and community building. Plus, there's a relationship marketing and I'll touch up just a little bit on that one.

Speaker 1: 7:45

That relationship marketing is networking. It's talking to people one-on-one, having those coffee dates, building relationships, really working with people and growing your network. And that'll always, always, always be in place. But I think it is more important to be building that network and to be building your support system. Even if social media was like every, it was always and it was never going. It's absolutely never going anywhere. But it doesn't necessarily need to be part of everybody's holistic marketing plan. The intentional relationship marketing, I think, is more important for one-to-one service providers, one-to-one coaches. People have that one-to-one model. That's where relationship marketing is really, really important and I know many of the people in my audience have more of a one-to-many model. So courses, group programs, masterminds, memberships, those types of offers, and so relationship marketing is a little bit less important in those offers.

Speaker 1: 8:42

So we're really going to be focusing on the content marketing, email marketing and community building piece in this episode, and that's because email is not as addictive as social media and, same with content, it doesn't tend to be like blogs, podcasts. I'm going to like asterisks beside video content, because it absolutely can be, depending on the type of video content that you're creating. People can absolutely get sucked into the YouTube rabbit hole and get lost for hours watching videos Good quality and or nonsense videos, right. But specifically I would say, blogs and podcasts don't have that same suck-in factor that social media does and that YouTube does, and part of that is because with podcasts specifically, you can be doing other things at the same time and so it's not taking your full energy and full attention.

Speaker 1: 9:49

And for blogs, it's because of how we consume blogs Now. We tend to Google the thing that we're looking for, pull up the top five, maybe 10 posts that look like they can answer a question. We read through those and then we move on to go right, we don't tend to get sucked in and then you read that one blog post and you click through and then all of a sudden, you're reading all of the person's blog posts. We used to do that absolutely, but I don't think we consume blogs the same way anymore and so they don't have that kind of addictive factor that social media where you're like, okay, I'm just gonna go pull up my friend's profile to see whatever picture it was that they posted yesterday and then, all of a sudden, it's three hours later and you're scrolling reels and you're like, oh my gosh, what happened to my day? True story, right.

Speaker 1: 10:35

So the bottom line here is that this means you absolutely 100% need a holistic plan that includes content marketing, includes email marketing and then, of course, has that community building aspect, which is your social media, in my opinion. So let's talk about content first. This is again your blog or podcast video. Content and consistency is gonna be really, really important and I recommend that you are being as consistent as you possibly can, with the highest frequency of content that you can manage. That doesn't impact the quality. So my recommendation is putting out a new piece of content every single week, as long as you can maintain a high value, high quality content and you're not just rushing and putting out a piece of garbage because Jenza has said I have to put something out every week. No, I would much rather you pull back and do every other week or once a month if that's what you need to do, because quality is more important than frequency. Consistency is also more important than frequency, so you need to be consistently putting it out every single month. You need to be consistently putting out high quality content, right? So quality is number one, consistency number two and frequency is number three, and building up to being able to produce something every single week is my recommendation. I also think you should be focusing on nurture content and giving freely.

Speaker 1: 12:07

People have a lot of beef when I say that. I rile feathers up when I say that, but I do not have a paywall in my mind where I say this or I don't say this and I only tell people who are paying me, and I don't have that wall in my head. If I think that something is a valuable piece of information that people could benefit from, then it's gonna come out of my mouth. I'm going to share it on the podcast because I just don't feel like I just don't have the energy or interest in gatekeeping the information in my head, right, and I think that if you're focused on nurturing and really providing good quality, valuable content for the people that you're serving, that you don't need to gatekeep. You also need to remind people that you have offers and you have services and that they can pay you when they're ready, because people are still gonna pay you because they want it in the more organized way. They want to not have to flip between episodes here and there and everywhere. They really want it lined up from A to Z like you would have in your course or your program, right? So those are my philosophies. Your content really should have a focus on nurturing people, providing really, really good quality content so that they feel like they're really getting something from you, and that helps build the relationship, build the trust so that they'll buy from you.

Speaker 1: 13:38

Second piece of the holistic plan is your email marketing, and this is the most important in my mind. If everything else had to go and you only kept one thing, I would highly recommend that you're keeping your weekly emails. Again, same thing quality is number one, consistency is number two and frequency is number three. With emails as well, you wanna be sending out quality emails that are providing people with information that they can use. It's gonna be less informative and more conversational than your content and it may be links to those blog posts or podcast episodes and more bullet point kind of information and summarizing information in your emails, but it's still gonna be quality content that drives people to your long form content. That's my recommendation there, and emails are really, really important because they don't tend to be as addictive as social media and we're not really trying to minimize our email reading. We are still going through our inbox, opening the ones that are most interesting to us and that we think will be the most valuable. And also, if someone starts reading your emails and is getting high value, quality content from them and they feel like your email is making a difference in their life or their business, they're probably gonna keep reading it and continue to come back to it.

Speaker 1: 15:12

So highly recommend that you make sure your emails are openable, like, worthy of being opened. This is another way that you can be nurturing your audience and that you can be creating relationships and building connections with them. It's also a really, really, really, really great way to sell to your audience, with soft pitches included as frequently as you want and then hard pitches less frequently, but you can still include those in there where you're really really trying to make a sale. And the more often that you are reminding people you have things to buy, or sorry that you're selling things for them to buy, the better, because they will know that when they're ready to buy that they can buy from you and that's really important. So some tips for growing your email list making sure that you have a form on your website that it could just be like sign up for your email list, sign up for the newsletter, or it can specifically offer a very specific opt-in, like on my. If you go to MarketScalegrowcom or forward slash, slash now and you scroll all the way to the bottom, there's the holistic marketing strategy freebie. That's there. So that's an example of having a very specific freebie available. I don't think I have like joined my email list anymore, but I definitely did have that previously. Another option is to have a pop-up, and on my website you'll see that there's the case studies that pops up.

Speaker 1: 16:46

Social media is a really great way to grow your email list. Having a link in your bio that directs people to get on your list, creating content that talks about your freebie, so that people are interested in your freebie and then they can sign up for it another great option. And then through your content so when you're putting out long form content, having an opt-in right on that blog post or talking about an opt-in in your podcast is a really great way to continue to grow your email list. So those are some tips for you about that. The last one is community building. We'll talk about social media in a second, but for community building, I do wanna talk about collaborations and working with other people, and whether that is by going live together guest podcast episodes where you're on their show or they're on your show either way around. Same with guest blogging, if that's your preferred route. Getting your name out there into other people's audiences is a really, really great way to build your community and to fill it with like-minded people, especially if those that you're collaborating with have sister niches and their audiences would be ideal for you as well. But not competition but you're not in competition with the other person, right? Also, getting in front of other people's audiences through summits and conferences if you are interested in talking to a larger group, that's another good option.

Speaker 1: 18:13

Okay, social media you already know this, but it can be an uphill battle. Fighting the algorithms can be very, very challenging, especially if you're later hopping on the bandwagon or you're not willing to pay for ads, because that can absolutely help. It's not the only tool that you should be relying on at this point. It should be supplementing your content and supplementing your email marketing plans, and really with the goal of building those relationships, getting into DMs, having one-to-one conversations and becoming more visible Social media. In my opinion, number one goal should be increasing your visibility and driving people to your other places. So driving people to your content, driving people to your email list.

Speaker 1: 19:03

We know that it is addictive and we get sucked in to the scroll when we're quote unquote just looking for content, ideas or posting content or applying to DMs. So being aware of that for yourself and trying to be intentional with your time in social media is really, really important. But also remember that you can pass your social media off to someone else their social media managers that'll do it, va's that can help with it, and so if you feel like you are okay with letting go of the personal touch behind your social media, you can pass it off. But I also know that there's some people that are like, no, that's my baby, I need to keep it. So you don't have to. But just the thought if you find yourself getting sucked in a bit too much and you're ready to hand it off, then definitely suggest doing that so that you can continue to have a social media presence but not get sucked in yourself. So okay, I hope that this was helpful. I hope that it's given you some ideas of where you can go so that you are not impacted by other people reducing their screen time, other people reducing their social media use, because hopefully you're gonna be creating a content plan, hopefully you're gonna be having an email marketing plan where you are creating content, sending out emails every single week, you're nurturing your audience, you're building those relationships off of social media so that your business continues to grow, continues to thrive. And, yeah, have a wonderful weekend. Happy Saturday, and I'll be back in your ear next Saturday with a new strategy session.

Speaker 1: 20:42

["saturdays"]. Thank you for listening to this episode of Market Scale Grow. Every week on Saturdays, we release a new Saturday strategy session, sometimes with amazing guests, and I'm so thankful that you've taken some time out of your busy schedule to make me part of your journey. If you love this podcast, don't forget to share it with your friends and then head to your favorite podcast app to subscribe so that you won't miss next week's episode or any of the upcoming ones. And if you loved it, be sure to leave a review on Apple Podcast so that other people can find this podcast and we can impact teachers and teacher business owners around the world. Thank you so much for listening and I'll be back in your ears next week with another Saturday strategy session. ["saturdays"].