Consistent Doesn't Mean Constant: The Real Equation Behind Sustainable Marketing

Most marketing advice about consistency is missing half the equation.

In this episode, Ruthie breaks down the success equation she uses with herself and every client: time + consistency + intensity, multiplied by belief. 

She explains why most founders end up burned out, not because they're working too hard, but because their consistency and intensity are out of balance with their actual capacity.

You'll hear why shiny object syndrome leads to too many half-built channels, what the real trade-off is between intensity and timeline, and how to build a marketing strategy around what you can actually sustain, not what the internet says you should be doing.

If marketing has been feeling heavy and you're not sure why, this one's for you.

Join the next Marketing Mixer, a virtual networking event for mom founders. 

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@ruthie.sterrett
@theconsistencycorner

Transcript

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Ruthie Sterrett (00:01.09)

Welcome back to the Consistency Corner. And if you're new here, welcome for the first time. I'm glad to have you here. I'm Ruthie, marketing strategist and founder of the Consistency Corner and the marketing director that you need in your corner to help lighten the mental load of marketing.

Most marketing advice you hear about consistency is wrong. And I'm telling you this as somebody who has the word consistency in their brand name and like literally built my business on helping you be consistent with marketing. But what I mean is the post every day, show up consistently, just keep going. Yeah, that sounds great, but, and cool and like, yeah, that can work. But what we're not saying,

or you're not hearing enough is that consistent doesn't have to mean constant. And volume without strategy is the fastest path to burnout. So today I want to talk about the actual equation behind sustainable marketing, why most founders are getting that math wrong, and what consistency looks like when it's healthy versus when it's a burnout machine.

Ruthie Sterrett (01:18.584)

So let me give you a frame that I come back to over and over and over again, and this is called the success equation. So any result you are looking for, the equation, the formula is time plus consistency plus intensity multiplied by belief. So ultimately, belief is the multiplier. So if we don't believe it's gonna work, anything multiplied by zero is zero, and so then it's not gonna work. But let's say we believe the thing is gonna work.

So we've got time, how much time are we letting pass for the thing to work? Consistency, are we being consistent? And intensity, how intense are we being? What is the volume of the output? All four of those things are in your control, sort of, sort of. Time isn't always in your control, but the amount of time something will take, you can at least plan for.

Consistency and intensity are the two levers though that while we can control, we have to make sure they balance each other out. And this is where most marketing advice starts to fall apart. It tells you to be more consistent without ever talking about intensity, or it tells you to be more intense, do more, post more, be more places without honoring the fact that you don't have the capacity to do that consistently.

Here's another way to think about this success equation is if you're a couch potato and you decide I'm gonna train for a marathon. Okay, great. I have 12 weeks until the marathon. All right, that's my time button. I have 12 weeks. And I decide I'm gonna go and run 10 miles a day, every single day. And then I'm run 11 and then I'm gonna run 12 until, you I'm gonna go from 10 to 26 over the next 12 weeks.

My math's probably not math in here, but you get the point. But I start with 10. Well, that's too intense, and I hurt myself because I'm not a runner and I haven't trained for this. So I cannot be consistent with that intensity. But the flip side is if I say, okay, well, I can consistently walk around the block every day. I can totally do that. But that's never gonna get me ready to run 26 miles. It's not intense enough.

Ruthie Sterrett (03:46.73)

So you can't just walk around the block and say, well, I was consistent. Because again, we're not being intense enough to get the result you want, which is to be able to run 26 miles. Marathon training only works when the consistency and the intensity work together, not one without the other. And any marketing activity that we are doing, posting, emailing,

running ads, networking, whatever it may be, is the same. So here's what I see happen with mom founders specifically, is it's not just that they're doing too much. Like that's surface diagnosis. Yeah, we're probably all doing too much, because there's a lot to do, right? But the real pattern is shiny object syndrome and comparisonitis. Somebody told you to start a podcast. Somebody told you you should be on TikTok.

Somebody told you to write a newsletter. Somebody said, sub stack is where it's at. Somebody said, no, no, no, you should run ads. And so now you're trying to do all of it or feeling bad that you're not. And what you are doing now, you're probably not doing very well because you're doing too much. And that's the burnout cycle. Too many half built channels. None of them getting the intensity that they need to actually work.

and you not being able to be consistent because you're trying to do too much, you're trying to be too intense. And then you wonder why nothing's working because consistency without intensity at the right level is just maintenance. It's not growth. So when we say that thing isn't working, is it that it's not working at all? Like it's not getting you any results or the results zero?

or are the results just not what you wanted? Like it didn't move fast enough. Because if it's like not working at all and you literally have zero results, okay, then maybe that's not the right strategy. But if it's getting you some results, it's moving the needle, it's headed in the right direction, it just hasn't achieved the goal yet, okay, which of those levers, time, consistency, intensity, can we increase to get the results that we actually want?

Ruthie Sterrett (06:15.352)

But it's why we have to start with capacity, not channels, when we're talking about marketing strategy. Because the capacity is going to tell us the intensity that we can sustain consistently. I'm gonna say that again, because that was a mouthful. Capacity is going to inform the intensity that we can actually sustain consistently.

If your capacity is lower, you can still get results, but the time component stretches. Lower intensity, longer timeline. That's the trade, there's no cheating it. So if you can't be consistent at the volume you need to hit your goals in the timeline you want, you have two real options. You either accept the longer timeline at lower intensity,

Or you open up your capacity so that you can get more intense and be consistent with that intensity by either outsourcing, getting help with other things, not the thing that you're trying to do, or handing off the thing that you're trying to do. There's no third option where you just push harder and don't burn out. That's the lie. And as high achievers, we regularly think, I can do that, I can do that.

I can do that, but we can't do all the things. We cannot do all the things all the time. Literally my little friend Claude, my AI agent even told me as I was doing a exercise with it on my own capacity, Claude was like, you're trying to do three people's jobs at once and you wonder why you're exhausted.

because again, the third option, pushing harder, trying to do more, is what leads to burnout.

Ruthie Sterrett (08:14.222)

So let me walk you through how I think about this with my own marketing strategy. When I map out my marketing strategy and do this for clients too, I look at top of funnel, middle of funnel, and bottom of funnel separately. For each phase of that customer journey, I'm picking primary channels, the non-negotiables that go on the calendar and get prioritized. The channels where I am showing up, publishing content, no matter what.

So I'm picking one primary for each phase of the funnel. And there might be overlap, right? And then the secondary channels, the ones that I can do the best I can, but if they fall off, that's okay. They're great, I wanna do them, they will get me results, but they're secondary. They're not non-negotiables. And then I know that if they do fall off because of my capacity,

that they might impact the results, but I'm okay with that because I've planned for it. So my non-negotiables every single week are my Friday newsletter, social media, and the podcast. The podcast and the newsletter are both heavy nurture pieces. Neither one of those for me is really top of funnel or bottom of funnel. They're heavy nurture. And then social media,

While I show up on social media every single week, the volume flexes. And social media can be used for top of funnel, middle of funnel, and bottom of funnel, depending upon the type of content. And whether or not I can achieve one, two, or all three of those jobs depends on the amount of volume content that I'm putting out there. So I might be inconsistent with networking. I might be inconsistent with asking for referrals.

I might be inconsistent with certain social media platforms because when I say I prioritize social media, I prioritize one platform, Instagram. LinkedIn is a secondary for me. TikTok and threads, tertiary. Like we're just putting those over here. We don't even care about those. If I show up, I show up. It's mostly for research.

Ruthie Sterrett (10:32.641)

But then there's other channels in the mix such as ads, such as SEO, such as funnels that are working on autopilot. And because I have often been inconsistent with top of funnel work, that's why I decided to layer in an ad funnel. And so that's a gap that I'm filling. I'm paying, I'm spending money.

on something I don't have the capacity to consistently produce organically. That doesn't mean that I'm failing. It doesn't mean that I'm not good at marketing. It's that I'm being honest about my own capacity and using money to buy what I can't spend in time. And those are the questions that I ask my clients. We talk about whether or not ads make sense for you and this, how fast do you wanna go?

What capacity do you have? What's your budget? Like all of those things are pieces of that conversation. And there's no right answer because everybody's business is different. Everybody's capacity is different. What stage you're in, your existing audience, all of those things play into that conversation. But capacity is such an important piece. And so this is where I want to name something that a lot of agencies don't talk about.

when they offer done for you marketing. They say they're gonna take this thing off your plate. They're gonna do this for you. And when it comes to social media, particularly, most agencies are gonna sell you a package of posts, right? 20 Instagram posts a month, four emails a month, whatever the deliverable is, there's a count. That alone is not a strategy. That's a content factory.

So what we do at the corner office is different. We build the strategy, meaning what channels are we gonna use and how intense do we need to be in those channels based upon bandwidth, your capacity, your budget, and your business goals. And the retainer hours, because we build a custom retainer for every single client, the retainer hours will flex up or down.

Ruthie Sterrett (12:51.662)

based upon what we build for you and what your budget is. And then the retainer hours from month to month can be allocated accordingly so that we're fitting the projects and the deliverables into the bandwidth that you actually have. So if you have a launch coming up and you like, if our client has a launch coming up and we need to put more hours into project work, such as launch planning or creating a new lead magnet,

or funnel or sales page, whatever, we might shift the content volume for that month so we have the hours to get the project done. Because real consistency isn't 20 posts a month no matter what. Real consistency is showing up at the right intensity for the season you're in and honoring your capacity.

So if you're listening to this and you're like, okay, I have been white-knuckling my marketing and wondering why I can't keep up and why I'm feeling burnout and why all of this feels so heavy and complicated, your strategy was probably built without real capacity in mind. You may have built it based upon the shoulds from the internet. And the corner office could be the strategic marketing partner that will flex with your life, not against it.

and we'll give you a team in your corner to make those decisions and then actually execute on what we've decided together is the priority. So if you're starting to think about getting support, I'd love to have a conversation with you. The link is in the show notes to book a call and we can talk about what consistency could actually look like in your business with the right support when the intensity in the plan has been customized just for you.

Thanks so much for being here, my friend. I hope to see you in the next episode and know that I am already in your corner and cheering you on and I'll see you again soon.