In this episode we're talking all about the ECONOMICS of marketing (it should come as no surprise that Meg is a total nerd about this stuff 🤓).
But don't worry, there won't be any supply & demand charts here ... just a conversation about making choices with limited resources.
Here are the five economic principles discussed in relationship to our marketing:
Quote:
The more money we have to spend, the more we spend. The more time we have, the more of it we spend working. When we give ourselves less time, we also need to figure out where to focus the remaining time. It’s not about doing more with less. It’s about doing less with less to achieve more. You need to do the right tasks with your restricted time and have other people do the right tasks with their restricted time. - Clockwork, Mike Michalowicz
Homework:
Next steps:
In this episode we're talking all about the ECONOMICS of marketing (it should come as no surprise that Meg is a total nerd about this stuff 🤓).
But don't worry, there won't be any supply & demand charts here ... just a conversation about making choices with limited resources.
Here are the five economic principles discussed in relationship to our marketing:
Quote:
The more money we have to spend, the more we spend. The more time we have, the more of it we spend working. When we give ourselves less time, we also need to figure out where to focus the remaining time. It’s not about doing more with less. It’s about doing less with less to achieve more. You need to do the right tasks with your restricted time and have other people do the right tasks with their restricted time. - Clockwork, Mike Michalowicz
Homework:
Next steps:
Hey everyone, it's Meg Casebolt from Love At First Search, I am here for day three of the Social Slowdown Challenge. Today we're going to be talking about how to make choices in your marketing.
There seems to be this sort of fallacy in the marketing theory space that all of us have infinite resources, infinite time, infinite money to spend on our marketing, and more is better. And the the economist in me wants to take a bit of time to geek out with you about the fact that that's just not how reality works.
Y'all already know that I'm a major nerd, I would, I love economics, I would have majored in economics if it had better study abroad options, but I didn't. So I just minored in economics. And I love it. And I really like to think about economics as the politics of choice, the study of choices of resources of limited resources, and what we as humans do with that choice. And so today, I'm going to share really briefly, five economic principles, for lack of a better term that I think about a lot when it comes to our marketing. And I want you to think about it in terms of what decisions you are going to make in your marketing. Okay, so the first thing to think about is trade offs.
In economic theory, every decision that we make, and we say yes to, is also something else that we're saying no to, every time one thing increases, another must decrease. So if you are choosing, you know, we're talking about social slowdown here, if you're choosing to go spend time on Facebook, that is time that you are not spending going for a walk around the neighborhood.
If you're staying up late to watch tick tock videos, which I have definitely definitely fallen victim to, I'm not sleeping, I don't sleep as well, right, there are always these trade offs that we are making, in how we're spending our time, our money, our energy, our resources. So that's our first thing to think about, I'm just gonna throw these at you. And then we can kind of consolidate and synthesize some of these ideas. Another economic principle to think about is your opportunity costs. So not just your time, although time is a finite resource, you know, all of us all have 24 hours in any given day, and we can choose how to spend it, yes, there is an opportunity cost of if you're spending time on one thing, you're trading off another, but also the cost of something, isn't just the money that you're spending on it. It's also what you have to give up to get it. The example I always think of with opportunity costs is breastfeeding. I when I was you know, a mom of super young kids with babies, I had a lot of problems with milk supply. And I felt like I had to spend that time doing the pumping and the power pumping and the, the you know, having the baby on the boob all day, every day, right. And it like I didn't have the resources, I didn't have the supply. And I guilted myself for the choice to, to try to, you know that my body couldn't keep up with the demand, it felt so hard. But I also was spending a lot of money on like, breastfeeding pads and extra pumping supplies and all this stuff when like, it really wasn't worth it.
Right? It was just as easy to get the formula and I slept better and my husband could help. And I had this feeling that I had to do something.
And there was also this feeling of well, breastfeeding is free. Right, not thinking about all the different bras and equipment and bags and that kind of stuff. Right? So I want you to think when we're talking there, that was a rough example. But I want you to think when you're thinking about your marketing, what are the things that you think are free? What are the things that you're only thinking of in terms of money, without also thinking about both the time that you're investing into it, and the the mental load of it. You know, I was lucky that even when breastfeeding wasn't going well. It wasn't a huge, huge expense. For me, that was problematic, but it was mentally draining and the guilt that I felt around it and the FOMO that I felt around it. It dragged me in a hard way. So thinking about the opportunity cost of the things that you're investing in.
Chipotle leads me
to number three, which is like there's no such thing as a free lunch.
Breastfeeding, like technically may have been free but also it took a lot of time and resources for me. I like to think about that. That quote from I think it's Richard Serra. He's an artist
He said this in 1973. If something is free, then you're the product. At the time, he was referring to television, the way that, you know, television was creating an audience that could then be sold to advertisers. But in the context of what we're talking about here about marketing, about social media, we think that these tools that these platforms that LinkedIn and tick tock and Twitter and whatever, we think that they're free,
but actually we are being packaged up and sold, and we are producing for those platforms instead of for ourselves. We are doing, it's not a free lunch, right? Like we are doing unpaid labor to create something for Mark Zuckerberg to build his platform, instead of building it for our own businesses. It's not free, it's your time, it's your energy. Just because you're not spending money on it, if you're going with organic social media, doesn't mean that it's not valuable doesn't mean that you're not using up your finite resources.
Our economic principle number four, is the sunk cost fallacy. I think a lot of us and I struggled with this for years, right, I spent years building up a Facebook group and building up a couple 1000 followers on Instagram. And like, I spent a lot of time and energy learning these algorithms learning these systems. And then it was scary to walk away because I had built something that I thought was what I was supposed to be doing. And the sunk cost fallacy is the tendency to follow through on something if you've already invested your resources into it, like your time, your energy, your money, whether or not the current costs outweigh the benefits. So if you, you know, if you have a Facebook group that has, I don't know, 5000 people, and I'm pulling numbers out of the air here, and nobody's buying from you, and nobody's engaging, and the algorithm stopped working, but you're like, but those 5000 people, it took me so long to get them into that group, so I can't walk away from it. That might be a sunk cost. You might want to spend some time, you know, figuring out how to gather those people into a place where you have more control over your way of communicating with those folks. And then my final economic principle before I shift gears is the fact that money is not wealth.
I think that's a quote directly from Adam Smith, right? It's this idea that people are, people are prosperous. If they have access to goods and services, not necessarily money, all the money in the world is not going to
you can still be starving, even if you have all the money in the world if there's no food, right? And as this applies to our marketing, I want you to think about
wealth versus money. You know, what are the goods and services that you have access to? What is the thing that you actually want to get out of your business versus the resources that you're investing into it? Money is not wealth. If you are let's say that you're running like a ton of Facebook ads and you're making a million dollars and then you're reinvesting. $900,000, back into your business. Is that still a wealth generating activity? Yeah, I mean, it is because you still have $100,000, okay, math checks out.
But the point is, money is not wealth. And you need to be thinking a little I don't want to say you need to be I would encourage you to think about what wealth and happiness means to you. Without tying the concept of wealth to how much is your gross profit, your business, your gross revenue and your business? Okay.
So there's my five economic principles just to kind of toss them at you. And the the basic idea here is that, like, our resources are finite. Our time is finite. Our money is finite, our energy is finite. We only have a limited supply of that. And here's your quote for today before we move into our homework, it's from the book clockwork by Mike McCalla wits, he says the more money we have to spend, the more we spend, the more time we have, the more of it we spend working. When we give ourselves less time. We also need to figure out where the folk to focus the remaining time, it's not about doing more with less, you're doing less with less to achieve more. You need to do the right tasks with your restricted time and have other people do the right tasks with their restricted time. There's this idea in marketing that we have unlimited time and, you know, especially entrepreneurs should work 80 hours a week to not have to work 40 hours a week for someone else right? Like all of that is freaking bullshit guys.
It's it's a terrible way. It's a draining way to spend
You're at time and your energy, you have limited time and limited resources and limited money. What can you do to make your marketing work harder for you, instead of you constantly needing to make to deal with these opportunity costs and to continue to invest in your sunk costs.
So your homework for this week?
Number one,
think about what you want to be doing with your time.
I'm gonna really focus on time here, because I've already recorded tomorrow's podcasts that I know we're, we're going somewhere with it. Think about what you want to be doing with your time. We looked at the amount of time, you know, in our prep work that we're spending on these tasks and these activities.
What's the opportunity cost of being on those platforms? What's something else that you could be doing with that time? For me, when I started spending less time on social media, the way that I did it, and we'll talk about this a little bit more. And day five. The way that I did it was I replaced the apps on my phone with the Kindle app. And I made really conscious decisions that when I pick up my phone, I don't open up Instagram, I made the choice, I took that pause, I made the choice. And I opened up Kindle instead. And I read a book instead. Right, and it took me about a year to break that habit of always opening
the social media first and foremost, and respond turning off the notifications and responding to those first and feeling like I needed to be on all the time.
So that's not to say that you need to read books, although you know, if you're reading romance novels, you know that I'll send you recommendations.
But what could you be doing with that time instead, I found that when I started looking at my time intentionally when I started looking at how I wanted to spend my days and my weeks and, and planning out my time more intentionally, I spent more time reading, I spent more time playing piano, I spent more time doing yoga. Yeah, there's still days where I like, lay on the couch.
And scroll through that. Now Reddit is my platform of choice. I'm certainly not perfect, y'all.
But it's not going in to get that, you know, that business dopamine hit from social media anymore. And that's made a huge difference in my mental health. So let me know, you know, share in the group reply to your emails, let us know, what would you be doing? If you spent less time on social media? What's the opportunity cost that you're giving up by spending all this time on your marketing, and if your marketing were more efficient, if you could spend less time on your marketing, whether that's, you know, decreasing your social media, cutting it out, finding alternatives, whatever that looks like for you, if you could, if you could save yourself a half an hour a day even? What do you want to do with that time instead?
Sometimes it's not about quitting things cold turkey, it's about replacing them slowly with something that you prefer. Okay. That was homework. Number one, what do you want to do instead? homework number two, what do you already have? There is this, just gonna keep using the term fallacy, there's this fallacy that we have to always be creating new things. But you might already have, you know, a huge amount of emails that you've written for your email list that you wrote once and never went back into. You might have you know, social media posts that did really well the first time you posted them. And you could use a recycling tool to send them out more than once. So that way, you don't need to create something new all the time. Maybe you have some blog posts or podcast episodes that you will go back and update instead of needing to create something new. So I'm not going to ask you to do like a full, you know, a full on marketing, asset audit, I thought about it, but like it's a lot of work. But just maybe just think about what you already have. What, what wealth, have you already created in your marketing. I'm choosing the word asset intentionally here. Because when you think about what you own, what you've already created, and what intellectual property you can benefit from now,
what do you not need to create from scratch?
Maybe as you think about that, we think about the vision that we created. Yesterday, we're going to talk about time management tomorrow. You know, what, what do you already have? What wealth have you already created?
And as you're going through this, here's the quick pitch. I'll keep it to a minute or less, as you're going through this. If you're thinking to yourself, Wow, I already have a lot of resources, and I want to figure out how to use them better. Or wow, I wish that I could create something once and have it show up in search results for me for a longer amount of time. And maybe that would be a better use of my time and a better opportunity cost
then creating something new for social media all the time. Hi, I'm Meg Casebolt. I run love it for search, where we teach people how to do this. We teach people how to get traffic from Google to their websites, or any most search engines. So not just Google, but also YouTube, podcasting, etc. If that's something that you want to embrace as part of your 2023 marketing, we are starting our attracting activate group program on February 6 of 2023. If you're listening to this in a couple of months, we're going to be running it live twice a year, now we're changing up the release schedule. So we're going to start one group in February one group in September, and actually teach that program live. If you want to find out more about how that program works, you can head over to love it for search.com/webinar. And I will do a full live overview of what you can do during that four month program. Or during your own four month program. Even if you don't join our tracks and activate program, where you can still see the blueprint, you can still see sort of here's what we recommend for month one, month, two, month, three months, four, you can also find all that information at attract and activate.com I write up, you know, here's what we cover in each of these four months of this program. So you can get an idea of how you could do it with us or do it on your own. Right, if this is something where you're like, I just I want to I want to have a plan, but I want to try DIY in it. And then maybe come join us, you know, in September or the next year. That's cool with me too. But you can definitely see our framework and our approach over at attraction, activate cat.com, you can sign up for the webinar, love it for search dot webinar. And I want to encourage you, if you haven't already, you can come on over and sign up for the challenge. It's at social slowdown.com/challenge we send out every day emails to let you know that the when the podcast has gone live, we'll send some show notes so you can sort of skim through it. We're having live conversations every day this week, in our group, and if you if you just want to keep listening along, that's fine too. And just want to let you know that you know you can get a little bit more support, you can get the official scorecard that we shared yesterday.
So definitely come on over to social skillet on.com/challenge and sign up for that, if that sounds good. And I will see you or I'll talk to you. Tomorrow, I will have a conversation with a special guest expert to talk about time management productivity. And like also sort of what capitalism expects from us in when it comes to our productivity and how we can start to remove ourselves from the the correlation between our self worth and our productive output. So it's a really amazing conversation.
Mostly not me talking. I think I looked at the transcript and it was like 73% of our special guests so it won't just be talking for 20 minutes or half an hour in tomorrow's episode. So definitely tune in there and I will talk to you