the mental rollercoaster of content creation (and how to make low views hurt less)

This is the year we all  stop tying our self-worth to our post performance. Making content on social media is vulnerable and it takes guts! I'm guessing you didn't start your business to become a content creator, but now that you're here, let's talk about how to deal with the mental game of social media.

In this episode you'll hear about:

- The marketing mindset it takes to protect your mental health while on the content hamster wheel.

- How to handle low video views, especially when you feel like you've poured your heart out.

- Controlling your inner narrative when posts don't perform the way you thought they would.

- Truths about the Instagram algorithm that'll help you understand why some reels take off and other's don't and how to set your future posts up to get more reach.

- Steps to take after a post flops, and the attitude to approach it with.

Do Strategic Stories; The 5 Day Challenge!

➡️ https://magicmarketingmachine.com/strategic-stories

Jenna Harding shares honest insights and emotional truths from her own journey on stage and in marketing, and gives both strategy and mindset reframes to help you stop beating yourself up when your content doesn’t perform the way you hoped.

This is a must-listen for anyone using Instagram or social media to grow a business, market a service, or build trust with an audience.

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Music by Jordan Wood

Hosted by Jenna Harding (Warriner), Creator of Magic Marketing Machine

Transcript

You said:

Jenna Harding (00:00)
I was just talking to a comedian this week and I was coaching them on their social media and their content. And one of the things they said really struck me. They were like, I'm having a hard time with this concept of opening my heart and putting my work and my art out there and risking it not performing well.

that really resonated with me. I think all of us feel this at some point to some extent, right? you it looks more like I don't wanna be embarrassed if this post doesn't do well. Maybe it's like every time I talk about something that's actually important, I get the lowest amount of views. Maybe one of these sentences sort of resonates. To them, it was like.

their standup tells their personal life story. It talks about things that are emotionally raw. And if they put that content up online and it doesn't get a bazillion views, it makes them go, I mean, was this worth it? It's almost like a smack in the heart.

you and that's how you've been feeling, I wanna offer a few different ways that we can look at this. Some strategic and analytical and others emotional.

We've found ourselves in a world where we have this amazing asset, social media, the freest way to get your business in front of a bazillion people, the freest way to send someone to your website or to your sales page or to your email list or whatever they have to do to take that next step to buy from you.

It's this huge asset and opportunity.

And in order to take advantage of it, we need to expose ourselves and our vulnerability to the masses, which, let's be clear, is not something that is normal. It's not something that most humans are gonna need to go through. But right now, if you want to excel on Instagram or any social media platform,

posting Canva graphics just isn't gonna cut it.

That's not the content marketing that's going to take off. So you started this business. You thought, I want to help people. I want to do this thing that I'm good at. I want to make a bunch of money. And now you are a public figure. Now you are a spokesperson. And now you're a freaking actor. And that's never what you thought that you were getting yourself into.

so we can resent it, we can find alternatives and not be on social media, or you can figure out a way to make it work. And part of that means shielding up, having your boundaries, energetic and literal boundaries, following a strategy so that you know what you're doing, and doing the personal work that it takes to be in front of an audience like this.

I get that I'm lucky because I grew up on stage and I came to marketing second. I was used to being in front of people. I've been on stage since I was nine years old in Alice in Wonderland and then I thought that I was gonna be an actor. So I spent my entire life doing it, right? I went to an arts high school out of town. I went to college for musical theater and I did the whole actor thing, commercial actor. You might've caught me selling you a Philly cheesesteak and a Tim Hortons commercial.

I've been on stage for more hours than I can count, hosting cabarets and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The point is I'm used to being in front of people. I got to do all of this work before I came to marketing. And I totally understand that that is...

most people's lived experience, but because of that, I have the skills in my pocket to also teach you how to do it and help you feel comfortable sharing yourself with the world.

So firstly, from a strategic point of view, when a post doesn't take off, it doesn't do what you wanted it to do, how you expected it to perform.

In that moment, which is frustrating, I get it, the first instinct is gonna be like annoyance and frustration, but you get to control what you make that mean. You can make that post not performing well mean that you stink and your hair looked stupid so nobody watched it, which is not true, but it's always what we think.

that the algorithm hates you, which is not true and not gonna be helpful.

you get to decide what it means. And I wish that I could crawl into your brain and I could decide what it means, because I wouldn't tell you that it means that the post was no good or that your point was moot or that you looked silly.

I would look at it and think, well, if the story you're telling in this post is important to you, let's put a different hook on it and try that. Let's add more engagement attractors and try that. Engagement attractors is a strategy that I teach my clients to help you get more.

engagement on your posts and take it into your own hands. So let's add, let's get more engagement on this. Let's change the hook. Let's shorten it. Let's fix the format. Not assume you are broken or your idea wasn't good. Let's fix the format.

Let's fix the carburetor, you know? there's a missing nut or bolt in this machine. And what if it's just a tiny little bolt that needs to be tightened? We don't need to throw away the entire product.

part of being in front of people and showing ourselves to people is we need to be so strong in what we believe about ourselves and the message that we believe. If you look at some of the, like who do I follow? I follow this one girl. she's so famous. What's her name?

Man, I can't think of it. But anyone, any big people that you follow, they have opinions and they are sure in their opinions and they know who they are. Because if they didn't, when a million people tell them in the comment sections what they think of them and what they think about who they are, they would have an existential crisis, right? So we need to be so sure in who we are, so sure in our message.

and not make a post not performing or a negative comment mean anything about us except for that post, that piece of content probably needed to be optimized a little differently, something needed to be said a little differently, it needed a different hook, not that everything that matters to us is trash. You know I'm saying?

I was away this weekend teaching at an expo, and so I was invited to come speech. had two classes that I had to teach, and different from theater, when you teach at a conference, the lights are up, right? So in theater, you can't see the audience, you can't look at their eyes, you can't see how they're responding, You just hear them laugh, and you hear them.

and you know and it's easy to like kind of pretend they're not even there sometimes but at a conference you've got fluorescent lights shining down on you and the audience it's not their responsibility to be active listeners they're just sitting taking everything in which means usually you're looking at a bunch of blank stares and like resting angry faces because it's not their responsibility to change their faces

That's why I always like to lock eyes with someone who's smiling and like, great, I'm gonna look at you the whole time because I feel so much better and safer looking at these smiling people.

so I needed to adapt to that as a performer. I needed to look out at people who are giving me nothing on their face and put up my wall, my shield, and remember how whatever I'm seeing on their face, what do I wanna make it mean? Do I wanna make it mean that I am boring?

that they already know everything that I'm teaching, that their wife dragged them here, and that this is not interesting, and that my examples are stupid and my jokes aren't funny? Do I wanna make their blank face mean that? Or do I wanna decide that their blank face means they're listening, they're internalizing, they're thinking, they're taking what they need and leaving what they don't?

We have to do so much work controlling our inner narrative when we have eyes on us like that. I need to look at my slides and go, Jenna, you made these slides. You believe these slides. The strategy you're teaching is based on your experience. Stand strong in what you are teaching.

At one point this weekend, this always happens when you open up the floor for people to raise their hands. Someone will inevitably raise their hands and they don't have a question. They actually just have a comment or they wanna start teaching and that happened. If you're listening, girl, I don't care. I just wanna teach about it. I just wanna talk about it for a second. But this girl raised her hand and was like, can I answer that last guy's question? And to be honest, she understood his question more than I did. I think that I didn't quite understand what he was asking.

But so she started answering him and I actually didn't agree with what she said. I didn't think what she was giving was good advice for the room and I addressed it. Old Jenna would not have done that. I would have been so concerned. I would have thought, she's probably smarter than me and if she's brave enough to speak up then she probably knows what she's talking about. But I was like, yeah, I mean, that's one way to do it. That's not how I would do it. Like I fully.

just had to stand in my belief in myself and my belief in my material and contradict her. It was so uncomfortable. I didn't like it, but I did survive it.

Another way to look at this super constructively is not every post you publish needs to take off. Not everyone needs to. And one of the benefits of my growth nurture sales strategy that I teach my clients in magic marketing machine is we know ⁓

that nurture content typically doesn't perform the same way growth content does, and that's okay. So when you post a long story time that goes a little bit deeper and builds your authority and your brand authority, that's not the stuff that goes viral. That is not the stuff that your followers are sharing with their group chat.

It's not the stuff the algorithm is gonna pick up and take wide. It's not gonna make the evening news and that's not its job. The job of your nurture content is to connect with people to show that you know what you're talking about, to build authority and make them feel safe buying from you. So when you use the growth nurture sales strategy, judge each post the same way.

Every post has a different job and you judge it based on what its job was.

It's unrealistic to hope that everything you put up on Instagram gets the most views of the week. It doesn't make sense math wise. And also it's just not how the platform works.

I want to remind you of one more truth. One more truth. Why is it that you are telling yourself that when you post something and it doesn't get a ton of views, some anonymous jerk face is going to your page and looking at all the views you got on your Reels this week and going, that one only got.

however many, that one didn't get as many as the other ones. Look how bad this one reel they posted are. And then you're running and deleting it and archiving it because you think because this one person that doesn't exist is looking at your content and pointing out the ones that didn't do as well as the other ones by their standards. Why are you telling yourself that? Why are any of us telling ourselves that? No one is looking at your posts and judging the ones that didn't perform well. Actually,

The ones that didn't perform well are the least likely to get in front of someone for them to even judge them, all right? So we're gonna stop deleting our posts, we're gonna stop archiving them, we're gonna stop worrying, we're gonna stop making posts that don't perform, means something about us and who we are and how good we are at our jobs.

If you wanna challenge yourself to start showing up with more authenticity and a little bit more raw, right? Connecting to your audience without feeling like everything needs to be perfect and edited and filtered and smoothed. best way to start is by using Instagram stories. Because when we look at Instagram stories, we expect them to be

a lot more casual than a reel or a carousel. expect them to be in the moment. If you see graphics in your Instagram stories, I can almost promise you, you just skip by them. think about the ones you watch. It's someone who just picked up their phone because they had something important in that moment to say to you. They pick it up.

They put it down, it's not filtered, it's not like perfectly edited and high quality, it's really casual, which really builds trust. Stories are the perfect place to build trust with your hottest leads because stories are also being shown to the people who typically interact with you the most and who you're like direct messaging with, right? So you probably have hot leads watching your Instagram stories right now and they're thinking about buying and we wanna

build that trust, nurture that trust, and then give them an invitation to choose now to work with you. And if you wanna do all of that in one week, you're gonna wanna get strategic stories, the five day challenge.

I will send you a little video, you can watch a little video every single day. It's gonna take you less than 10 minutes to watch the prompt and film your video. the goal of Strategic Stories was to take away.

all of the strife of having to think of what to post and give you a nice balanced week of stories where you're like nurturing and getting more engagement and interacting with people and then selling. But a lot of people do this challenge and then sell a ton at the end of the week, which is also really fun. So that's a quick little challenge. It costs practically nothing. You can find it below this episode and I would encourage you, if you do it, DM me and we can chat about it and I'll watch your stories.

thank you to everyone who has been leaving comments and reviews and ratings on this show. I was not seeing the Apple reviews and there was a whole bunch sitting there and some of you left positive feedback and constructive feedback. I appreciate all of it and I actually didn't see it until now. Also, if you're listening to this show on Apple, make sure

the reviews, okay? Because turns out I accidentally published this show twice on Apple and some people listen on one and some people listen on the other and are subscribed to it and I need to delete one because it was an administrative error. So if you're listening to this on Apple and you can't see any reviews, search shiny new clients and follow the right show because the one you're listening to is about to be deleted and I don't wanna lose you, all right? That's all for today, I'll see you in the next one.