How to Scale Your Brand Without Social Media
Big Impact Moves to Consider
It may surprise many of you to hear that I spend a lot of time thinking about how to break free from the algorithm. It’s on my mind pretty often especially with each major social media platform outage that seems to be happening with increasing frequency. The question that I spend time thinking about is the following “What would happen to my business if social media went away?” Or, “How would I grow my business without social media?”
I think about how I would position my brand, how would people find me and what strategies I should focus on if I had an algorithm free business. You may have noticed me bringing up this issue/question with increasing frequency this year.
Why?
I’m starting to lose my enthusiasm and interest in social media. It’s a huge time suck and I just want to spend less time engaging on social media. Instead, I’m focused on the activities that actual move the needle in my business and create the results that I’m focusing on.
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What Results Am I Focused On?
Helping people find the strategies and monetization streams that will help build stable business with areas of focus that corporate DEI initiatives often can’t or won’t work on.
Helping grow the missions of the wonderful people that I’m of service to-I want to help them change the world and make it a better place. Seriously.
Make money.
It’s that simple.
A couple of weeks ago I talked about “Asking for what you want.” Thoughtfully getting in front of the people that you would like to: learn from you, become a part of your community and hopefully buy from you is why you have to be so intentional about marketing your brand, mission, services and goods.
With that in mind, I’m sharing how I’ve focused on growing my brands with a minimal focus on social media.
7 Tips for Impactful Business Growth
Breaking Up with Social
If you’ve been thinking about where to best allocate your time and energy as you build your business, I thought it would be helpful to share some tips and strategies to support your marketing strategies.
Tip #1-You’re Not Alone
Connect with other online business owners building with minimal social media focus. This is how I discovered the Off the Grid Podcast hosted and produced by Amelia Hruby. There’s also the often forgotten fact that for thousands of years business grew without social media. You’re not a weirdo for focusing on the strategies that do the following:
Attract the people you would like to serve to your brand.
Make sales
Balance out where you’re finding your audience
Part of why I’ve begun to focus so much on diversifying my traffic and audience away from social media is because I’ve seen the writing on the wall.
Social media platforms are huge time sucks for me and incredibly distracting.
They can be very stressful to be on with a lot of negative energy.
These platforms stand in the way of my personal goal-to move people into my personal brand eco-system.
Having clarity about why I’m shifting my audience building strategy has made it so much easier to say “no” to activities that don’t align with what I’m working on.
Tip # 2 Grow Your Email List
This is a non-negotiable task that you have to focus on. There are some perspectives that I would like to share.
List growth typically will be slow in the beginning and that’s ok. As you learn the process, you will begin to grow your list faster.
The longer you focus on building your list the more you’ll experience its value.
Don’t overthink the tool that you’ll use to grow your list. I’ve used different tools at different points in my online brand building journey. Currently, I’m using two different tools:
Flodesk-It’s an email service provider that I use to build landing pages to workshops and other resources that I’ve built out. It’s also the way I like to keep in touch with members of my list that allows me to create segments within my list.
If you sign up for Flodesk with my affiliate link you will get 50% off for your first year.
Substack-The Creators Getting Paid newsletter is one of the ways that I grow my list. It’s a great way to share helpful content with almost 1500 subscribers at one time.
SMS Messaging-Text to opt-in services are a fantastic way to build your list when so many people consume content via their phones. There are several platforms to help you do this-just Google them and do your research to find a tool that works best for your budget and level of tech adoption.
Tip #3 Market with Impact in Mind
Create Long-Lasting Evergreen Impact
There are a couple of ways to do this but social media could never do that unless you go viral for something. And you’re very likely to attract people who aren’t a good fit for the work that you’re doing during a viral moment. Have you ever. thought about what actions will create the biggest long-term impact and be a good fit for the effort that you used to attract people to the work that you’ve been doing. A huge way to do this is to create your own content.
Build and grow a podcast
Create content on a website
Design a branded “Television Show” and host it on your own platform. Why not on YouTube? Because you don’t own the platform.
You could also create a mix of these marketing techniques on your platform.
4 Additional Tips Below (Plus a Bonus Tip)
I have 4 more tips to help you get started with diversifying your marketing and brand reach. The final one is huge and I share some tips on how to make it happen.