Grow With Soul Ep. 01: A Slow Marketing Manifesto
The first episode of Grow With Soul introduces the key components of slow marketing and the freedom to grow a business and a life that is true to you.In this solo show I talk through the concept of slow marketing and why it's the best way to build a sustainable business, how to simplify the marketing you're currently doing or think you should be doing, how to find your purpose, the power of focusing on your audience and being human, and how and why to be valuable.It's my hope that this episode helps you to stop everything you think you should do and want and focus in on what you really want in your work and life.You can read more about slow marketing in this blog post, and if you're discovering Simple & Season for the first time, you can find out more about me here and find other podcast interviews and guests posts on my press page.
Here's what I talk about in this episode:
my story from in-house marketer to marketing coach
the difference between slow marketing and the other marketing advice you might have read
simplifying what you're doing in your marketing
how to find your purpose
focusing on your audience and embracing your humanity
the importance of value
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Read the episode transcript:
Hello and welcome to this very first episode of Grow with Soul podcast. I’m so glad that you’re here listening with me. This podcast has been weeks and months in the physical making, but probably years in my head of trying to pluck up the guts to do this so I’m really grateful that you’re here with me.
What is Grow With Soul? What is a simple marketing podcast?
I’m never really sure whether to make big fanfare out of moments like this or just quietly slip into the content, but I don’t want this to be like a big episode just about me, so we are going to get onto some really valuable stuff, just introducing slow marketing to you and if you don’t already know me, or you do already know me, I hope that it’s going to be really useful for you to just start rethinking how you approach marketing and start shifting that mindset.
Having said that, I am going to introduce myself: I’m Kayte. It’s spelt with a Y, and sometimes people think that it’s Katie, and in future interviews on this podcast you’ll hear people call me Katie because I tend to just not correct them! But it is Kayte, and I’m also known online as Simple and Season; that’s my blog where I first started out, and then also I’m there on Instagram.
I started out as a marketer in-house working for various companies, I’ve done B2B and B2C services, and I loved it. I loved coming up with ideas, I loved working in the team, but then something happened in the summer of 2016, which was that the company I was working for, a delivery company, went a bit crazy. And what that ended up meaning was that I wasn’t doing a lot of marketing, I was doing a lot of logistics and customer service and I was coming home every day and collapsing and watching crap tv and then going to bed and then doing it all again. I wanted to get some of that creativity back in my life and have a bit more purpose, so I started a blog.
I’d always wanted to start a blog. I’d started various incarnations over the years but none of them actually made it to being published and public. The only thing I can say about why Simple and Season actually made it to being published is that it just came to a point where it was more important that I did it than the fear that was holding me back. That went live in that summer and over the course of the next couple of months, I was meeting people online through the blog, I finally worked out after plugging away on Twitter for a while that Instagram was definitely where my people were, and I started to meet more and more makers and people with small businesses who just had no idea how to market. Because marketing is something that’s always come naturally to me, I couldn’t really understand why they were doing what they were doing, but I started to learn and notice that it wasn’t something that came easy to everybody. At the same time, as I was becoming more and more invested in this online world, I was becoming less and less invested in the ‘real world’ of my job, and it felt like the job was the side hustle and the blog was the real thing.
It all came to a head in March 2017; I went to a marketing conference and the idea had been to really reignite my passion for my job, and to get inspired and ready to start the year again and get right back into it, and really it had the opposite effect. I was in there listening to these talks by huge banks and corporations, and they were talking about essentially spying on people through their online messaging, and ways to get more pennies and pounds out of people, and I was just sat there thinking ‘I don’t want to be a part of this’, I needed a shower after that! I didn’t want to be in that world, I wanted to use what I knew and what I was naturally good at for good rather than evil.
And that’s really where the second half of this story began. A month later, my other half (who is a chef) and I went to Snowdonia, which is a National Park in North Wales, and it’s a mountainous national park, so it’s all mountains and rivers and it goes down to the sea, and it’s just beautiful. We’d been loads of times before but on this occasion, my boyfriend had an interview at a hotel, and he got the job. So, I went back into work after my holiday and said ‘Okay, I’m leaving, I’m moving to the mountains and I’m going to start my own business’.
This was a huge shock to them, to everybody who knew me, to my family; it was never something I’d ever spoken about, I’d never talked to them about my blog and suddenly I’m upping sticks 200 miles away to work on this website that I had. And I didn’t know what I was going to do, I just had a purpose that I wanted to help the people that I’d been meeting online grow businesses that made their life make sense and enabled them to live the life that they wanted to live.
I didn’t know how to do that, but I worked with another coach, Jen Carrington, who you may have heard of, and she helped me through formulating what the business was going to be. As I was starting to set up my business, what I had been planning to do was offer marketing services and just freelance like that, but then I realised as I was setting it up, that your business is your baby, and you don’t want anybody else coming in and doing it for you, you want to do it yourself but you don’t quite know how. So that’s what I knew I wanted to do; help people who knew they wanted to do it all, but they didn’t quite know how, didn’t have the confidence to do it, needed a little bit of accountability; that was where I could provide value.
So fast forward, I’m now a creative business coach, a marketing mentor. I help predominantly women (there are a couple of men, I’m not anti-men), I help them to really find clarity around their business idea, whether they’ve already got a business or it’s just a dream, I help them find clarity around that idea and then really build it, build a marketing strategy, build a business to the point at which they live the life that they want and feel confident and purposeful in the work that they’re doing.
So yeah, that’s the story so far. Well, that’s the whistlestop story so far, I’m sure a lot of other things will come out over the course of this podcast.
But less about me, and more about slow marketing. That’s the kind of marketing that I teach. I’m not sure whether I invented that or not, I’m sure there’s lots of people doing it, but the irony is that it’s not the marketing that’s most visible. Slow marketing isn’t what comes up when you Google a problem or you’re looking for marketing advice because the stuff that comes up there is the loud, shouty marketing. It’s the ‘10x your income, build a 6 figure business, make 1 million dollars in 6 days’ kind of marketing. And if you’re listening to this podcast, I’m assuming that that is not what you want, that is really turning you off and perhaps makes you feel unworthy and that you’re doing everything wrong, because that’s how it makes me feel. I don’t want to grow an empire, I want to grow a business that gives me the life I want to live. I don’t want to feel like because I’m not 10x-ing all the time that I’m somehow less of a business person and I’m not committed. I’m committed, just in a different way.
So slow marketing is really the anti that kind of marketing. And I know it sound oxymoronic because you’re thinking ‘well I don’t want to be slow, I want to be fast, I want things to happen, it’s all been slow so far’, but let’s just think about that for a while. Let’s imagine that over the next two weeks, you doubled your orders, or the number of clients that you got. What does your life look like with double the workload. It’s out of control! Your quality slips, you’re not giving the service that you want to be giving, you’re stressed, you’ve got no time, you’ve not been outside for 5 days, you’re not eating properly, you’re constantly firefighting, you’re not putting things in place so that after those busy two weeks, you’ve still got a business left.
And after this peak of income, what you’re left with is actually a business more broken than it was beforehand. Is that what anyone wants? Although the idea of going viral and having huge growth in your business sounds like something that you want, actually when you think about the reality, it’s not. If you are building a business that isn’t just ‘get rich quick’ and they you’ll leave it and move on to something else, if you have a business that you care about and that you believe in and that comes from your soul and from your heart and that you want to be doing for the rest of your life, or at least a substantial portion of it, then you’ve got to take it slow. It’s got to be sustainable and get rich quick schemes and 10x-ing and doubling orders isn’t sustainable.
How do we take it slow with our marketing when all the advice tells you how to be fast?
I’ve got a few things that I want to talk about, which are really the foundation stones of everything that I teach, that will really set the scene for the episodes to come.
Simplify
I know that’s an umbrella term, but really with that, it means just removing all the excess stuff that you’ve been reading. Really look at what you’re doing and ask yourself why you’re doing it. If you’re doing something in your business because you’ve read or heard that you should and it doesn’t feel right, then just stop doing it. It’s obviously not serving you, you’re obviously not doing it wholeheartedly, so just stop doing it. If there’s anything that doesn’t sit right with you in your business, and steps that have been recommended, if you’ve read a blog post and it says ‘do these 5 things’ but number 4 makes you come out in hives, don’t do it. That’s your right as somebody who’s self-employed and has a business: don’t do things that you don’t want to do and that doesn’t sit right with you as a human being. The whole point of doing this is that you have a nice time doing it and that it fits with your soul.
There’s no right answers with marketing. Some marketers, particularly ones that sell courses and services, want to tell you that their way is the right way to do it, and if you don’t do it like that you’re going to be a failure, and you don’t care about your business. Frankly, that’s a lie. There is no right way to do marketing. The only right way to do it, is the way that’s going to make you do it consistently and sustainably and the way your audience will respond to. If advice doesn’t look like your business, it doesn’t mean that your business is wrong. So if you’re looking at one of those five step formulas and you can’t make it work for your business, that doesn’t mean that you’re wrong and that you need to shift everything. Take from it what is useful and leave what isn’t.
Now that you know how to simplify, I hope that that’s kind of releasing you from that tyranny of what you should be doing. But then what do you do, once you know what you don’t want to do?
The Why
The way that I always start working with my clients and in every blog post I’ve ever written I bang on about this; it’s starting with a strong purpose. Starting with the Why of what you’re doing. Usually we start businesses with a What, because, particularly with product business but also with services, we find a thing that we like and that we’re good at. So whether that means you love photography so you become a photographer, or you are a knitter so you start knitting cushions, you start with the What. But the difference between a brand and a business is the Why. Think about all the businesses that you constantly go back to, that you buy from again and again, that you’re a loyal customer to (and I don’t mean supermarkets). Think about those brands and how they make you feel and why you continue to buy from them. On one level it will be that you like the product and the quality, but on the other hand, you like the way they make you feel, and what buying from that brand tells you about yourself. You buy into what they stand for, you want to be a part of their story.
And that’s what makes the difference, that’s what you should want to be in your business, you want people to want you and what you stand for and how you make them feel, not just the stuff that you do. If people are coming to you for your product and the stuff that you do, they’re not going to be loyal; the minute they find someone doing it cheaper, or more conveniently, they’ll jump ship. You want people to care where it comes from, you want people to buy into you and what you stand for and to come back again and again and you want to build relationships and community with those people because that’s how you start a sustainable business. If you’re always looking for new customers again and again then you’ll always be chasing, whereas if you can build a community of customers, you’ll have customers who get it, and who get you, and will come back and buy from you. That’s sustainable.
Work out what your Why is
A way to do that is an exercise where you ask yourself Why 5 times. So if you say ‘I want to create knitted products’, well, why? Oh, because I love knitting. Why? Oh well, because when I was a kid I used to learn with my Grandma and I loved that her house was full of knitted stuff. Why? Because it made it feel homely and I got a lot of comfort from it. And you see, that’s when you start to get yourself towards a Why, and other people buy into that. People who come to your website and see you talk about the comfort of home will think ‘god if I could just buy one of those cushions I could feel a little bit more comfortable in my home’. So they buy a cushion, and in 6 months time they buy another one, and when you bring out a new product range, they buy from that too, because they want to feel the same way that you did.
That’s another thing that a strong purpose does; it allows you to pivot and transition your business model. Let’s say you’re a web designer, and you’re the best web designer on the internet, and everybody comes to you for your web design, and you’ve designed all the best websites. But then, actually, you want to illustrate children’s books. But nobody’s going to buy your children’s books because you’re a web designer. Why would they buy children’s books from a web designer? Whereas if you started from a Why, which might have been your aesthetic, or you create childlike, wonderful web designs, but actually the Why was all about the childlike wonder, then obviously the children’s book would make sense, why wouldn’t they buy a children’s books from you? Or children’s clothes and toys?
Having that strong Why means that everything that you want to do makes sense, because it stems from that Why and from you, rather than shifting from one What to another that doesn’t make sense.
A purpose is also great for anchoring you. One thing that a lot of people that I work with really struggle with is the fact that they’ve got everything in the whole world to talk about and to do. Whereas a purpose anchors them. It means they’ve got a standard to hold things up to. So, an example I use is if you have an ethical vegan sustainable clothing company and the Daily Mail get in touch, they’re probably not in line with your purpose! So that’s an easy way to say no, and yes, the coverage would be huge but would it be the right coverage? So it’s easier to anchor and make decisions.
Audience
This is the most important thing; we’re going to basically talk about it in every single episode of this podcast ever, because the person you’re serving has to be at the heart of your business; who you’re serving and what they need and what they struggle with and what they want to achieve and what they’re searching for. When you know where they are online and what magazines they read and what podcasts they listen to, whether they prefer Instagram or Twitter and who they follow. When you know that stuff, your marketing plan writes itself, because that first bit about their needs and their goals, that’s the content you’re writing, your blogs, emails, Instagram captions, that’s all your messaging. Then when you know where you are, that’s where you put those messages. And that’s what marketing is. All that fluff on top? That’s all superfluous.
It’s about getting in front of your people where they are with the information that they need to see. And just treating them like a human; actually remembering that it’s very easy for us to sit behind our screens and say ‘people need this’, whereas that’s quite dehumanising. You end up seeing people as this mass and not the individuals that they actually are. We also tend to see people in the content in which we observe them. Going back to the web designer, we see them as just somebody who needs a website and what those goals and challenges are, but then we don’t think of them also as a mother or a student or somebody in a full time job as well; we don’t think of them as a whole rounded person. And actually, the more you can speak to the whole rounded person, the more effective you’ll be. And you’ll get in front of them more, say you’ve got a local business and they go to one cafe, and it’s just amazing; if you can get your flyers in there, even if it’s not related to the cafe at all, you’re still getting in front of your people.
Think about their day to day life and how you can pop up there. If they also work in a job, where do they walk? What do they do when they’re walking? What do they do on the train - do they listen to a podcast or read a magazine, or do they scroll? They say it takes 7 contacts for people to make a purchasing decision, and so a contact is something from seeing you on Instagram, seeing you mentioned by an influencer, hearing your name mentioned on a podcast, opening a magazine and seeing you there, Googling something and a blog post comes up; these are the touchpoints that will build up the trust to buy from you for the first time.
Remember also that if everyone just likes you, no-one’s going to love you, and the whole point of having a purposeful business is that you have an audience who loves you, and they come back again and again and again to buy from you, so just think about that. Is what you’re doing making people love or like you? The only way to really make people love you is to get really specific and talk just to them, because otherwise you’re just going to be generic.
Being human
We all forget that we’re human a lot of the time, especially in marketing. All of this advice that we have online has made us think that it’s this complicated thing and we need funnels and really expensive software in order to do anything basically right, when actually all that marketing is is a human talking to another human at its basis level. Even back in the days of bartering, it was 2 people who wanted the same thing and they had to work out a way between them to get it right, and we’re doing the exact same thing but for some reason we’ve added on algorithms and formulas. All that sales and marketing is is an exchange between two people, and somewhere along the line it’s been complicated, so just bear that in mind, and use your humanity to your advantage. If you’re a small business, you have that human thing down, the big corporates have to pretend to be human because they’re actually just sprawling and they’re hundreds of different humans in there and there’s nobody taking the lead. You’re an actual person, so you can build that personal trust and talk as a human to other humans, and approach it from that perspective. Don’t think that the fact that you’re small will hold you back, because it’s your biggest superpower.
Serving with value
This is a bit contentious and people feel like they don’t want to give everything away, but just do it. Really. I mean you’ve got to do it in a way that works for you but you’ve got to approach things with the point of view of helping people. If what you do isn’t valuable, then people aren’t going to give you their value back.
The most obvious one is that you have a product that is valuable, and people exchange it for money, which is valuable for you, so that’s the value exchange there. So marketing from the very first touchpoint is a constant value exchange. Right at the beginning, you are exchanging something that’s valuable for the attention of the person you’re attracting. That can be a beautiful Instagram picture that makes someone stop for a minute and give you their attention. If you've got a caption that makes them laugh, or think, or speaks to them in some other way, they’ll exchange more attention for it, maybe even a click to your website, and when they get there there’s a really interesting blog post, they’ll exchange more attention. They’ve got all of this value from you so far, so they’ll look at your email opt-in, which is an e-book that speaks to them in a way that makes them realise they’ve been waiting for something like that, and because it’s valuable, they’ll exchange their email address for it. Then when you send them email marketing, and that’s packed full of value, they’ll look forward to it every time it comes, they’ll click all the links, and if you’re promoting a new service, they’ll go over there and sign up and buy it because they’ve had all this value from you, they know you, they love you, they trust you, and they’re going to give you their financial value in return.
So yes, with marketing there’s a lot of upfront ‘free stuff’ that you’re giving, but what you get back is so valuable to you, the trust of the people and that they’re your people, who will advocate for you and tell their friends and colleagues about you; that’s the way you spread organically, sustainably, soulfully
Remember also that people are very selfish; we approach things with ‘what can I get out of this’ - that’s just how the world is, but we need to shift our thinking as marketers to understand that people are approaching us with that mindset. We need to give them something, we need to approach them, not with the point of view of ‘what can I get out of this person?’ but with ‘how can I help this person?’
I hope that even if you’ve never heard of me and you don’t know who I am, that this resonates with you in some way, and that it feels soulful and that you feel released from the idea that marketing has to be something that makes you feel gross, because it doesn’t, and I really hate that there seems to be this perception that marketing is gross, and that if you’re trying to sell something you’re doing somebody else out of something. This whole idea that marketing seems to have become a game and there’s a winner and a loser and there’s tactics to get something out of someone else and ‘haha, we fooled them’. That’s not what it’s about, it’s about two people who want the same thing, they both get it and they’re both happy with it. So strip away everything that doesn’t feel right and do the stuff that does, because that’s the stuff you’re going to do wholeheartedly.