Where community strategy
meets intentionality.

I am going to pivot this over to Carolyn. She is going to share with us mindful marketing for your community. We’re going to talk a little bit about her amazing experience leading her own community, which I’m a member of. Today is really about how you share your message mindfully.

So, Carolyn, I’ll let you tell me the rest. 

Intro. I am a social marketing nerd. I started my company’s evil acts enterprises in 2015. I love business owners. I love communities. That is where my heart is. I grew up with two parents who owned their businesses. So, that was the only logical path forward. Right? I love the flexibility, bringing people together, and all that stuff; Bad Ex Enterprise is a social marketing company. And my focus is organic growth.

That is mindful. Like mental health, positive social media use because we know how detrimental social media and the internet can be to how our brains function on a functional level, right? Not even to talk about emotional damage and everything else. So, with social marketing and your community, you want your community, no matter what, to be a healthy space, right?

You want people to go there, whether you’re for wellness, whether you’re focused on something else, or whatever. You want them to go to your community to be supported in some way, and you want them to go there with healthy behaviors. You don’t wish to necessarily. I’m making vast assumptions about everybody here, but you probably don’t want the angry basement dwellers. These keyboard warriors are online all day, very upset about everything.

That’s not healthy in any community, right? Even for them, they should be doing other things to support their mental health. How do you mindfully send the message and spread the word about your community in a way that’s still really supportive of your mental health and your potential members?

You don’t want to encourage people to be constantly plugged in. So super brief, obviously. I could talk about this forever because I love communities. These are the three things that you should be doing to develop a really mindful strategy, whether it’s for your community or for your brand in general, and they are going to be fairly universal.

1. So first, Deb touched on this a little bit. You have to know who your members are. You have to know who your ideal client is and do your homework before you start doing any community-building planning for marketing. Any of that, you have to be honest with yourself.

Sometimes, being realistic about who you’re working with is a little bit of a soul journey. So, I’ve worked with many different clients across many other industries for marketing strategy. I’ve had several instances where a client is wholly convinced that they will work with this type of person.

When, in actuality, their products and services are aligned with somebody very different, and they don’t want to admit that or make changes, right? They’re like, Nope, this is how I want to talk about my brand. This is what I want to do. I’m like, then you will consistently attract the wrong person. So, it’s harder for some people to let go of preconceived notions about who needs them and who needs their community.

As Deb will tell you, Who will engage and who will go through it is the best way to do that. She’s very skilled at doing this to ask people you have to do homework interviews, potential clients, interview potential members and know what the transformation is that your community will offer.

Think backward about it, okay? Who would want to undergo that transformation or engage in that sort of growth? Find those types of people and ask them, and if you keep getting a negative response or if they’re like, oh yeah, that I wouldn’t really need that, adjust the sample, adjust the audience, and keep going until you find your ideal client.

Before you do any marketing work, you have to know the people because that’s what the community is native to. We don’t care about the content. It’s about the people, and if the right people aren’t there, it’s going to be no fun and a problem. So, the second tip I have for you today for mindful marketing of your community is to plan content that provides value, like such a marketing buzz phrase.

SoNot provides value, and this is where it gets very magical for your community. That model—that behavior that you want within your community. So we’ll use my community as kind of a case for this. I’m a social media marketing nerd. Most of my social media presence concerns different marketing strategies and tactics.

I’m always asking questions, asking people to weigh in, sending me messages, and telling me a story about that specific topic that I’m sharing. When people get into my community, which is called Bax Axe Biz Club, they, it’s not optional. They have to do that to participate.

They’ve already been primed to know, like, Hey, Carolyn’s going to listen. If she asks for feedback about something or wants to hear her biggest struggle, she will weigh in right away. One of the first things you do when you join my community is you’re asked what your current biggest marketing struggle is.

And when you answer that, I’m immediately sharing a link to one of my YouTube videos or a resource I know about. I’m replying to that. I want the first interaction that people have within the community to be a reward for the behavior. I’ve already modeled on social media, right? Replying to me, telling me what’s going on in their lives, and being vulnerable, we’ve modeled on social media as soon as they’re in the community, and they interact with the behavior.

I want them to get a reward and have a solution right away. It doesn’t always work, but sometimes, most of the time, it does, and they then know, right? Okay. So they’ve been commenting and replying. Maybe we’ve had a few messages. I’m like, Hey, you should join the business club. It’s free. It’s neat. And there are a lot of resources for you there.

They join. They have a struggle that they share. They immediately get that little benefit. Right, right away. The third piece, if you’re figuring out, you know, I have my content figured out. I know who my ideal client is. I know what’s going to happen within the community. So, what’s that external marketing piece?

Where should I show up? When your ideal client is defined, it’s easier to determine where they are online and where to show up. I suggest picking platforms that have a longer lifespan for your content. Community is not something that happens in a day or two days.

It takes a very long time to build. If you commit to building a community, you commit to the long haul. Right? So, make a few Facebook posts about it and a few LinkedIn posts. The lifespan of a social media post is so small. It’s like a day or two. Suppose you make a YouTube video that is search engine optimized because YouTube is owned by Google, with a vibrant title, keyword, and heavy description. In that case, it solves a problem you will solve even more profoundly in your community.

Your content will constantly attract those people over a much longer lifespan. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t or don’t need an Instagram or Facebook presence. Just be aware and very intentional about where you’re putting your most time, effort, and resources. 

Blogs, YouTube, and even Pinterest because it is a search engine for that content. The three tips I have are a lot more life than just posting on Instagram or tweeting—a good foundation for being intentional with your community marketing.

For social media marketing, you often hear it’s all about creating content that could be like a full-time job unless you have a VA that does all that or a social media marketer that does that for you. Gary V says post a hundred times a day, or if you hear other people that their thing is if you don’t have anything valuable to say, don’t say anything, what do you think from a social media marketing perspective? Do we like where we are, and what should we be doing? 

1. So, always think analytically, right?

A social media platform wants people in it long and wants people to stay on it longer. That’s unhealthy. It’s not good for your brain. It’s not good for your people’s brains. How can you use it to support you and your end user? For me and most of my clients, the strategy that I suggest is to figure out a frequency that you can be consistent with.

So consistently doesn’t mean constant, consistent means. I can have one excellent post per week that’s rich with information. That’s just a fantastic post. I’m going to do it. If you’re like, I could do it daily. That cadence feels good to me. Go for it, but keep it in mind.

It’s for. The long haul and more and more I’m seeing, you know, Instagram, Facebook, and even with the rise of TikTok, video is the content that gets the most love and is pushed out the most. So, I’m like, if I’m making videos, I’m putting them on YouTube because the most powerful search engine backs it. So, starting this year’s beginning, I’ve focused on that as a platform for my business.

It’s incredible the level of attraction I’ve had for, you know, it’s not massive. I’m just starting, but how do videos perform? Well, weeks after they’re posted, the reach that they get is like two hours of performance versus an Instagram post—two hours versus hundreds of hours of performance.

To me, you know, my time is my investment. Sure, I could hire people to create content for me, but I have to interact with that content. No one is me. No one knows my business as well as I do. So I’m still going to have to go in. If I have a VA posting for me every single day, I’m still going to have to check in every day.

No, thank you. Know what you want and the amount of time you want to spend on social media, like physically spending on it. Even if you schedule posts in advance, you’d need to see if there was a comment check-in on those things. Know how long you want to spend. Be really real with it. One thing I do is I grid out 24 boxes on a piece of paper, and then I color in, okay, you know, representing the 24 hours in a day.

I need to spend eight hours sleeping, two to three hours eating, and this long to hang out with my kids and knit. And then you work in and say, okay, my working hours are these. How much of that time do I want to spend with clients? How much do I want to spend on social media?

I view it more from the human perspective. Sure, posting it a hundred times a day probably would result in a lot of followers, but those followers are going to demand constant attention from you, and that’s not what you want. So, I hope that answers the question. 

Thank you so much, Carolyn. What excellent tips! There are so many people creating content just for creating content’s sake instead of why content is essential, the purpose of it, and the thought behind it

So a lot of people don’t take that time. 

You end up working against yourself, too. Yeah. When you create content just to create content, you’re wasting your own time and people’s time. They won’t view you as important or high-value because you’re just putting garbage out whole.

But yeah, I’ll end on that.