288: Common questions: for all small business owners who marketing themselves

I get a lot of questions. 

Some are pretty normal like “how many hashtags should I use on Instagram?” or most recently “should I use hashtags at all?” 

But others, way more specific and helpful to individual business owners. I have been doing multiple workshops and 1:1 sessions at the moment, so I thought I would share what I am being asked (and answer them for you). 

If you LOVED this episode, make sure you share this on your Instagram stories and tag us @contentqueenmariah.

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KEY EPISODE TAKEAWAYS 👇

✨ The most asked questions in content marketing 

✨ Should you do video? 

✨ How to know what platforms to show up on 

SHOW RESOURCES 👇

If you like this episode, don't forget to share it to your Instagram stories and tag me⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ @contentqueenmariah⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠!

Other than that, enjoy - chat next week 💕

PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION

This is episode 288, and I'm gonna answer the common questions I get from business owners who market themselves. Welcome to the Content Queen Podcast. I'm your host, Mariah, entrepreneur storyteller, digital nomad, creator of Content Bootcamp, and founder of Content Queen. I'm here to teach you how to share your unique story, create business, and market your business with strategy through the channels that work for you.

Each week, I'll deliver a story to help you connect to a powerful strategy around marketing, business and content creation. I'll also be joined by amazing souls and entrepreneurs. We share their own journey, along with Al Steps help you take your business to a whole new level through amazing storytelling, powerful aligned marketing and content strategy.

Let's do it. Hello everyone. Hello again. This is the third part of the series where we're just talking about, I've spoken about content plans versus content strategy, which I think was a good eye opener. For a lot of you then I've talked about how to stick to your plan. Now, within the live round of Content bootcamp that I do, obviously the power of being live is you can ask any questions that you might have, right?

And then you can get your specific answers. I did a workshop today as I'm recording this, and. Everyone wants their questions answered, right? But what happens is there's a lot of common questions. Um, so I thought is part three, the third part before we go into bootcamp, which is happening on August 25th.

It's the first week, which is a homework week, and then the live call being the following week, which is the 1st of September. And you can join and get any of your questions answered. So if some aren't answered, you can get them answered. But basically the point is to keep you accountable, to build your strategy, because without it.

Your marketing is really going to suffer. Like I can't, I, I've stood on this hill and talked about content strategy for so long. I think it's starting to sink in. But even on the workshop that I did today, a lot of these people didn't have documented co uh, target audiences. They didn't know what they wanted to achieve.

So content strategy is gonna help you map that out. So. You've been following me for a while. You might be listening to me for a while. Join us in the live round of bootcamp. The link is in the show notes. If you have any questions about it, reach out to me. My inbox on social media is always open. I always reply.

You can email me can if you're on my mailing list, you'll get emails about it. You can ask me any questions, but let's go through some of the common questions. Now. There are some high level questions that I get a lot of. How many hashtags should I use? Do hashtags work anymore? How do I make my what's, you know, should I make my Instagram feed look polished?

All those kind of very specific Instagram questions, which again, is just one of the dominant platforms. As a business owner, we always feel like we should be on it. I'm not gonna answer any of those questions. I will if you specifically ask me, but there's a difference between what we think we need to know the answer to and what we actually need to know the answer to.

And how many hashtags do you use? All that stuff is tactics and yes, helpful. So should you use hashtags, you should use keywords because now Instagram is indexed on Google. Uh, should you make your feed look aesthetic depends on your brand, but raw content is really something that's trending at the moment.

All these questions are very technical and a quick Google search or some chat, BT might help you. But the questions that are really gonna help you are the ones very specific to your business. But I'm gonna go through some generic ones today. The first one is, what platform should I focus on? I get this a lot right now.

This is because there are so many platforms where overwhelmed all the things. Of course, I always recommend future proofing your business, so don't just put all your eggs in the social media basket. I've spoken about that for a long time as well, but. You want to be where your audience is and you want to be where you enjoy.

There is no point you showing up on a channel 'cause your audience is there if you don't enjoy it. But I could argue that probably 90% of the population are on the generic platforms. Apart from the very niche view that might be on a very specific platform. So the answer is find where your audience is, find what you like, and then try and branch out a little bit.

I really like the idea of some sort of content that you own, email, blog, podcast. I mean, to a degree. I'm not really sure how, you know, Spotify and Apple Podcast owns my content, but that's okay. It's more like I have all these files, they're on my computer. Um, I could put them anywhere I want in terms of on my website, et cetera.

Um. And then having your social platforms as well. So what platforms should you focus on? That is your answer. Of course. We can look at, oh, tiktoks going bonkers. You should jump on that. Or you know, Instagram is dying, get off Instagram. But every channel works for every person, dependent on their audience, their strategy.

You can make anything work. It's just like we're in this, you know, economy at the moment where yes, there's of course living crisis, but there are people still buying so. You know, it's just what works for some, what work fathers, et cetera. The second one is, what type of content should I create? So this can have two types of answers.

The first one being, you know, if you want to reach more audience on something like Instagram, more video content, because that's going to go out to your, uh, more than just your current following. Uh, if you want to rank or Google or in chat bots. For chat, GBT blogs might be the place for you that's very dependent on your goals.

But then there's a level deeper of like, what type of content should I create? We need to look at the marketing funnel or the marketing cycle. So you wanna create content for brand awareness, people that don't know you, consideration people that you wanna be able to trust with and conversion people you wanna sell to.

So you wanna have a mixture of that content. And we have a whole module in bootcamp on that. So if that is going over your head, let's talk about it. But yeah, there's this true, okay, what are my goals? That will help me decide what type of content that I. Should create, but we wanna have a mixture and we wanna test what works.

Does video work for you? Does blogs and written content work for you? Everyone has a different style. I've done podcasts on this before. I'll put that one in the show notes for you to check out. Then when I had today was a guy was talking about, he's marketed, he's got kind of two different services that he offers and he's struggling to turn the content that he puts out there into paying clients.

But he is only on social media. He doesn't have an email list. So if you are like, well, how do I turn my content into paying clients? You gotta move them down the funnel. If you are just posting social media content and then like, Hey, buy my service or buy my product, and then people don't really know you, it's kind of hard.

So you kind of wanna take them on a journey, right? You wanna create social media content, build their trust, and then you wanna direct them somewhere else. Direct them to your website, direct them to your mailing list. Because people are gonna make their purchasing decisions on those two platforms. But they might not just go to your website to look at your services.

They might go to your website to read something that you've talked about on your website, a blog, or to learn more about you. You might, on your about page, your team or people might wanna join your mailing list because you're giving them something in exchange for their email, and then you can nurture them.

So if you're struggling to turn people into paying clients, do you have. The infrastructure set set up for that. And I know lots of people don't have a mailing list. And that leads into the question, is it worth having a mailing list? Absolutely. It is owned media. Media that you own. You own that space, you pay for it.

Social media, you don't own. That is borrowed channels. Earned media is when you, you know, pr, collaborations, et cetera. And paid media is paid Social media. Paid advertising, anything like that, owned media, your website, your mailing list, you can do it for free. There's plenty of free platforms that you can join.

There shouldn't be an excuse of why we don't have an email list. And if you do have an email list, how are you nurturing them? Are you emailing them too much, not enough? Are you looking at your analytics in your email? Are you paying attention? Are you focusing on it? I know lots of people have a mailing list and aren't engaging their clients, not using it for the maximum potential.

So that's my answer to that question. How often should I be posting, get this question all the time. Again, I can't give you an answer specifically right now of X amount of times you should be posting every day. This social media platform favors this algorithm. No. You wanna create a level of consistency that's gonna work for you so you don't burn out.

Because you are doing your own marketing, but you need to show up enough that you are in people's faces and not in a like rah rah kind of way in like a, here I am. And again, this depends on your goals. I like to use this analogy though, 'cause it does help people give them a little bit of a guide if, and someone says, oh, if I post every day, is that a waste of time?

If you've got the time and the energy and you're getting the results post every day, go by all means. But if you don't. Then look at it like, okay, my gym instructor, gym, PT person, woman, she was amazing, loved her. Um, I said to her, okay, these are my goals. You know, what do you suggest for going and doing the program She gave me, and she said, depends if you wanna grow like muscle, see results, or if you wanna maintain, if you wanna maintain two times per week, if you wanna grow three times.

Per week. So in terms of like social media content, you kind of maybe wanna look at it with that. I don't mean stories though, Instagram stories or Facebook stories. I mean in your feed, direct content out. And then the stories can be a whole other thing. In terms of blogging, email marketing again depends on your goals, but we do wanna create some kind of consistent blogging if we do want to rank for SEO.

I used to do weekly blogs until I got to a point where I didn't need to. If you're doing one a month, it's good, but it depends on your goal. If you wanna grow, you might need to do more email marketing. You could do weekly, but it could be overkill for your audience. But then like once a quarter is not enough.

So there's a balance. Again, looking at your time, your audience, and your goals, it's very important to answer that question. But I've given you a little bit of a, I guess, insight into rough timings and how often. Big one here. How do I create content without it taking all my time? This is a time consuming process, content creation.

I'm not gonna sit here and say, you can create one year of content in one hour. No, you could. It won't be good. Probably be generated by AI and might not get any engagement, and by the time it actually gets posted, you've probably forgotten about it and you don't resonate with it. And there's an energy thing.

Repurposing is huge. So yes, we've got direct repurposing. Like I take this post from Instagram and I can post it to Facebook. Or we do things like, I've got this blog, how can I utilize this blog as much as possible? Or repurposing ideas, concepts. So my framework, content bootcamp framework, use that a lot.

Repurpose that as much as I can. Things that you've, materials you've put together over time. And then having some sort of plan, posting plan will help. Strategy obviously helps 'cause it just, you know what you're doing, but the posting plan really tells you what you are doing and then mapping out your time of when you can get it done.

Did a really good episode on that last week, so I'll link that in the show notes. Having a calendar set up and then practice. The more you do it, the quicker it takes you. And then of course you can use AI to support you. How can AI help you? If you've got a video you've filmed and you need a caption for social media, you can transcribe that video and then get chat GBT to make a caption to support it.

I do that a lot. It's really helpful. So just using the tools that you have and repurposing as much as possible. Also, repurposing old content. We forget what we see every 200 something days, so it's probably quicker now. We probably forget what we seen last week. To be honest. The attention span's definitely changing.

So that's how it can take you less time. But if you have that plan and that strategy does, it makes a massive difference. I was saying this in the workshop today that I ran, how often do we get to 5:00 PM and we've real, we've got a post. And a post that we think is gonna take us five minutes to do, actually takes us an hour by the time we write the caption, find the visual, you know, get everything organized, post it versus.

If I do it in a batch time, you work in flow, you'll get it done a lot quicker. But we think things take us a lot more time 'cause we are doing it individually, one at a time. Whereas when I create content, I do it in series. So today and yesterday is like getting graphics, visuals done. A bit of caption writing today, as of Wednesday, more caption writing on Thursday, finalizing everything Friday.

So, and videos in there. So that's definitely how you can save a lot more time with that. How do I know if my content's working? Now, I did a video on this because someone said to me, oh, my social media, oh, that post worked well or that didn't work well, and I go, okay, what is the metric for that? 'cause a lot of the times it's just views, right?

Like, how many views am I getting, et cetera, rather than, okay, how is my content working based on my overall plan? And the overall, that bird's eye view of my content marketing over the series of years, months, quarters, you know, because I've been posting for since 20 20, 20 19, really consistently, and now I can fully see how it all works together.

I have been able to for a little while, but like your first year, first couple years, even, just like learning things takes a bit of time. So obviously measurement, looking at your data, but not just looking at data from like an individual post, but like trends and themes. So when I'm looking at content for my clients and the measurement, okay, one post might have gotten like low views.

Do I deem that as unsuccessful? No, because it was working towards the overall goal and I could be looking at other things like the overall number of website traffic from social media. Or that post, I remember a client, we, we did a post on her retreat and didn't get a lot of engagement, but had something like 21 website taps.

It's pretty good. And if you just looked at the views and the engagement, you would've deemed that as unsuccessful. So we need to be really mindful of our goals when we are looking at what is working and what isn't. If our goal is reach. And engagement then short. That's the metric that we're, we're gonna be looking at.

But that's sort of how you understand if your content's working or not. But again, if you don't have your goals, your content strategy, it's really hard for you to sit there and say Something's working and it's not working. 'cause it's towards your overall plan. Like I have one client that has a very different goal for social media than another, and maybe she doesn't get as many views and or he, whoever doesn't get as many views or likes as the other.

But their goal is their goal, so it's working. You know, another one is very interesting because if you are new to the game, you might be like, am I behind? Is it too late to grow online? Absolutely not. Yeah. There's people, some people that can post one video to TikTok, more a creator than a business owner.

But they could all, all, all of a sudden like, you know, start racking up all these views because they need to the platform, they've got the energy. People are attracted to them 'cause they're like here, they're fresh. So, no, it's absolutely not. Um, definitely isn't even with ai. Now I think we're start, we're going to eventually like detach from AI content a little bit.

And really look for the human connection. And now, you know, social media platforms, you have to label AI content legally, YouTube, and not monetizing any AI generated content. So actually it's still a really great time if you wanna show up more human. So that's my answer to that question. And what tools make it easier for me to create content?

Obviously there is AI that makes our lives easier. There's no question to that. So anything like chat, GPT, any ai, like there's so many out there, it's quite overwhelming. It's like when I first started my business, you know what website provider, what this, what that? It's the same. It's just finding the tools that work for you, playing around testing it, project management.

But things that really help me are just simple things like project management tools. I use clickup. I bloody love it. It's my second brain. I use Airtable as a content plan, content calendar. They're things that really help me. And then of course you've got your content platforms like your Canvas, your cap cuts, although their terms and conditions are a little bit interesting.

Uh, your edits, which is a new editing app from Instagram, there's loads of tools. I think the biggest advice for tools. That make life easier is something that you, is it overwhelming for you and you are prepared to spend a bit of time learning it? One of my clients recently moved to a project management tool, and when you do the immediate need for organization organized people, it's to just spend hours in there and move everything over from whatever you were using in the past, spreadsheets, et cetera.

But you've gotta do it bit by bit and learn it with time and don't expect yourself to know it all. Something can be really overwhelming when you first look at it. Even things like Canva, there's so much in Canva, but just like having a little bit of time to learn all the things and then finding what you like.

And yeah, there's new tools out there you can test. But there's so much out there and you really finding what you like, you like and what resonates with you is really important. That's what's gonna make your life easier, to be honest, rather than like trying all the tools and jumping on every trend. Do I have to do video?

You know what I'm gonna say? Depends on your goals. But also video is one of those interesting things on social media especially, is we know video is able to. Create more connection. People seeing people, especially with ai. Do you have to be face to camera talking? No. Could you do voiceover and other ways of doing video?

Absolutely. But really why you on this platform will determine what, if you need to do video, if you need to grow or you want to grow your audience to a bigger capacity, people that don't know you, et cetera, then yeah, video is really great for that. But again, it's finding your style of video. It's finding what's gonna work for you and your business.

I have a client I've mentioned before, B-roll type footage with texts over the top works so great. When she shows up it, it's okay, but nowhere near as good. So like every audience connects with things differently depending on if they're time poor, et cetera. Like does a busy parent have two minutes or one minute and a half, even one minute to sit there and watch a video?

Yeah, maybe not text on a screen, even if it is animated and moving with some, you know, imagery in the background. Some nice music probably is better for them. So if you are really hesitant to do video, is it, I think it's like good to check in. Is it like a mindset thing? Like a why I think is the question.

And then what can you do to either make it easy for you? Sometimes it's just a practice and a confidence thing and. Then yeah. Again, is it in alignment with my goals? Can other people be in my video? Like what does that look like? And the last question is, should I just hire someone to do it all for me?

And whilst of course, I would sit here and be like, yes, it makes your life easier. Not always. I think you should learn. I think knowledge is power. I think creating your own content strategy that you can work with. If you do get a VA or you do hire a marketer or whatever down the track, it's knowledge is power.

It's always good to know what you want. Um, and then it, of course, it gets to a degree when you, if you do outsource, it is great to trust that person as well and trust that they know what they're doing. Um, and, you know, the kind of dropping control, micromanagement, et cetera. But I think it's really powerful to learn it first and then before you make a decision and do bits and pieces yourself, because you will learn it and you'll learn what works, and you'll learn more about your audience.

And even if, say you did outsource it and that person still might need a video from you or something, you're still grounded. You're still understand what your audience wants. You're still connected, you're still relatable. So it could be a goal for you to outsource, but I think learning to love it first or even just enjoy it or.

Become some kind of expert in your audience is really important before you kind of shift that over. And it depends on your business. I mean, I'm talking to small business owners, entrepreneurs, but if you are, you know, starting something a little bit bigger where it's not just about you outsourcing, it does make it a little bit easier.

So they're all the answers to my questions. If you do have any, pop them in. If you're on Spotify, you can pop 'em in the comments. You can ask me on Instagram, whatever that looks like, because. You know, I know you have lots of questions, but if you want my time. In a call, join Bootcamp. As I said, it kicks off August 25th.

If you're listening to this after the date, you can still join and join Bootcamp. We do a live round that you, you will be invited to a live round regardless of when you buy it. It just depends on when that live round is. I do wanna open up more live rounds if I get more interest. So if you do and you reach out, we can make it work and somehow if, if you're listening to settle later date.

But be a content queen or king, and remember that developing your strategy and story develops your business. Thank you so much for joining me today. Please don't forget to share this with all your business and entrepreneurial friends. You can do this by adding it to your Insta Stories and tagging me at Content Queen Mariah, or just tell 'em about it.

If you do rate reveal on whatever platform you on, it does help me get this podcast out there. More amazing guests, more content. All the things benefit for you. It's all for you guys. Follow me on Instagram or TikTok and let me know if there's any topics you want me to talk about in the future. I'm all ears, but I will talk to you very soon.

We have a guest episode next week and I think you're gonna love it. It's really cool. I'll see you then. Bye. 

PodcastMariah MacInnesmarketing, marketing advice, how to be authentic online, business ownerComment