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This lead to no longer wanting to run a business. It didn't fit me anymore. Even contacted a business broker to consider selling the entire thing. And that may have seemed dramatic, but at the time, it made sense. And I've been told that that's pretty relatable. Really did check every box of the problem I was solving. Funny thing is, I was solving the wrong problem. Hello, and welcome to episode 308 of the Kate Show. Guys, today I have just a very personal and transparent topic to share with you. In short, I pivoted in my business recently, as in, you know, like, last fall. So I'm recording this in mid June. So it's been, what, nine months? And last fall, I knew that something had to change in the way my agency delivered ongoing marketing services. And with AI infiltrating everything, I mean, like, everything, every online tool I use now has an AI component. And sometimes it's helpful, sometimes not so helpful. But I looked at that and thought, well, I guess that feels like the next somewhat unnatural step, kind of an evolution to include an AI element in my service offering and turn the whole thing into an app for client convenience. All sounds good, right? And what ensued after implementing these changes led me, quite honestly, to no longer wanting to run a business. It didn't fit me anymore. And when you run a lifestyle business and it doesn't fit you anymore, it just naturally leads to, should I sell the business? What. What. What's going on here? This isn't right. And also the new way of delivering my ongoing marketing services. So email marketing, blogging, it worked really well for a small group of clients and didn't fit that great for everyone else. And I gave it some time. So I thought, well, maybe it's just there's a learning curve. Um, now my clients are wonderful, and they, like so many of my clients, have been with me almost since the beginning of my business. You know, I've got some clients going on eight years right now, and I've been in business for 12, which is wonderful. Like, I. I can't tell you what a huge compliment that is. They have been through so many changes and iterations with me, and they haven't complained. And I think it's because they are true professionals and they understand that businesses must adapt and must change if they want to keep moving forward. So I pivoted for the sake of, like, this is what we need to do. I mean, it's the brave new era of AI, right? But after doing so, I was stressed and depressed, honestly, in a way that I'd never been. In 12 years of running my marketing agency, I even contacted, contacted a business broker to consider selling the entire thing. And that may have seemed dramatic, but at the time it made sense. And I've been told that that's pretty relatable. So I'm going to tell you what happened, why it went wrong, and how I found peace with a surprisingly simple solution. So, in short, my entrepreneurial pivot became a twirl. Let's get into it. All right, so the issue is that my clients and the industry at large want marketing to be easier and faster. And honestly, who doesn't want that? I want that. And with this AI obsession everywhere we look, adding an AI assistant into my membership socialite vault felt like, yes, this is what we're supposed to do. So I spent many months of late nights and we morning hours building and testing and fixing shout out to my team. They've been so patient with me during this time. And after six months, everything was functioning as planned and we were getting positive feedback from the clients who were choosing to use it. The AI tool turned any piece of human written content into my client's brand voice within seconds. It's actually pretty cool, to be honest. I mean, who knows, maybe I'll do something with it again in the future. Plus, I wrapped it in an app so so that my clients could get their marketing done on the go. It really did check every box of the problem I was solving. Funny thing is, I was solving the wrong problem. So whoops on its face, the updates that I made to my membership were working really well. But successfully solving the wrong problem isn't really a win. It's more of a distraction. And it can be a big waste of time and effort, especially if I don't learn from it. So thank God I have learned from it. But things did get a little bit dark first. Like I said, I'd never contemplated selling my business prior to this. I'd never been depressed professionally or so completely burned out. I know that eventually I will sell my business, but I'll be like 60, okay? And I'm only in my mid-30s, so I've got a long ways to go. And I was just shocked by how much I wanted to be done with it all. And I wasn't really sure why. Was it because I now have three kids that are under the age of seven? Was it because I haven't gotten a good night's sleep since May of 2019? Or is it because postpartum hormones from my third pregnancy were just bothering me longer than Usual this time around, who knows, could be all of the above. But my husband, who's also the co founder of my agency, he's able to assess business and business decisions with full far less emotion than I am. And after sitting in on a meeting, he looked at me and said plainly, you have not been happy ever since you added that and I quote AI crap to the vault. And that's when the light bulb turned on. I had been asking God around the clock for wisdom, discernment and direction. And if you guys listened to a couple podcasts episodes ago, I talked about, here's where you can find wisdom and direction for your business. This, that was me like in real time trying to sort out what to do. And not for the first time, God gave me that wisdom through my husband. So of course my husband feels very important. But that's, that's good, that's great. That's why I keep him around. He's got good, um, wisdom really. And my husband Matt is a former remodeling carpenter and he is the current money guy over here at Socialite. And what he said was, the business has become too complicated. You need to treat your clients the way an interior designer treats her clients. They don't show up at a client's home with 50 samples and tell the homeowners to pick one. But that's what the Vault has been asking your clients to do. It's overwhelming. It's too much work. Even with all of the automations and the AI and this was not easy for me to hear, but it made too much sense to ignore. And usually when my husband gives me advice and I ignore it, I just wait for the situation to get worse and then I end up taking his advice and then things get dramatically better. So I've learned like, okay, I hear you, let's explore this. So in short, like, I'm pivoting the business again. And by the time you hear this episode, we are in full post. Pivot to the pivot, which makes it twirl. So I've twirled. I have twirled in my business. I have not just pivoted, I have twirled. It's a little embarrassing, to be honest, to have made so many big changes twice in a 12 month period. But it is also incredibly refreshing because yeah, I made a mistake, I learned from it. And as a result, it has brought one of the most profound simplifications of my business ever. And here is why. We are currently, as of this recording, absorbing our entire Socialite Vault membership back into My agency and restructuring it as a full service offering. So you might be like, what does that mean? Well, think of full service interior design. Okay, now it's full service marketing because the experience and the resources and the tools we've built over the last decade still have so much value. We are able to do this white glove full service authentication offering without costing an arm and a leg. Because that's actually really important to me. Okay. There are plenty of marketing agencies out there who serve the design industry who will deliver great work and they also cost thousands of dollars a month. And that's fine, like no shade on them whatsoever, but that's just not my brand. Like, I produce high end, high quality content for people who are serving the high end residential industry. But I refuse to be the one who's like, now pay me $5,000 this month. That's, that's just not practical. I don't like that. I know that there is. And I have found and I continue to do a way that is so much more affordable with the same end result. So, like, why not do that? That's just the innovator part of me, I guess. So with this simplification and higher level of service, this results in meeting, needing a smaller tech stack. It decreases overhead. It allows us to provide full service marketing to all of you. Because really, I. I've listened to so many clients tell me I am so busy, I can't make a selection for any topics. I can't pick anything. I can't even get back to you with my edits. And that's okay. And when I hear it from one or two clients, I'm like, okay, yeah, you're super busy, I get it. But when I hear it from tons of clients, I'm like, aha. Okay, this is my opportunity to step into this new gap and help you all in a way that makes the most sense for you now. Because the membership fulfilled a need for literally 10 years from 2016 to 2026. It fulfilled a need and has done phenomenally well. It has honestly been one of the things God used to change my life, to change my family's life, and to change the profitability of so many businesses that we've worked with. And it's been wonderful. But that doesn't mean I was meant to keep doing it that way forever. So here is what our process looks like now. The membership going away, the whole service not going away. We no longer are going to offer multiple marketing plans. We'll offer one marketing plan that covers all of your email marketing and Your Google Business Profile listing needs what? Yes, I said that. So many people have asked me for help with their Google Business listing because it is a free tool but so many people do not know how to use it. And so now that's just a standard inclusion in our plan. Blogging is still available. It's an optional add on and I do highly recommend it of course. All right, on a quick shout out, if you're currently a Socialite Vault member, you've already received messaging around this, so please refer to emails from me or reach out to me directly. Okay, so what does this really look like? Well, you're going to be getting two custom professional email newsletters per month for your business. And because email marketing averages 36 to $42 per $1 spent, it's one of the highest ROI marketing channels. And our non salesy emails sell high trust high ticket services because we lean heavily on the relationship side of what you do as a home industry professional. I also want to talk to you about open rates because that's a good way to measure whether your email marketing is effective. The average open rate for the home and garden industry is 21 to 35%. Our clients are considered top performers because they have open rates that average 45% or higher normally due to the email newsletter quality and sending frequency, which is about two to four weeks. Now what I really lean into here is visual storytelling for a visual industry. If you cannot represent your business through the visuals, and if you cannot speak about your business in a way that resonates with your ideal client, marketing is going to feel next to impossible. So what we do is we use a thoughtful combination of visual elements, professional copywriting and your brand voice to inform and delight and inspire your audience to either refer you or hire you themselves. Now the thing is you do not need a large audience or large mailing list. Many clients come to us with a few dozen contacts, that's it. And they still walk away with new projects. The statistical and anecdotal evidence strongly suggests that successful email campaigns don't require large contact lists. Thank goodness. When you first get started, your contact list will probably look like past leads, clients, friends, family and industry colleagues. And that's okay. It is completely okay. No one knows the size of your mailing list except you and us. And we don't care. Okay, so what about Google Business? So we need to lean into this because when you are using your Google Business listing appropriately, meaning your profile is all filled out, hopefully you are requesting and receiving five star reviews from your own happy clients. There's still one more thing that you can do, and that is posting updates. But what do you say? Is it just like a social media post? Like, what is the purpose? Well, here's the thing. We will take the email newsletters that we've already created for you and repurpose them into four Google Business posts a month. This will increase keyword relevance, which means that Google Business posts provide another avenue to associate relevant keywords and services with your business. And that allows search and AI to better understand what you offer. It also creates keyword justifications. When you naturally include your services in your posts, Google will highlight short snippets of your posts directly in the local map pack. So it might say something like their website or their post mentions plantation shutters, blah, blah, blah. This will make your listing stand out against other competitors in your local area. And that's the thing. Your Google Business listing or your Google Business Profile is great for local SEO, and that's what we are focusing on here. When you post once a week, it will also improve the user engagement of your profile because profiles with fresh updates are more likely to convert searchers into actual clients. Higher engagement metrics also tell Google that your profile is a valuable result, and in turn, they will give you more visibility. It's great. This also signals freshness and trust. So if you're posting every week, these consistent updates prove your business is open and properly managed, and that builds immediate credibility. So that is why we want to focus on the Google Business listings and the actual posting of updates for four times a month or essentially every week. One thing that we're always going to include is unlimited marketing consultation and strategy. Because if you're working with us on your marketing, we need to be able to talk about any and every aspect of your marketing. Whether you're trying to figure out if you should run an ad with a local paper, what the ad should say, whether you have SEO concerns and would like us to assess your website. All of that's included because we are here to consult with you on every area of your marketing. Real marketing is an ecosystem, it's not a silo. It should not all be piecemealed. Now, I did mention there was a blog post add on. So in addition to our standard plan, we have an optional add on for a monthly blog post. Our professional writers will choose one of your newsletters every month as the starting point for a blog post. And that blog post will be optimized for search engines and for AI models. It will be written in your brand, voice and formatted. With images directly on your website. And we will use some proprietary AI tools to speed up the process of recycling marketing content like this. And it's important to note that Google does not penalize websites for using AI as a drafting tool. But Google does penalize websites that publish shallow blog post content, which can mean it's really short, it doesn't offer any actual value or any new information. It doesn't sound like a person wrote it, it doesn't feel authentic, it doesn't show genuine authorship. It looks like, like Claude or site or custom GPT or. What am I trying to say? ChatGPT just like regurgitated a bunch of text and then it was copied and pasted as a blog post on your site. No, that is not okay. Google will penalize you for doing that. Google would penalize us for doing that. So that is not what we do. But we do use AI a little bit internally to speed up some of our workflows so that we can keep the cost to our clients at a certain level. Now, with all of this being said, what have I learned? I have learned so much. Number one, clearly I am not immune to Shiny Object syndrome. I did something because everyone else was doing it and not because it was the best fit for my client or my business. And that was humbling to realize, like I should have known better. But number two, it's okay to try things and pivot and then pivot again if it doesn't work. Number three, I have learned to never make decisions based on emotion, like selling my agency. But I need to treat those emotions as warning signs that something should be investigated further. The emotion is never the issue, so got to figure out what the real cause is. And the fourth thing I've learned is that we need to know what our clients need, not what they think they want. And I also need to know what my business needs and not what everyone else is doing around me because I don't even know if it's working for them. To be quite honest, it didn't work out the way I wanted it to for me. And this is when the blinders need to come back on and I just need to focus on being different than everyone around me. Again, that's okay. The fifth thing I learned is that I need to put three times the amount of effort into explaining what I offer in a simple way. Because anybody can be wordy. It takes real effort and real work to explain what you do succinctly and in a way that accurately conveys your message and is appropriately received communication. Is a huge part of marketing because marketing is a relationship. And what is a relationship without good communication? So, all that being said, I'm excited to provide this full service email marketing in a way that feels scalable for my team and provides a custom experience for my clients. So if you're curious about what this looks like, go to katethesocialite.com and check it out for yourself. But I hope that my story of pivoting or twirling rather encourages you to make any necessary changes in your own business, even if that means backtracking a little bit. And as far as I'm concerned, it's all forward motion with a little veering to the left and the right because we're learning from it. So the, the veering just keeps things interesting. All right, guys, thank you so much for listening to my rambling story. And remember, keep your marketing simple and your message clear. And if you're not clear on your marketing, go to katethesocilite.com and book a discovery call with me. See you next time.