← The Mindful Marketing Podcast (Formerly Known As The Savvy Social Podcast)
The Mindful Marketing Podcast (Formerly Known As The Savvy Social Podcast)
Creating Your 2025 Marketing Plan
00:27:30
Feeling overwhelmed by all the marketing “must-dos” out there? Or wondering how to create a plan that actually feels manageable and works for you? In this episode, I’m walking you through the six core elements of a successful 2025 marketing...
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- [00:01]
Andrea Jones
It's 2025 and that means we're going to be Talking all about 2025 marketing in this right here podcast episode. Welcome to the Mindful Marketing Podcast. I'm your host, Andrea Jones, and it is my honor to help you scroll less, connect more, and grow together. Before we get into this episode though, a quick word from this episode's sponsor. I've recorded over 300 podcast episodes. Yeah, it's a lot of podcast episodes and I've tried a lot of different virtual recording studios, but my favorite has been Riverside. Riverside makes their virtual recording studio look so profess. My guests love it. Plus I also low key love recording YouTube videos in here as well because it's so easy to use. My team also loves Riverside because it spits out separate audio video tracks, making editing easy. Breezy Lemon squeezy. And if you want a little magic, they've got this tool called Magic Clips which uses AI to take your video and turn it into perfect social media sized videos. I'm talking vertical videos for TikTok and Instagram, Facebook reels, all the places you can post these videos with the captions included. And you don't have to hunt and search for that perfect clip. So if you want to try this out for yourself, click the link that goes with this video or if you're listening to the audio on the podcast, it's in the show notes. Okay, click that Link, use the 15% off coupon code. It's DREA D R E A and try Riverside for yourself. Thank you, Riverside. All right, 2025, I talked in my predictions episode about a lot of things changing in marketing this year, and we as business owners, as leaders need to change with it. Some of the things I talked about in that episode are things like reputation being the cornerstone of our marketing, how the algorithms are changing, and how community is the backbone of everything that we do. Well, in this episode, I'm going to talk more about how we can implement all of those things. Six different elements of your marketing ecosystem. These elements are so important to creating a cohesive strategy that works for you and with your preferences, especially for those of us who are personal brands. Meaning our face is the face that people see when they connect with our brand. It's the face that's on our social media accounts, it's the face that's on our website. It's our personality driving the business. And whether you're doing this for yourself or your clients, these six elements will help create a cohesive strategy. So this works no matter if you're piloting, podcasting, writing emails, and yes, posting to social media. Now the first step in this EcoSystem is your POV statement. Your POV statement, this is something that we worked on last year in our program, which is a statement that is your guiding light for your marketing. It has a bunch of different elements to it, but the core idea behind a POV statement, it is, it's your unique perspective. A lot of times in branding guides or marketing guides, this is called your usp, your unique selling point. But my POV statement combines the usp, the unique selling point, with your own client avatar. So we've heard that line before. Client avatar or ideal client. Ideal customer avatar. These are, you know, essentially personality profiles of the type of people who purchase from you. So POV statement marries those two ideas and combines your own value system into that. And I think this is so important that all business owners should have personality driven brands or otherwise. The POV statement will be your guiding light when it comes to creating content. And I see time and time again where brands and businesses, something happens in the world and they're not quite sure what to say, they're not quite sure how to respond. And usually it's because they don't have a POV statement. They don't have a guideline in their marketing playbook to help them understand how to move forward with that response to something that happens. And so the POV statement is a key element into your marketing. Now, when we think about the POV statement as well, this isn't something that you just create once and you set it and forget it. It is something that's a living, breathing document. So I'll use my own brand as an example in this episode. So my POV statement includes things like my family history. You know, a lot of the work that I do comes from my own history, my own personal background. I talk a lot about that in my work. My POV statement includes my values. So things like social media boundaries or social media mindfulness. My POV statement includes the values of the people that I work with, so their family situation. A lot of my business owners that I work with are busy. They're busy with life things, right? Like aging parents, young children, they're going back to school, they have a full time job. And so we're trying to run our business while life is happening. And marketing is a part of that. And so when I teach marketing, I always make sure to teach it from the perspective of that lens because that's the lens that helps me and that's the lens that helps my clients as well. So those are the things that you put into your POV statement when it comes to building your marketing plan. Second element of your marketing plan is your offers. And I think a lot of times we dismiss the inherent value of our offers when it comes to marketing because our offer should actually create its own internal marketing ecosystem. So here's what I mean by that. Um, one of the clients that I worked with, one on one last year, had an amazing internal marketing system. Her, she actually did not have a lot of Instagram followers. Um, and she came to me because she didn't have a lot of Instagram followers. But as for after digging into her work, referrals were her best source of business. Why? Because her offer was irresistible and her offer was so good that other people would go, oh, you need help with this, you got to go see so and so, right? And so I think sometimes we dismiss the inherent value of our offer and it can be very challenging to market it it because it doesn't have its own internal marketing. And I saw this when I ran my agency the best. My agency thrived off of referrals because me and my team would come in, we would do the work and people would talk about it because it provided a lot of value to them. And so not only do you have to have this shiny, you know, polished marketing playbook on the outside, like your actual offer on the inside has to be good. Okay? So your POV statement and your offer. The third thing, and this is a really big thing when it comes to your marketing plan, is having a signature content piece. This is kind of the third and the fourth thing because I'll also talk about supporting content in this plan as well. So signature content, supporting content. Now I'll say this as well. I'm going to spend a lot of time diving into signature content and supporting content in a three hour workshop that I'm teaching inside the Mindful Marketing Lab. If you're in the lab, we're going to go in this in depth. If you're not in the lab, you can purchase a ticket to this workshop by going to onlinedrea.com playbook. I will have the option for you to purchase the workshop there whether you want to join live or watch the replay. Okay. But I'm going to give you the down and dirty version for the podcast. Okay? So signature content is the content you don't miss. Okay? It is your ride or die content. It is the content that you're known for. It's a content that people share the most It's a content that is the easiest for you to deliver. I was talking with a substack person and they were really considering TikTok. Okay. Long form content writer. I think their content would actually perform really well, like as a talking head on TikTok. But after going through a consulting call with them, I realized they do not like recording talking head videos. In fact, it would take them hours and hours and hours just to get through one video with all the stops and starts with the nerves and all of that. And so after digging through all of that, I was like, why are we even, like, fiddling around with TikTok at all? Well, it's because someone else told them that they, quote, unquote, should be on TikTok. And I think when we think about marketing itself, sometimes we take all the shoulds and then we try to do that plan and it doesn't work because someone else told us we should be doing it. And it's not coming from an inspired place. And we can sense that when you're creating the content. Like, we can sense that this content isn't coming from an inspired place. It's kind of feels like this content, maybe you're forcing it a little bit, you know? And so when I think of signature content, your preferences come first, specifically how you deliver your expertise. So again, I'll use my brand as an example. I am a talker. If y'all. If y'all didn't pick up on that little tidbit. I like to talk. This is how I process information. It's actually the best way that I can explain, explain things. Most often it is my comfortable spot, especially if I'm basically talking to myself in a room like I do when I record this podcast. This is where I shine. Okay? So when I'm creating content, I tend to lean towards talking content, audio and video specifically. So when I think about my signature content piece, for me, that is the podcast. We produce an audio stream for all the podcasting apps. We take the video, put it on YouTube. Even Spotify now has the video on there as well. So for me, if I were to create a signature content piece, it would be talking. If I were to start over again today and I had to start over from scratch, I would actually probably choose maybe even a live stream. And I would love to do a live stream if, like, my time frees up a little bit with the kiddos. Live streaming was so fun for me when I did it back before kids, and I would happily do it again because it is my happy place is so off the cuff talking is my jam. Right? If you told me, andrea, you need to start a substack newsletter and produce two newsletters a week on that platform with a bunch of exclusive written content, I could do it. I'm not saying I couldn't do it. I could do it, but I wouldn't be happy doing it. It's not my happy place. It'd be like pulling teeth. It would take me a lot longer to produce that content. And so while that is a great strategy, there's nothing wrong with that strategy. It's not the strategy for me. And so when you think about your signature content, your preferences matter here. And if you're working with a team, I just have to say the preferences of the leader, the face, the personality behind the brand, definitely matters. So if we're talking about, you know, a course creator, and let's say you're like the virtual assistant or you're the social media manager for a course creator, you need to think about your client and their preference. Are they a talk? Are they a writer? If we're developing a marketing plan for them in 2025, we want to think about what's the fastest and easiest way for them to create that signature content piece. I'll give another example of this. One of my past clients, Kara Lowenthal, was a great example of this. She also is a talker, but she is very intentional about the words that she choses and chooses. And she did a ton of research on her podcast and she would do podcast episodes. Now, I'll say this, she's not really like a huge video person. She's doing it more now, which is great. I love that for her. But when I worked with her, she didn't want to be on video. She didn't really care about video. And so we dismissed it. We test a few things, but it wasn't really a huge focus because her signature content was her podcast. Her podcast was the thing that when people found her, when they discovered her, they, like, went back and listened to all the back catalog. Okay. Her podcast was the thing people were texting to their besties going, did you listen to this episode? It was amazing. The thing about her podcast as well is that because her work was so conceptual, a lot of times it didn't work well being truncated for social media. You kind of needed the full experience in order to fully understand her work and her perspective on the world. So podcasting worked for her. Okay, I'll give another example of signature content. One of my clients, Linda Talafaro, also Is a talker and would do live streams for her. So Linda works best with bit of interaction. She doesn't want to feel like she's talking to nobody. She wants to have interaction. She had a weekly live show where she would interact with the people who were listening. We had topics that we came up with every single week. We would still follow the topic, but she would have more of a conversation with her audience. That was her preferred method of delivery. Show up live and present. That's signature content. Supporting content is the content that supports the signature content. Okay, So I think oftentimes we try to put an even playing field for all of our marketing, right? We're like, social media is equally important to email. It's equally important to the podcast. It's equally important to YouTube. And then this is where we get burned out because we're trying to put equal levels of importance on all of the various elements in our marketing, when really there should be a couple that are signature and a couple that are supporting. So I mentioned, for me, my signature content is my podcast. My number one supporting content is not social media. It's actually my email. And this realization early last year is part of the reason why I rebranded away from savvy social everything towards mindful marketing everything. Because I realized then that social media, while it plays a huge role in my marketing ecosystem, it is not the signature content piece for me. It is a supporting role. And it plays a very big supporting role. You know, like supporting best actress, supporting best actor. Uh, the movie would not be the same without those roles, but they're not the lead. Okay? So the lead for me is my podcast. And then my number one supporter to that is my email marketing. That is where I have my largest community of my Internet friends. All right. In the supporting content category as well, for me are things like social media. I consider my YouTube channel to be supporting content, Though it's a little bit on hiatus right now because of the, you know, whole having kids thing. Two kids in three years. Hello, busy life life. It will revamp once I get more time. But when I analyze where to put my time and I realize the podcast was it, and I still take podcast is still recorded in video form, still put those videos on YouTube. I don't create custom YouTube videos at this moment because I realize it plays a supporting role in my marketing strategy. So hopefully, like, the difference between signature content and supporting content is a little bit of a relief to you as you're thinking about where to spend your time. So back to my client, Cara, her signature Content, the podcast, supporting content, social media, email marketing, even guesting on podcasts like those are her supporting content pieces. Okay, so supporting content is important. It plays a crucial role in your marketing ecosystem. But there's a hierarchy to all of this. Now, I gotta also talk about attraction strategies because I think sometimes we think the content is the attraction strategy. Sometimes. I'll say it again, sometimes we think the content is the attraction strategy. But that is all not always the case. It's not always the case. In fact, more often than not, it isn't the case. There are a few exceptions and I think actually describing the exceptions will help you understand the attraction strategy. So there's exceptions to this. YouTube is a great example of an exception. And it's why I love YouTube because it's both. It can be all the things signature, supporting and attracting. Okay? By publishing content on that platform, you can check off signature content, supporting content and attraction strategy in your marketing plan, in your marketing playbook. Now that is because YouTube is search first, social second. So people go on the platform looking for the things that they are looking for, then your content could show up, then they could consume your content, come into your marketing ecosystem, sign up for something, head down the rabbit hole and away they go. Right? YouTube is great for that. Platforms that aren't great for that. Inherently, things like posting to your Facebook page, that is not inherently an attraction strategy. Facebook is not actively taking page content like native photos and text based posts and pushing them out to people who don't follow. Maybe for big pages, but for small businesses, like a lot of folks listening here, that's not an attraction strategy. Okay, that's maybe supporting content used to be attraction strategy. It's not an attraction strategy anymore. Posting to Facebook reels is an attraction strategy. Because currently, at this moment, here, now in today, January 2025, Facebook is prioritizing the discovery of reels. So if you post to Facebook reels, Facebook is going to take that content and try to show it to people who do not follow you. So therefore attracting new people into your ecosystem. Okay, so when we think about attraction strategies, it's intentionally designed to find new people. And posting content doesn't do that. And this is why podcasting, while it's a great signature content piece for me, it is not also typically an attraction strategy for me. For my brand, I like to do podcast guesting and I like speaking in summits. Okay, Again, leaning in my preferences, give me an off the cuff Q and A. I could do that all day, any day. And so for me, being on A podcast guessing in summits. This is my biggest way of meeting new people, essentially, and having them know about me and my work. That is my attraction strategy. For other people, this may be networking on social media. Maybe you're connecting with people on LinkedIn like my client, Linda Teleferro. She connects with people on LinkedIn. That's her attraction strategy. That's how she brings new people into her world. For Cara, it was more of the podcast guessing piece. She also did a ton of media. I'm talking being on television shows, being featured in magazines, things like that. That was her attraction strategy. The attraction strategy has to be also lean into your strengths. But you have to understand that attraction strategies aren't always signature or supporting content pieces. Sometimes it can be. Again, YouTube is a great example of this, but sometimes it's not. Okay, so when you, when you're analyzing, if your marketing is actually working for you, I want you to ask yourself, do you have, you know, your attraction strategy? Do you have your signature supporting content? And then, you know, the other things we talked about. Is your POV clear? And are your offers helping with that attraction strategy as well? Okay, I said there are six things. So the last piece of this marketing playbook is analyzing your metrics. I know, I know people don't like the metrics word. Okay, the, the metrics word can be a little bit scary. But it's so, so important when you're thinking about your marketing playbook. Because I wrote this in a newsletter the other day. Sometimes it feels like we're throwing spaghetti at the wall and we're like completely out of noodles. And we're like, well, now what? That feeling. That feeling comes from not looking at your spaghetti strewn noodle y wall and going, okay, I saw those noodles stuck, but the rest of them didn't. So what's so different about those noodles? Like, you really have to analyze these things. And I know it's not necessarily a fun thing, but we really need to take a look. So here's my personal example on this. If y'all been following me for a while, you know I'm a huge RuPaul's Drag Race fan. Love RuPaul's Drag Race. Love it. Watch all the seasons. Spin off seasons, All Star seasons, international seasons. I just love it. I love the show. However, y'all don't really care. That came from the data. Like, I love talking about it. I love using it as an example, but it's not something that a lot of my community is a super fan of. Like, I am. Okay. You may like reality TV shows, but not necessarily RuPaul's Drag Race. So I may use like generic reality TV show example, but I'm not going to go deep into the RuPaul Drag Race references. Okay? That doesn't really work. And that came from looking at my metrics. I'm not saying I'm not sharing my love of RuPaul's Drag Race. I'm just saying I'm not going to use, you know, like deep cut inside jokes because it doesn't land. Right? And so I think that comes from looking at the metrics. What does work is when I talk about my family, when I talk about family values, when I talk about my family history, right? So I honestly often share those stories over my hobbies and things like that because they're more resonant. And that came from looking at my metrics. One of my top posts from 2024 was a post I shared on threads about my family history. I talk about how my, you know, great great grandmother was a slave. My grandmother worked on a pig farm. My mom, you know, owned her own business, was basically a not, say, home mom, sorry, single mom. And then there's me. I own my business and I'm like creating new generational opportunities for my kids. Right? I shared that on threads and it got shared, reshared like a bunch of times. I made the same video on TikTok. It's like one of my most watched TikTok videos. I was just sharing something in the spur of a moment where I was like, I think this will work. And it did. I infused my story into that and it really connected with people. And so I'm not saying I'm, I'm, you know, not sharing everything about my life. I don't, I don't share everything about my life online, but I notice the things that really connect with people and I go, hmm, maybe I should share more personal stories. And this ties into the running thread, into all of this. And the thing that we're really focusing on in the Mindful marketing lab in 2025, which is this idea of experimentation and playfulness in your marketing. I think that this is going to be huge for marketers, especially those of us with personal brands or personality driven brands, is having moments of experimentation and play. And big brands do this too. Okay. If you look at their marketing, it's not all serious. In fact, a lot of the big brands have a lot of fun. The one I point to right now is the Beyond Meat brand on Threads. And I'm just, I Said that out loud. And then I was like, is that the brand? I think it's beyond me on threads. The little cow. Their social media team is having a wild time, just having a silly old time on the platform. And it's working. People are liking it, following it, sharing it. And this goes back to one of my predictions in the predictions episode, which is social media now back at the top of the funnel. Okay. It's not about directly converting every single person who looks at a social media post. In fact, that's just not going to happen. So we need to set that thought aside. So if that's not going to happen, how then can we connect with people and connect with them in a way that's sticky and that's memorable and oftentimes that means being very, very human. And in order to do that, we need to experiment and, I don't know, have a little fun in this marketing thing. Right? I want you to think about your experience scrolling through social media today or yesterday or recently. Okay? You're on your app of choice, you're scrolling. What content makes you stop and watch, what content makes you want to like and comment and what content makes you want to share. And the share worthy content is the content that wins because we're getting our community to be our attraction strategy for us. Okay. And when we think about the share worthy content, it's oftentimes not like a sale or a promotional offer. Okay, it can be, but it's more often than not. Not that. Okay, I have a little running thread with some of my spicy book friends where we just share like little memes and funny, funny reels with each other. And it's fun, right? We each have a little, little blasty blast. I feel like that level of fun needs to be infused into our marketing. And I can't give you the formula for this. That's why experimentation is key. And it's one of the things we're really heavily leaning into in the mindful marketing lab coming up this year is how to build your own formulas based on this marketing playbook outline, based on your preferences, based on what you know about how the algorithm works, based on things like your signature content, your supporting content, but infusing lots of experimentation and play into your marketing so that you actually have those posts that take off, so that you have a content strategy where people are, you know, texting their friends, like, did you listen to this episode? So that you have that working for you and it doesn't feel like you're clawing and fighting and biting for every little like and comment because Instagram didn't show your posts today. That last one was a little bit personal because Instagram's having a moment right now and it's not a good look insta they'll fix it soon but it's not fun for me right now and maybe you're feeling the same way. So to recap, your 2025 marketing plan needs to have a very clear POV statement highlighting your unique preferences, your difference that you make in the world, your customers values as well, and tying that all up into something that is very clear on how you're different from your competitors. You need to have a really significant offer where the transformation is clear and people get results. You need to identify your signature and supporting content pieces so that there's a hierarchy and importance in your content and you're not trying to give equal attention to everything and therefore burning out. You need to clearly identify what your attraction strategy is and know how new people can discover you and be delighted by your signature and supporting content and then have a frequency where you're analyzing your metrics. Metrics that matter. Metrics that actually tie into your business goals and your bottom line. So as I mentioned, we're going really in depth into all of this in the Mindful Marketing Lab with a three hour workshop. If you want to join me for this three hour workshop, it's on January 16th. I will put the link in the show notes. You can also go to onlinedrea.com playbook and sign up there. If you're not a member you can just join the workshop itself. It's 97 or join the lab for nine days to $7. Your choice choice. And I'd love to support you in co creating your 2025marketing plan. I'll be back at you with another episode soon. That's all for today. Bye for now.