Turn every event into a growth engine? How about no…
This little gem dropped into my inbox on Friday and it hit two of my least favourite buttons: the Big Red Rage Button, and the Oh God I’m Exhausted Button.
Now, in fairness, this is an article to promote LinkedIn Events, so of course they’ll be banging a certain drum (“Marketers who use Event Ads see up to 31x* more viewership, and brands, like Impact.com, have doubled event attendance when using the ad format”), but come on – is this yet another thing that we should all be doing to appease the marketing gods?
My issue with this is nothing to do with the concept of holding events – we do actually need those as business owners, not just to source new business, but also to fill the connection void that a lot of us experience when we work alone or lead a team. My problem comes from the sheer amount of content that tells us that we should be monetising everything, even our hobbies.
- You like crochet? Then you need to set up an Etsy shop
- Enjoy writing? Get yourself on Substack and start charging people to read your work
- You like doing funny videos? Get thee to TikTok and become an influencer!
Aren’t you tired yet? I definitely am. I can’t decry the rise of social media – after all, it’s what pays my bills. But I do lament the increase of “always be closing” content. It’s hard to relate to. It’s difficult to empathise with. It’s impossible to keep up with, intellectually and financially. And that’s what hits my Big Red Rage Button, because there are so many small businesses that can’t manage this level of intensity, but they’ll burn themselves out trying, and then consider themselves a failure for not succeeding in a race that’s rigged.
As part of my job, I listen to small business owners despair that they’re rubbish on social media. They tell me that they can’t get their heads around all of the noise that tells them what they should be doing to become an overnight success and rake in all the cash. They think they’re failing, that they’re just not good enough, that everyone else is doing so much better than them…
Let me be clear: you’re not failing if you haven’t leveraged social media to 10x your business. That’s bullshit bingo, and it doesn’t actually mean anything.
The whole nature of social media is that it’s a highlight reel – even the gritty “I messed up my first business – here’s how I fixed it the second time around” kind of content is cherry-picked and curated. The words authenticity and genuine are bandied around a lot on socials, but that doesn’t mean that everything you see is actually genuine. In rags-to-riches stories, we see the end result first, before we learn of the struggle to get there.
The bigger businesses, the ones that appear so successful? They have whole teams and departments doing their marketing for them. You can bet that business owner is not dedicating brain space to “hacking” platform algorithms or trying to do a quick video in between doing their actual job, which they’re highly skilled at.
The difference between them and you isn’t that they work harder than you do – it’s that they’re not doing everything themselves. And that’s important to remember for the next time you’re caught in a doom/guilt spiral.
So, what can you do about your own Big Red Rage Button?
Firstly, you can cut yourself some slack and give yourself some grace.
Remove “I should be doing this” from your vocabulary. Replace it with what you can do.
If you read an article that says you should be posting three times a day across four different platforms, ask yourself if that’s something you can realistically do. If the answer is no (and I’d be more surprised if you said, sure, I can do that!), then ask what you can reasonably manage to do. Perhaps you can post once a day. Perhaps you can post twice a week. Find what works for you, and – frankly – nads to what anyone else says you should be doing.
If you can afford to outsource your social media, and it just stresses you out to do it yourself, then outsource it. I have a couple of clients who like to do some posts themselves when the mood takes them, and I have no problem with that at all. They know that if they can’t face posting for any length of time, they’ve got content going out anyway, and that takes the pressure off.
I’ll say it again – find what works for you. That might look like posting to one platform rather than four, and that is 100 per cent okay. You don’t need to throw loads of money at ads and boosted posts. Social media is one branch of marketing – it’s unlikely to bring in most of your income, so if it’s just you in your business, you don’t need to throw everything you have into that one avenue.
Remember that you are just one person, and the most you can do is your best.
