A "Set it and Forget it" Social Content Strategy That Works and a Growth Success Formula Every Entrepreneur Can Use

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Welcome to today's episode.

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Our guest today is Ruthie.

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She runs a marketing agency called the Consistency Corner and she gives CMO-level strategy and done-for-you service to brands to help them grow.

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She's done great things like help one retailer grow from $20 million to over $100 million in revenue, so I'm sure she's going to have some great stuff to share with us today.

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Welcome to the show.

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Yeah, thanks for having me, Eric.

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I'm excited to be here.

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So before we jump into a story about the marketing you're most proud of, first give us one or two minutes about you, some context of who you are and what you do, so people know what that is.

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Yeah, absolutely so.

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I run the Consistency Corner, a marketing agency that I founded to really help CEOs take off the marketing hat, and we do that several different ways, whether it's they take off one hat or they take off all of the hats.

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But CEOs for the most part want to spend time leading their teams, scaling their business, serving their clients, not always doing the marketing, and so we're that strategic partner that takes that off their plates.

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But what I learned in my corporate career and you referenced the retail brand that I worked for a long time that we took from $20 million to $100 million I really learned that being super clear on your values, your mission, your vision and your ideal client is the foundation to effective marketing.

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And so with all of our clients today, no matter what package we work through, that's where we start, and once we can get those things out of a CEO's head and on paper, we can do so much more with the messaging and the strategy, and that's the foundation that I love to start with.

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That's a great foundation.

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If you don't have that, I don't know where you're going.

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Yeah, and oftentimes I think founders and CEOs they have that, but they have it in their head and they need support in creating the language to get it out there so that they can lead their team with that language, so that marketers can craft messaging with that language, so that it can all be aligned and, as my brand says, consistent.

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Absolutely so.

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Let's jump right in.

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You have a story for us about some of the best marketing you've ever done, that you're most proud of.

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Let's hear it.

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Yeah.

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So I'm going to take you back, let's say, six or seven years ago when I was working in corporate.

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I was a new mom in my corporate job.

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I was overseeing a marketing department for the retail brand and we were overseeing and managing somewhere between 17 and 20 social media profiles.

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At the time.

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I can't remember the exact number in the moment, but I was spending a lot of time on social media and found myself one day scrolling and put my phone down after about 45 minutes and was like that literally added zero value to my life.

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I just wasted 45 minutes of my life.

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But I have to be on social media because it's part of my job.

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And what the heck am I going to do?

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Because I can't just cut it cold Turkey.

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And so I sat down in that moment and I just wrote out some best practices and some ways to stop the scroll and used that as some guidelines in my own personal life and even taught it to some friends who were in that solopreneur or side hustle space and we talked about using app limits and checking your screen time to have awareness to where you were.

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But then we really started to go deeper and it was about making sure that you're not treating social media as your entire marketing strategy, that you have a robust funnel strategy in place of where you are attracting, nurturing and converting, and knowing that it sure as heck should not all be on social media, but we give so much weight to social media.

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And so, as I left my corporate job and started my agency, I kept coming back to that social media alone is not a strategy.

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Just like a coffee cup isn't coffee right, it's a container for your coffee and social media is a container for your message.

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And yes, your customers are on social media, people are on social media.

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Your business absolutely has to be there, but we don't have to let it consume our lives the way the platforms maybe want us to Right.

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And so, as I launched my agency and I'm serving some retainer clients and having some success, I decided to launch a group coaching program to try to help new business owners understand the marketing funnel and design their marketing strategy.

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And I'm going to be totally transparent here.

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That launch 100% flopped, like I sold zero and, like many people have major imposter syndrome, like what is wrong with me?

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Why couldn't I do this?

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But at the end of that launch period, I was burnt out again on social media because in that launch period, I had been creating tons of content reels, stories, posts, along with email marketing that I was doing behind the scenes and I was just like I need a break from social media, and so I leaned into a strategy called the Instagram nine grid, and it was something that I had learned about several years ago but always felt like posting on Instagram.

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I'm not going to use a nine grid, and what a nine grid is, if you're not familiar with it is it's a set it and forget it content strategy, where you basically turn your Instagram profile into a mini website or a magazine cover or a billboard and the nine sometimes more posts.

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You set it and forget it, and we design it so that it's super intentional, where it shares who you serve, the problem you solve, some of your brand values, what makes you unique, your offers, your free resources, all of those things, and then you don't have to think about posting anymore.

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So after that flopped launch, I put up a nine grid for myself and was like I'm onto something here, people need to know about this, and so I turned that into an offer.

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We do done for you nine grids, and I have nine grid templates that I share.

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But what's been really interesting, eric, is that the people who could most benefit from a nine grid don't know what it is.

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They're like what a nine grid, what is that?

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But then, when we break it down and we talk about the fact that it's a set it and forget it Instagram strategy, so that they can check the box of having a professional presence on social media without becoming a content creator, they're like yes, please, that is what I want.

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And so figuring that out and learning how to talk about it and message it in a way that it solves the problems that my customers are having has really been the evolution of leaning into and supporting people with holistic marketing, but leading with this Instagram nine grid strategy for me so people can't be single-threaded with just having social media as their only channel.

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and then the other thing is that some people really over index on social media as a channel, even if they're doing other channels.

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For example, one common thing I hear is some people say you need to post every day on LinkedIn, for an example, and that creates a lot of inertia and also burnout, I think, because a lot of people ask me how do I know what to say every single day?

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I don't have something to say every single day.

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That's a lot of things to say, and so I think the strategy you're talking about is interesting because it doesn't over index that way.

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Is there an aspect of it that allows people to not also have it just become stale?

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Is there like some update after some period of time?

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Yeah, that's a great question.

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With my clients, we typically want to revisit their nine grid every three to six months and, depending upon the seasonality or the nature of their business, we might give it a refresh and repost it with a couple of additional notes or changes in the copy or the graphics, based upon a new season, time of year, or if, like many business owners, you launch new offers and you have new things to talk about, we might refresh the nine grid and put it up with those new offers or make it solely about a new offer If you're in a launch period.

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I found it really helpful too for a lot of, I want to say, personal brands, but people who have built their business with their name.

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But their business has now grown to more than just their name and so they've got a company social media, they've got a personal social media, they've got followings on both, but like they can't keep up with both.

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But they want people to know where to go and so they can use a nine grid to even point you back to like where you want people to be and where you're the most active.

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And when I work with clients, we we devise a content strategy to go along with the nine grid Again.

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Where are you attracting people?

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Where do you want to show up to nurture your people, Now that we've got this kind of box checked for your Instagram profile?

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Is it email?

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Is it stories?

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Is it LinkedIn?

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But something you said about LinkedIn that I want to touch on I don't have something to say every day.

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I tell this to clients all the time.

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If you feel like you are saying the same thing over and over again, you're doing it right, Because your customer needs to hear it over and over again and they're not hearing it every time you say it.

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Algorithms, open rates, all of those things you can be repurposing.

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You can be telling the same story over and over again, different ways, and it's going to resonate with different people at different times.

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So that's okay?

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Are you saying that if you just keep saying it over and over again, people will believe you?

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People are eventually going to listen and it's funny because a lot of times and I don't know if this is the confirmation bias or the echo chamber, but people seek out content that they need to hear People who read personal development books.

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A lot of the times you're reading books that are about the same topic over and over again because you need to continue to hear it and because we're all inundated with so much content, it's not going to stick until we've seen a message or heard something several times.

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It's why retargeting ads work, because it helps us see the same thing over and over again.

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So you mentioned at the beginning that you're working with CEOs and entrepreneurs who often marketing falls under one of the many things they need to do, and, being an entrepreneur or founder, the challenge is you have to be an expert in so many different areas sales, marketing, customer relations, product, it goes on and on billing, accounting.

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You have to be an expert in everything, and the reality is that a lot of founders don't have a background in marketing and they still want to be successful, and so it seems like that's the sort of advice that you're giving to entrepreneurs.

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What advice could you broadly give to both entrepreneurs and marketers about being successful in the market that we're in 2024?

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I think we have some interesting weather conditions with the market and the economy and, at the same time, certain tactics and certain channels are evolving.

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Things that were really effective a number of years ago are not as effective today.

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Tactics within the social platforms are always shifting.

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So how do people succeed and win today?

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What would you say?

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What is the best advice you would give people?

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Yeah, I'm going to share a formula with you and this is called the success equation, and I can't take credit for it.

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It was shared by a mentor of mine several years ago when I was starting out in the entrepreneurial space and was in network marketing.

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So I'll give you that context.

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But the success equation can literally be applied to any result you want to get, and that can be in marketing, that can be in business, that can be in relationships, that can be in health and fitness.

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But it's this time plus consistency, plus intensity, multiplied by belief, equals your results.

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So if we're not getting the results that we want, we've got to go back to those four ingredients.

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Number one, belief.

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That's the multiplier.

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If our belief is zero, we're not going to get the results we want.

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So we've got to work on the mindset stuff first, but then time, consistency and intensity.

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Maybe not enough time has passed, maybe it's that it's not working yet, but then we also have to ask ourselves, with the time that has passed is are we being truly consistent and are we being intense enough to move the needle?

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And that's where we want to look at those two things together in terms of being consistent at an intensity you can maintain.

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And I'm going to give you an example from running.

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If somebody decides they want to run a marathon and they've been sitting on the couch and not exercising at all, they could easily say I'm going to run a marathon, I'm going to train for this, I'm going to go out and run 10 miles a day.

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That's very intense and that's going to help them get ready for 26.2, but they're probably going to burn out, they're going to hurt themselves, they're going to give up because that's not an intensity they can maintain.

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On the flip side, they could say I'm going to take a walk every day and I'm going to walk around the block and I can be really consistent doing that, but that's not an intensity that's going to move the needle.

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So we need to balance those two in a way that we can leverage them both in the success equation to actually get the results that we want.

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I love that trifecta of the consistency, belief and time and intensity Because I've worked for companies before back to what you said at the very beginning where the foundation, the cultural values that you need to have.

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One of the companies that I worked for, intensity Matters was the internal slogan and I thought that was a good slogan.

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I worked for another company where the founder really emphasized the belief because if people didn't believe we could be a hundred million dollar company, then it wouldn't happen and I thought there was something really there.

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And then the consistency and the time those aspects of it is also something I think about a lot, because a lot of companies I talk to expect overnight success and they don't realize the biggest successes often take many years to materialize.

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You have to string together a couple thousand days of unglorious hard work before you get to a glorious result, like getting to ring the bell at the opening of the New York SAC exchange.

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This has been my experience.

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Like I had to work 10 years in one job to have that, to have that result.

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You hear about people winning like new artist of the year that have been doing this for 20 years, like you're not a new artist, you're just new for people to finally notice.

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Exactly, and I give the example of OpenAI and ChatGPT.

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Some people have remarked to me that was like an overnight success.

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I'm like no, it wasn't.

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They started that 10 years ago.

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They've been working on it for a long time.

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They just got to a point where they could actually launch it and it had enough that they started to get that success, because I use, like ChatGBT, version 2.0 and it was unusable.

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It was terrible for lack of a better word, but they kept at it and they got there and it's getting better and better.

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So I think that these things are interesting because I don't think people put together that equation, quite like you said, for most businesses, and if they did, I think they'd have a lot of success.

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So I think that's great advice.

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Yeah, and it's tough because everybody wants a quick fix, everybody wants the easy button, and so it's easy to sell the easy button, but it doesn't actually exist.

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And so, as a marketer, I have conversations with my clients about we've got to have the foundation in place, we've got to have a framework in place, we're going to work on some things, we're going to have a long-term plan, because overnight success isn't a thing.

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I often have to remind people that marketing is not a vending machine, because people are like I want this and that and some of this and plenty of this and all of that, and I want it now, I want it yesterday.

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And I want more tomorrow.

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So marketing is on a vending machine and I think having that right formula that you shared is great, because I think if people are focused on the belief in what they're doing, the intensity of they're going to figure it out, and putting the right amount of time and consistency into it, they'll get there.

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So thank you very much for your story, for sharing these ideas and insights with us today.

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We appreciate it.

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I will definitely link in the show notes to the free resource you have on the Instagram, nine grid, and I encourage everyone to share this episode with your friends.

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There's lots of great ideas in here and thank you so much for being with us today and sharing this with us.

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Yeah, thanks for having me.

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I appreciate it.