Busy Isn't Growing: Why Working Harder Stopped Moving the Needle

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Speaker C: You're listening to the brand marketing show. The show for the creators, the innovators. The ones who wake up at 3am M with an idea that won't let go, uh, and refuse to accept. That's just how it's done. Who sketch prototypes on napkins and turn kitchen tables into laboratories. Who look at every impossible and whisper back, watch me. You don't just create products and you understand that people don't fall in love with features and benefits. They fall in love with the future you're building, the problems you're solving, the way you make them feel when they hold your creation in their hands and you're determined to make them feel something extraordinary. Some might call you perfectionists, dreamers, disruptors. We call you the future because while the world is drowning in ordinary, you're busy crafting extraordinary while mass market settles for mediocre. You're obsessing over every detail that transforms a simple product into an experience people can't stop talking about. Hi, I'm, um, Cath Langman and um, I'm here to lift the lid on what's possible when innovation meets obsession, when purpose meets profit, when that crazy idea in your head becomes the must have product in their hands. Are you ready to turn your vision into their obsession? Let's go. Hey there, listeners. Kath Langman here. Welcome back to the show. Or welcome to the show if this is your first time listening. Um, I'm, um, kind of uh, weirdly excited to bring this particular topic to you today. And I really hope that you find what I'm about to share a little bit insightful, certainly that it might give you a little bit of hope, uh, and direction for your efforts with your content, your marketing content, particularly for social media. So I've had two conversations this week that on the surface really couldn't have looked more different. But by the end of the second one, I Kind of realized that they were basically the same conversation. And so the scenario was two founders, two completely opposite behaviors. But I realized that it was the exact same problem underneath. And I think if you've been in business even for a little while, um, but you know, certainly if it's for a long while, uh, one of these is definitely going to sound uncomfortably familiar. So let me tell you about the first founder. So I spoke to this Brown brand, early stage brand founder, who told me almost as an aside that she'd spent five hours that week, um, making a single reel for Instagram. And you know, this is an early stage brand founder. So she's doing all the things, right? She's, you know, innovating with the product, she's wearing the marketing hat, she's wearing the fulfillment hat, she's wearing literally every hat in the business. But so five hours, that's a significant amount of time when you're wearing all the hats. Filming it, refilming it, getting the lighting just right, editing it, choosing the audio, writing the caption, second guessing the caption, rewriting the caption, and then posting the reel. And she watched it do what her reels usually, uh, do, which is get a respectable number of views over about two days, mostly from people who already follow her, and then quietly disappear. And she said to me that I did the maths and the lifetime return on that five hours was at best a couple of hours of anyone actually paying attention. And I thought, what am I doing? And that's really why she came to speak to me. But that question, what am I doing? Is the moment everything changes for a founder. Now hold on to that comment for just, um, a second because I'm going to introduce you to the other founder. So the second conversation was with someone much further along in their business journey. Uh, she was a seasoned operator, decades in. And, uh, you know, this was a brand, or is a brand with a really significant track record and successful. But this year, for a few different reasons, she's had a big drop off in her results. And her response has been to pull right back, pull back on all, you know, almost all of her marketing and, uh, and advertising. And she described what she's doing now as basically just a couple of static posts a week, in her words, as a sign of life. I know many of you and look, I've been there too. It's like, I don't have time to think about this, but I want anyone who turns up to my social pages to know that I'm still in business, right? I'm still going. Anyway, um, totally get that. Sometimes you just have to make sure that your accounts don't look abandoned while you work out the. What the right pivot is. And so that's what she was doing. So there are my two founders. One is sprinting on a treadmill on Tuesday, pouring hours into content that evaporates by Thursday. And the other one has completely stepped off the treadmill and is idling in the car, in the car park, posting just enough to prove that she still exists. So one's doing too much, the other one's doing almost nothing. And the reality is they are stuck for pretty much the same reason. And the way out of that scenario is exactly the same for both of them as well. Now, before I tell you what that reason is or share the way out, uh, I want to give you a frame that I keep coming back to lately because it just explains so much of what happens to founders at each stage of their journey. There's this con and look, this is not just for business either, by the way. I'm sure you'll recognize why in a tick. But there's this concept that comes from Zen practice. You might have heard of it. It's called the beginner's mind. And I kind of first clocked onto this years ago when that beautiful animated film Kung Fu Panda was out. My kids loved that when, um, well, they still do actually. And so that kind of concept was explored through Po the Panda's transformation from a clumsy noodle maker into the Dragon Warrior. But the idea of the beginner's mind is roughly that, you know, in the mind of a beginner there are many possibilities, but in the mind of an expert there are very few. So the beginner is open minded and you know, approaches things with a growth mindset. And so the, you know, the beginner literally doesn't know what doesn't work. You know, they haven't experienced that yet, so they just will try just about anything. Whereas the expert is a little bit more close minded because they know too much. And you, uh, know they, they've tried lots of things. They know what works and what doesn't in their experience and that knowled, which in many ways is an asset, uh, but it can quietly close doors that really you need to keep open. So just keep that in your back pocket for the minute. We're going to come back to it because both of my founders here are in their own way suffering from this. Alrighty, so let's talk about why posting and hoping worked for you once and then stopped working And I want you to think about going to the gym. I haven't seen the inside of the gym for a little while, I have to confess. But specifically, um, I want you to think about maybe the first time you or someone you know that had never really been into exercise before starts exercising for the first time. So if you have never lifted a weight in your life or never really exercised in your life, and you start showing up and doing more or less anything, you will see results fast. Your body has so far to go that almost any stimulus produces a visible change. And people in the strength world do have a name for this. They call them newbie gains. You barely have to know what you're doing right, and you just have to show up consistently and do some work, any work, and your body actually rewards you for it. Early stage content marketing is almost identical. When your brand is new and when nobody's heard of you, and when you're starting from a following of basically zero, apart from, you know, friends and family, maybe almost any consistent posting will produce some results. You show up, you post regularly, you're enthusiastic, and your audience grows, and consequently, you'll start to see some sales coming in. But the trap that is hidden inside that success and the lesson, you know, that you want to learn here is posting works. Or the lesson that you do learn from that kind of habit and behavior, right, is that posting works. Or rather, consistent posting works. And if I just keep showing up and keep posting, the results will keep coming. And for a while, you get that reward, right? You get that positive feedback, but then inevitably you plateau and that growth flattens out. But the reels, they still take five hours to make, but they just don't reward you with more numbers, more results. You know, they just give you the same tired results. And so the sales will go sideways for a month, and maybe then another month, and maybe then a quarter. And your instinct, because of that early lesson that you learned in the newbie gains phase, your instinct is to do more of the same thing, but just harder. So post more often, make the reels prettier, uh, be more consistent, push harder. But here's what every experienced weightlifter knows and what every plateaued brand founder really needs to hear. What? When you've been training for a while, turning up more often is not what breaks the plateau. Doing more reps of the exercise that's stopped responding really doesn't do anything. What breaks a plateau is changing the stimulus. It's progressive overload. It's better programming. It's paying attention to form. It's doing something genuinely different, not just more of the same. So my five hours, a real founder is the person who's still adding reps to an exercise her body stopped responding to a long time ago. She's working incredibly hard, she's very, very busy feeling productive. So nobody could accuse her of laziness. But the effort isn't the lever anymore. So if I am really clear about this, because I don't want you to miss this bit, the answer is not to make better reels. The answer is not to add load to the same broken movement or poor form. The answer is to change what you are actually doing. And we will get to what that is in a bit. Now I'm going to go back to my second founder, the seasoned one who has basically pulled back to the signs of life social media content strategy. And on the face of it, she's the opposite of the that first founder. She's doing too little, not too much. But watch what's actually going on here. She's had a drop off and she has sensibly recognized that flogging the same approach harder is not the answer. And so she's stepped back to rethink. And so far, honestly, that's a healthy response. Pulling back to reassess can be the smartest thing that a tired founder, uh, does. So the thing here is that stepping off that content marketing treadmill isn't the trap, but the trap is where she goes looking for the answer. Because if you pull back to reassess and then you spend that reassessment sorting through the strategies that always worked for you in the past, that is the playbook that built the business in the first place or the tactics that you used successfully in the good years. You, you're trying to solve a new stage problem with old stage tools. You're reaching backwards. You're consulting the expert in you, the one who already knows how this is done. And you gotta remember that expert's mind is going to offer you fewer, uh, possibilities, which is subtle and a, uh, bit nuanced. So stepping back is fine. Reaching back, though, is the problem. So the seasoned founder only stays stuck if her search for a solution is a search through the familiar. But if she instead treats this moment as genuinely new, and if she's willing to go and find the things that she doesn't already know yet, uh, the approaches that, you know, maybe aren't already in her existing repertoire, then that pullback moment becomes the most productive thing she could possibly do. So it's not the trap that, uh, it's not the pause that traps you, it's pausing and then looking in the rear vision mirror for the road ahead. And to be fair here, because I know this is something that I always try to do before I diagnose anyone's marketing, some of her drop off this year is likely to have been uh, not part of strategy failure at all. It would, you know, we've genuinely had a rough run in our economy this year and cost of living and that sort of thing. So the kind of people, I mean really the kind of people who buy anything, but in the context of this show and my audience, the kind of people who buy premium brands, you know, they'll have a considered values led, uh, high quality or at least value for money in how they like to use the things that they're buying. You know, those kind of customers are exactly the people that are going to be really exposed to things like big interest rate hikes and cost of living pressures. Right. And so of course some of them will have been deferring though, you know, any kind of nice to have purchases in their lives, even if it's just temporarily until a budget is delivered or um, the RBA bank decision comes through. Right? So part of this found that second founder's decline would have been contributed to by that kind of real external demand, demand side softening that any kind of content strategy, you know, if you keep speaking the same way to the same audience, you know that's not going to prevent that from happening. Right? But even when the dip is genuinely external or at least contributed by to by the external, that signs of life is not a recovery plan. And going quiet while you wait for conditions to improve and while staying quiet while waiting for conditions to improve is just going to guarantee that you're invisible at the exact moment that demand comes back. So you got to just caution yourself that retreat is not a long term strategy and you have to just be really wary of staying there too long because it can become a really slow way of disappearing. And so where are we now? So we have my two founders and the one thing that they share is one. You know, obviously one is over effort with no strategy, the other is under effort with no strategy. But so the behaviors are opposite, but the diagnosis is identical. It was never about how much effort you were putting in, it was about whether the effort was building anything that you could compound. And in both cases it isn't. The sprinter's effort evaporates by Thursday and the idler's effort isn't even pointed at the right direction. Or the right destination. So neither of those is compounding. They're not going to go anywhere new. Right. So what's the fix here? And I have heard this advice mangled so many times. The problem with disposable content was never that it's on social media. The problem is that it's disposable. So a reel that is designed to just entertain the people who already follow you, that's going to peak in 48 hours and then it's going to be gone. It's just a broadcast. And that's not to say you never do that sort of thing. Right. But the reality is it's a performance with a really short shelf life. And, you know, you do the whole show, the curtain comes down on Wednesday, uh, you have to start building a whole new set and do it all again. So nothing is accumulating. There's no compounding asset at the end of it. I always love that term return on effort. Right. You've got to keep that in mind sometimes. You literally wouldn't run any other part of your business this way. I mean, imagine if every product you made dissolved two days after you made it. Unless it's something food related or drink related, of course that's intended. Okay, now I'm confusing myself. The shift though is to move your effort towards content that compounds content that's still working for you in six months. Content a complete stranger finds when they go searching for exactly the thing that you sell long after you've forgotten that you made that piece of content. And that's what an asset is. It earns while you sleep, it earns while you are on holidays. It earns long after that 48 hour period might be up. What might be a little bit surprising is that this doesn't mean that you should abandon social media. It doesn't mean, you know, go and delete Instagram and just write blog posts in isolation somewhere. Social is absolutely part of content that compounds. Part of it is, you know, when you add, uh, some paid amplification, AKA advertising, but also, uh, particularly now in the current moment in time, when you rebuild it to be discoverable, like search, you know, content that's searchable. So when the words you say in a real and the words you type into a caption are the words that your ideal customer is actually typing into the search bar on Instagram or on TikTok or on Pinterest or into Google or into ChatGPT or wherever there it is that they go searching for stuff. When that's true, a single piece of Content can keep getting found by new people for months or even years because search keeps serving it up. So social media stays as a platform, but it's doing a completely different job. You're no longer broadcasting just to the people who already know you. You're warm, engaged audience. You're being discovered by the people who don't. That's the difference between content as a performance and content as an asset. I think historically, almost no brand has been using social media this way. And look, that's largely because social media was never historically surfaced as part of organic search. Um, but that is also exactly why it's such a massive opportunity in the present moment yet. But most founders are still doing the show and the song and dance and the effort to create the content every couple of days and wondering why their audience never really grows. There's a second problem hiding underneath all of this that can quietly sabotage everything else as well. Even if I convinced you tomorrow to switch off, uh, you know, all your effort from disposable content to compounding content, you'd probably hit a wall almost immediately. Because most founders, if they're honest, have been guessing what to put in their content for years. Guessing what their customer cares about, or, you know, guessing what. Which words will land. Guessing which objection is the one actually stopping the sale or making assumptions, you know, assuming that the customer reacts or goes looking or makes decisions based on exactly the same preferences as you, the business owner. And the really cruel thing about disposable content, it can't even teach you whether your guesses or assumptions were right, because it's gone before it could tell you anything. You literally cannot build content that compounds on top of messaging. That's a guess. You will just be building a durable asset pointed in the wrong direction, which is arguably worse than building nothing. The founders who break through are going to be the ones, or are the ones who know rather than assume, and I mean know at a documented level what their customers actually want to hear, what they value, what nearly stopped them from buying, what are the exact words that they use to describe either the problem that you solve or the desire that you meet once you have that content stops being a guess and it finally makes sense to invest in formats that last, because now you know they're built on something true. Now, let's bring this all the way back home, back to where I started. And that is the beginner's mind. The reason both of my founders are stuck isn't a lack of talent or effort or experience. It's that they've both in their own way, kind of slipped into the expert's mind. The first one is so certain that posting frequently and consistently works that she keeps pouring hours into it. The second one is so practiced at her old playbook that she's reaching for it, even though the world has moved on. They both know too much to see what's in front of them. And simultaneously they're both trying to take the least risky path in a tough economy, which I totally get. I want to share my personal take on how you keep the beginner's mind, because it's not. To me, it's not some kind of serene, floaty thing. For me, keeping a beginner's mind means actually just being willing to struggle sometimes. Now, you can probably tell if you see me in a video, but I'm not a spring chicken, as my gran used to say. So I've had plenty of real world experience of struggle and doing hard things. I know from experience that the moment something gets really easy, uh, you know, the moment that you've really mastered something and it stops being really difficult. I'm a parent too, you know, I've seen it with my kids when they started to learn how to walk or to learn how to read. Uh, but that moment is the moment that your progress stops. So if you're not struggling with something a little bit, you're not really growing. The fittest person in the gym isn't the one for whom it's become comfortable. It's the one who keeps deliberately seeking out the load that's still hard. So the brands that genuinely succeed at building really successful businesses and brands, and I mean commercially and sustainably successful, they're not the ones who always know the most. They're the ones who, however experienced they are, stay willing to be a beginner again, willing to not know how to do things, willing to try new things, and willing, of course, to struggle just a little bit. I don't think being busy was ever really the goal of being a founder. Being run off your feet, I don't think that should ever be the goal either. But to me, compounding, uh, you know, building. Compounding assets, that's the goal. Building something that's still working for you long after the effort is spent and, you know, my term, return on effort, to me, that's the goal. And it starts with being willing to look honestly at what you're doing, set down the playbook that might have got you to where you are right now and learn the next thing. Now, if any of this has landed a little too close to home. If you have recognized yourself in either of those two founders, that's actually a good thing because recognition is going to be the first move out of a plateau or out of a slump. And if you would like some help working out which of your efforts are uh, compounding and which are just evaporating and what the next highest leverage thing actually is that you can do for your brand, that's exactly what we do. And so I invite you to book a brand growth strategy session with us. We'll look at the full picture together and you'll get to walk away knowing what is worth your effort and what's quietly wasting it. If you'd like to do that, book that in with me. The link is in the podcast show notes or you can head to productpreneurmarketing.com and uh, you'll find that in the menu. Top menu. That is it for this week's episode. I hope you have enjoyed it. As always, if you know someone that another brand founder that might need to hear this message, please pass it on on whichever podcast platform you listen to. For now, I will say goodbye and as always, I will be back in your ears this time next week. Bye for now. You've been listening to the Brand Marketing show with Kath Langman and I hope this episode sparked something extraordinary for your brand. If it did, it would mean the absolute world to me. If you'd write me a review over on Apple Podcasts, let me know what breakthrough moment you had or what game changing strategy you're going to try in your business. Until next time, keep creating something remarkable.

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