Streamline Your Marketing & Visibility With Simple Workflows

Welcome to the Well-Built Business Podcast. I'm Chelsea Warner, systems strategist and founder of the Well-Built Business Method. Now, I'll be honest, operations isn't the flashiest part of entrepreneurship. It's not the thing people usually want to focus on, but it is what will keep you in your zone of genius and away from burnout.

If you've hit a point where you realize structure, clarity, and clean systems are what actually unlock sustainable growth, you are in the right place. Each week we talk about what it takes to build a business that supports your life, not one that constantly drains it. I'm really glad you're here. Let's dive in.

If you tuned into the most recent episode, you know that we are having this conversation around all things marketing and visibility. Systems workflow streamlining. In the last episode, I really normalized why it's so challenging for service provider or expert led businesses, so challenging to think about systematizing or even outsourcing. The marketing and visibility work that you do, because for most businesses where you are the service provider, you are the face, your name is on the line, your reputation is on the line.

Like you wanna make sure that things are being said, how you would say them, that you are representing yourself, how you would online, the same as you do in person, right? Having that integrity, and that can be incredibly challenging to figure out, okay, how can I actually get some of this off my plate? So what we're gonna talk about today is actually a little bit of a paradigm shift and some very specific things that can be really helpful to audit in your own business. Even if you're just gonna tackle one small way of how you're gonna streamline your marketing and visibility, it can become a little bit addicting to once you like start opening your mind to what is possible.

But we're just gonna start with one at a time. So I want you to picture yourself if you say, I have blocked off Friday for marketing, right? That's a big topic. Let's say you sit down and you're starting from scratch.

Maybe you're trying to get into creative flow and you're trying to create content. Okay? What content are you trying to create? Maybe some week it really, some weeks it really flows of, okay, I'm in the zone.

I really wanna write a newsletter. Okay, I can turn that newsletter into a carousel post and like maybe it all really flows, sometimes. And some weeks you sit down and that blinking cursor staring at you in your email newsletter software or in a Google Doc, and you're like, ah, what am I supposed to be doing? What is the process I am supposed to be doing that only I can do and I just can't get that flow going.

What I wanna pose to you is that the issue isn't actually your creativity or lack thereof in a given moment that you've blocked off to do this work. It's actually that there's not a solid system underneath that is supporting you. In doing that aspect of your work, because for better or worse, we cannot avoid that. If you want more clients coming into your realm, into your world and you want them clicking and booking and having a session with you, or getting onto your newsletter list, like the marketing and visibility, which ever way you are gonna splice it is going to require effort and output from you.

Now, it could be that you're really into doing ads or you're doing more like local networking, and I love that we might cover some different methods of lead generation in future episodes, but I just want you to think right now about the things that you need to ideate. You need to write, you need to record. Okay? So the paradigm shift I want us to explore is that you don't actually need to be in creative flow to create good content.

Content that will help someone find you, understand what you do, and take a step into your world, and that belief that you have to be in the right state. You have to be in a good mood. You have to be in flow. You have to feel creative that day.

That belief is keeping you stuck and giving you what can feel like a very real excuse for not creating the volume of content that you could be. And I'm not here to say you need to post every day on every platform, but if you have a regular rhythm of what you try to create and put out. Of how attract and nurture and communicate with your audience and then talk yourself out of it. That can very often mean this paradigm needs to shift for you.

When we talk about this paradigm shift, I want to beat the drum that I will always believe that clear. Beats being clever. Every time in marketing, we can get so caught up in the lingo, the jargon. Like maybe you are a breath work facilitator and you only follow other breath work facilitators.

And so you can get into the jargon in the space of, oh, this is how we all say something, but are your people. That have never been introduced to Breathwork yet, saying it that way, I don't know. And so I always focus on the fact that when you're actually creating content, clear, be clever, and you do not have to be in like this creative portal to be clear about what it is that you do. Your audience needs consistency.

They need to consistently see who you support, what do you offer, and how you help solve a problem that audience is facing. Now, we're not gonna be diving into like how to do marketing and what your messaging should be. That's not the point of this podcast. I want us to start thinking about how can we actually.

Automate systematize support you as the founder so that you're not burning yourself out in this creation mode, and then realizing you don't have enough gas in the tank to do the other parts of your business that you actually do love. So simple workflows really is about how to make consistency possible without burnout. This is something I navigate all the time. I have a friend who does not do online marketing for his business, and he looks at.

In his mind how much content I put out, and he's oh my gosh. It just feels like everywhere I turn, there's a video of Chelsea. But I actually don't enjoy creating content and marketing like right now it's a Saturday. I'm batching out my four podcasts for the month, so that.

I can, have my workflow and stay consistent and walk the walk of what I encourage doing. But it's a lovely day out. Like my husband and son are off on an adventure. I would much rather be sitting outside in our lawn, looking at my garden, reading my Kindle, right?

Like I'm a pretty. Simple person. I do not create content from an ego standpoint. Many of my clients are not as well.

It's really just I know I need to market so people can find me, so I can work with more people that I love. And that's where I come at marketing. Do I enjoy being of service? If someone reaches out and says, oh my gosh.

This episode helped me so much. I love that, but I am not here like creating content to be some guru or put on a pedestal. I'm here to be like, I help service providers and expert led businesses to create systems so that they avoid burnout and can be more in their zone of genius, right? That is my who.

That is my what? That's the problem I solve. And now here's all the different ways I can introduce why this matters. And I want you to start thinking about your marketing the same way.

So let's talk about a three-part framework. It is very simple, but this is about three steps that you can take to audit the output that you want to be creating, putting out into the world, and then build simple workflows backwards. Okay? So I'm gonna go briefly through the three steps and then we're gonna look at a specific example.

Don't worry. We're also gonna have a case study in next week's episode talking about how this is actually working in a business here locally that I'm working with. And then also the following episode is gonna be a very specific workflow that I'm working on, and it might be one you're working on and you'll get a ton of value out of that episode. So let's just look at this three step framework.

The first step is I want you to define your ideal output. If you were just to look at what platforms you want to be existing on, and you were to think about the frequency and the consistency, and be really honest about what is realistic to put out. What are you actually trying to produce? If you just looked at a calendar as a production calendar, and you said, each month, I like to make sure that I am showing up on Instagram two times a week, right?

So in a normal month, that's eight posts. I want to be putting out a weekly email newsletter that is four pieces of content. I want to be doing a podcast every other week, like just to really look at the platforms you wanna be showing up on. Frequency, how often is it happening?

Daily, weekly, monthly, and really see what you're committing to as far as content that you're putting out. You might realize that you actually are biting off more than you can chew. In a lot of cases. If you are trying to be very active on multiple platforms, it might be a season to choose one or two.

And then get really systematized and organized so that you can be really consistent on those two. And then maybe you look at how you could repurpose or put something out in a different way. But step one is to define your ideal output. Okay?

Then step number two is to look at one of those methods of output. And to trace the workflow, this is the fun part for me. This is me asking you a lot of questions. If we're working together in a business systems audit or if we're on a live call doing some consulting work together, I am like, okay, but what do you do next?

But what do you do next? But what do you do next? So this is, let's just say for example. You are saying, okay, all of the steps from idea to publishing, maybe you like to do a weekly kind of education based carousel on Instagram.

Okay, so what are you doing from scratch every time? Do you go into a blank Google Doc or do you have a Google Doc where you have all of your past ones and a template of how many slides you do and the typical thing you cover on slide one, slide two. Are you going into Canva and starting with a blank Canva, or do you have templates of the carousel style that you like and that has performed well? Or do you at the very least have your brand kit set up inside of Canva so that all of your colors and logos and everything, it's organized and ready to work with?

So if you're starting with a blank Google doc and a blank Canva, that is gonna take so much longer than it needs to. So that's why if you are looking at multiple platforms you're trying to create on and everything is starting from scratch in every, sense of the word, then we need to make some systems for Yabu. 'cause that's gonna be taking way more time and energy than it needs to. And so you might look at this and say, okay, if I do sit down and make an honest production calendar of what I wanna put out monthly.

Maybe you're not gonna dissect every single one of them, but if you start with one and say, okay, this particular weekly carousel, could I create more of a workflow around that so that it's very easy to sit down and do it weekly for that week? Or it could be even actually a lot easier to sit down and batch out four of them for the whole month. So then step three is you are a detective. You're a systems detective, a very like sexy systems detective, and you're looking to find the streamlining opportunities.

So where are repeatable patterns? Where are things that you could decide once that you don't have to be creative about? And you're probably gonna start to find that when you streamline, fill in those streamline opportunity gaps. That things become so much faster.

So the steps, just to recap, this is the framework for auditing your output and then building systems backwards. Step one is defining your ideal output, that production calendar of what you are committing to, putting out the frequency, the consistency, the days of the week, the days of the month, all the things platforms. Step two is to trace the workflow to look at how you are doing each of the different types of content ideas. And then step three is to find those streamline opportunities.

And so like I said, it might, if you are working on multiple platforms, it might feel very overwhelming to try to streamline all of them at once. And that's not the intention, especially if you're DIYing it. But you could be saying, you know what? Every Friday I'm gonna carve out 90 minutes, and that's gonna be my CEO, like marketing and visibility systems.

Brain. That is when I'm gonna look at one of these types of content I'm putting out and trace out the workflow or find those opportunities, create a template, 90 minutes a week you could chip away, I guarantee you could chip away at creating systems over the course of the next two, three months. That would've vastly shrink the amount of time you're creating and spending time on creating. Potentially even find ways that you could more simply streamline or repurpose and create more of a workflow so that maybe you're actually starting by writing and batching your weekly email newsletter.

So maybe you actually sit down and batch the newsletter. Then the newsletter informs the topic that week's teaching carousel is gonna be on. And then maybe after you make the carousel, you pop open your phone and record a reel. So you're like in the thought arc of what that topic of the newsletter is.

And now you've got a couple different ways that you can share those thoughts and you can have those done ahead of time. Just some examples, so let's actually talk about this weekly newsletter just as as an example, what it looks like right now for most people. Let me think of a topic. What am I feeling inspired about right now?

What types of conversations have I been having with my clients, which I love, like I love things being relevant. And then you write the whole thing. Maybe you use ai, maybe you do it out of your own brain, which I love. That's how I write my emails.

And then maybe you find an image and then you log to, maybe you wrote that in a Google Doc or a note on your phone, and so then you log into your email software. It could be active campaign. Go high level Kartra, like wherever you write your emails that go out in a marketing blast, and then maybe you go in and you like format it and write the subject line and then make sure that the footer image is really pretty. And like all of these little steps are like, you're just reminding yourself, oh yeah, I need to have that.

Oh yeah, I should check the open rate of my subject line. Oh yeah, you just bumble through the steps and then you do it. What can be systematized? You could actually go into your email builder and create a template that has all of the options of what typical headers you use.

Maybe you have like upcoming events and. Biggest aha moments, things that I'm loving right now. And so you could put like options of headers or topics that you sometimes write about. You could put in buttons for your most frequently shared calls to action.

So you could have picture this, if your template had five buttons of the five things you talk about the most, maybe it's book, a sales call, book your first session, sign up for my course. Like you could brainstorm the things that you typically share from that platform of email marketing. You could have all of them. And then when you go in later for your next week and you clone that template, save one, as I always put template, do not erase like in the naming of my templates in my email builder, and then you can just like clone or duplicate it and then delete the buttons that you don't need in that issue.

So if you have the world of options that you typically are going to be using and then you can shrink them by deleting it is so much faster to just delete delete, delete the four that you're not using, and leave the one that you have already tested to know that it's the right link and that it opens on desktop and mobile and you can trust it and it's good to go. It's in your brand colors. It's bolded, you can create these templates. Even put some structure of, maybe you could even put some notes in there of a reminder to you, write a hook here, share a quote here.

Put call to action button here. This is how I write my sign off every time. Maybe you save maybe have a really nice little image of you that you put below your signature so that people can remember whose email they signed up for, right? So you can have all those things.

And this is just something you could put on your to-do list of, make an email template. And maybe you keep bumping that to the bottom of the list. But if you really see it as I have set aside 90 minutes every week to implement that thing that Chelsea dol me to do from her podcast, and you are tackling this really with intention, then you will prioritize that because it'd be like, you know what, that's gonna save me like literally 30 minutes every week when I write the newsletter.

Or it will allow me to batch faster or it will allow me. Maybe you have a online business manager or a virtual assistant who is saying, I would love to help. I just don't really know exactly how you do the newsletter each week. And they like want to help.

Or maybe they tried doing a draft and you didn't love it, and so then you didn't really give them feedback, right? So if there's squishyness and you literally can't hand it off. Then this can save you so much time. So I want you to think what actually needs your brain?

The topic, the insight, the creativity, right? That's it. Everything else can be a system that is waiting to be built and to support you or even to be handed off for someone else to truly own. So just to recap like this reframe that we're exploring, and we're gonna explore it a lot in this podcast, is that systems create freedom.

Structure carries you on days when motivation and creative insight doesn't. Documenting your processes means that you can hand things off sooner than you think. You know what your email newsletter could start to look like. It could start to look like you doing a voice note.

After you drop off your kiddo on the drive home from their school and you drop that voice note into let's say a Claude or a Chachi PT thread that you have trained, it could create an outline based on the types of topics that you typically like to cover in an email or a format. And then you could open that outline, write the email, send that Google Doc to your assistant who has the template. And so you literally could have just been like voice noting for five minutes dropping it into Claude.

And then writing for maybe 10 minutes, like brushing it up, making sure it sounds like you not over relying on AI being your voice. Does that sound easier than what you're doing now? And you might not be doing a weekly newsletter, but this is just the type of thing I want you to be using this. Three step structure for of really working backwards from that ideal output, tracing the workflow and finding the opportunity for streamlining and or delegating.

I want you to believe in your soul. That consistency gives you real data of what's working and you can't optimize what you keep changing or what you're not easily able to show up to actually do. So as I said, in a couple future episodes, we're doing like a four part series on this marketing and visibility. Workflows and systems.

And so previously in episode two we really looked at normalizing why this is such a challenge for the type of business you're running. Obviously this episode trying to give you some glimmers of understanding what you could start doing to audit and put some systems in place. Next episode we're gonna be doing a case study from a physical business, a my son's outdoor school. I'm volunteering on a marketing board, and of course I can't help but want to solve the operational problems.

And we're gonna be talking about some of the systems things in this space of marketing and visibility that are buying back so much time and freedom for the founder. Following episode, documenting my own journey of creating systems for my ideal output for short form video marketing, as well as podcast blogging and newsletter. And you can steal systems that I'm working on from that podcast. Just a big picture.

Marketing and visibility is one of the six pillars in my well-built business method, which is a six system pillar. Let's call it a framework, right? And this is where founders feel the most pressure to be on, right? That's why we're starting with marketing and visibility.

It's such a great place to start streamlining. It's such a great place to start delegating or automating. And if you are a solopreneur or you're working. Really on understanding how to guide your time, prioritize your, your goals, your action plans.

Make sure that your to-do list feels realistic for the season of life and business that you're in. That is where I step in and support you for a three hours. Live in a rooted VIP day. I actually walk you through an energetic exercise, and then we step right into strategy and operations brain and map out your next 90 days so that you are going to be held, you're gonna be clear, you're gonna know what to do when you open your laptop on Monday and every day going forward.

Alternatively, if you have a little bit more complexity to your team, some systems in place, maybe some team members supporting you, or a co-founder, let's actually dive into a business systems audit. We're gonna look at the six pillars, decide which two need attention first to buy you back the most time and money that ROI, and then you walk away with specific steps that you should be doing in those top two systems so that you can start to create systems that will support you as a founder to be in your zone of genius and further away from burnout.

So I hope that you got a ton out of this episode, and hopefully I will see you next week.