Your marketing team has the week off
Sunny skies. High 64F. Winds WSW at 5 to 10 mph.
You’re a one person team, I get it. But the marketing team needs a week off.
This week we’re not looking for more subscribers. We’re gonna put “growth” on hold this week.
Instead, your job is to get your sales team making sales. Your shipping team making your paying customer happy. Your front office team working smarter and more efficiently.
YOUR SALES TEAM: Can you send an email and get 5% of your fans to click something? Anything?
If you emailed your fans and said, “next 10 people to email me will get an exclusive demo MP3 of my next single,” would 20 people reply?
If you marked down something 25%, would it spur even one sale?
Would 20 people who already exist in your current creative universe take the time to hit reply?
Figure out how to motivate 20 people to do something. Anything.
YOUR SHIPPING TEAM: I ordered a hat from someone I’ve been following for years. It showed up in a plain box, and shipped from an “order fulfillment company” with a name like U.S. Logistics Corp.
I had no idea what this mystery box was on my doorstep until I opened it.
You don’t want your customers to feel bewildered when getting their orders. Your order confirmation emails don’t have to be boring (see how CD Baby did it back in the day).
You don’t have to outrun a bear, you just need to outrun your friends.
YOUR FRONT OFFICE: Set up an actual online store that can be optimized for the 10 people a month you’re serving. Build it today so you can handle 100 people a month a year from now.
Take the photos you’ve uploaded to Instagram and the videos you’ve posted on Facebook and put them on your website. Build a place for your existing fanbase to fall head over heels for your work. Turn it into a place so cool that your fans wouldn’t dare tell their friends to follow you on Instagram.
Reply to the people leaving comments. Reply to the emails already in your inbox.
Make every reply a giant hug.
Write an email that people love to see in their inbox.
YOUR CREATIVE DEPARTMENT: Do you have current photos on your site? A current bio? Are there any broken links in your LINK IN BIO? In your Bandcamp sidebar? When’s the last time you updated your profile photo? Your logo?
Is the design of your online ecosystem coherent or a jumbled mess?
Someone emailed me (see below) asking how to get more people to their site without social media, so they could make more sales. A reasonable challenge in the year 2025.
All their fun, flashy, informative videos were on Instagram, miles away from their online store.
They had a nice site, sure - but all the immersive media, the videos, were sitting on Instagram, for 90% of their followers to never see.
I told them to move that cool stuff to their website. Put the sauce next to the sexy ADD TO CART button.
We don’t need more traffic. We need to captivate the people right here in front of us.
Maybe we don't need more subscribers.
Instead, we need to optimize what we’ve got because just throwing 1,000 more people at a bad set-up won’t help.
◼️ Need some ideas for your own project? Want a personalized email from me, outlining what you could do this week beside marketing?
Pick my brain via email. Send some backstory and 1-2 questions to me here:
free-trial@socialmediaescape.club
Last week I replied to someone with a 1,000 word email and they wrote me this:
“BOOM! Super helpful feedback … and so generous. Do you really take the time personally to do this depth of research into us/our brand and personalize an email like this? That’s unheard of … I’m super grateful.”
If my reply resonates with you, they’ll be a payment link to book five more emails.
The first one is free. Try me: free-trial@socialmediaescape.club
◼️ Quitting social media is scary, so start your adventure with other creative folks on the same journey. Paid subscribers get to join my weekly Escape Pod Zoom calls. Find out more info here.
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This is so thought-provoking. I do focus mostly on my website and Substack. I really downsized on my social media in the last year. I only post to BlueSky and IG now daily. But my book excerpts, photos, art, etc all go to my website and Substack. I use Substack for my email newsletter so I have put a lot of focus into my presence here instead of social media. I have a bok release coming up later this year - we will see how it all pays off!
Dynamite