08 - Marketing is Saying the Same Thing Over and Over (and That’s a Good Thing)

This is a transcript for Episode 8 of Everybody is a Creative. Find the original shownotes and audio here.

Welcome to Everybody is a Creative the show where we embrace—you guessed it—everyone as a creative. Whether you're a business owner, a side hustler, or just have a hobby or passion project that you love, we will be exploring creativity in all its forms and tapping into the things that keep us creative. I'm Ella, also known as Whimsicella, a copywriter who's also attempting to write her first novel and a self-identified creative from birth. I hope you'll use this place to jam with me on what it means to be a creative, even if you don't identify as one, yet.

Hello and welcome to Everybody is a Creative, first podcast of 2025 guys! I took an extended break because I wanted to you know winter, winter is tough, winter's hard. Sometimes you just have to take some things off your plate and have a nice chill time while you cope with winter. And I think you would agree that this winter has been harder than other winters for various reasons. I was actually on a call with a client the other day where I was saying now next winter, I need a hibernation plan because, yeah, I just haven't wanted to show up. I haven't wanted to do more than is necessary, because it's a winter, it's slow season. I love this podcast. I've loved doing it, but like again, I just needed to take some things off my plate, and that just called for an extended break. But we're back. I'm excited to create some new content. I'm excited for some of the solo episodes I have planned. I'm excited for new guests we have coming on. And, yeah, I'm just, I'm, I'm glad to have, like, taken the break I needed, and now I have the energy to come back and be in your little ear holes. Yeah, I've not been, I've been doing nothing. I've not been completely, just, like, resting on my laurels, like I took a break, I think, for a month for from my email list, like December to January time and a little break from social media. But on the whole, I have been, you know, at least the last like month or so, regularly emailing my list, sometimes twice a week, regularly showing up on social media. I schedule my posts in buffer, and it has a little like running tally of like, how many weeks I've been, like, consistently posting. And I think I'm on, like, week eight or week nine. So you know, I'm I'm doing all right. I'm doing okay. And it feels like time to get the podcast back up and running, but yeah, as well as doing my emails, doing my socials, I ran a workshop earlier this month, which is wild to think about, because January was, like 1000 days long, and February feels like it went by in a blink of an eye, but yes, earlier this month, in Feb, I hosted a free workshop called Find your words and get your message heard, and I took people through a little process I do when I get blocked and I'm Stuck in overthinking, and I just need to get words down on a page. It's a little methodical. Kill Your Darlings, which is basically, you know, setting a timer, brain jumping for five minutes. When the timer ends, you sort of step away from it, give your eye little rest. Set another timer for five minutes, cut down what you wrote in half. Set another timer for like, two minutes, three minutes, and then cut what you wrote in half again. Just a great way to sort of like clear, clear, clear the pipes, clear the pathways for when I'm stuck in overthinking mode and I just get words on a page. That just makes writing less daunting. And yeah, we also did a bunch of like, journal prompts and stuff to do with, you know, brand voice and target audience and all that juicy stuff. And yeah, it was really fun. And I've got another workshop coming in March, which I'm really excited for, and I'm going to tell you more about at the end, because my main thing I want to talk about today on this here podcast. So as a copywriter, hello, if you didn't know, I am a copywriter. I've been self employed for almost five years. I think July will mark five years of me being self employed, which is crazy, but I work with a lot of clients on retainer, so they give me a little bit of work to do each month, and stuff like that, which I love doing, because I love working with people on like over the long term, and watching their businesses evolve evolve and adapting their voices for like changes of seasons and all that juicy stuff through like rebrand and refreshes and pivots and all that stuff anyway. And what comes up with a lot of my retainer clients is the need for always needing new content, new stuff, new new, new I need new content, new ideas. You know, I need to reinvent the wheel. I need to keep, you know, innovating. Keep coming up with fresh, fresh stuff. And I'm not saying that you should. You shouldn't do that like you shouldn't come up with fresh ideas. That is, like, very important. But whenever I suggest, like, repurposing content, a good 90% of the time, the first sort of thought that comes up when I suggest repurposing content is, oh, well, I don't want to be annoying. I don't want to be repetitive. I don't want people to, sort of like, roll their eyes when they see me talk about the same thing over and over again, to which I say, being repetitive is important. It's necessary. Because, just to get into some marketing lingo, here, there is a marketing rule of seven where you need to people need to hear something. People need to see something at least seven times before, like, the method sticks, or before you know they they're prompted into action. So whether that's buying something, clicking subscribe like whatever they need to see something at least seven times. I would argue, these days, the way we're constantly inundated with things on our screens, you know, our laptops, our TVs, our phones, it's more than seven times at this point, but let's just go marketing rule of seven. You just see something at least seven times, I guarantee you, because there's a case for a lot of my clients before we do work on repurposing, is that you're not talking about your things enough to be annoying. You're not talking about them enough to actually be considered repetitive. And I think the reason why it's also important to not be afraid to be repetitive and just talk about your thing multiple times is that if you're known for something, you have to talk about it a lot, like if you want to be known for a thing, you have to be seen talking about it several times. Like, I guarantee you, you're just not talking about your things enough. Like, you can't just, like, post an Instagram story, and that be it. You can't just post one thing on LinkedIn, and that's it. You need to talk about things a lot, and in order to not burn yourself out by talking about all of your things all the time, you gotta repurpose your content. You got to repeat your brand messaging. Do you think like Nike, when they came up with just do it? They were it was like that came up with that, right? I don't know. But do you think when whoever came up with just do it and put it all over their branding, do you think they were like, ah, are people gonna get annoyed? Are people gonna get annoyed that we we say, Just do it. No, they just do it. Yeah, they just do it. No one calls them boring. That's what they that's what they're known for. That's, you know, their repeated messaging. And I guarantee you, you are not repeating your message enough. And the reason why things feel repetitive, whether that's because you know you're in a business and you're selling services, or you know you've got a creative project, you're getting off the ground. The reason why it probably feels repetitive to you is because you see everything you post. Your audience, unfortunately, does not whether that's because of algorithms, whether that's because people just like have their own lives and are not glued to their screens. I guarantee you not everyone is seeing everything you post. So while it may feel like to you, but you're repeating yourself, I promise a lot of your audience are seeing all of this with fresh eyes for the first time. And you know, it's not boring, okay? You may think, oh, you know, repeating things is boring. Being repetitive with things we talk about is boring. I guarantee your audience doesn't think it's boring. You're just getting tired of repeating yourself, or you're not even you're just getting tired of the thought of repeating yourself. And here's the thing like, when we talk about repurposing content and repeating your message, I'm not talking about just writing something and copy pasting, copy pasting, copy pasting the same thing over and over. That is annoying. I'm talking about sort of taking one idea and having lots of different ways to talk about it, you know, just being known for one thing, talking about it in lots of different ways. So, like, an example I'll use is okay, say you are a stylist, and one of your offerings has to do with, like, color analysis. You know, finding it's very like trendy on Tiktok, like, you know, you're finding out if people are, like, a true winter or a summer, or like a spring, or like, whatever, I don't know all the terms, but yeah, you're focused on color analysis. How do you talk about color analysis, over and over again, so that you're known for it? Well, one of the ways you could talk about it is why you get into color analysis, why color analysis works? Do you have to stay true to your color palette. Or are there times you can stray? You can tell a story of finding your own color analysis journey. You can tell the story of how you find found a client's color. You know, analysis, there are so many different ways you can talk about it. You know, using storytelling, using ways people can find their own color theory, color things color theory. That's the thing you know, things artists use in artwork and things like that applies to the fashion color theory and color seasons and things like that. So that's a very jumbled example. It's first thing in the morning. I just hit record. But yeah, there are so many different ways you can talk about your things, and so many different ways to get the message out there. So say you wrote, like an email about you know why I got into color analysis and color theory, a long form email, just telling your audience that that in itself can be turned into lots of different bits of content. Content stacking is when you take sort of like one piece of like anchor content and turn it into a lot of other bits of micro content. So say you this example of writing an email about why you got into color analysis and color theory. You write a long form email to your email list, and then you know, you take a snippet of it to turn it into a reel or a tick tock, or you take the main points and you turn it into a carousel post graphic on Instagram. You take sort of like short little snippets and you post them on threads. You know that's making your content go the furthest, rather than just thinking, well, I already wrote like an email about it. So I'm not going to be super repetitive about you know, where I post this again. No one has eyes on your content. 100% of the time. Not everyone that follows you on Instagram follows you on LinkedIn. Not everyone who follows you on LinkedIn is on your email list. Not everyone on your email list is on threads. You see where I'm going with this being repetitive is necessary because no one has eye on your content 100% of the time. And each of these platforms have different purposes. You know, threads is for that short and snappy. You know, bits of dialog content like short little pieces and Instagram, depending whether you use reels on autism or sort of like nurturing platform or nurturing your current audience, Tiktok works best with a brand new audience, fresh eyes. Your content is always pushed onto like fresh eyes. Each content serves like a different platform. So you're doing yourself a service by making one piece of content go as far as possible. I'm gonna stop it there, because I feel like if I keep going, I'm just gonna keep ranting. But the work. Job that I alluded to at the beginning of the episode that's coming out next month in March. I'm very excited for it. It's called never run out. How to Turn Your expertise into endless content ideas. And I'm gonna go in depth about my repurposing method, how to take one content idea to make it go far. I'm going to have worksheets. I'm going to take you through the process. Going to help you build your own system of content repurposing. And it's going to be a lot of fun. And I am excited the workshop I did earlier this month, really, just like little fire under me. I really love the workshop format. I really love how engaging it is. Like I get to, sort of like, show you my expertise and teach you, but it's like, it's interactive, like we can talk to each other. It's really amazing, and I'm really excited for it. So, yeah, never run out next workshop coming 18th of March. This one is not free. This one is 15 pounds. And the reason why because it is absolutely stacked with a valuable content. Like, seriously, you will be revisiting this workshop. Like, obviously, the replay is going to be available forever. Since you're paying for it, you'll be able to revisit this workshop time and time again. When you need help repurposing your content, you'll need to revitalize your ideas, help them go as far as possible. And yeah, I'm just really excited. And you know, it's going to be 90 minutes, so it's a long one, but it's gonna be a good one. And as well as sort of teaching in the system, we're gonna do, like live demos, where you can tell me your business, tell me your ideas, and our sort of, like workshop, workshop live on the call, sort of ways you can sort of take your ideas and make them go further without sounding repetitive. Because I know you're still worried about that, but there, I promise, there are ways you can repurpose your content and talk about the same thing again and again without sounding repetitive. So yeah, that's That's me, guys. I'm really excited for it. I'm going to be doing a lot more workshops this year, I think. And I'm really excited for it. I'm excited for this one. Yeah, 18th March, 7pm UK, time, 15 pounds. I would suggest signing up before the 18th, because after the 18th, I'm going to be raising the price for it to 25 pounds for the replay. So yeah, get in on the early bird pricing action. Details for the workshop are all going to be in the show notes with a little Linky link Yeah, it's gonna be a good time. I'm looking forward to seeing you all there and teaching you my methods got a lot of great feedback from my last workshop. So this one is gonna be even better, quite frankly. So yeah, I'm gonna leave you with this. Content isn't boring. Your audience still needs to hear your message no matter how many times you repeat it. And I'm going to challenge you this week to take a topic that you feel over it like you're over it, but find a new way to frame it so through story, through a fresh example, even just a different format, like go through your social media platform of choice. Find find a post, one that performed really well, one that didn't perform as well, but like a topic that you know you like to talk about a lot, or maybe you're slightly over talking about, and just find a fresh way to talk about it. So whether you share a story related to it, whether you turn it into a carousel post where you whether you turn into a quick, real tip kind of thing, just do a fresh take on it and see what happens that's that's my challenge for you today. And yeah, so glad to be back on the pod. I'm gonna call this like Season Two of the pod. We're officially into Season Two. I'm excited New Era 2025. Let's smash it. Thank you for listening to everyone as a creative I will see you soon.