Why posting on social media isn’t a marketing strategy

Let me say this first. If you’re posting regularly, that is genuinely hard, and you deserve credit for it. Keeping that up week after week is painful. It really is.

But when someone tells me their marketing strategy is “I post on social media”, I have to be honest with them. They’ve just described something they do. A strategy is how all that doing turns into money, and posting on its own very rarely gets there.

What it looks like when posting is the whole plan

See if any of this sounds familiar:

• Endless content, a few likes and maybe a comment.
• A free PDF sitting in your Instagram bio that almost nobody downloads, however lovely it looks.
• A few people on your email list who never react to your emails.
• Discovery calls that nobody seems to book.

And a very pretty Instagram grid that isn’t giving you any results at all. It matches! The colours are lovely! The bank account doesn’t care.

I’ve been there. At one point I had no flipping clue who any of my leads were. Sending out emails was like talking to a brick wall.

The chicken and the egg

The usual answer is that you just need more eyeballs. Which sends you round a loop I think most of us have been stuck in:

“Oh, Mr Algorithm, how can I get more engagement?” “Well, you need to get more people.” “Well, how do I get more people?” “Well, you need to get more engagement.”

The marketing triangle

There are only three bases you need to cover to master marketing. That’s it. Three. Everything else is detail.

When I say promotions, I don’t mean a flash 50% off sale. I just mean telling people you have something for sale and how they buy it. That’s all.

Getting loud and a pipeline, with no promotions, gives you a really nice hobby.

Most people who are only posting have got base one and not much else. Sometimes not even base one, if the posts only ever reach the same handful of people who already know them.

Social media has turned into interest media

This one caught a lot of us out. Social media has gone from being social media to being interest media. Your posts get shown to strangers because of what they’re interested in, which is great for being found.

It also means you should assume the people seeing your post have never come across you before. And selling to someone who met you eleven seconds ago is hard. It’s like a stranger at the supermarket asking if you want to go halves on a caravan.

So many people are putting their content, their promotions and their one-to-one call offers all on social media, and just hoping it gets them clients. I understand why. Hoping is free. It just isn’t very reliable.

Move people somewhere you can keep talking to them

This is what base two is for. Your posts get people’s attention. Your pipeline is where you keep it, somewhere you can reach them again next week without a stranger’s algorithm deciding whether they see you. I go into why that place needs to be yours separately, because it’s a whole rant on its own.

And no, that doesn’t mean every post needs a call to action bolted on the end. It really doesn’t. Some posts are just there to be good.

Where a live show fits in

A weekly live show is the easiest way I know to cover all three bases with one hour. It gets you seen. People who come back week after week are your pipeline, warming up without you chasing anyone. And it gives you a natural, not-at-all-awkward moment every week to mention what you sell.

That’s why my own marketing is built around one. I’ve written about how one live hour becomes a week of content, and about how it warms people up before anyone is asked to buy.