The future of community and marketing is no longer focused on a one
single place. And in this episode, I wanna talk about the omnichannel
approach to building marketing communities. Welcome to
episode 343 of the Mindful Marketing Podcast, where I
help you scroll less, connect more so that we can grow
together. Before we dive into this episode, though, a word from our
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Riverside. Alright. Let's talk about
community. It is something that I talk about a lot in this podcast
because to me, marketing is building communities.
And especially in this day and age here now in 2025,
when I think about the power of marketing, a community can make or
break you. We have cancel culture. Right? So if your community is not
backing you, your business can literally go away in a matter
of days. Because if, as a community, they decide not to support you, it can
have really big impacts on what you do. The flip
side is also true. When people really love you and
support you, it can propel your business forward. I talked about
this recently in a TikTok video, which, the it's this idea
of positive contagion and negative contagion. So as humans,
we, have emotions that are very contagious. Right?
When we get in the room with people who are in the same headspace as
us, we kinda feel those emotions ourselves, and the same
happens on social media. This is why we so often seek
out echo chambers is because there is an endorphins
that's released when we're all on the same page, whether we're all
all on the same page against someone. K? So it's a negative contagion.
We're all feeling negative emotions about the same thing, or
we are all on the same page for someone. We are all rallying together in
support of someone or something. Both things are very strong
emotions as humans, and this is why community can make or break a
brand, especially smaller businesses. Because when
people rally together around us, it could really propel our
business forward. But if they're against us, this is where
businesses can crumble and break down, especially in an economy
that's as volatile as the current one that we are in. So
in my opinion, community is not predicated
on a specific platform. K. So in the
good old days of marketing, you could say, I have a community in
a Facebook group, or I'm part of this forum where we
all hang out, or I am on Instagram connected
in to, I don't know, a particular hashtag. Right? We could say
those things and that would be our community. So for example,
I was in the, YouTube community back in
2006, 2007. This was when
YouTube was in its infancy, and I found my people on
YouTube. I was a part of the early days community, not
really a consistent creator, which is one of my biggest regrets. I think
I posted, like, a couple videos a year kind of thing, but I was in
the comment section. I would watch all my faves.
Jenna Marbles being a fave. Yes. She, she
is a icon in the space. Right? So,
I was I was in the community. I went to the very first VidCon, got
to meet all of my people. But there was a particular forum that we
spent a lot of time on and where we hung out, and it that's actually
where I met my husband. So back then, we had a very
specific place where YouTube creators would go and hang out, and
we would spend time together there, and we would build collabs and things like that,
and then we had our YouTube channel. And that was pretty much it. We have
our YouTube channel in this forum. Now when we think about
community, our communities are spread out across multiple
channels. Some of them are on Instagram. Some are on Facebook. Some of them
only read our emails, some of them only listen to our podcasts.
More often than not, they're in multiple places. They listen to the podcast
for one thing, they check your email for another, and then they see your post
on Instagram. But they never log in to, I don't know, blue sky, so they
never see you over there. Right? So that is a a
great example of how community is now an
omnichannel thing. Right? It's an omnichannel thing.
Thus, thus, if I can say that, thus, it sounds so proper,
when I think about marketing as a small business, it
is no longer vital
to be on one platform and one platform alone. And this is it was a
very common practice even as as early as 5 years
ago where, if someone came to me and they said I
only wanna be on Instagram, I'd be like, yeah. Cool. Let's do it. Only Instagram
is great. We can build out a mini funnel, and we could sell out your
offer. That is very challenging to almost impossible to do
here now and today just with the nature of how we all
interact with marketing and how we all interact in this digital
space. And a lot of the progress that we're seeing in digital
marketing, a lot of it is from the pandemic and the effect that
it had on the progress that we're we were making as a technology.
Like, technology is advancing at hyperspeed. It it has never moved
this quickly before. Think about it. Chat gpt
existed and came into be, in November of 2023,
y'all. November of 2023. Like, we're in
February of 2025 at the time of recording this, and I
use Chat gpt every day. Like, literally this morning,
I was like, hey. Here's an idea that I have for a package.
Can you be really mean and tell me that this is a bad idea?
Like, this is how I use Chat GbT every day.
And so the way that we're using marketing is moving
so quickly, and this idea of, like, a decentralized
community is something that's becoming more and more popular. And it's not
only for smaller brands. Big brands are doing this too.
There is Lululemon is a great example of this. They have a a
campaign called Sweat With Us, where it's not a campaign
on any particular channel. K? They don't just go,
come to this location, and we're gonna run together or work out together, or you
have to be on our in our Facebook group to come to us. No. It's
a it is a campaign we have omnichannel. It's in their email.
It's, you know, printed on materials in stores. It is
on their Instagram. It is in their private community spaces. It's
everywhere. And so they're not solely relying on, you know,
building out a Facebook group where their most loyal fans live, which is a
strategy I used to teach, you know, back in the day. They're relying
on the slogan of the campaign having its own legs,
and they're believing that their community members are smart enough to figure out
what the campaign is wherever they are. And then they use savvy marketing to be
able to communicate the values of that campaign. Thus, allow
there's that word again. Thus, allowing people to join in the campaign
wherever they are in their process. K? So it doesn't
matter if they are, new to
Lululemon or if they are, you know, they've been a
Lululemon fan for years years, doesn't matter if they're,
solely a Facebook group user or if they're, like,
sometimes on Instagram, sometimes on threads. They can participate in
the sweat with us challenge wherever they are. I think this is a
huge, huge thing to know as a business owner headed into 2025
is that if you are on one platform and one platform alone,
it can be very challenging to grow as a business
owner. So I wanna encourage you to embrace this omnichannel
strategy. Here's what it looks like. I I as I'm saying
this, I do recognize that doing everything at once is
overwhelming. Okay? So I don't recommend just
trying everything all at once, unless you have all the time in the world, which,
you know, go for you if that's you. But if not, take a phased
approach. K. We're gonna start with one platform, usually your signature
content piece, then we're gonna layer in supporting content pieces, then we're gonna layer in
your attraction strategy. Okay. So if we're thinking about the marketing ecosystem, strategy
includes different platforms. Now
these different platforms are
all way to the
includes different platforms. Now these different platforms are all weighted
differently. I'm not saying that they're all equally as important. K? They
have different levels of importance, but all of those levels have a unique
purpose and they serve a unique purpose to your community and allows you,
as the business owner, to go where your community members are.
Fish where the fish are. I think I said this either in a workshop recently
or on this podcast. Like, sometimes, we we fight so
hard. We're, like, swimming upriver, if I'm gonna use the fish analogy We're swimming upriver.
We're fighting so hard. It's that we're going where the fish are. Right? Fish where
the fish are. If your people are hanging out on threads, you hang out on
threads too. Okay? I
do still recommend having a couple of home based spots,
and this is where I can sit consider a lot of your signature content pieces,
but also having internal marketing, home bases as well. So
I'll use my business as an example of this. My
signature content is my podcast. This here podcast where you're
listening, it is where I spend the most effort, time, and energy when
it comes to my marketing. It's where when people come into my world,
they say, you know, when they join the lab, the Mindful Marketing Lab,
they say, oh, I listened to your podcast for years, and then I knew I
had to join. Right? And so for me, it is the number one
way that people get into my world. Secondarily, almost
equal of importance is my email newsletter. I actually have more
people on my email newsletter than any of my social media channels. So
for me, when I look at my email newsletter, it is very
important to me to nurture and communicate to that community and that group of
people. That is not to say there are people who, listen to
the podcast and never read the email. Sometimes that happens. There are
people who listen to podcast, they never open a single email. There are people who
read all my emails. They never listen to a single podcast episode. So there's a
lot of crossover and content there, but I know that's where my
my most supportive community members are. Secondarily,
I have my secondary content pieces, which are social media
and my YouTube channel. So a lot of those serve unique purposes. A lot
of it is communication space. I love to be in the comment section in my
DMs, have conversations with people. This is how I build communities, but
I don't force people into, a certain
particular channel. I kind of go where they already are.
Okay? So when we think about this in terms of your
business, some of the questions that I want you to ask yourself is
what what is your signature piece of content? What is the one thing that you
wanna be known for? And then what is your supporting content strategy look
like? How can those other channels support you? Now I mentioned
internal marketing as well. So I do have an actual community space for all
my client to customers and where all my members hang out. It's in Circle, which
I love, by the way. If you're looking for, like, a all in one community
tool, Circle is the best. I just
loved it. Maybe I'll do some videos on YouTube about that. But, anyways,
that point aside, I have a
community space for my clients and customers. However,
in the Mindful Marketing Lab Pro, so there's a pro level to the lab where
if you are a marketing professional, I give you even more support. You get
unlimited voice access to me. There's a lot of stuff
in there, but the voice access is key because I've had a couple members
say they don't like using Circle, and we wanna go back to Voxer, which is
what I was using before. So old Andrea would be like, no.
We have to use Circle. That's the tool. That's the place where we are. But
between you and I, I don't really care. I don't care.
As long as they're using the space, I'll meet you on Voxer.
That's fine. I have all my notifications turned off anyways, so I just set up
a little Asana task so that I don't forget to check Voxer instead of
Circle and away we go. I'm able to maintain
and retain my community members more by
being open to this omnichannel thing. Like, yes, all of our courses are in circle.
All of our livestreams are in circle. All of our conversations, our member resources,
they're all in circle. But if my community member comes to me and they say,
actually Voxer is easier, cool. Let's use Voxer. I talk to my friends on there
all the time anyways. K? So this is where you fish where the fish are.
So a few other tools that will help you with this is I do love
a good scheduling tool, when you are scheduling out your content
to multiple channels, specifically social media channels. I
recommend Metricool, and I'll put that link with the show notes as
well. I also recommend Airtable for content
planning. Y'all know I love Airtable. I have a bunch of videos on my YouTube
about Airtable. It is how I plan out my omnichannel
content marketing, strategy, my marketing ecosystem.
It's how I know when I need to record podcasts, when to send out emails,
when the social posts are happening, and to make sure everything is organized
so that everything still flows together but is spaced
out. And then I also love to use, I use a
combination of Airtable and MetraCool for tracking and
analytics as well. K. So what channels are having the most
impact right now, what channels are growing, which ones are stagnant,
that sort of thing. And what I will say about this entire process is it
can be very illuminating. So, about a year and a half ago,
I left X slash Twitter completely. Basically, a
couple months after Elon Musk purchased it, I believe, like, 8 or 9 months
after, Musk purchased Twitter, I left the
platform. And part of that decision is because I was using this
omnichannel strategy. I was posting in multiple places. Twitter had
the least amount of engagement, and it was steadily going down.
And I was noticing, like, my community members there were,
not growing. Like, it wasn't growing as a community. And so for me, to make
the decision to leave the platform was very helpful. So while I do recommend
this omnichannel strategy, I'm not recommending you have to be on
all the channels all the time. Just saying having multiple
channels is in your benefit right now, especially with the uncertainty with some
of our faves. Like, hello, TikTok. Are we still gonna be a thing by
the summer? Please be a thing by the summer. I love you.
Okay. So my
encouragement for you as you listen to this episode is I want
you to take an audit of your community space. And
by audit, I don't get lost in the details here. I just want you to
take a look at the places where you spend time and the places where
your community members are talking to you. Okay?
Are they reaching out to you there, and do you have a presence there?
For example, I was talking with one of my mentees recently about
this, how she loves Instagram, loves being on Instagram.
Instagram's her jam, but she posted the same thing to Instagram and LinkedIn, and
LinkedIn got way higher quality of engagement. And
so while she likes Instagram and she'll continue posting
there, her people are on LinkedIn. And so simple shift in
her strategy for this year is to spend a little more time on LinkedIn than
she does at Instagram. She's not abandoning it. She's not abandoning it. But
it's not a big focus for her or as big of a focus as it
was in the past because she actually looked at the data, and she used this
omnichannel strategy to her benefit. K? She's just
adjusting and shifting as her community members around her
adjust and shift as well. So do your audit, look at your different
channels, and see where people are reaching out to you, and
use quantitative things here, right, or qualitative things here.
I don't want you to say, oh, I got 10 messages on Instagram and 2
on LinkedIn. Therefore, Instagram's better. Look at those
messages. We the people on these Internet streets are so
notorious for sending absolute spam trash in the
DMs. Okay? So if you got 10 DMs on Insta, but
9 of them are spam, we're not gonna count those. And if the other one's
from your mom, doesn't count. And in LinkedIn, the 2 DMs are
actually people going, hey. I saw your post. I really liked it, or someone connected
me with you because I think we could work together. LinkedIn would be a better
option for you in this case. K. So I want you to take a look
at the kind of data that's tough to see in a spreadsheet
and see where your community members are reaching out to you.
With that in mind, I will leave you to think on that,
but I also want to invite you to join me in the Mindfault Marketing Lab.
If anything I said here today really resonated with you and you're like, yes,
I'm ready to do this. I'm ready to start this, but help, I need some
more support. The lab is for you. Yes. I have courses on a lot of
our favorite platforms. I'm talking Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube,
Clubhouse even, which is oddly making a comeback right now,
my threads workshop. If you if you really wanna dive into any of these
particular categories, I have support for you. But the best
part of the lab is you get unlimited strategy support. Yeah.
Unlimited. Unlimited. That means you can ask as many questions as you want and get
my strategic little brain on everything that you do. And then, of course, you
can jump into any of our group sessions. Coming up right after this,
we've got 2, LinkedIn sessions, following up our
LinkedIn challenge about LinkedIn ads, LinkedIn video, all of the
things that you wanna learn about LinkedIn in 2025. And then we also have,
some special guest experts this month as well, talking about SEO,
as well as our content collaboration lab that we do every
month as well. So come on in and join us. The water is fine, and
we have a lot of fun in the lab. I hope to see you there.
Tune in next week because we have another podcast for you.
Jen Zellers is gonna be on the show talking to us about sustainable
visibility, which is so exciting, and I love it. I'm excited for it. I will
see you then. In the meantime, make sure you give us a 5 star rating
on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Helps keep us in the top 100 marketing
podcast. I'll see you next time. Bye for now.