Welcome to the Mindful Marketing Podcast. I'm your host,
Andrea Jones. Tune in every week as
we redefine marketing playbooks to break free from what we should
do so that we can scroll less, connect
more, and grow together.
So I got this Instagram message recently that said, I've been
listening to the podcast for 2 years. I'm excited to join the Savvy
Social School. But when I went there, I saw a wait list page. What the
heck happened? Are you a still accepting member? So in today's
episode, I wanna talk about it. Let's get into it. Before
we get into it, this episode is sponsored by Riverside, which is the all in
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Hi. Hello. Welcome back to the podcast. So in this new
era of mindful marketing, there are some things
that are shifting in my business. And I one of my values
is transparency. But I haven't really publicly talked
about this because I didn't wanna be one of those business owners who was
doing, like, a blowout sale or going away thing or
a huge announcement. So I just didn't. But that
message made me think about the repercussions of not talking about something. So I
wanna talk about The Savvy Social School today, where we were and where
we're going, and use this as an example to
bring, larger depth of conversation to the podcast. Because
it doesn't necessarily have to do with social media marketing, but I do think it
has to do with positioning and marketing in general in the business.
So hopefully, I'll listen to the 3 part series about
pivoting because we are a new podcast now. Welcome to the
Mindful Marketing podcast. And part of this pivot for
me was also looking at my offers and my offer suite,
and how I wanted to show up there. Because honestly,
deep down, I'm still social media lover. Social media is
my main boo. It will be for the
foreseeable future. I don't see myself divorcing from social media.
I love it. I love teaching it. I love facilitating
workshops. I love talking about it. And there are so
many other things that I do in my business that I also wanna talk about.
So that's where we are. What happened to the Savvy
Social School? So in 2023,
I went through quite a lot of changes in my business and in my life.
I got pregnant. I
also had a challenging year in the agency. I had to
let go of 6 people. Our client list went
down drastically because of the economy.
The pandemic kind of
bubble of revenue that was infused with things like the
PPP loans were running out, people had to pay back huge tax bills.
And, my ideal clients weren't weren't able
to afford our offers for a while there.
Right? So that sets the stage for this.
Then the retreat happened. And as I've talked
about in previous episodes, hosting a live retreat really is
a catalyst for me for a lot of the changes that I made in my
business. I recognize that I deeply crave
intimacy in my business. And so I was exploring how to do
more of that, while also maintaining community in my business.
Because community to me is the reason that I'm doing
all of this in the first place. Like, I love I love, love, love that
piece of it as well. So
at the end of the year, I did it was one does examine your
offers, examine your your business, really do a
breakdown of everything that's working for you and that's not. And one of
the most challenging things throughout the year was the school. In
2023, we went through a number of pivots to try to increase
revenue and retention. So at the beginning of the year, we raised the price, it
went from $57 to $97 a month.
We also change platforms about halfway through the year, we
were before that point on Teachable, hosting all of our
courses. The year prior, 2022, we moved from a
Facebook group to a Circle community. And
then Circle introduced courses, and so it made sense for us
to move from Teachable to Circle. And I have a whole podcast episode about that
I'll put in the show notes why we made that choice. But I'm loving
Circle. Like, honestly, when I hear other people have memberships on Circle,
I'm more likely to sign up because I'm like, oh, yeah. I love Circle. I'm
on there all the time. So that changed
things. Then almost immediately after that switch, I
got pregnant. And for those of you who haven't been
pregnant or have no plans of getting pregnant, it
is very physically, mentally
challenging. And this particular one for me
is was very mentally and physically challenging. I'm prerecording
this. I'm still in it. So it feels like I'm exhausted.
And if you watch a video of this, I'm, like, sitting sideways because I my
belly is so large I can no longer just face forward. It's a
thing. So it's it's it's been a whole
process. And then in analyzing things, we
looked at things like our exit surveys, we looked at what people were saying as
they were leaving and just noticing our community was,
it was challenging to commit to the $97 a month, on
a monthly basis. And so they'd sign up, do what they
can with that month, and then go, like, pause
or cancel and then go implement in their business, which is totally fine. I don't
have anything against that. However, that's not sustainable and that's not really
what this was meant to be. Combine
that with, I started learning from a gal named
Lizzie Goddard this year, and she creates a ton
of, offer. She has a lot of offers in her
business. She's what she calls this playground model, which is
fascinating to me because I purchased something very specifically from her because I want
to learn a specific thing. And then I ended up literally buying everything
because I just I'm really fascinated with the business
model. And so I started testing out some of the things
that she teaches and I was really enjoying the results.
So that all culminated
to the beginning of this year where I was looking
ahead at what to do with the school. I'm pregnant.
Our retention is down. Our revenue is down,
And I spend the most time trying to fix this
membership that was challenging for
me. So what I'm going to do is we're gonna take a quick break. When
we come back, I'm going to play for you most
if not all of the video that I released to my members at the
beginning of this year, so that you have context on what I told them.
And then I'll give you more context because it's been a few months since I've
made that announcement. I
will play that video, and then when we come back, we'll talk more
about what happened since then. Here we go.
It's our birthday.
And I'm hosting a birthday party.
So online, Drea, is celebrating 10 years
of business. I cannot believe I started this business in March
2014. And here we are 10 years later
with this birthday celebration. I am doing a 10
day super sale. And I'm not talking about, like, little 10% off
here, little 20% off there. No, ma'am. We are
doing 50, 50, 50% off
select of offers throughout this 10 day birthday
sale. But the catch, the kicker is you have to be signed up to our
email list to get the offers that are coming out every day. So you
can sign up by going to online dreah.com/birthday.
So onlinedrea.com/birthday.
Sign up, put your little email address in there, and then every day of the
sale, I'm gonna email you what's on sale for that day. And you only have
24 hours to grab that offer
and away you go. Away you go. So if you're ready
to celebrate our birthday with us, come to our fab
fiesta and let's have fun. Let's have a party. I'll
see you there.
Hello. Hello. Hello to everyone in
the Savvy Social School. I am doing
a livestream today to share some very important
announcements and updates to those of you who hold a Savvy
Social School membership. I'm gonna talk
about the why and the what, but I also wanna say
never fear. If you are a member, you're still a member. But
we we are making some significant changes to our business model,
and we're changing some of the key deliverables that are included in the
Savvy Social School. So first, I wanna talk about the why.
We started the Savvy Social School in 2018. Prior to that, I
actually had several individual courses, my main one being a Canva
course that I started in 2016. But in 2018, we
changed to the membership model, and I love the membership model y'all. I
love being in community and support. I love being members in
other people's memberships. But as we reach
our peak in 2022, we had our best year ever in the membership.
I started really spending heavily and investing and building out the
membership. We raised our prices in 2023,
but the economy just did not agree with all of that. We had
a very rough year. I know a lot of you watching this video, listening to
this reporting also had a rough year in 2023 and
the Savvy Social School did not do well, mostly because our
members, were struggling to maintain
a membership. I can't tell you how many times people emailed
asking if they could pause or postpone because of unforeseen
circumstances in their business. And so that led to
a very low, revenue year for us in the
Savvy Social School and low retention for our members. So not only
were we not, producing the revenue that we needed to sustain
the membership, we were also not really helping
y'all, because you would come in for a month and then you would feel
bad about not being able to take advantage of your monthly
fee and and dive into all of the materials or show up live.
And then you'd cancel with that bad feeling. Right? That bad feeling
of, man, I really didn't, you know, accept the
most of this situation. So that's kind of a recap
of what happened in 2023. We also, in 2023,
though, started releasing additional offers. So you've noticed
we released additional offers separate to the Savvy Social School, which is a
first for us. Typically, everyone is funneled into the
school. Everyone becomes a member. But last year,
we started having our smaller products like be your own b
roll, our content maximizer bundle, we
started selling the Instagram template bundle, things like that to really
help support you, and those actually did really well.
And then tied into all of this and why I'm making these
changes is personal life. I know it's kind of hard
sometimes to talk about personal life as a business owner, especially because it
does impact so many people. I've really struggled with this.
But I got pregnant this year last year, I guess.
This year is 2024, so I'm currently still pregnant. I'm due in, like, a month
and 2 weeks oh, sorry. 2 months and 2 weeks. I'm
7 months in. It's been a journey.
Plus, I'm chasing after a 20 month old who's very
vibrant and takes a lot of energy. And so I've
been leaning on more asynchronous support. So what that means
is simply I prefer to have a way of communication that I can come
to at any point. So live sessions are actually very
challenging for me. And those of you who have small kids or
extenuating family circumstances may also understand this challenge
of, you know, not being able to show up live. And that's another thing that
kept showing up time and time again in our member
feedback surveys and in the exit surveys is that
a lot of people were saying, I love the courses, I love the
templates, I love the challenges, but I'm really struggling to show up
live. So if that's you, I'm right there with you.
Okay? There's also a cost to running live sessions if I'm not
the one to show up. So with my first pregnancy,
I hired in a bunch of guest speakers to come in and teach in the
school. So there's the cost of that. There's the cost of my team facilitating
those sessions instead of me, and so it is it is costly
in a financial capacity as well as a time
on top of all of this, I do have a second membership. Those of you
in the Savvy Social School Pro, you if you know, you know. That's my
mentorship program. It's for, social media professionals,
and I spend a lot of time in that membership
So with that being said, we have decided to change
I say we. It's it's mostly me. I have decided to
change the business model of the Savvy Social School. What does that
mean for you? Well, in
short, the Savvy Social School will not be sold,
henceforth, will not be sold as a membership
product. Now don't be scared. If you already have a membership, you're forever
have access to your membership, and I'll talk about all of that in a minute.
But for new people coming in, it's probably starting around February because
we still have to flip over all the websites and all of our funnels.
But we're going to test out not having an
open membership model. Now,
there are lots of people who run this membership model, in the
online business space. They have closed membership models versus open. So ours has
been open. You go to savvysocialschool.com, you join, you can become a
member at any time. Some people run closed membership models where you
only have a window of time to join and you only have a
a a chance, one chance to join. So we're we're going into the closed
membership model, temporarily,
potentially forever. The reason being, again,
is all of those reasons I listed before, and We're gonna focus on selling
individual products. So if y'all like a little BTS behind the scenes moment, that's the
reality of it. Okay. So, what does that
mean if you hold a current membership? So if you hold a
current membership, you still have access to all of the things you
currently have access to with one exception.
All of your courses, you still have access to them. And any new courses
that I create, as long as you remember, you have access to all of them.
K? So you have access to all of the courses
here and going forward. For instance, yesterday or 2
days ago, we just released Airtable Like a Boss for our members
only. You also have access to that. Okay? You'll have access to all of
our challenges, past challenges, future challenges, as long as you're a
member. You have all the templates. You have the feed podcast, the trend savvy,
the content ideas. You can ask us questions. You're in the community.
So you have all of that going forward. So that's not changing. The biggest thing
that's changing is our live events. Our live events.
So we are
saying we won't ever host live events. I love live events. Now that's not saying
we won't ever host live events. I love live events. I'm super
excited for the LinkedIn challenge next week. We will most likely do
the Instagram challenge again, plus host pop up live events throughout
the year, but we're no longer going to be hosting our monthly live
sessions. And those of you who've been in the school for a long time have
seen us shift those sessions over the past 2 years because we've
really been trying to encourage members to show up live. But the data is
saying y'all can't show up live. We've tried study hall. Who
remembers study hall? We tried, doing
business coaching sessions. We tried live workshops. We are
currently trying the Business Spark sessions. And for a membership that
has about a 170 members, to only have 2 or 3
people show up for each of those, is a signal to us
that it's not working in that model. So we're no longer
hosting our monthly spark sessions or accountability sessions
as a part of your current membership. Now,
this video will be emailed out to all of our
members personally. You will have the option to cancel
your membership if you want. I wanna be fully transparent about this.
I'm not the type of person to try to, like, sneak this in
and hope you don't notice. Right? That's why making a big deal about it, making
a big announcement. It's a big deal for me.
It's a big deal for me because I've spent the last 6
years, hosting live sessions in this membership
model, and it's not as, impactful as I want
it to be. So with that, I just wanna thank you all
for being a member, whether you've been here for a month or
the whole 5 years. This is not the end of the
Savvy Social School. Absolutely not. We are just shifting away
from the membership model as a selling point for the
school. Because, again, the data is showing us that
most people like to come in, consume the
information that they need, and then go and do that.
And one of the I'll leave I'll leave a wrap up this video with
this thought. One of the things that really impacted me
when I was working on this with my accountability coach, Becky Mollenkamp,
who's here in the school, was this idea that I'm
spending so much time trying to make something work with
a group of people, y'all, who've signaled to
me like, hey, this model, this way of delivering this content isn't working
for me. And instead, I can spend all of that time
and energy making something that works so beautifully for y'all, for me and for
you. So that's what I'm gonna spend my time doing over the next
year. I'm committed to creating way better,
resources for you here in the school. We've already spent so much time improving
everything. Y'all have seen it. The improvements just in the past 6 months have
been astounding. I'm so proud of them. And so I I
wanna focus on that rather than focus on making a membership model
work. If you have any questions, my DMs
are open in the community. Jemmy on
my team will be emailing all of our active members to give them an option.
If you wanna opt out, no hard feelings. I definitely wanna give you that
option. Those of you who wanna stay, you still get access to so much. There's
so many resources in here. And this isn't saying that we won't
ever do live session ever again. This isn't saying that we won't ever,
open up the membership again. It's just saying for now,
this is a decision that makes the most sense for me, as
I head into pregnancy and as
I explore creating other offers.
Thank you so much for your understanding, your kindness, your generosity.
Oh, Ginger, I see in the chat. I'm staying. Yes, Ginger.
One of the first members, if not the first. I appreciate
that. But we will follow-up after this
video. Goes out to everybody.
And if you have any questions, of course, we're here to answer them. But happy
New Year. Happy 2024. Feels like the year of shifting for a lot of
people. And I'll see y'all in the community, which will always be here
for now. I mean, I say always, but, like, I I love community.
This community space will always be here. Alright. Thank you. Thank you. I'll
see you very soon. LinkedIn challenge, I think, is the next thing
coming up. Alright. Have a great week, everyone.
So there you have it. I decided to change models,
business models, so I can focus
more on delivering products that make more sense for
my business, make sense for my clients and make sense for me
personally. And also be completely transparent in that this decision
did come from a place of, financial consideration as well.
And I think a lot of business owners in their marketing do not talk about
this. It's it's almost like a little bit shameful to
say, hey, this program, while it also wasn't working delivery
wise, it wasn't working financially. So we had to make some shifts.
Right? I think not enough people talk about that, which is why I wanted to
have this podcast episode. And it's the reason why I didn't
make a big deal out of it, on social media. I had it as
a PS in an email. And then this week actually, we're
we've reopened the doors to new members because of our fab Fiesta
sale. And so new people can join this week, but it's not gonna
be open all the time because it's not our focus, and it's not
really where I want people focused all the time. So what
has come from this, the beautiful thing that has come from this since
changing models is that I've had
people come into my ecosystem who would have
never done that before. Prior to 2023, I
wasn't really selling individual things. I'm trying to think. I think you
could purchase visually savvy individually, but I don't even have
that anymore available. So prior to
2023, you your only choice of
working with me was go into the Savvy Social School and get everything.
And what I recognize after moving to this model is
that you don't need everything, and you may just need a
solution that helps you for today until you realize that you
need everything. And again, I this came from my work with Lizzie
Goddard. I bought one course. It
was the beginning of 2023. I bought one course to solve one problem.
And then I bought another course, another course. And then I was like, oh, I
just love this whole thing. Give me everything. Right? And so I
think that that is my goal with the Savvy Social School
eventually. So will the business model change in the future? Perhaps. Maybe.
Once I get a better handle on what everything includes, because I do have
another membership as I said in the video.
That is ultimately my everything package
is I want professional, like, people who do social
media as their their business. They're really the only people who
need everything, in my opinion. And so that's everything and
then some. But for the people who are like, I don't need
the, you know, live sessions. I don't need 1 on ones. I just want
all of your courses. I kinda want that to still
be an option that's on the table sometimes when I'm able to
facilitate the onboarding of those folks and really get
them in appropriately. So
what happened to the Zagun Social School? It's still here. If you're listening to this,
we're just about at the end of our fab fiesta. You can still join, but
we're closing the doors. I probably won't open them again until, like, maybe do a
Black Friday sale. I don't know. It depends on how my
life is going at that moment, how finances are going at that
moment. This is how business owners make decisions, right? Like
we, we look at what to market based on, yes, what people
need and then also what we need as business owners. And so I wanted to
be transparent about that because I do I don't think enough people talk about it.
So let me know what you think. Send me a DM on Instagram. I'm at
OnlineDrea. I'll probably be,
slower to respond because I have a newborn, but I'm working from the
bed for the next couple of weeks as I, transition
my personal life as well. Anyway, thanks for listening to this
shiny new episode of the podcast. I'll be back soon with another one. Bye for
now.