Welcome to Female Owned, the podcast for small business without the hustle, without the hacks, without the overwhelm. My name is Astrid Bracke and I’m a small business mentor working with small business owners, freelancers and creatives just like you to create slower, gentler and more profitable businesses.

In the previous episode, I shared my marketing journey with you. I talked about how marketing felt like a necessary evil in the early years of my business, and how I felt I was flailing. And in spite of following seemingly everyone’s advice, my marketing had few results. It also made me feel overwhelmed, burnt-out and anxious. In 2021 and 2022 I got so few up, that I switched things around—also by necessity, because I became ill with severe clinical depression.

A couple of things were bugging me about my marketing back in 2021. I felt like I was playing a game I didn’t know the rules to—and that went especially for social media. The only social media platform I used at that point was Instagram, and there was so much advice about best practices, hashtags, when and what to post that I constantly felt overwhelmed. 

I constantly felt like I was falling behind and like I was never doing enough. This was probably fuelled by the myth that if only I marketed in ‘the right way’, I would be booking clients all the time. I couldn’t even keep up with my own content calendars: I was spread thin between creating posts for Instagram several times a week, plus writing a regular newsletter, plus pitching to podcasts, plus pitching to write guest posts, plus trying to get a hang of Pinterest and keeping my blog updated. I still feel claustrophobic just summing all of that up. 

And I felt out of my depth with especially social media. I found creating the visuals hard, and it took me much more time than I wanted. I love taking photographs, but the ones I love taking didn’t match the vibe or mood I wanted my business to express. In a later episode I’ll share my experience with social media—and my decision to leave it—in more depth, but my struggles with Instagram were a big reason why I switched up my marketing.

My single rule for marketing became that I would only market in ways that worked for me. Specifically, that meant a couple of things:

• I wanted coherence and I wanted to feel less pressured. I wanted to feel less pressure from platforms and channels, and from my own content calendars;
• I wanted to lean into my strengths and joys. Writing and creating worksheets and courses feels easeful and joyful to me—that’s what I wanted to do;
• I wanted to be able to take a break, to have my marketing tick along without me. This is especially important to me because I have chronic fatigue and wildly fluctuating mental health.

Probably because I was emerging from a period of clinical depression, making the choice to market on fewer platforms was easily made for me. I simply had to, I had no choice.

I also knew that although I enjoyed doing outreach, writing guest posts and pitching to podcasts would have to become something I did occasionally—not weekly or monthly. This kind of outward-facing marketing feels particularly impossible when my mental health dips, so I took it out of my regular schedule.

I next started thinking about which platforms and channels allowed me to step back from my marketing when I needed to. Focusing on evergreen marketing felt like a logical step. I don’t want my content to disappear into some algorithm black-hole after a few days—I want people to be able to easily discover my content after weeks and months, even years.

I ended up with a pretty short list of platforms that I wanted to use, and that I’ve been using since:

• my newsletter
• my website
• my blog
• Pinterest

To help me think about how these platforms could work together, to make me feel less scattered and be more efficient, I tied them together in a marketing ecosystem. The heart or hub of my marketing ecosystem is my website. If people were only to learn about me in one place, I want it to be my website because I have most control over it, and it feels like my virtual home.

I no longer wanted to create content just for one channel. Instead, I want each part of the ecosystem to feed into the next. For example, if I have a new offer to share, I’ll create a sales page on my website, which I then link to in my newsletter, in which I also write about the offer. My old newsletters are turned into blogs on my website, for which my VA creates pins. And these pins lead to my website again.

If you’re curious what this looks like visually, do check the show notes for an image of my marketing ecosystem.

The simplicity of this felt baffling to me. Could I really do so little? This felt so simple and spacious, even more so once I had the funds to outsource uploading the blogs and creating the pins.

But to answer my own question: it turns out that, yes, I can do so little. Of course I don’t know what my business would look like if I were still doing all the things I did before. 

But I do know that I am now in a place with my business that I dreamed of when I started. I’ve decreased my hours at my teaching job to just two days a week, and work 3 days in my business. I’m making financial goals that I thought I’d never make. I’m working with such lovely clients.

The ecosystem consists of my core marketing. In the next episode I’ll talk about minimal marketing, and how I’ve build my system in such a way that I can scale down when I need to, and scale up went I want to.

For now, I’d love to invite you to think about your own marketing. How coherent is it? Are you doing too much? What can you have work together more? Which strengths and joys do you want to use in your marketing? And what would your marketing ecosystem look like?

If you’d like to dive deeper into marketing differently, do check out my website—-astridbracke.com—, my newsletter and my gentle marketing programme Grow, which will run again from November 2025 onwards. 

I’ve also created a free marketing quiz that helps you identify your marketing hurdles—and where I’ll send you my favourite easeful marketing strategies to tackle them. You’ll find the link in the show notes.

Do let me know what you thought of this episode by leaving a review or commenting on Substack, I’d love to hear from you. 

Until next time.