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.

Before I dive in to this episode—if you’re listening to this episode when it first drops, I’d love to invite you to submit your marketing questions to a free office hours I’m recording next week, answering all your marketing questions. You’ll find the link in the show notes.

Even though, as I shared in the previous two episodes, marketing my business feels good now—and I even enjoy it—I don’t necessarily want to spend a lot of time doing it. 

That was one of the problems early on in my business: I was spending so much time figuring out how to market my business, being on all the channels, creating all the content, that marketing suddenly felt like my job, not mentoring people.

That’s why when I support small business owners with their marketing ecosystem, I especially pay attention to the number of channels they want to market on. There is, of course, no right number of channels to use. If you believe the marketing gurus, the more channels the better. 

And that’s what we see around us. The big companies around us are on all the channels: the supermarket I buy my groceries from, part of a national chain, is on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, Pinterest and YouTube. But they spent 100 million euros on marketing in 2022. They have a huge marketing team.

I—and you, too, I assume—on the other hand, do not have 100 million euro to spend on marketing. I don’t have a marketing team. I neither have the time, energy nor desire to spend a lot of time marketing.

I want my marketing to be minimal—and it is.

I explained a bit about what my marketing looks like in the previous episode. I market on 3 channels:

• newsletter / Substack
• website, including blog
• Pinterest

I send out a free newsletter twice a month, plus monthly newsletters for paid subscribers. 

I run my newsletter through Substack, which has as an advantage that I benefit from what they call the ‘network effect’—readers finding me on the platform itself, or through recommendations from other Substack newsletters.

By the way, if you’re curious about moving your small business newsletter to Substack, I have a blog post on that topic, and a course on Substack for small business owners that I’ll link to in the show notes.

Two old newsletters are uploaded to my blog each month by Laura of The Smallest Light. She also creates about 4 pins for each post and schedules these. I used to do the uploading and pinning myself, and it wouldn’t cost me more than half a day, I’d say, but this was a perfect thing to outsource.

And that’s it. That’s how people have been discovering my work for the past couple of years.

These 3 channels form my core marketing. Sometimes I add things—like this podcast—and sometimes I scale down, for instance by writing fewer newsletters.

Along with my marketing being minimal, I need it to be flexible. 

The content calendars I would make in the first years of my business were so overwhelming for me because they were anything but flexible. They might work for one week, even for two weeks, but then the third week something happened in my life, my energy dipped, my mental health got worse, or whatever. And there went my plan.

Which led me to losing momentum, getting discouraged about my marketing and my business.

The marketing I do now is the marketing I can do in an average month. I feel really fortunate that I’m able to pay Laura to do some of the work for me. If I didn’t, I would probably not pin to Pinterest as consistently, nor would I upload old newsletters as consistently.

Because sometimes I just want or need to scale down, for example during summer breaks and periods when I was unwell.

I also allow myself a lot of flexibility when it comes to sending out my newsletter. I used to send out a newsletter on the first of every month, but now no longer have fixed dates. I do tend to still send out newsletters primarily on Tuesdays and Thursdays, the days I have most time to engage with responses and comments.

If you take anything from this podcast, I’d love for it to be this: give yourself permission to market less than you think you need to. Give yourself permission to tend to yourself and your human needs.

Sometimes, especially around launches, I scale up my marketing.

I’ve written extra blog posts and created extra pins as a way of upscaling before a launch, and earlier this year I created the marketing hurdles quiz. I also wrote a blog post about that, and for both the spring enrolment of Grow and the current one asked Laura to create extra pins for it. For most launches I reach out to business buddies and write guest blog posts, and of course this podcast is a way of upscaling too.

Scaling up only works for me because I know it’s for a limited time, I prepare for it, and I can always scale back down again to my core marketing. 

For this autumn launch of Grow, for example, I blocked out days in my calendar for prep months in advance, to make sure I limited the number of client calls during this period.

This system that I landed on, of having a core of marketing channels that are really minimal, and giving myself the flexibility to scale down when I need to and up when I want to is what makes my marketing sustainable. 

If this kind of minimal marketing appeals to you, I’d love to invite you to think about how to apply it to your own marketing. How can you make it more minimal and more flexible? Can you make a plan for scaling down when you need to and scaling up when you want to? 

My gentle marketing programme Grow might also be just the thing for you if you’re looking for a more human, gentle and effective way of marketing your business. The waitlist is open now. Waitlist subscribers get 10% off, early access and special bonuses. The link is in the show notes. 

In the show notes you’ll also find a link to the free marketing office hours I’m recording soon, and a link to my marketing quiz so I can send you a free ebook with marketing tips, tailored to your business.Until next time.