We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Amanda Wrafield a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Amanda, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Let’s start with a story that highlights an important way in which your brand diverges from the industry standard.

More often than not, in the marketing sphere, the advice you find is all geared towards the “best practices”. And those best practices are all about how to make the algorithms happy, and how to do the absolute most in order to see results with your content and marketing.

However, I work with a lot of solopreneurs and entrepreneurs with extremely small teams. They don’t have the time or the ability to focus all of their energy on their marketing, and those best practices aren’t realistic for them. Typically, they’ll put in the effort to hit those targets and end up in a constant content creation mode – or, what I like to call the content creation hamster wheel. Eventually they become so burnt out by that hamster wheel that they quick creating content altogether – and stop marketing their business. Which leads to a feast or famine cycle of clients.

Instead, I help my clients and students use simplicity to find their own personal best practices. Instead of working to make the algorithm happy, we focus on nurturing our current audience through our content – at a pace that’s consistent but not constant. This leads to happier business owners who are able to say goodbye to both the content creation hamster wheel AND the feast or famine client cycle.

Amanda, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I began batching my content because a dog peed on our carpets. We had just moved into our new home when we realized that the previous owner’s dog had peed on every single carpet in the house. My husband and I have two cats, and we were worried about them wanting to mark their territory over those spots, so even though we weren’t ready to put down new carpets, we immediately ripped out all of the old carpet. Which left us with subfloor in four rooms of our house – including my office.

As a podcaster, sound quality is really important, and in order to create decent sound during those months without carpet, I had to lay out every blanket we owned on my office subfloor. This got old quickly, and I ended up deciding to try and record an entire month’s worth of podcast episodes at one time so that I didn’t have to lay out the blankets every single week. The freedom I felt from not having to record every week lead to me wondering if I could do the same with all of my other content as well. Which led to the creation of my monthly batching system where I create a month’s worth of content in just one week. Leaving time and space to get strategic with how I’m growing my business.

I began teaching this system through my online course – Content Batching Bootcamp, and that was the start of what my business has become today. Now I work with 1:1 clients to craft their own marketing strategies throughout the year. I also offer 1:1 VIP Days where I help creative educators map out their launch strategy and marketing plan for their launch. And I offer courses and templates that help improve your marketing through my shop. From content creation, to strategy planning, to launching, I help with it all!

I also host a podcast – the Chasing Simple podcast – that is full of incredible teachings on marketing and time management as a business owner.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

It’s so easy to fall into the trap of believing that you need a large audience on social media in order to build and grow a business. I know I did at first.

But what I’ve learned over the last five years of owning my business is that it’s not about the quantity – how many people you have following you on social media – but the quality – how many of those people actually care what you have to say.

My first few years in business, I was constantly focused on how I could grow my audience size. But over time I realized that the people that were buying from my business? They were the exact same people in my dms, responding to my posts, leaving comments. It wasn’t a large group, but it was clear that it didn’t need to be. The people I’d been corresponding with, those were the ones that cared when I had something new to offer.

The best advice I can give to someone just starting to build a social media presence is to focus on building relationships, not audiences.

What’s been the best source of new clients for you?

The best source of new clients is, without a doubt, past clients and students. Like I mentioned previously, relationship building is truly key for growing your business. When you focus on serving your people well, on caring about THEM, and going above and beyond for your people, they in turn share about what you do.

Not to mention, word of mouth is way more convincing than our own marketing will ever be. So it makes more sense to focus on serving your people well and building relationships than to try some new strategy that you just heard of in order to get clients.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://amandawarfield.com/
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/mrsamandawarfield/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amanda-warfield-336765a0/
• Other: Chasing Simple Podcast: https://amandawarfield.com/chasing-simple/

Image Credits
Lauren Carnes Photography