Episode 55: Why Consistency Alone Is Not Enough and What I’m Doing Instead

NOTE: This is the transcript from the original recording, rather than the edited episode so timings may vary.

Victoria (00:01)
Hello and welcome to this solo episode of the Mum Means Business podcast. And today I really want to talk about consistency, particularly consistency in marketing, because I feel like I’m going through a bit of a shift when it comes to consistency versus alignment and energy. And so if we start at the beginning, when I…

relaunch this business.

When I emerged from my double maternity and I relaunched my photography business, everyone was talking about consistency. This is the early days just post COVID. And obviously online businesses had soared, people had made their fortunes and consistency seemed to be the name of the game. And I totally get it. Like why does consistency matter?

So there was the whole algorithm argument. So if you post on Instagram daily, the algorithm will call you its favorite. It will push you out to more.

If you post on Instagram daily, the algorithm will think you’re amazing. It will push all your content out to all your perfect ideal customer avatars and everything will just work beautifully. And I’m not sure I buy that or perhaps the algorithm has shifted or perhaps just what people want to see on these social media platforms has shifted. Then there’s the argument that you build a recognizable brand, which I totally understand.

But there again, you need to be consistent in all of your brand aesthetics. Then there’s the argument that you build trust. And this I think is the key piece. If people can rely on you to show up again and again and again and deliver a really consistent message, then they start to trust you. And we come back to that trust piece when it comes to sales that people have to see you. I think back then it was like seven times.

They have to hear your message before they’re going to buy from you. And now it’s 3,226 times.

But still, that trust element is so important. And I think it’s one of the reasons I started this podcast is because I felt like I was really struggling to build that know, like, and trust factor. And for me, long form content just felt so much easier in order to do that. And then I think the final reason that I can come up with why consistency is so important is because it enables you to be disciplined enough to show up.

daily if that’s your pattern and fail faster to test things out and to trial weird and wonderful social media.

to test things out and to figure out what lands and what doesn’t and move quickly through those fails to get to the thing that is gonna move the needle in your business. And so I’m gonna tell you a little bit of a story because I remember when I first met my now coach, Theresa Heathwaring, we had a Zoom call, a sort of intro conversation and…

I told her that I had posted on Instagram every day for at that point, I think 14 months about my photography business and about photography education. I have posted some stuff on gardening. have posted some, mean, it was a little bit all over the place. I’m not gonna lie, but every single day I had shown up on Instagram with two tiny babies on my feet, two under two. And it had been a creative outlet for me, but it had also been…

this kind of frantic need to make my business work in its new.

in its new form. And she was horrified because the punchline of this story is that I had posted every single day and actually I had an audience I think of that I had a following at that time of around 600 people.

And so obviously my content was not where I needed to be because if you post every day for 14 months and you have a following of 600 people within that there are all of your friends and people who followed you in the first place then something is off. And I really feel looking back now that that something was my energy. I was in the trenches with 202

under slept, overstimulated, frantic. We were going through a really difficult time in our relationship. We had just built our new, our new…

We had just built our forever home, which was a work in progress. We were flat broke. had…

so much going on and I desperately needed to make money. I needed to make money to alleviate this financial pressure and my photography business didn’t work in the way it had before and there was all this like online business stuff that I was listening to in my ears through podcasts all day every day sometimes.

that I was listening to on podcasts and absorbing in social media. And I had trialed bits and pieces, thought maybe this will work, maybe this will work, maybe this is it, maybe this is it. And my messaging was all over the place. I was darting around from one idea to another. One minute I thought that I might be a gardening influencer, the next minute I thought that maybe I would open a baby cafe. I think most mums, new mums have.

dreamed of opening a baby cafe at one point or another. It’s like right of passage for maternity. And so all these ideas are whirling around and I was regurgitating them all onto social media. And so anyone landing on my social media account, my Instagram account particularly, would have thought what the hell is going on with this woman? Like I don’t know whether I should follow her because she’s frantic. I don’t know what she’s doing. I don’t know what her offer is. I don’t know what her thing is. I don’t know what her messaging.

is it just feels.

I don’t know what her offer is. I don’t understand what she can do for me or what value that I’m gonna gain from this content. So I’m gonna, I’m gonna die. And that is totally understandable. I get it. And it wasn’t that it didn’t work at all. I got photography clients during that time, family photography clients, but in terms of growth of audience, it fell flat on its face. Another thing that I used to be super consistent about was

emailing my list and this is my email list for my photography business which at the time was purely analog family photography and I would email them every single week. I would also blog every single week because back when I started my business SEO was king and I knew I hadn’t blogged for a long time when my

When my photography business was established, I hadn’t needed to so much when I was shooting weddings. I’d been doing it for over a decade. I was there, I was on page one for loads of stuff and I was getting work. So it had fallen by the wayside, but now I was attracting a different audience. I needed to put effort into that. So I was blogging weekly. I was emailing my list weekly and my list was like a hundred people. It wasn’t much.

I was showing up on social media every single day and I was knackered. And the point that I really want to hammer home is that I was showing up regardless of my energy levels. I posted and as a result, I was posting quantity, but not always quality. I was experimenting. I was testing. I was trying to get my head around reels and I was trying to figure out what would land on what wouldn’t.

but my energy was not where it needed to be. I was not ready to handle an audience. And to be honest, I am so glad that only 600 people had to go through that with me because when I look back now, I am just filled with all the cringe. So moving forwards, when I launched this podcast, I took that consistency mindset.

and I plunked it right on top of this new project. So until the 50th episode went out, I had posted on social media every single day. So social media, I’m just gonna use the word social media, I mean Instagram. I had also posted occasionally on LinkedIn, normally sort of one post a day as the podcast went out, but Instagram is where I was really hammering it out.

but Instagram is where I was really concentrating my efforts. And I got to episode 50. I launched a new brand, which I’m gonna talk about because I’m so thrilled with it. I’m gonna talk about that in a separate episode. But I launched the new brand that Liz Mosley kindly and beautifully designed for me. I did pay her to be clear, but she did such a great job. And also 50 episodes, I never thought that I would get to 50 episodes.

It’s just none of that is true, right?

and also 50 episodes felt like a real milestone. I did not anticipate that I would necessarily get this far. And I also reflected, like, how was it going? How’s it doing? I’d been posting every day on Instagram. How was that looking? And to be honest, in a lot of ways, I was pretty pleased because the DMs that I’ve been getting from listeners who…

are relating to some of the conversations that I’ve been putting out into the world have been so lovely. And I do feel like slowly but surely there is a community growing around this podcast, which is amazing to me. And if you’re one of those people who has sent me a DM, I’m so grateful or just message me to say how much you loved it or shared on your stories. It means the absolute world because podcasting

is not the easiest thing to measure. And so I was thrilled with that because I feel like I’m connecting with people on a human to human level through this podcast, which is so important to me. But then I looked at my numbers because we all do it, right? We all look at our follow account. It’s not like we hold all our self-worth and hang it on our follow account, but…

It’s not like we take our self-worth and hang it on that follow account, but it matters. It does. Because the more people who aren’t aware of us, the more people we can impact and the further our message will spread. So I looked at it and I wondered whether actually to keep doing the same thing and to keep posting every single day, regardless of my energy and putting out kind of mediocre content sometimes.

was the right thing to do or whether actually I was that definition of insanity, whereas

where if you do the same thing over and over again and expect different results, that one. So…

But I wondered whether I was leaning into that definition of insanity where you do the same thing again and again and again and expect different results. And so I thought, actually, maybe this is a nice, neat opportunity to just try something different. And this month, the month of June, when I’m recording this, it has been a lot. I have been traveling around a fair bit, trying to attend a lot of in-person.

events and do the networking thing, make friends, meet new people, talk about the podcast, talk about what other people are doing, talk about my photography business, just like talk about business in general with other women who are navigating all this same stuff because I think it’s so important and it really energizes me. And so I’ve been doing a lot of that but actually that means that other things have had to fall by the wayside.

And my phrase of this month has been, am only one person. And I think why that’s been so important to me this month is that I just have not accepted that there are so many hours in the day. And for years, since I became a mom and since I navigated this big identity shift, I have been frantically trying to hustle, trying to hustle to make my business work.

And actually has left me really tired, but more importantly, it hasn’t worked. Being consistent, showing up daily, hasn’t worked. It hasn’t led me to the point at which everything falls into place. It hasn’t been the magic fairy glitter that I sprinkle over my business and suddenly things start to happen. In fact, I think it has been

the moments where I have paused and reflected and refined my messaging and really thought about what I want to do and why and what value I want to add and what impact I want to have, what my purpose is. The power has been in the pause and the power has been in the conversations that I’ve had on this podcast.

to have the power.

power has been in connection with other women on the same path and those conversations, those moments, those throwaway comments that someone might make that actually just really really land and make you reflect to make you think are what has really shifted my mindset, my energy and so I’ve realized

that saying yes to one thing is saying no to something else. And for the first time it’s landed. I have heard this so many times. So this weekend, I said yes to actually gardening and no to making content about gardening. Since the 50th episode, I have not posted every day. I have looked at my day and I have thought, I have space?

to do that. I’m committed to it still. I’m not gonna go a week without posting, but every day looks different when you’re a business building mum. And so I’ve looked at the day and I have thought, do I really want to have this pressure hanging over me all day trying to scramble around and think, when can I find half an hour or an hour to do this? Do I want that? Is that the energy that I wanna bring to my kids?

Or do I want to say, today’s not the day, I’m just being present. I’m gonna go and garden. And I’m talking about gardening because this week’s episode is with Kendall Marie Platt. She is amazing. She is a gardening revolutionary. And definitely go and check that out. That will be episode 54. And so gardening was on my mind anyway. And I needed it. I’ve had a frantic month. I needed to get out in the garden, get my hands in the dirt.

and just sort of potter, plant, look at the sky, have my bare feet moving through the grass. And so I prioritized it and the social media stuff didn’t happen. I disappeared. But I know that when I come back, my energy is going to be so much more aligned with what I’m doing. So.

from this moment henceforth, which is one of my partner’s favorite phrases, I’m not gonna be consistent. I’m shifting the pattern. I’m changing things up and I’m gonna test what it means to mark it in a way that feels aligned and in tune with my capacity. I would like to try aligning my productivity

with my energy, rather than pushing through regardless, staying up late when I desperately need sleep.

trying to find hours in the day that just aren’t really there. I want to be real and honest with myself about my own capacity.

So where I’m gonna be consistent now, and I’ve really had to think about this, I am gonna be consistent in this podcast. I’m gonna make sure that an interview episode and a solo episode go out every week. I’m gonna be consistent in emailing the list for my photography education business, because I really want to deliver that weekly value to them. I am gonna be consistent.

in putting out the marketing content for the family business, which is my day job.

and I’m gonna do things differently when it comes to this pug market.

and I’m gonna do things differently when it comes to marketing this podcast on Instagram, on LinkedIn, and I’m gonna give myself a break on blogging for my photography business, for my photography education business, and see where that takes me. My point is, consistency is not enough. It’s really not. And I really want you to take this away from my story.

I spent so much time trying to create content when I should have been perhaps staring at my baby. I was with my babies 24 seven. I don’t have any regrets about being present with them, but I have regrets about being present with them.

And perhaps if I had trusted the process, given myself time and space to actually pause, calm down, and think about what I was doing rather than just doing. One of the key takeaways from Atomicon that I attended a couple of weeks ago was from Andrew and Pete.

in their first opening session. And if you haven’t listened to it, go back and listen to my Atomicon debrief, which came out last week. And they said, doing something is not always better than doing nothing. It’s always what you hear, isn’t it?

And they said it in a much more funny way. But that was the crux of it. And we hear so often doing something is better than doing nothing, but actually is it. If you’re spending your time pouring all of your spare energy into putting out content that is not moving the needle, that is not better than doing nothing. In my experience, looking back, had I stopped and done nothing?

and just thought a little bit more and reflected and given myself space to think.

and given myself space to reflect, I might have had the opportunity to hone in on the thing that really mattered. Or I might have just been able to say to myself, this is not the most important thing right now. Give yourself a break. So quality is more important than quantity and quality doesn’t necessarily mean beautiful. As a photographer, I find that quietly.

I find that quite challenging. But actually I think now quality means connection. It means honing in your messaging and delivering it in a human to human way that lands with the viewer or the listener makes them think, yeah, me too. And I think that is the quality that we need to find in our content that is going to move the needle for us. And I’m not there. I want to be really clear. I am not there yet.

I’m working on it. But this is all a work in progress. And I feel quite strongly now that if I can tune in my…

And I’m sharing this because I want to learn from my own lessons and I want to give you the opportunity to learn from my mistakes.

and I’m sharing this with you now.

And I’m sharing this now because I want to give you the opportunity to learn from my mistakes. If you are holding yourself to a rigid social media content calendar and it is draining you, then give yourself permission to deviate from it. Consistency and discipline have their place. They are important. And I think when you feel aligned,

and your messaging is spot on and you can see traction and momentum, it’s amazing. But it’s not always the answer.

And if we give ourselves permission to just press pause and go into our real lives, then we can sometimes get the perspective we need to come back with the energy that is going to land better. I really hope this helps you and if you have any thoughts or reactions to this, come and find me on Instagram, slide into those DMs and let me know. I would love to hear from you. And I will speak to you soon.