Why Your Marketing Keeps Falling Apart (And It's Got Nothing To Do With Your Content)

This week I'm sharing a piece of feedback that stopped me in my tracks - a brand new client who not only loved the content my team delivered in their very first month, but was equally impressed by the systems and processes behind how it was delivered. That feedback sparked a conversation I've been wanting to have on the mic for a while.

Because here's the truth: you can have the best content strategy in the world, but if the infrastructure behind it isn't there, your marketing will always feel harder than it needs to.

In this episode I cover:

• Why the infrastructure behind how you deliver is part of the impression you make
• The real reason founders stop marketing when business gets busy — and how to break that cycle
• Why content without systems is just noise (and what to do instead)
• The simple four-part framework I use to build a marketing system that's actually scalable
• What good marketing infrastructure looks like - a practical checklist you can action today
• How my team and I rebuilt TSC's entire backend over nine months and why that's directly driving our best growth yet
• Why AI is your best friend when you're starting from scratch with systems
• The mindset shift that changes everything: marketing is a mandatory business function, not a task you do when you have time

Mentioned in this episode:
Cocktails & Conversations - my next In Her Empire Era live panel event, Thursday 13 August, Tada Studios Auckland CBD. Early bird tickets are almost gone - grab them right here: https://events.humanitix.com/in-her-empire-era-presents-cocktails-and-conversations 

Links:

• Join the IHEE WhatsApp community
• Follow on Instagram: @inhererampireerapod
• Find Loren on LinkedIn: Loren Tomlinson
• Visit us at: inherempireera.com

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If this episode gave you a breakthrough moment, share your key takeaway on Instagram and tag @inhererampireerapod. Your insights might just shape a future episode.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Good morning. Happy Wednesday and welcome back to another episode of the In Her Empire Era podcast. I'm your host, Lauren, back with another episode for this week, brought to you by The Social Collective, my, as always, amazing digital marketing agency. Shout out to TSC because I wouldn't have these episodes without it. But thank you so much to everybody for tuning in this morning. I am waking up today feeling full of gratitude because so much has been happening and there are so many amazing things that are unfolding, which I am really excited to share some of them with you today and a few more as the weeks go on. But today's episode is really going to be focused around something that has been a topic of conversation in the TSC office and a really important conversation that I think is a really fun one to bring to the mic today, actually. It's come from a really amazing piece of feedback that the TSE team and I received yesterday, which I thought is worth having a conversation on the mic about. And the reason that I'm bringing it to the mic is because it's one of those conversations where I think speaking about things in the immediate moment that they happen is good and helpful, more helpful when you can reflect back on just how far you've come. And I'm a big advocate for, and I've said this to my team when it comes to creating content, whether it's a LinkedIn post, it's a podcast episode, it's an EDM that we're sending out, it's a presentation that I'm giving. No matter what it is, I am much more of a fan of sharing when you have built and grown and scaled and then being able to look back and reflect on where you've come from rather than talking about things in the here and now and while they're happening. And now this episode today is all around really looking at the infrastructure behind the impression when it comes to our content and marketing our businesses online and why I personally believe that your internal processes are one of the most important parts of your marketing strategy because without things falling into place behind the scenes, keeping up with your marketing is a much, much trickier process. So allow me to give you a little bit of background and a little bit of context for today's episode before I dive into the nitty-gritty. The reason I'm bringing this to the mic is because yesterday my team and I received some absolutely incredible feedback, which we are receiving more and more feedback just like this one recently. And it is a really true testament to so, so much hard work that has gone on behind the scenes. And I'm not here to gloat. This episode is not about why it is so amazing. I want to take all of the things that we have learned, especially in the last nine months in particular, and I want to share some key learnings with you so that you can fast track your marketing growth and you can fast track your business growth so that you can learn from the things that my team and I have been doing and you can implement them for your own businesses because that's how I love to grow and I want to share that with you too. So, giving a bit of context in terms of the feedback that we received, this is a new client to set the scene for you, very new client to TSC. They've come on board for us to take over their organic social media content and they're setting up some email automations for them. We sent off this content yesterday. We received feedback not long after sending it off with their most positive feedback and some really great comments and one in particular that really stood out to me. So, aside from the fact that they really loved the content, which is a true testament to how amazing of a team I have these days, is that I can have the absolute pleasure of being able to onboard some amazing, amazing brands to TSC. And I have an incredible team that keep our wheels turning behind the scenes and they pump out amazing content and great strategies and really thoughtful content because as a frictional marketing team, it is our responsibility to make sure that everything is seamless and fun and easy and reflects the clients because one of the one of the things that I am always telling our clients is I want every single client that comes through the doors of the social collective to be able to see their marketing content rolling out, but their audiences having absolutely zero awareness that we are behind the scenes. They know we're behind the scenes, but I want them to feel like their content is so insanely authentic to them and to their brand and to their voice that you have no idea that there's a marketing agency behind the scenes. And that, in my opinion, is a job well done. So the piece of feedback that I really want to hone in on though is the fact that not only did they say they loved the work that we'd produced, which is obviously fantastic, but they commented on how seamless our systems and our processes were behind the scenes. So we have a really, really structured process behind the scenes when you're working with the social collective. So the way that we deliver content, the way that we get feedback, the way in which we present your content to you. So we have a dashboard that we've built out for clients. We've got different parts to the dashboard, which obviously relate to different parts of your marketing, whether it's your socials, your ads, your emails, your strategy, meeting notes. Everything has its place. It's I think there's a word in French. Well, there's a little phrase in French called mis en plat, and it means everything in its place. And I really live by that. And I think that it is really important in business to have such good structures because this structure and these dashboards and these systems that we have in place have been becoming a really large point of conversation with clients recently because of how structured they are. But this didn't happen overnight. This is something that we have been working really hard on for the last nine months. And this feedback, because it's, like I said, not the first time we've received it, really made me think about how the infrastructure behind the business and how you deliver is actually part of the impression that you make. And I think that's really important when we're marketing ourselves, especially as service-based businesses, for those of you who are listening and products too, but really for services, I really pride myself on making sure that not only do you see polished, professional, really slick, really great content publicly, but behind the scenes when you come to work with us, it is just as well structured. And I think that's a really important part of running a business. But I also think it makes marketing your business so much easier because you are marketing truth. You are marketing reality, and you are marketing something that you know is scalable. And I think that's where I've seen a lot of founders struggle over the years is feeling like they want to market and they want to grow and they want to scale their businesses, but their internal infrastructure just doesn't quite match it. And when your internal infrastructure doesn't quite match the standard that you want to see for your business, and especially when it doesn't match, I guess being able to hold space and have capacity for all of these clients that you want to bring on board, it means that the more that you grow your business, the harder things become, the more stressed out you become, the more pressure you put on yourself to really deliver high-quality services. And while you're so hyper-focused on delivering the best experience for your clients on your books, we are forgetting entirely about our marketing. And that's then when we start to see our future pipeline diminishes. It becomes less and less because the leads that we did have sitting in our future pipeline, they have literally moved forward into becoming clients. But if we've stopped looking at who's in our pipeline for the next six, 12, 18 months, even 24 months and beyond, if we're not consciously looking at that, we are losing opportunities to grow our business in the future. And so this is where I think a lot of brands kind of get to that point where they start to think, okay, is it time to be outsourcing? Is it time to be moving on to that next step with my business? So whether you are ready to outsource your marketing or you are wanting to do it yourself, I think it's time to look at whether you have the capacity to be able to create these internal systems. And if you are ready to do this yourself, that should be the first thing that you turn your focus to before you start going ham on your marketing. Especially if you're thinking about advertising for your business, I think it's really important to have the internal infrastructure to support the growth before you go and put ad spend behind your business. Because posting content is obviously the visible part. The invisible part that we don't often see is the structure that actually makes that sustainable. And so that's where for our clients that are ready to outsource their marketing, they are very hyper-aware that their time is best spent really honing in on these internal systems and processes for delivery of their services and they outsource their marketing because they go, you know what, we're gonna turn our focus to the internal stuff, and then we're gonna outsource the marketing so that we can keep building our future pipeline. And that's one of the things that we did as an agency. It was a very conscious decision on my part was when I bought on my most, well, I guess not my most recent two staff because we've grown since then, but the two amazing girls that are now my left and my right hand additional arms in the business, I really made the conscious decision that we were going to not slow down and not stop, I guess, the marketing of our business, but we were going to consciously pull it back, focus on streamlining the internal processes within the business, and then ramp things up when we had the infrastructure to support the growth that we knew we were going to be creating. And sure enough, that has been paying off tenfold, especially in these last sort of like three, four months. We have seen the best, quickest, most amazing growth, most aligned growth, I should say, in the social collective that I have ever seen. And every single client that is working with us is feeling supported, is feeling nurtured, has the infrastructure to be able to support their every question, their every need, their every piece of marketing because we have built those internal processes. And that has also allowed us to create systems and processes for our own marketing so we can continuously show up because that's the through line when it comes to how you grow your business is being able to consistently show up. It allows me to create these podcast episodes. It allows us to repurpose them, it allows my team to create EDMs and social media content. It's also allowed us to do two new things that we have coming up in the next few months that I can announce. I teased something on my LinkedIn and on my Instagram last week that I have signed an agreement to move forward with something very, very exciting. And that is only possible because of the infrastructure systems that we have in place. And we have such a good marketing structure and a good marketing strategy that we know that when this new project comes into play, that we have such a great way of running it. So I want you to think about, I guess, the the truth when it comes to marketing and systems is that we can't win with our marketing long term if we don't have systems. And this is a really, really important conversation that I had in last week's episode. So if you haven't caught that one, make sure you go back to that episode and listen. Because especially for service-based businesses, but product two, when we get sales coming in the door or we get leads coming in the door, we have to have that support system to be able to nurture those beyond that initial inquiry. Once you launch a lead generation campaign, you absolutely must have some sort of email automation or preset template that's ready to go, something that means that you can get in touch with that lead really quickly. Because I can guarantee you, if you don't, you are missing that opportunity. It's the same as when we post content on social media or we send out EDMs. Content without systems is just extra noise. It is extra noise and it's extra overwhelm for us, especially as the founders or the managers, it's even stressful for your internal team because it doesn't compound, it doesn't convert, it just ends up burning you out. If there is no streamlined system or reason why you're doing things and you're just simply churning content out, if there's no system in place to make it sustainable, one, it's not easily repeatable. Two, you will never be able to hand it over. And three, it's exhausting and it becomes really exhausting. And that's where I love AI now. I really love the fact that we can use it as a tool to brainstorm. You can teach it everything it needs to know about you and your brand and the way that you operate and the way that you talk, and you can get it to spitball ideas with you. So, as far as I'm concerned, there really isn't an excuse now to be able to show up online without a good system and process in place, both behind the scenes and also for your marketing content too. Because systems, I think so many people are under such a misconception that systems are only really for bigger businesses, but they're actually what allows small businesses to show up like big ones. My team and I have been saying it a lot recently that we're now here, we're playing with the big dogs. We are out in this marketing space and we're playing with the big dogs. We are going out and doing amazing partnerships, we're running epic events, we are about to do this new project that I honestly, the second I can announce what it is, I will be shouting it from the rooftops because I am so gosh darn excited. But we are here to play with the big dogs. And the reason we can do that and we can have pricing that is exactly where our business should be. We have packages and offers that are exactly where they need to be for our triple A absolutely aligned clients is because we built these systems and processes behind the scenes. So to give you a really simple, I guess, example of what that could look like is something as simple as starting off by knowing your offer, your audience, your review process, and who approves what part. I'll say it again. Knowing what your offer is, understanding who your audience is, knowing what the review process looks like. So how does content get reviewed? Who's doing it? And exactly that, who approves what? So for us, a lot of it starts with my senior account manager, Morgan, jumping on a call. She then starts to create the strategy and her and I liaise on a strategy with, well, for this new client. This then, through a series of different parts of the process, in a nutshell, I'm giving a bit of an overarching summary. It then goes to Aria, who is our social media coordinator, and she is responsible for creating the vast majority of the content for our clients. So Morgan briefs in Aria. Aria is then responsible for creating the content. It then comes back to Morgan. Morgan approves it, gives any feedback, changes get made between the two of them, then it comes to me for a final sign-off. So it's actually gone through three sets of eyeballs, and then it goes to the client. So at no part are we doing a one-done slapdash job of flicking it off and hoping for the best. There are so many, and there's so much more that I won't even go into detail on, but there are so many more systems and processes we have in place within that big overarching system, because that alone, something so simple as knowing what you're trying to promote, knowing who you're speaking to, knowing how it all gets reviewed so that at least a couple of people have looked over it and knowing who approves what, that alone is a game changer for your marketing. If you're wanting to streamline things, that is how you do it. If you want to then scale, so I'm talking bringing on someone in the team. So whether it's a contractor, whether it's an employee, whether it's then outsourcing to an agency, you still have that same sort of process. You still know your offer, you still know your audience. The review process and the content creation part may change slightly, but your who approves what still stays the same. We still get our GMs or our marketing managers or our founders to approve the content. So we do that middle component, but their system still stays the same. All they've done is subbed them out with us. They've added us in and they've taken themselves out of the process. So you see what I mean by having a really clear, streamlined system actually makes a huge difference. And to give you, I guess, a really good indication of what good marketing infrastructure can look like. So I guess think of these things here that I'm about to list off as a little bit of a checklist, if you will. So if you are sitting with your cup of coffee and listening to this episode, grab a pen and paper and note these down. Otherwise, timestamp this part of the episode and come back to it. But this is what good marketing infrastructure really should look like. The first thing is having a really clear feedback loop. So knowing the content, of course, needs to be reviewed. But I want you to think about how that process looks to get it approved so that there isn't back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. Our process is obviously when we do a whole bunch of internal things. Once it's had the final sign-off internally, goes to the client, feedback is provided by the client and that comes back to us. We make the changes, we send it off for one more final review, and then we make any final little tweaks and adjustments, and then it all starts to go live. So it could be something as simple as that, but it's understanding who is responsible for what parts of this process so that you're not then having somebody create it, someone else is providing half-ass feedback, or isn't really providing much at all, or nobody is providing any feedback. And then of course, that's at which point you're all sitting around the table going, our marketing content's pretty garbage. Chances are it's because there isn't a clear feedback loop. There's probably no really sufficient brief, and there's probably no clear feedback loop. Another thing to think about is your content calendar and make sure that your content calendar is built around your business goals, not just for the sake of making a grid look really pretty. I know that that can be really tempting to make your grid look really aesthetically pleasing and think about, oh, but I could put this picture here and that picture there. And I see, I guess what people used to do, which was use apps like preview. So for anyone who ever used preview, it was like an Instagram, an empty Instagram feed, if you will. And people could go in there and they could just pop in a whole bunch of photos and make it look pretty. Now you need to work backwards. You need to start with the goals, you need to start with the intentions, you need to start with what the vibe is for the business. Like what do we actually want to achieve? Case in point, I have the second of these two projects that I am working very, very hard on with the team behind the scenes. This second project is not going to be launched until the second half of this, well, the second half of the second half of this year. So I guess like the towards the final quarter, because we have things right here, right now, that need to take focus and need to be the primary focus of our social media content. And if we add this extra thing in, all it's going to do is confuse our audience. So while I'm itching to share it and itching to roll it all out, I know that this is something that needs to wait. And that's because we have really clear business goals. We have internal KPIs that our team are working towards as a collective, and we want to achieve those. And so to do that, we need to be really honest about what gets promoted and what doesn't. The other side of things is also looking at once we've got that content plan, what are the platforms and the tools that make it easier to collaborate with other people, with your team, and really staying across what's happening. So for us, some of our tech stack looks like using Rela for social media content. We use things like Slack for internal communication. We use Notion for a lot of our client dashboards. We use Notion for keeping our own notes as well. And we use ta uh platforms like ClickUp for task tracking. So there's some of like our four core tech stack softwares that we use. And again, it means that everything has its place, like I said before. And it means that everything has a reason for being used and means that myself, as the now almost removed founder, I'm not part of the day-to-day when it comes to the execution of everything. I'm responsible for sales, I'm responsible for business visibility and brand visibility and podcasting and events and all of these extra amazing things. But that is something that my team really have ownership of is doing the job and executing everything because that is what they love to do and that is what their roles are. And then being able to loop me in through the various channels so that I can see things when it is my turn. It also means that that way you're not micromanaging. If you have anyone that is on your team that is helping you with content, whether they are internal, external, whatever, platforms and tools and having really great systems and processes mean that you're not micromanaging and it actually makes them feel a lot better about doing the work because you're giving them the ownership that they so rightfully should deserve. And the last couple of things that I would think about is of course making sure that you have a way to measure everything, even if it's a really simple like spreadsheet and you've got a few little places to plug in the numbers, making sure that you're measuring what's working. And when I say measure, the other thing to think about is measuring what your version of success looks like. Sometimes it's not in the numbers. Sometimes it's just, I actually don't have to do it anymore because somebody else is taking care of it. Or I was free to go and have a coffee or do this meeting with such and such because somebody else was taking care of this content for me. So really measuring what's working for you and setting your own KPIs around that. And the last one that I think is super, super important is the mindset that marketing is a business function. It is a mandatory business function. It's not a task that you do when you have time. I think that is one of the biggest areas where so many business owners get tripped up is thinking, I'll just do some Instagram posts when I've got time. I'll just send out a newsletter when I've got time. We spoke to a client of ours who we absolutely adore, this client, and they realized that they had an email database. Of this is someone who has come into a pre-existing business, but they realized they had a database of over 40,000 emails. Like 40,000 people are sitting on their database that they, since they've been in this role, have not once emailed. That is crazy. And when we started to talk to them about it, we were like, oh my goodness, that is a goldmine that you're sitting on. If you want to drive more awareness to your business and to your brand, you need to get out there and start having conversations with those people. But one of the biggest reasons why they haven't done it is because they don't have any systems and processes in place. So of course, that naturally then leads them to look for, okay, well, who can help them? Who can help us make this happen and who can actually help execute all of that? So really making sure that it's a business function and it is something that if you want to grow your future pipeline and you want to guarantee that you will have a sustainable business that is going to stand the test of time, it's going to stand against all of the changes that are happening in the world and AI. And while nothing really is certain, the one thing that is certain is that if you are working really hard now and building these substance and processes, I can absolutely guarantee it will be worth the payoff. Like I said, my team and I have streamlined the socks off this business. This business, I said to my team this morning, this business looks like a totally different business than what existed this time last year. This time last year, TSC was a vastly different machine. We had next to no systems and structures in place. There were no SOPs, there were no set processes of how we do things other than what lived inside my head. And that is not a scalable business model. But what we have now and what we have built now is not only a business model that could effectively function without me. So if I was not able to be in the office for a wee while or I had to take a step back, I have full confidence that what we have now built would completely function without me, which that could make that just makes me want to cry. The fact that that is where this business is at. And so that's why I'm so passionate about talking about this stuff because I know what it's like and I know that it's possible. And to see the growth that TSC is going through, I thought last year's growth was wild. This year's growth is knocking it out of the park. It is insane. So I am here to use my platform and use this podcast to tell you that it is absolutely possible for your business. It just takes really, really being diligent and it takes a little bit of stepping back and looking at it with a bird's eye view. And sometimes it takes pulling in a strategist, like a marketing strategist or a business strategist to help you really look at things with a wide lens and go, okay, where can we restructure some things so that we can grow as much as we can internally and then we can start to look at outsourcing our marketing. And when you get to that point, we're here. So to wrap up this episode, I have a final few thoughts that I would like to share. Is first and foremost, that the businesses that are growing aren't just doing more marketing. They are doing exactly what I said we are doing at TSC. We are not only marketing, but we are constantly adjusting our strategies and our structures behind the scenes to make sure that we can have our marketing really land. We're bringing in clients and selling them on something that we know we can absolutely deliver on when they get inside TSC. And that is something I'm incredibly proud of. And I also want you to think about if the thought of handing over your marketing feels overwhelming, because I'm not here to tell anybody that they have to outsource their marketing, it actually might not be outsourcing it that's the first cab off the rank. It might just be getting the clarity for your own next internal steps. So thinking about what is one thing that you can start by doing yourself. And then when you do have the right team and you've got the right systems and processes and infrastructure in place, that's when handing it over actually feels like a massive relief, not a risk. You're excited because high handing that over and passing it over gives you more capacity and more capability to handle more rather than having to look at it like I'm handing over my marketing and I actually don't know if I'm gonna have enough money to be able to afford this. That's not the kind of position you should be in when it comes to outsourcing. And that's obviously the standard that, like I said, we hold ourselves to at TSC. And that's the standard that, in my opinion, I think all businesses should be held to. So I hope you found this episode helpful. I wanted it to be a little bit of a reminder that you can absolutely do it. And also giving you some inspiration that hard work really does pay off. I have put up a couple of posts on LinkedIn about it in the last week, talking about how so many things that we have been working towards for such a long time are starting to come to fruition. And I want to use this opportunity, like I said, not to gloat in any way, shape, or form, but really to inspire you, to remind you that when you dig deep and you do the hard things, especially like coming up with systems and processes and all of this stuff that typically speaking, especially if you're a type B human like me, you're a creative, that stuff is pretty sucky. It's really time consuming and it's exhausting to think about systems and processes. But one thing I will end this episode on with reminding you is that AI can be your best friend when it comes to this. If you are sitting there and you are thinking, I've got decision paralysis, I don't know where to start, I don't know what to do, I don't know what that looks like, I really want to encourage you just to jump onto Claude and ask Claude, hey, I'm sitting here, these are the things that I'm trying to streamline. I don't know where to start. Can you ask me some questions and then can we work through it? And honestly, my friend, that is the best place to start. So if you are having to do this alone or you are the sole responsible person for your marketing department, or you're a general manager, or whatever role you sit in in your business, use AI to start getting that ball rolling. And if you get stuck, of course, you can always reach out. But that is everything for today's episode. Don't forget, if you are in Auckland on Thursday, the 13th of August, we are going to be having our next event, which I'm so, so excited for. It is Cocktails and Conversations, and it is gonna be a live podcast all around the new AI era. So talking about everything I've discussed today, really, and so, so much more, and giving you that reassurance that your business is not going anywhere, but we need to use AI to keep up with what's going on. So, tickets are now live, they're on our Instagram bio, and I'll pop the link in the show notes below. Early bird tickets are almost all sold out, and when they are gone, they are gone and there's limited spaces. So make sure that you get involved. Also, if you're listening to this thinking, I would love to get my brand seen in front of an amazing room of female founders and senior leaders and my business alliance with AI or an alliance with females in business and just amazing women and all of the things that they are doing. DM us because we have a couple of sponsorship spots available and I'm keen to chat with some businesses that want to get in front of this amazing, amazing room because the tickets are selling fast and we have some incredible businesses that are already in the room. So make sure that you are there and do not miss out. But that is everything for me. I will be back on Monday with a coffees and content update episode. And until then, stay caffeinated, stay organized, and I will see you then. Bye.