I know I shouldn't say this but I hate marketing right now
As a content strategist whose literal job is helping you market your business, I feel like this isn’t something I should be telling you. I feel like these are the sort of thoughts I should keep in my head and pretend I’m not having. But I don’t think that does anyone any favours…
So if you’re struggling with your marketing at the moment, know you’re not the only one. Let’s have an honest chat about what’s going on for me and what I plan to do about it in 2027.
Links mentioned in this episode
A done for you 14 day content plan that's perfect for your Black Friday offers, seasonal content or if you want to be more strategic with your content but aren't sure where to start.
Done for you content with a twist (the twist being you) that’ll help you build (or rebuild) the consistent posting habit you need to start growing your business and making those steady sales.
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As a content strategist whose literal job is helping you market your business, I feel like this is not something I am supposed to be telling you. I feel like these are the sort of thoughts that I should keep in my head and keep as a secret and pretend that I'm not having.
But I don't think that does anyone any favours, and I feel like I really want to be honest with you about where I'm at with marketing at the moment, so that if you're feeling the same, you can feel, I don't know, maybe reassured, maybe relieved that you're feeling the same, and maybe inspired to do things differently as well.
I launched Robin Rose Creative a year ago. I think it's a year this month, actually, a year towards the end of this month, and I've obviously been playing around with my marketing for the last year. I've been marketing businesses and helping other businesses market themselves for nearly a decade now. It'll be a decade in February since I've been helping other people grow their businesses with social media, through content strategies etc, and I have found, or I haven't found it hard as such, I don't know. I, I think I've just hit a point where I am so fatigued by all the things I'm supposed to be doing, and I'm not even doing all the things that I'm supposed to be doing, right?
I'm not doing all the shoulds. I'm not even following like a fifth of all the marketing advice out there, yet I am exhausted by it, and I'm kind of hating it a little bit. I find it really easy to help other people with what to post. I find it easy to know what to post myself, to be honest. I struggle with the implementing things, which is something that I've talked about before. But I feel like never before have we been in a moment in time where the marketing, there are just so many options. There is so much noise.
When I started out as a social media manager, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, I was very good on Twitter, and Instagram were the main four. Pinterest was kind of there, but also that's completely different 'cause that's a search engine. That's not a feed in the way that it is now. But Instagram was literally a grid feed. That was it. Stories didn't exist when I started helping or when I started as a social media manager. Facebook was a Facebook page and a Facebook group, and that was it. Live video I don't even think was a thing. I'm pretty sure lives started to be a thing once I'd started my business.
So things were a lot more simple. Things were a lot easier. All you had to do was focus on writing something really good and showing up regularly. Writing something that would help people and writing regularly enough so that you were at the top of their mind.
Nowadays, even if you just look at Instagram, you're expected to show up on stories, to showcase your personality and document behind the scenes and build connection. Then you've also got to make sure that your highlights are there so that anyone landing on your page can instantly view your highlights, build up enough of a picture of who you are so that they decide to follow you, or maybe they might even buy from you if you've optimised your highlights enough.
Then you've got to write a bio that isn't only personality focused in 150 characters, but also is search engine optimised, has keywords in it so that people can find you organically, whilst wanting to sound like yourself but not having a lot of space to actually do that. Then you've got the links in your bio to make sure that obviously they're the right ones. And then we've got pinned posts. We have to make sure that there are certain posts on our feed that instantly build the know, like, and trust, that instantly grab the attention, and that they are optimised and updated regularly enough so that they don't go out of date so that someone lands on your profile then disappears straight away. And then we've got things like carousels and static posts and reels, and now there's going to be long-form content on Instagram, and that's just one platform.
And yes, you can repurpose and cross-post, but that's still so much work and it is still exhausting. And as somebody who does it for a job, I don't want to sit here and pretend that doing all that is easy and that I can just show up all the time. I was consistent on my Instagram for four weeks, five weeks, posted five times a day. I've got my plan in place. It's easy for me to follow my plan. But then I got ill, so I'd scheduled content up until a certain point and ironically, the last reel that went out was how I'm getting myself out of an Instagram rut. And then because I've been recovering from illness, I haven't posted again since that, which was last week sometime.
And you can have all these things in place, like your plans, like the ideas, like content scheduled, and that can still feel like it's not enough, and it can still feel exhausting and overwhelming and like nothing is working.
And I don't feel like I'm in the position where nothing is working. I'm seeing the stats, I'm seeing the behind-the-scenes things that you won't see. You obviously see the likes and comments, but I s- can see the profile visits and the website clicks and the, the traffic there. I'm seeing that, and I see that my content is starting to have the impact that I want it to. And at the same time, I just don't think I want to dedicate all the time and energy that I have been into showing up on Instagram.
And these are conversations I've been having with a lot of people at the moment. Um, we've been having conversations about how things are going to change again. I also believe that we're exhausted by AI and by seeing the same content and by seeing the same captions and seeing the same graphics that people have just knocked up on ChatGPT.
I went to the forest the other day, and I went for a walk, and they were advertising creative workshops at the forest that I'd gone to. They have, um, little... I don't know what they are. Like, huts. I don't know the best-- It's like old converted stables, I think. And they offer creative workshops. But the creative workshops they were promoting was a graphic that had been created on ChatGPT. And I said to my mum, I was like, "Oh, it's an AI graphic." And she was like, "How can you tell?" And I was like, "Because I've seen 50 other posters that look exactly the same. It's the same font, it's the same colours, it's the same style. It's the same image, but they've just put their name on it."
And that's a creativity workshop. You can't advertise yourself as a creative business using something that isn't your own creativity. Like, I'm so so fed up of seeing it, and I equally understand that it does make life easier for a lot of people. And I'm actually writing a Substack about this at the moment. I'm halfway through the article. It's taking me a lot longer to write than I anticipated, but it's my very first Substack for Robin Rose Creative. So it's called The Robin Report, is the name of my Substack for this, um, company. And I'm writing an article about it at the moment about how we can keep our humanness and also use the tools that make our life easier, because I feel like that's where the disconnect is, and that's where the disconnect has been for a long time.
The AI companies came out with these tools that do make our life easier as business owners, that can help us, that are great when we're somebody who says to ourselves, "I'm not creative enough." Then you've suddenly got an answer. But what's that, what that's done over the last couple of years is really strip any original ideas and creativity and personality away from businesses. And people don't buy from robots. People buy from humans. People buy from people. We want to see personality.
I open up my Instagram, or my F- I can't even be on Facebook at the moment. But I open up my Instagram, and I see so much of the same stuff, and I'm so freaking bored by it, and I also know that sometimes some of it does work, but I just can't... Like, I'm, I'm-- I think I've just hit my, kind of, limit with it. So what I think is going to happen, and again, I've had a lot of conversations with other marketers about this recently, I do feel like there's going to be a shift coming where short-form isn't the priority anymore.
People have got really excited by short-form. People are pouring all their energy into short-form, the dopamine, the quick wins. It's a lot easier and a lot quicker to see results or to not see results with social-- with, with short-form versus the long-form. It's a little bit harder with long-form to see what's working, what isn't, and it takes a little bit longer. But I feel like the depth that long-form can offer people moving forward is gonna be so much more valuable to people trying to make a decision, to people considering you as an option.
And that's not everyone, right? There's, there's a lot of companies that have teams to help them with their social media. There's a lot of people that still thrive on social media. There's a lot of people who would much prefer to create short-form content, and I don't think that's disappearing anywhere, obviously not at all. But I'm thinking about for myself, where my priorities lie. And I thought to myself a little while ago, I was like, "If I'm going back to prioritising long-form, like blogging on the Robin Rose Creative website, starting my Substack, putting out the podcast episodes," obviously I launched this podcast in September. This is a big part of my strategy. If they're gonna be my priority and Instagram is going to be my presence place, so it's not gonna be the place where I focus on growing or getting clients or trying to have that something that I need to maintain regularly. If Instagram's gonna be my presence platform, how can I then say to people, "Oh, I can help you grow on Instagram"?
But I've got a decade of experience helping other businesses grow their business. I've got the hard evidence and the proof that I don't need to have the profiles that get the results because I've got, I've got the experience of helping clients get the results.
So that's one thing that I'm reassuring myself around is that just because I am choosing a different way of creating content and a different way of marketing myself doesn't mean I can't help other people market their business in the way that they want to. So I've got some-- I've got ideas around how to do that. I've got an episode coming up maybe next week. It might be a bit longer 'cause this is taking a lot of planning. But I've got an episode coming up about how to market your business in 2027, the Confident Content way obviously.
But I feel very much like we are all fatigued, we are all exhausted, we're all fed up. I honestly think we're all sick of complaining about it as well. I don't know about you, but I get sick of hearing myself say, "Oh my God, I hate Instagram." Like, it's my fucking job. It is my job, and there are times where I still hate it. However, I do also know how powerful it can be, and how good it is, and how lucky we are that we can market ourselves for free, et cetera, et cetera. Um, but I'm, yeah, I'm, I'm sick of hearing myself complain about it. So I'm gonna be doing things differently.
I'm gonna be sharing how you can do things differently if you so choose to. And also, I'm still gonna be sharing how you can market with social- with short-form content, because I do still feel like it's valuable. I just feel like it's maybe not the be-all and end-all anymore.
And for me, 2027, I feel like 2026 was testing, experimenting, almost documenting my cycle in terms of marketing. If you actually look at my marketing this year and where my priorities have li- have laid, lied, where my priorities lie. Oh, I d- oh, I don't know how to say that. But if you look at the cycle of my marketing for Robin Rose Creative, and where I focused my attention on each time, when I look back over previous years, I can also very much see a correlation in how I like to market at different times of the years.
I don't know whether it's because we're, like, wintering down soon. That's when I very much feel into the long form, the essay writing, the blog writing, the cosying up. Like, if you could see me right now, I haven't even recorded this as a video, but if you could see me right now, I'm in sweatpants. I've got a blanket wrapped around me. I'm tucked up on the sofa. I am cozy. This is how I like to create content when it's co- when it's, like, wintery and colder outside, and I really crave that depth. Maybe because, is it Scorpio season? I don't know.
I'm a Scorpio moon, and I feel like depth is something that comes from that, because I really crave that emotional connection, that deep feelings, the not-the-surface-level stuff. Maybe it's just where I am in the year but this is what I'm really looking towards for 2027. And then if you look at other parts of the year, like January to, when was it? Like January to April. Oh, that's a lie. Like January to June really I was solidly consistent on social media. But I had that like new year, springtime, fresh energy, new beginnings, and it made me want to show up on social media more, and it made me want to do things differently.
And I don't know, maybe this is just a season, and in six months time I'm gonna be like, "I'm back on Instagram five times a week again." Who knows? Who knows what will happen? But I really do believe in what I've always said about long-term strategies getting you long-term results, and I feel like long-form content is a long-term strategy. My blog posts are already ranking semi-well. Could they rank better? Yeah, absolutely, but that's also probably because I was not consistent with the blog posts. But it doesn't take that long. If you create blog posts in a ri- in the right way, like in terms of the SEO and the keywords you use, the way that you structure it, if you are very intentional with the long-form content you're creating, you will start to see the increase in cold traffic. You will start to see the results from it, and then those results will, as with anything, compound over time.
I've already seen that with the podcast. I have been shocking at promoting this podcast since I launched it, yet the cold traffic coming to it, I can already see a difference over the last three, four weeks versus when it first launched. Every week, I'm getting more and more downloads of the episodes that have already been released, and it's seemingly coming from nowhere. And at the same time, I also ... It's not ... I, I also know it's not coming from nowhere because my titles are intentional, because my show notes are intentional, because I've set the posts up, I've set the episodes on the website up to drive that cold traffic, to receive that cold traffic.
Anyway, I feel like I'm waffling now. I don't know if this was the most helpful episode ever. Probably not. I have got no notes in front of me. It's just something that I wanted to talk on. It's just how I'm feeling at the moment. I don't know how things are gonna move going forward. Yes, I'm gonna start showing back up on social media again this week. Am I gonna stick to the five posts a week? Probably not, because once again, I've done the thing where I do it, and then I burn out, and that's just typical me, to be honest.
I've had some really lovely feedback about, uh, The Mini Robin. I did The Mini Robin for someone the other week. So it's a two-week taster of The Robin Intensive where I basically just tell you what to post for two weeks so that you get an idea of what it's like. I give you the hooks, the call to action, the purpose of the posts, and this is something that if you're considering running a Black Friday offer, if you're considering content to go out on your socials over Christmas, if you're trying to be more strategic with your content, but you don't really understand how to do that, and you want to see how that's done, then this would be the perfect option for you. So I'll leave the link to that in the show notes.
And as I said, there's still The Robin Intensive, which is your 90-day done-for-you content strategy. This is where I tell you what to post, when to post, where to post, give you your hooks and your calls to action for an entire 90 days so you don't have to think about how you're showing up on social media. And yes, I can do this for you long-form as well. It does look slightly different from a long-form, fro- from a long-form perspective, and there is also the option to do an entire content ecosystem to ensure that your short-form and your long-form are complementing each other perfectly. So again, I'll leave the information for that in the show notes.
If you have any questions, do get in touch with me. And over the coming months, my hope is that we both fall back in love with marketing, and we find our feet again. I, I've, uh ... Like, I haven't fallen out of love with marketing. I still enjoy it. I still love the str- I still love the strategy behind it. I still find it interesting. I could talk about it till I'm blue in the face. It comes very, very naturally to me, and also, I need to find my groove, groove with it again and approach it slightly differently than I have been doing over the last couple of months.
So I'm excited. I hope that you're excited. And yeah, I'll see you in the next one. I'm gonna stop there 'cause otherwise I'm just gonna chat shit for who knows how long. So thanks so much for listening. See you in the next one.
The Art of Confident Content is planned, edited and produced by Rebecca at Robin Rose Creative. If you've been thinking about launching your own podcast and want support bringing it to life, email hello@robinrosecreative.com. I would love to hear about your idea and discuss how I can help you with the concept, episode ideation, and launch content.
And when you're finished leaving me a five-star review, don't forget to check out The Robin Intensive. This is done for you content with a twist that will help you post consistently for the next 90 days at least. The link is in the show notes.
Oh, and one last thing. If you made it here, DM me the word gift, that's G-I-F-T, on Instagram because I've got a little something special just for you.
The Art of Confident Content is planned, edited and produced by Rebecca at Robin Rose Creative (that’s me in the pic!). If you've been thinking about launching your own podcast and want support bringing it to life, get in touch here. I'd love to hear about your idea and discuss how I can help you with the concept, episode ideation and launch content.
You’ll find previous podcasts planned, edited and produced by Rebecca here:
