19. One Post. No Ads. 10,000 Impressions. Here's What Actually Made the Difference. | Marketing

There is more free marketing content online right now than you could ever possibly consume. So why do most service business owners still not have a marketing system that works? The answer, Ginny argues in this episode, is not a lack of information. It is a lack of accountability, community, and actually doing the work.

In this episode, Ginny takes you inside the very first cohort of the Compound Marketing Machine Group Experience and shares what happened when real business owners with full schedules and busy seasons showed up and did the work together. One participant posted a single organic piece of content and earned over 10,000 impressions, something that had never happened to him before. Another came in with 23 blog posts already written and finally got his system built and published. 

Ginny also shares research on goal achievement that explains why information alone is rarely enough. The likelihood of following through on a goal jumps from around 10 percent when you simply hear a good idea to around 95 percent when you have a specific accountability appointment with someone who will ask you about your progress. That is the difference between a course and a cohort.

She walks through the CALM framework behind the Compound Marketing Machine Cohort that combines elements from her Brand Builder Blueprint Course and Compound Marketing Machine: Clarity, Authority, Leverage, and Momentum. And she makes a direct challenge to every listener who has ever bought a course they didn't finish, downloaded a guide they never opened, or saved a reel they never watched.

Three things you can take away from this episode right now:

• Clarity before content. Before you write a single post or publish a single blog, you need to know who you are, who you serve, and how you sound. Without that foundation, your marketing will always feel scattered.
• The content that compounds answers real questions. The questions your customers ask repeatedly, the objections they raise before saying yes, and the things that feel obvious to you as the expert are the gold. Start there.
• Unpublished content does not compound. Done is better than perfect. You can edit a post after you publish it. You cannot compound something that never goes live.

If you are ready to stop consuming and start building a marketing system that actually works, head to OutcomeAcademy.com/compound to enroll in the next cohort. The first meeting is May 5th.

Thanks for listening to The Outcome Academy Podcast.

If you enjoyed this episode and want to keep learning how to work ON your business with systems, strategy, and practical tools, here are a few ways to stay connected:

Website: https://www.outcomeacademy.com/ 

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Your outcome isn't a wish. It's a decision.

Transcript

There is more free marketing content on YouTube right now than you could possibly watch in a lifetime. More courses, more tutorials, more step-by-step guides than any business owner could ever possibly consume. And yet, most service business owners still don't have a marketing system that works. Here's what I think is actually going on.

Welcome to the Outcome Academy podcast. I'm Ginny Seeley. I'm a business strategist and longtime process improvement expert, and I also co-own an appliance service business and a co-working space with my husband, Joe. So I understand what it looks like to juggle growth, leadership, family, and big dreams all at once.

If you're a service-based entrepreneur or executive who wants to stop putting out fires, work on your business, and build momentum with systems, smart marketing, and practical tech, you are in exactly the right place.

Hello, my friend, and welcome back. Let's get into something today that I've been thinking about a lot, because I think it explains why so many smart, capable business owners are still stuck when it comes to marketing, even though they've tried everything.

A couple months ago, I ran the very first cohort experience of the Compound Marketing Machine. It was a small group of real business owners with full schedules, real teams, real seasons they're going through in their businesses, and real lives. And I want to tell you what actually happened inside that cohort, because I think it's going to challenge you a little bit in a really good way. And I also want to tell you about the second cohort, because enrollment is open right now, and our first meeting is going to be on May 5th.

But first, let me back up. One of our participants from the last group came into the program while planning his wedding, under contract for a brand new business location, and heading straight into the busiest season of the year. He had every reason to say no to the program, but he showed up anyway. He did the work in module one in the very first week, the brand clarity work that most people skip because it doesn't feel like real marketing. And he wrote one post based on what he learned about his business, his audience, and his voice.

That post got over 10,000 impressions—10,000—something that had never happened to him before. He didn't boost it. It wasn't a paid ad or anything like that. What he did was answer a real question in his own voice, backed with clarity about who he was, what his business stood for, and all those things. It got shared, it was celebrated, and he was so excited about those results.

Another participant came in with 23 blog posts already written and ready to go. His trouble was taking action on things that he had already written. And he was super motivated by a speaker that we saw together at a conference called Marcus Sheridan. And Marcus Sheridan talked about a concept called "They Ask, You Answer." So he had already done all the writing. He needed a system and the accountability to get it live and working.

These are real business owners with real results and a framework that made it possible.

Here's the thing I want to address head-on, because I think it's a pretty honest conversation that we can have about marketing right now. There is not a shortage of information out there. You can find a free YouTube tutorial on just about anything: blogging, SEO, email marketing, Canva, Google Business Profile, content strategy. You can even read Marcus Sheridan's book. You can find all of this information completely for free. It's available right now—more information than you could ever watch.

There are courses on every platform. There are Facebook groups full of tips. I think we're serial consumers. And I say "we" because I've been guilty of this too. We watch the webinar, we buy the course, we download the free guide, we save a reel to watch later. We even share it with our friends who are entrepreneurs. We consume and consume and consume. And we feel like we're making progress because we are learning.

But learning is not the same as doing.

And here's the hard truth: consuming is comfortable. Doing is uncomfortable.

Consuming does not require you to risk anything. You don't have to hit publish. You don't have to show up imperfectly in public. You don't have to deal with what happens if nobody reads anything that you put out there. And you don't have to deal with somebody actually responding in a negative way, which is really scary.

Doing requires all of that.

And here's what makes it even harder. Most of the time, when you're trying to do the work of building a marketing system, you're doing it alone. Nobody's checking in on you. Nobody knows what you committed to last week. Nobody's going to ask you what got in the way and why you didn't follow through. And so it's very easy to slip back into consuming without ever realizing that's what happened.

The other really difficult thing that I want to share, because I'm super passionate about this, is the marketing targeted towards you as an entrepreneur to spend money on marketing that you don't have at this stage of your business. Or you have a marketing budget, but somebody wants you to spend it in the wrong place on things that do not compound, and they go away as soon as you stop putting money into the system.

That's something we talk about in the Compound Marketing Machine, because it's a problem. We have people who are just starting their service-based businesses, and somebody's sitting there selling them thousands of dollars’ worth of Google Ads a month, a huge SEO campaign, and a truck wrap that they just don't need at the start of their business.

So I'm here to tell you: even when you're ready and you have the money to invest in marketing, these foundational steps are crucial before you even take any of those steps.

All right, that's my TED Talk. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

But it really breaks my heart when people spend so much money, because you're targeted as a new entrepreneur, and then you're spending and spending and spending. And then as soon as you stop spending, all the benefits go away, and there's nothing there to ground you and help you stay relevant in the space online, with your website, with your branding, all of those things.

Next, I want to introduce some data to you, because this is also super important. And it's what drove me to design the Compound Marketing Machine as a group experience rather than just a course. It's been there as a course. People have taken it and they've had success with it, but you know how passionate I am about community and working together on something, which is why we have the whole mastermind program as well.

Research on goal achievement consistently shows that the likelihood of completing a goal changes dramatically based on how committed you are. If you hear a good idea, maybe a 10% chance you're going to follow through with it. If you consciously decide that you're going to do it, that goes up to like 25%. If you make a plan for when and how you're going to do it, that comes to about 50%. But if you commit to someone else, around 65%. And if you have a specific accountability appointment with someone who's going to ask you about your progress, the research puts that number at around 95%—95%.

The difference between a 10% chance that you're going to stick to what you're going to do and a 95% chance of following through is not more information. It's not a better course, and it's not a more detailed tutorial. It's someone who knows what you said you were going to do, and then they ask you about it.

That's community. That's accountability. That's what this cohort does that a course simply cannot.

All right, so I'm going to show you the behind the scenes a little bit for this amazing cohort that we have. The framework behind the Compound Marketing Machine cohort is CALM—C-A-L-M. And that stands for clarity, authority, leverage, and momentum. Every single letter is important, and it's a special step that you're going to work through in the program. But that framework only compounds if you actually do it, and most people don't do it when they're doing it alone.

In C, what we're getting clarity on is you and your business. And so what we do in that step is we work through some content in the Brand Builder Blueprint program. And when you sign up for the cohort, you get both courses—Brand Builder Blueprint and Compound Marketing Machine—right in your course library.

Clarity means you know who you are, you know who you serve, you know what you stand for, and you know how you sound before you write a single post, before you publish a single blog. Because without clarity, your content sounds like a different business every single week. Or worse, you start using ChatGPT to write your stuff and you sound like everyone else out there.

So I will tell you, we do use AI in our program. And what I give you are the tools to help you write things that sound like you. And so this part of Brand Builder Blueprint that you do, you are going to create a document that helps everything you do in AI sound like you. Of course, you're still going to have to take a look at it. I never, ever suggest that people just cut and paste something that AI created and then post it. But what we do in all of our programs in Outcome Academy is use AI the right way so that you can save time and energy.

We've talked about this before on this podcast—to spend real, quality time interacting with your teams, your clients, your families. We do not use AI to replace you. We use it to amplify you and free up time for meaningful connections.

Having said all of that, before you write a single post, you're going to use these clarity exercises to really make yourself stand out in a very noisy world and show up as yourself and your business that you want to show up as—not like someone else's, and absolutely not like the noise.

And that clarity produced the 10,000 impressions on one organic post, because he showed up there with his now wife. It was real, it was them, and it was authentic. And I know that word gets overused, but it truly was authentic to his brand and what he wanted to put out in the world. And people immediately connected with that.

Week two is authority, and that's the A in the CALM framework. This is where we've had really important conversations about what actually makes good content. It's not about creativity or just putting out random things to get attention. What we want to put out is content that answers real questions that our real clients are already asking.

We're going to answer their objections before they say yes to our services—the things that feel so obvious to you as an expert that you're almost embarrassed putting them in writing, because surely everybody already knows the answer. Guess what? They don't. They don't know the answer. You know the answer because you're the expert, but they don't.

And so these are the questions that people ask you over and over, and you roll your eyes because they keep asking the same questions. They're asking those same questions for a reason. And so we talk about that, and we brainstorm a list of things that you can answer so that you know what to write about.

My student had already written 23 pieces of content because he was already thinking about his customer questions, because Marcus Sheridan planted that seed in him at a conference. So he had all this content, but he needed the structure to get it working, and that's what the cohort gave him. And so at the end of the cohort, before it was over, he had published his first piece of content on his website, which is really cool and exciting.

Week three is leverage, and that's the L in the CALM framework. This is where the Compound Marketing Machine gets built. We went from writing the content to building everything around it—Canva, brand kits so you're not starting from scratch every single month, and how to make the three digital assets you need for one piece of content, and a simple newsletter that doesn't have to be long or fancy, but it goes out to your email list.

And when we named the resistance out loud during that week—overwhelm, perfectionism, the fear of hitting publish and nothing happening, the fear of hitting publish and something happening that you didn't expect—all of that is normal. All of it came up, and we reframed it together, because unpublished content does not compound, right?

If you write absolutely beautiful content that serves your people, but you never hit publish on it, well, they're not ever going to see it.

Week four was all about execution, and that is the M—momentum. We walk through the full publishing cycle. This is your Compound Marketing Machine, and we worked through that whole thing and made sure that we could get through a whole cycle together.

So we're going to take two weeks to work through that this time. And so we're extending it to give you a little more time, but I don't want to extend it forever. This does not need to be an eight- or 12-week program. This is about four weeks of meat, but we're stretching it through six weeks now to give you a little bit more time to feel really good about what you're going to put out there into the world.

So the machine: we have our blog post, we send our newsletter, we push our content to Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Business Profile, Nextdoor, Instagram—one piece of content pushed out to multiple platforms. And that is the machine.

And once that first cycle is done, every single future post becomes copy, paste, publish. That's the machine. That's what changes.

So that's what we build together. We build your system. And you know my favorite quote: you don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. So that's what we build together in the Compound Marketing Machine group cohort program.

So I want to challenge you on something right now. How many courses or articles or downloads or guides do you have that you have downloaded and sworn that you were going to look at one day, and they're just making clutter on your computer or in your phone? 

How many ideas do you have about your marketing that never made it to a published blog post?

I'm not asking that to make you feel bad. I'm asking because most business owners I know would answer honestly and say a lot, right? Including myself.

Although I've been using this Compound Marketing Machine for five years now, and I'm telling you, it keeps us top of mind on Google, in AI search, and all the things.

The reason that you're not publishing your things is not because you're not smart enough or motivated enough or good enough at marketing. The reason is you're trying to do it alone.

Doing it alone is really hard. We were not built to grow our businesses in isolation.

Your mastermind group, your peer group, your cohort—people who you know that you committed to—are going to ask you about what you did. Those relationships are not a nice-to-have thing in your business. They're the mechanism that turns a good idea into a built system.

The mountain in business that I talk about all the time—it's real. It's long. Some parts are genuinely really hard. And nobody climbs a mountain alone and lives to tell about it. The most successful climbers have a team.

Even people who actually make the trek alone have a team that helps them with their foundations before they go and do it. They have someone at base camp. They know that that person is headed up the mountain, and they'll know if that person hasn't checked in at a certain point or they haven't made it back.

That's the point of the cohort. It's the people, the accountability, the shared journey of actually doing the thing instead of just learning about it.

So here's my challenge to you, because you know I never leave a podcast episode without throwing down a challenge for you. I want you to stop consuming stuff, and I want you to start doing something. Not someday, not when things slow down, and not after you finish the next YouTube series on content marketing. I want you to do it now.

The second cohort of the Compound Marketing Machine group experience starts on May 5th. I've added an implementation week this time—that's the week of the 19th. We're not going to have a meeting that week, so that takes a little pressure off. It's just time. It's a gift to you—a built-in window to get your first piece completed before we move into the leverage and distribution phases.

I'm going to meet with you the next week, and I'm going to ask you if you did what you said you were going to do, where you are, do you need help?

We have a Facebook group you can check in on, you can share questions, you can email me—you have access to me. And that's something different that you don't always have in a course.

So the Facebook group is where you can post questions, you can post for feedback, you can share something you've created. We work together, we check in once a week in person in an actual Zoom meeting, we cheer each other on. All of those things happen in a group environment.

If you've been meaning to fix your marketing, if you're tired of starting over every single time life gets busy—you're posting and ghosting, things like that—if you're ready to stop consuming and start building something that compounds, I want you to head over to outcomeacademy.com/compound and enroll.

Give yourself this gift. You won't regret it.

And even if you are somebody that believes in paid marketing and it's working for you, these foundational steps are absolutely critical to make your marketing really, really work awesome.

If you have any questions, reply to any email I've sent you, and I'm happy to talk it through.

It's time to be a doer. Let's build this together.

As you think about this week, notice where this shows up in your own business. If you want to go deeper into this work, including the mastermind and other ways we support service-based business owners, you can explore everything at outcomeacademy.com.

Thanks for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode.