12 Ways to Promote Your Product-Business Without Social Media

Speaking from experience, once you are aware of your social media burnout — it’s often way past the point of return. Meaning, once you’re burnt-out, it’s time to focus on recovery, not adjusting course. 

My hope for all of you (and, honestly, myself included) is that none of us make it to that burnout phase anymore. How do we do that? Well, we diversify our marketing efforts and focus on marketing without social media.

Gasp. Is it even possible to market your business without social media? Yes, it is! You just have to build slowly, intentionally, and consistently. Let’s talk about how to do it, shall we?

Taking Time & Space Away from Social Media When You Need It

First and foremost, we have to talk about the toll being “the face” of our businesses takes on us, and acknowledge that from time to time we each need space and time away from social media to stay sane. Here are my top tips for taking a proper social media break:

Identify your goals

Before taking a break from social media, it's important to identify what you hope to achieve by doing so. This might include reducing anxiety, improving focus, or simply taking a break from constant notifications and information overload.

Set a timeframe

Decide how long you want to take a break from social media, whether it's a few days, a week, or longer. Set a specific start and end date for your break.

Communicate your boundaries

Let your friends and followers know that you'll be taking a break from social media, and provide a brief explanation of why to help manage expectations and reduce pressure to stay connected. This also gives you a bit of an accountability boost, too!

Disable notifications

Turn off notifications for social media apps and platforms to reduce the temptation to check in.

Find alternative activities

Replace social media with other activities that bring you joy and relaxation, like reading, spending time in nature, or practicing mindfulness. Perhaps pick a hobby you’ve always wanted to try — crocheting, baking, or writing a novel!

Stick to your boundaries

Once you've set your boundaries, be firm and stick to them. Don't be tempted to check in on social media during your break!

Why Should I Market My Business Without Social Media?

Let’s be honest, creating content for social media feels like a hamster wheel that never stops spinning out of control, doesn’t it? It’s not all in your head! The lifespan of social content is low and short, versus long-form content like blogging and email marketing where the lifespan can reach days to years.

Additionally, social media can be overwhelming and time-consuming, which can lead to burnout and reduced productivity. By marketing without social media, you can focus your energy on other marketing channels that may be more effective or enjoyable for you and your team.

At the end of the day, building marketing channels off social media is just good business sense. When you diversify your marketing efforts, you mitigate the inherent risk you assume when you put all of your eggs in one basket, so to speak. You don’t want to be in a position where life requires you to take time off social media and you simply can’t because business relies on it 100%!

How to Market Your Business Without Social Media

There are plenty of other marketing strategies you can use if you want to reach new audiences and build your brand without relying on social media. 

First, know your audience!

Understand your target market — identify where they spend their time online. An audience survey of your email list is a great place to start to find this out! Then, craft your message to resonate with your audience and select 1-3 platforms to begin diversifying your marketing efforts.

Start email marketing, if you haven’t started yet!

Email, email, email, is the name of the game. Send weekly emails, segment your list, and set up welcome and nurture sequences to build a healthy email list right now, even if you’re just starting out (ahem, especially if you’re just starting out). 

Craft consistent, quality, open-worthy content that speaks to your audience by weaving in your core values, sharing your story, being yourself, and providing solutions for your audience’s problems.

Partner with influencers and other business owners!

Look for other businesses your audience follows and create unique ways you can partner together! Collaborations with other businesses and influencers are easy, profitable, and can also help you with SEO!

Prioritize SEO!

Leverage SEO on your website and content marketing — it helps increase visibility and traffic to your website, improves user experience, is super cost effective, and has increasingly long term benefits. Here’s how to get started with SEO!

Prioritize consistent content marketing

A blog is more important now than ever - yes, even for e-commerce sites! My best tips are to create valuable and engaging content for your audience and focus on providing solutions, not selling your product. For example, if you sell mugs, you can write posts about self-care, rhythms, routines, and finding balance in the day-to-day.  

You can also utilize Pinterest! It’s NOT social media - it’s a visual search engine. And you can use Chat GPT to help write social captions from blog posts you’ve already written - easy peasy!

Use offline marketing

Traditional media such as television, radio, print, and billboards can be very effective in reaching a wide audience and can be an affordable way to promote your product or service. Participate in local events and fairs or use print materials like flyers and business cards - traditional doesn’t mean antiquated!

Create a referral program for discounts

Referral programs and discounts can be a great way to get the word out about your business without relying solely on social media. Having an incentive such as offering discounts or free gifts for people who refer their friends to your business can help you tap into word-of-mouth marketing and give you a great return on investment. 

You can also promote seasonal discounts and promotions through email newsletters, postcards, and even text messages to drive more sales. You can also start an affiliate program - it’s easy!

Utilize ads

Think of ads as investment instead of an expense! Video ads can be a powerful tool for reaching and engaging your target audience. You can also get super creative with the types of ads you utilize for your campaigns - have fun with it!

And, of course, there’s the all-time classic, Google Ads. Google Ads allows businesses to create ads that appear on Google's search engine results pages (SERPs), as well as on other websites and mobile apps that are part of the Google network.

Remember, it’s SO important to diversify your marketing - and it’s absolutely okay to start small. You may have big ideas for email, content marketing, attending events and tradeshows, and so much more, but start with manageable goals. Pick 1-2 to work toward and once those have been established and your systems routineized, set some new goals!

------TRANSCRIPT------

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the product powerhouse podcast. I am so thrilled. You are here listening to this episode and that you tune in to the podcast. It's seriously, my favorite thing that I get to do 

I really am truly just so grateful for each and every person who listens to the show. So today we are going to talk about marketing your business off of social media. And we are going to talk about this because I am seeing and hearing from my clients. So many people feeling overwhelmed and burnt out by the amount of content that they feel like they need to create in order to stay relevant or see any results from social media. 

And it can be a lot, if you are one of those people who are feeling that pressure. Then this is the episode for you because yes, social media is incredible. And it has made it so that we can interact with our customers in ways that were never possible before. But it is not the only way to market your business. There are plenty of other ways. 

And that's what we're going to talk about today. Let's jump in. 

If you are feeling the pressure from needing to constantly be creating content for social media, then listen up. Maybe grab a pen. Maybe you want to take notes. You are not alone. Trust me when I tell you, you are not alone. There are so many people feeling this. We are feeling the pressure of having to create content for Instagram and Facebook and Pinterest and Tik TOK and YouTube. And, twitter, it might still be relevant for some people. 

We are feeling it that's seven places not to mention a newsletter and our blog. It's a lot of content to create, especially when you already have a ton of stuff to do, right? Like we already have to create products, take pictures of products, source supplies, figure out packaging, figuring out shipping, do customer service. The number of things a business owner has to do is. Incredible. The number just keeps growing and growing. And with social media, it feels like a constant hamster wheel of having to create. That maybe doesn't even get results. 

So it's really easy to get burnt out and feel frustrated by social media marketing. 

There are other reasons why you should focus on other ways to market your business. I'm not saying that social media is bad or not effective. That is certainly not true. I enjoy posting on social media occasionally. But I've also gotten burnt out. I've also taken time off. But there are other reasons why it's valuable to diversify your marketing. One is that you mitigate the risk of putting all your eggs in one basket. So you're not, relying on one platform. 

I've heard people saying oh, I'm no longer allowed to run Facebook ads. My account got banned and they're not going to unlock it. Or people's Instagram gets hacked and they lose their following. 

That could be really devastating if that's your main way of marketing. And by diversifying and having other ways of marketing your business. You are giving yourself more security in your business. 

The other reason that I can think of that you might want to plan to incorporate other ways of marketing your business is the lifespan of content on social media is really short. So if you post on Instagram, it lasts like maybe 24 hours. If that, some things can go viral a couple of days later, but really the engagement that you get immediately is. What you're going to get from it. And then it's onto the next thing. So the ROI isn't very strong and if you're spending. Quite a big chunk of time creating a real or a tick talk you're not getting a lot out of that one video, unless you can repurpose it. What you should absolutely be doing. That is not the point of today's episode. We could absolutely talk about repurposing because I do this a lot for my clients. I have taken on a couple marketing clients. And the repurposing is like the main thing that I take care of for them. 

But there are plenty of other marketing strategies you can use. If you want to reach new audiences and build your brand without relying on social media, which I highly recommend. This is what I have done. And this is why I was able to take most of December and January off from posting on social media, without losing sales. I had a pretty good sales month in January, just on my digital products. And I wasn't really active on social media because I was recovering from a bad experience I had in the fall. And I needed to just step away to feel less exposed and vulnerable. And so I was able to keep my business going and still make sales because not everything I do is focused on social media. Like I said, plenty of ways to market. Let's talk about some of those. 

The most important thing that's going to come into play when you are thinking about marketing in other ways is knowing your audience, knowing the type of people you are trying to reach. Understanding your target market, where are they spending their time? And, creating resources that they are looking for and we'll use. If you are making a bajillion printables, but your audience doesn't have a printer, then it's not going to really work for them. They're not going to have the ability to print things. We have to think about the ways our audience is showing up in real life. And create for those people. 

The number one thing that you want to do is focus on growing your email list. That is going to be the place where you see the most return on your time. You probably already have some people on your list. And those are likely going to be people who have purchased from you in the past, which is fantastic because those are people who could potentially purchase from you again. 

But email is going to be the number one way you reach people directly who already are interested. So they're like warm audience. If they've already signed up for your email list, in some way they are vaguely interested in what you have to offer. 

Use that! Email! That's all I can say. Start sending weekly emails. If that feels like too much, they're sending every other week emails, monthly emails. It doesn't matter, but start sending emails.

You can even start segmenting your list based on what they've purchased or what they're interested in. But you want to make sure you are emailing on a consistent basis. 

Don't let your engagement in your email lists dwindled down to nothing, consistently sending emails is going to be really important.

I also highly recommend sequences. With sequencing, you don't even necessarily have to be creating newsletters or emails every week. You could do less because you have sequences that are going out, that are consistently keeping your business top of mind for your past customers or people who have signed up for your list. So there are three basic email sequences that I use for all of my clients are set up for people. And one is the welcome sequence and think about it in more broad terms. The welcome sequence doesn't need to be five emails over the course of five days. 

It could be 15 emails over the course of six months. But it's something that you only have to set up one time and everyone who signs up for your email list will get it. In fact, I'm currently working on a welcome sequence for one of my longtime clients, where it is actually 52 emails that goes out once a week for the entire year. So all of the great emails that she's written we've turned into evergreen sequences. So I will be talking about this more in the future, this is something that I'm working on and getting results, and I'm really excited about it. It's also what I'm going to be speaking about at the ultimate product party conference. So I'm really excited about that. 

That conference is coming up pretty soon. After I present there, I'm going to turn it into either a podcast or a course or something like that, because it is a really powerful way to work smarter not harder. Where you're sending consistent emails, but you only had to set it up one time.

back to sequences. So there's the welcome sequence. There's a thank you sequence after someone has purchased. And again, this doesn't have to be two emails you send after someone's made a purchase. 

This could be eight emails over the course of 12 weeks where you're just, showing them what's available. You're saying, Hey, you might like this 

Or this was recently added to the store. Any kind of email that is evergreen can be in a sequence. It doesn't have to be strictly thank you. Emails that, say the words. Thank you in them. So get creative with that. 

The other thing that I see e-commerce businesses afraid of sending our emails that are strictly about sales. And I have been studying this because I hear it so often. So I've been looking at the emails from the places that I'm subscribed to. 

 It's perfectly acceptable to send emails that are really just about the product. When I'm recording this, it's like early March. So you could send a, these are the things that are available in green because this month we're celebrating St. Patrick's day. These are the things that are available for spring. It doesn't have to be a huge value add or some heart warming story. It absolutely can be and I do think that there is a place to incorporate all of that and I'm not discouraging it by any means. 

 But I just don't want you to feel like every email has to be a huge production. Don't want you to discredit the emails that are strictly showing off product, because those can be helpful to your audience as well. 

The other thing you can do is partner with other small business owners and even influencers, looking for ways where other business audiences and your business really mesh and create you meek ways that you guys show up together. Collaborations are so important for business growth. 

They can help you grow so much faster because you are borrowing an audience that is already existing. Collaborations are one of the ways I have grown my business since 2019. I have been consistently showing up in other people's communities in order to grow my business. 

 It might be a little bit easier in my type of business because I do have something to teach them. So you might have to get creative, but you do have something of value to offer these communities for collaboration. 

Even Mon groups are looking for collaboration, book clubs, anything like that. You have something to offer these groups. You just have to get creative with way you're showing up. 

Also collaborations are great for SEO. I've talked a lot about collaborations in the past because they have been so valuable to my business and I have seen how they can help explode businesses. 

\ there is a podcast episode. 

All about growing your business with collaborations. Definitely look into that episode, if you're trying to figure out ways to collaborate with other business owners. They are good for SEO because of the linking, like linking to other business websites, other people's websites, and having them link to your websites is really good for building up the authority of your domain. 

Collaborations help in a lot of ways, so look for potential ways to collaborate. That is a great business growth strategy. 

I briefly talked about SEO but focusing on SEO on your website can be a really effective way of marketing. It's one of the ways, I think a lot of newer businesses that don't have traffic coming in, should start by optimizing your listings and getting people coming in through Google. 

You are setting yourself up for longterm success because with SEO, for the most part, once you get into a rhythm and figure out how to best optimize it for SEO, you do it just once. When you create the listing, although you might go back and optimize and tweak things later. Once you get it set up, then it's going to keep working for you. And it's one of those kind of more passive marketing methods. So you don't have to always be creating for SEO to be effective like you do with social media. 

Leveraging your SEO, optimizing your product listings for search engines can be really impactful. And that means incorporating keywords into your product titles and product descriptions. It means compressing images, creating links to other websites and getting other websites to link back to you. 

There's a lot of ways. To build your SEO. This is something I am very passionate about and love talking about. So if you want to check out my simplified SEO workbook, that is the best place to start it's available in our digital product shop. It's actually one of my most popular products ever. Hundreds of people have used it to get really good results. 

 Time spent improving your SEO is time really well spent. Another really valuable way of marketing your business online is through content marketing through your blog. 

Blogging is here to stay. I know sometimes you'll see people say oh, blog, blogging is dying. And that is just because they're not putting in effort. But blogging is here to stay. When you create valuable and engaging content for your audience. You are providing them with more than just a blog post it's entertainment. It can be educational. 

It can be so many things. I know as e-commerce business owners. It can be hard to figure out what to blog about. So you're going to have to get creative again with your research. You can look at influencers and other bloggers. That your audience might follow to see what types of ideas are working for them. 

For example, if you sell mugs, you can write about self-care and daily rhythms, routines, finding balance in the day to day. Anything like that can be really helpful. You could even create special at home coffee, recipes or tea drinks.

 If you do some research On Pinterest or social media, you can find really cool ways that businesses are using blogging to create content for their audience that is drawing people in. 

Also blog posts are really great to add to your Pinterest marketing besides just penning your products. You can also pin your blog posts. Pinterest is not social media. It is a visual search engine. I actually just had an episode a couple of weeks ago with Kate all from simple pin media, talking about Pinterest marketing for 2023. 

Definitely go back and listen to that episode. But blocking can be a great way to spend time creating content that lives longer because it's going to be on your website you can reference it often. You can incorporate it into those newsletters. If you are doing social media, you can incorporate it into social media. 

Okay. So these are all been ways to market your business online. Most of us listening to this podcast are online business owners and so that's where we're going to naturally want to promote our business and market our business, but it's not the only method that's available. 

There are offline marketing strategies that are still working. 

There's traditional media, television, radio, print, and billboards that can be effective in reaching a wide audience. And they can be affordable

it can be really difficult to track how well those are working. So they can feel a little bit. Like throwing spaghetti at the wall. But I say don't discredit those options immediately. There could be ways that they could work for your business. one of my Instagram friends she's an artist. Her art was just featured on a billboard. 

In Florida. And I think that's so cool and so exciting. It's a way of building brand recognition and getting your business out there. 

There's also press. You can use, press features to drive a lot of traffic. I have a wonderful client Elisia Bottin who has done a lot of her marketing through press and she's had her products show up on places like the view and the today show, it's just really incredible to see this press work for her. 

I have done an interview with Alison Carter, who is all about teaching business owners how did you scrappy PR and I love that episode. I have used her methods over the last year or so. A little less than a year to build my own press where I am showing up on other people's podcasts and I try to do two a month. And I've been using that for the last, eight to 10 months and it really works. I've had her on the podcast too. She is one of the creators of the ultimate product party. 

She is just really incredible. So if you scroll back or look for the episode with Alison Carter. Of course, I'll link that in the show notes. 

But press can be a really powerful way to get your business out there. Then you also have things in your local area, like events and fairs and markets. And I know those can be exhausting and it might not be that you want to rely on those, but they can be a great way to get out there. If you are struggling with your visibility, that can be a great way to get out there in front of people who are looking for what you offer, because the people coming to the markets and the shows are looking to purchase. So that could be way to get in front of the right audience. 

The other great thing about being at shows and markets is that you get to talk directly to customers in a way that feels really natural.

You're able to gather market research and like testimonials and information from customers. Take notes, write down the things people are saying. 

You can also do things like print materials and flyers and business cards and, handouts. Those traditional methods still work very effectively, you just have to do it right. You have to present the right information on those flyers or on those prints. 

 Another thing you can do in your local area is collaborate with the businesses in your area. If you sell mugs, can you go connect with the coffee shops in your area to set up a display? If you sell soaps, can you connect with the spa or the massage clinics or the chiropractors and sell your soap there? 

There are some really great collaborations in my community. And I just love seeing those businesses share each other it's very cool. It really does help to build your brand awareness and strengthen your brand in your local community.

Another option would be to create a referral program for your customers. These can be really fantastic. So if you share about my business with your friends, I will give you this, and this could be a really great way to get word out about your business without relying so heavily on social media. And having a really good incentive, a free gift or a little bit of a discount or anything That can incentivize people to share. With their friends and tap into word of mouth marketing. That can be a really great return on investment. So you're giving away, the discount, but in return, they're telling their friends about you. There was a great episode in the past done with Carrie Fitzgerald about this, who she grew her pet business incentivizing people to share. 

There are some really great and easy to use referral program apps like loyalty and rewards by stamped IO. There's also referral candy. 

There's a lot of great apps for creating a great referral program. The other thing you can do is have an affiliate program, which is very similar to referral programs, but affiliate program is where they get cash back instead of discounts to your store or bonus to your store, although you could technically pay an affiliate in credit to your store, but most of the time affiliate programs, pay cash. So people are incentivized by the money to share. 

I have done a podcast episode on affiliate programs for your shop before. And I also have a tech guide digital product in our store. That's all about how to set up my favorite affiliate program app called GoAffPro. Which has a free tier and it's really easy and incredible to use it is my favorite affiliate program app because it is affordable. So it is easy for you to get started. 

 So if you need help setting up in that affiliate app. Check that out. We also have the link to that in the show notes. 

Affiliate programs and referral programs are very similar, but a little bit different. 

Both it can be really effective at driving sales and traffic to your store. 

And then the last marketing method I have on my list for e-commerce businesses to try out is online advertising. 

I think sometimes we immediately cross out the idea of ads because they feel overwhelming and it seems expensive, but I've really had a good shift in my perspective, on ads in the last year. About thinking of ads as an investment in your business instead of an expense. 

It can be really beneficial to run ads to your business to get more traffic and get more eyes on your products that normally wouldn't see you. 

And there are lots of different ways to run ads. You can do Google ads, you can do Pinterest ads, you can do Metta ads. You can even do Tik TOK ads. So there's a lot of different ways to do ads. That don't require you to show up every single day, you set it up and then you keep track of it and make tweaks as you go. Now, I am not an ads expert, but we have had people on the podcast. 

Who have talked about ads? 

 we've had Lauren Schwartz on the podcast who talked about using video ads , also had he Dunstan who talked about using ads to boost profitability? I've had my friend Marta lumion from anchor marketing coach, talk about Google ads. So if you are looking for support around your ads, definitely check out the product powerhouse blog. 

Because we have a lot of resources to connect you with people who are ads, experts. 

As we wrap up this episode, I just want to remind you that it is important to diversify your marketing. So if you are putting a lot of eggs in your social media basket, Be sure to reuse and repurpose that material. You can take what you've been doing on social media and put it in other places and use it in other ways. 

Make sure you are investing in email marketing. That's going to be the number one way that you are able to collect information from your customers. Even if you're starting small with just a few sequences, that is good enough. That is more than good enough. You might have big ideas and you might have a lot of shows on the agenda and a lot going on. So start with small manageable goals, pick one or two, and work towards those goals, for several months and create systems. 

So that it's not so difficult and create workflows so that, every time I do this, post a blog posts, I use that blog post and I do these six things or these 10 things, whatever it is. That's how you're going to get the most juice out of everything you are creating. As far as marketing goes. 

And reusing those things over and over and just spread them out. 

 That way you're not feeling so burnt out. Also some of these things you don't even have to do every single day. That's one of the things I love about Pinterest for example, is you can sit down and plan it all out for a month. At a time and you only have to do that once. And it might take you two or three hours to, to do a whole months worth of marketing on Pinterest or scheduling. 

But then it's done for the month and you don't have to do it again for four more weeks. 

I know you are doing a lot, so the more you can use all of those things that you are creating, the better you're going to be. That way you don't feel so burnt out doing social media all the time. Thank you so much for listening to this episode i hope you found some useful ways to market your business. I would love to hear ways you are marketing your business offline or ways you are using your online marketing better. If you want to share with me i'd love to hear it. Honestly the best way to get ahold of me is on instagram dms You can also email me My email is hello@productpowerhouse.co. and i just cannot wait to hear from you And i hope you enjoyed this episode