Get a free chapter of my bestselling book ("Establish Yourself") right here > https://www.greateststorycreative.com/read

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Does the thought of putting time into crafting social media posts make you want to run the other way? You’re not alone. Social media burnout is real, but it doesn’t have to be the only way to scale and grow your coaching or consulting business. In this episode, I share three tried-and-true, authentic marketing strategies from my bestselling book, Establish Yourself, that have helped me and my clients build six-figure practices without living online 24/7.

🎯 You'll Discover:

• Why the "Tactic Tornado" leads to burnout and how to avoid it
• The simple visibility strategy most service providers overlook
• How focus on "baking a great cake" leads to repeat clients and referrals
• The alternate marketing I do to generate $80K in revenue annually instead of wasting hours on writing the perfect LinkedIn post

These strategies are part of the Establish Yourself® Framework, which I detail in the book and share in this episode to help you elevate your brand, streamline your business, and grow sustainably without the chaos.

📝 Next Steps Mentioned:

• Download your Free Chapter of Establish Yourself now: https://www.greateststorycreative.com/read
• Check out the Establish Yourself® Action Club: https://www.greateststorycreative.com/actionclub
• Connect with Annie on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anniefranceschi/

If you’re ready to stop spinning your wheels with social media and discover practical, sustainable ways to attract dream clients, this episode is for you!

I'm going to be honest, I find social media, freaking exhausting. Just the thought of writing a post about my business. It puts me to sleep and I want to do literally anything else. Do you feel me? Thankfully, I have figured out many alternate ways to market myself as a consultant and grow my practice to multiple six figures annually without living online 24 7. It's not ads or AI or even a complicated email funnel.

In today's episode, let's sidestep that sleepy social media and dive into what I've done differently to grow without marketing madness.

Welcome to the Establish Yourself® Podcast, your guide to elevating your brand, offers, and systems as a coach, consultant, or service provider. I'm Annie Franceschi of Greatest Story Creative®. I'm a brand strategist, author, former Disney storyteller, and forever Muppet fan. If you're ready for next level success, we'll get clear on your brand, Package Your Process™, and streamline your systems so you can land quality clients, boost profit, and make time for big dreams in your business and beyond. If you're ready for less confusion and more magic, it's time to Establish Yourself.

In the first several years of my business, I really believed that the tactic tornado was required. If you're not familiar with the tactic tornado. This is a concept I talk about in my book, Establish Yourself. But the idea is basically that every other day, there is a new marketing strategy that you are being told that you have to do.

You gotta do this. You gotta be on Tik TOK. You gotta do the webinar. You gotta do this. You gotta do a podcast. You know, what do I say? On and on until you are swept up in a tactic tornado. And where do you end up? Where does a tactic tornado put you? Down the black hole of internet marketing? Burnout with no results. I don't want to be there.

And I want to talk to you about what those are today. I actually wrote an entire book that talks about how to stay out of the tactic tornado, and how to do this. Today, I'm going to give you an overview so the book is called, Establish Yourself: brand streamline and grow your greatest business.

It is the book that inspired this show, but it is a 350 page book that will help you build a clear plan to optimize your business to the next level, to optimize your branding, operations, sales, client, experience, referral relationships, and marketing all without constant social media.

So let's dive in today with key points from that- three specific ways that I've marketed myself without social media, and how you can do the same, pulling from my signature approach, the Establish Yourself framework.

The first part of the framework is E for embrace your story. And one of the biggest things I did to embrace my story was I got clear. I got clear on my brand and my offer. And I talked about it everywhere. The best and the simplest visibility strategy you have is to get super clear on what it is you do, who it is for, and to talk about how to work with you.

I am constantly shocked in the hundreds of conversations I have every single year with coaches and consultants who are begging me for tips on how do I get visible? How do I get people to discover me? And I say, well, are you clear on what you do? What you sell? Are you talking about it?

Have you you said who it's for? Have you said how to work with you? All of those things are free. Right. So they are essential. But what I find is that a lot of people can't answer those questions for themselves. So that's one of my biggest strategies that has worked so well for me and for my clients is to stop chasing the tactic tornado and start with foundation: get clear on what your brand and offer are.

That is something I help clients do. I work with them directly- you can listen here from the podcast for more tips about this. Of course, the book dives into it deeper, but this is why if you have been doing so much social media marketing and not seeing results, this is often why- if we're going to diagnose it. Because I see this all the time where people are burning themselves out with all these tactics but it's not based on any clear strategy. You're not actually clear on what it is you're doing or selling, and so no one can buy it and they're not making a connection. So take a step back.

If you are down that funnel, let's take a step back all the way to the foundation and get clear. E embrace your story, get clear on your brand and offer.

What is the S of E S T the Establish Yourself framework? If the E is embrace your story. The S is shape your business. Shaping my business has really meant optimizing my client work and all the processes I use to run my business. I often refer to this as I try not to fixate on frosting. We're taught that the frosting is all that matters. That's the fancy marketing, the tactic tornado, like, oh, you know, the sprinkles and all of that.

But many of us never really stopped to make the best cake we can. Are we baking the best cake we can? I have spent literal years making sure that my business, my offers, how I work with clients, how I work behind the scenes is super optimized is handled so well that clients refer me like crazy. I counted the other week that I have something like over 20 clients over my 11 years who have spent more than five figures with me, who continue to work with me year after year, come back after multiple years.

It is huge when you stop worrying about the frosting of it all and bake a great cake. You can have a cupcake that is an amazing cupcake without the frosting and the sprinkles. Right. But if all you are, is frosting or sprinkles, or you don't have either of that, you're not selling anything. So even though it seems counterintuitive, like Annie, how do you grow if you're not quote unquote, working on marketing?

Well, I am because if I have a great business, if I have an amazing cupcake, my clients are telling everybody how great the cupcake is. They're taking a bite, they're having great results. They're super happy. That's how I have such a great client return record, so many great referrals that I have this wonderful universe of people to work with because they are happy- because I focus on making sure that they are happy and not delighting people who have never heard of me, which is what a lot of gurus teach.

So that's the second piece is to shape your business. Do not fixate on frosting. So EST, right? Embrace your story, shape your business. What is T? T is translate your value. That's really all marketing is if you stop to think about it, it's. Finding ways to get people to see and understand translate. Your value as something that solves their problems. So I really like this because I think traditional marketing leaves out a lot of opportunity for us like a lot of social media marketing doesn't suggest that there are other ways of attracting our ideal clients, delighting them and getting them to clone themselves. So one of the ways that I have done that, that I've actually taken action and then seen results without intense, social media marketing has been free speaking. So one of the biggest ways over the past decade that I've been doing what I've been doing with a brand consulting and brand strategy has been turning my free speaking into paid clients. So this is something I share a little bit more about in Package Your Process™-

where I actually teach the whole funnel for this, but I'll give you the broad overview so you can understand what I'm talking about.

I started this episode talking about how tired social media makes me- let's talk about why it feels sleepy and exhausting. It feels sleepy and exhausting to me because I know I will sit there and I'll come up with a LinkedIn post-

it'll take me 30 minutes to an hour. I put it out there and maybe people will like it, or maybe it will get completely ignored. And that annoys the heck out of me. I want that hour of my time (because I protect my time) to be valued, to be valuable, to add up to something. And, you know, I've yet to see in 11 years, social media really pay off for me.

So I do other consistent things than social media marketing. I go and speak in front of ideal rooms of coaches and consultants. I would rather spend that hour instead of working on a LinkedIn post, I would rather go speak in front of my ideal clients and share my expertise and invite them into the Marvel cinematic universe of what I do. To give you a sense of how this worked for me just last year, I spoke to over 600 people across 30 different talks.

The majority of those were virtual. That was about 30 ish hours of work. And it turned into close to $80,000 in business. All from free speaking. Not a single social media post was required for that. Not only did I get client business. I also got a ton of people on my email list. So those people could become clients in the future.

You might be listening to this because you saw me speak somewhere. That's a little bit of what I'm doing here with the podcast. It's too new to test it, to tell you what the results are. I'll be happy to share it in future episodes. I'm claiming accountability that I'm working toward doing this for a minimum of a year.

But let's, let's see, what's going to happen here.

The other thing I want to say about speaking to get clients and translating my value. I think it's important that whatever you do to translate your value, maybe you like posting on social media. I don't know. Maybe you like writing LinkedIn articles, maybe you like writing a newsletter. It's got to be something you like, because if you don't actually like it, you're not going to do it. I was just listening to a podcast episode and they were like, you know, you really gotta work on your consistency, but they didn't explain how you stay more consistent. For full transparency, my strengths finder strengths of 34 strengths, my bottom strength, which means my biggest weakness is consistency. So it has been having a system that I actually enjoy, a strategy

I like, and because I don't like posting on social media, I'm not going to do it. No matter how many strategies or courses I take or people I hire maybe one day I'll delegate it out. You know? I do think it's great for some businesses and clearly if it works for you, then it works for you. But I just know so many people in my universe who don't like to self promote, who are nervous about the visibility of social media marketing.

It just doesn't fit who they are. So I'm just here to say that there are lots of ways of doing that. I share more in the book, Establish Yourself, of course. But I did just want to touch on this that I think. You know, for me, speaking has been worth the time that goes into it. So it's really about what is worth the time for you.

So just to pull this all together, if social media exhausts you and has been burning you out with zero results, I would really encourage it. Invite you to pour your energy into what does let you up and to focus on that low hanging impactful fruit that the Establish Yourself® framework really points you to. If you want help with that? I've written a whole book about this and you can get a free chapter of it.

If you want to read the first 50 pages, it is my gift to you. So go find that it's at greatest story creative.com/read, R E a D. And you can get the first chapter of the book there. I'll make sure the link is in the show notes.

If you would like more than just a book and you're somebody who needs more accountability, this week I have opened the Establish Yourself® Action Club!

We only opened doors for a week every single year. It happens to be open now. This is my community. So if you want to come meet with me, ask me questions, run your marketing strategies by me and put the book into action- that is the place to be. If you sign up, it actually comes with a copy of the book.

So you get an ebook as well, and the digital workbook so you can work through this. This framework and all the examples I share in the book, put it into action, come and meet with us monthly on zoom. Meet with other entrepreneurs who are in the same boat as you -other coaches and consultants. Something else I really love is it's not just the book- it's a lot of the tools, trainings, and templates I talk about in the book.

So, if you're doing things like wanting to optimize your business, I'm literally teaching you some of my best practices and processes and on-demand trainings. If you want to track your revenue and be more clear on where your numbers are, I have the real-time revenue tracker- it's available to you immediately the minute you join action club. Rather than sell random digital products. I have put everything into the club- into the Establish Yourself vault. So you get access to all of that and you can start to take this action.

When I discovered that social media marketing was not a requirement for me to be a successful six figure entrepreneur that didn't work all the time.

That was a game changer. And that's why I created the action club. I wrote the book and then built this program so there would be a place for you that was within reach. It was affordable. A way to get expert feedback on what you're doing and the tools to put it into action,

Because as you may have already learned from me, I think the key here is to take imperfect action. We don't know what's going to work, but if we follow embracing our story and shaping our business and translating our value, if we focus on the things that we've already got some traction on and make them great- bake the best cake that we can and make sure that our ideal clients are being well-served and brought back into the fold. You know, you can't lose with that.

So if you've been somebody who's been burning out so much on what it feels like every guru teaches. Come join us. Come join me. Take more action. If all you do is listen to this episode and know you are not alone and that there are ways to grow without social media marketing- then I've done my job today.

I wish you every success as you work to EST: Establish Yourself.

 Hey, do you like surprises? Here comes the show's credits, but just like a Marvel movie, stay to the end so you don't miss something fun I put in just for you. Thanks for tuning in to the Establish Yourself® podcast. I'm Annie Franceschi and I want to hear from you. Follow me on LinkedIn. Share your favorite takeaway from today's episode as a comment on my latest post.

Mention your favorite Muppet in your message so I know you're a fan of the show. And for expert branding help, a free consultation and more resources, visit greateststorycreative. com / slash podcast. Now here it is your moment of magic.   

You know, the show has been out for a couple of weeks and thank you to so many of you who have left a review. Reviews keep coming in. And here is one from my five-year-old son, Leo:

 don't listen to mom. She's just being silly.