Welcome to the UnCloned® Insider audio newsletter. My name is Audria Richmond, and I am your marketing and launch strategist. I work directly with my clients to show them how to build uncloned brands and launch profitable marketing campaigns. We are the brand that you come to when you want to become or remain the obvious choice of your industry. Happy Monday.

I am back with another audio newsletter. Hopefully, you all had an amazing weekend. And today, I wanna talk about engagement is down. Now what? So I know there's a lot of people who have been talking about engagement being down.

I personally have been ex experiencing my engagement being down, and I've been I think I noticed it maybe like a month ago or maybe 2 months ago. And one thing you would notice is that, you know, you you know what you're used to getting on your stuff. So if you post a reel and you normally get x, but you're now getting x, if you normally make a post, you normally get x amount of comments, but you're now getting x. So you're very familiar with what type of engagement you are used to getting. Right?

And so when people say that engagement is down, that's not a lie. However, engagement down is you know, engagement being down is only in a few select places, and the places where engagement is down is social media on platforms we don't own. And I know y'all sick and tired of people saying this, and it's like, oh, I know. I know. Build a list.

Build a list. Build a list. But the truth of the matter is this is so important. It's more the it's more important than you think it is, and it's less passive than you're making it. Right?

And so if you have not actively been growing your email list, then you're probably you're probably filling it on a deeper level than somebody who has an email list. Right? You're probably filling it deeper on some on the level where, you know, some people have a bigger SMS list. Whatever the case may be, if you have a list, you're not really thinking about the algorithm. Right?

Yes. It affects you, but you don't you know that your business can still run and thrive without it. It's the people who have put in 100% of their time, energy, and effort for creating content exclusively on social media and not being intentional about growing their email list and not being intentional about growing any platform or any community outside of social media. And that's what I wanna talk about today. Right?

And so one thing we have to keep in mind is that we don't own these platforms. Right? And I know it's a lot of people who pride themselves on not having to run ads. However, those are the same people who are algorithm. Right?

I know that there are a lot of people who are saying, hey, you know, this is how you're gonna create a trend today and, like, let's create content. And one thing I'm noticing about a lot of content creators, at least the ones who advertise themselves as someone who has expertise, they're starting to be misaligned in their content. Let me give you an example. If you say that you are a financial expert, you teach people how to, you know, get better make better investments. But then I come to your Instagram and you're on a hip hop dance trend that ain't got nothing to do with finance.

You found no way to tie together. In my opinion, that's misaligned. I'm not saying that every now and again, you can't get jiggy with a trend, but when you have abandoned your entire business goals in sake of a trend, which is what I'm noticing with a lot of people, is that people who normally would create, you know, thoughtful tip related content, stuff that you wanna save and share are now becoming, in my opinion, and y'all can let me know if y'all haven't noticed this, but they're becoming more toxic on social media. Right? For instance, I'm starting to notice people, especially on Facebook, become extremely controversial.

Right? Making comments and posts, being messy, resharing stuff that's negative. Like, I don't know about you, but social media is starting to become a very negative place. And one of the reason the algorithm may be down is because people are tired of getting coming on the Internet to be, you know, put down or be set off emotionally or throw their whole energy off because you posted something on social media because you were trying to get clickbait. Right?

And then it's then you have a group of people who are like, well, I'm not experiencing any, you know, algorithm change. Well, those are the people who spend their whole life on social media. Every time you get on social media, here they go with another post. Here they go with another controversial topic. Here they go with something else to say.

Right? They they literally also it doesn't matter how many times you log on to social media. They're the first people you see. So why am I saying this? If you're experiencing engagement down, right, you have to be you have to ask yourself, what am I posting on social media?

Because one thing I'm not gonna deviate from, and I noticed it, and I've had a lot of social media people tell me this, you know, you would have more engagement if you did this, and that this is not in alignment with my brand, and that this is not the type of people I'm trying to attract. And so, 1, you have to be definite in who you want to attract, who are you trying to talk to, and who are you trying to communicate with, and are you in alignment with the content that you create to attract the right people? I'd rather have low engagement in the perfect content so when the perfect person find me, they can, learn more about working with our company rather than having a page full of junk just for the sake of engagement. So now that we've gotten that out of the way, I do have a solution for you. Okay?

And so I wanna go over a few things that you can do that you can tap into to get you going, while the engagement is down and how you, 1, don't don't have to allow this to affect you. Alright? So number 1 is gonna be what we've already been talking about is building your list. Are you actively and consistently building your email list or your SMS list? Are you asking people to get on your email list?

Are you asking people to get on your SMS list? Are you giving people a reason to be subscribed? Right? So one of the reasons why we've gotten so super consistent with our content, as far as, like, getting the audio newsletter out every Monday, and now we're starting to go live on YouTube every Wednesday or it's either live or we post a video every Wednesday on YouTube. It's because we wanna make sure that our community know that we're here to stay, that we're here as a trusted source, and that they can count on us.

If we only show up every blue moon, then people won't be able to trust you. So it's not just about asking people to get on your email list and get on your SMS list. It's about giving them a reason to actually be on the list. The second thing, you can be hosting virtual events. Okay?

AKA launches. I like you know, we we like to launch around here. And so you could be hosting launches primarily on Zoom where you can bring people together and nav navigate and create conversation in community, get people to engage in the comments, have breakout rooms. You can have virtual parties, virtual meetups. You can have, virtual discussions, virtual presentations.

There's a lot of things you can do on Zoom and the cool thing about it is Zoom is a dedicated place free of distractions. Meaning, if you got a 100 people who are on Zoom, you don't have to worry about somebody else going live and they jumping off your Zoom and going somewhere else. Like, people tend to be pretty tapped in when they're not on social media. So having a way to bring your people together on Zoom is definitely a way to beat the algorithm. Right?

The third thing, go live. You know, if you're experiencing a lot of low engagement on your social media platforms, go live. Right? As soon as you go live, the people who are following you or connected to you or have notifications on, they will be notified that you are live, and then they can come and engage with you in real time. So that's something you could do today as long as you don't allow fear to be the reason why you don't go live.

Right? Number 4 is opportunity hour, which is our trademark process that we teach about pitching yourself and your brand in 5 different categories. We actually have a free master class coming up about the power and pitching yourself 1 hour a day. It's gonna be really good. The master class is free, And so I'll keep you all posted on when that come.

But briefly, just to kinda explain it here, you wanna get in the habit of pitching yourself. The cool thing about pitching yourself every single day for 1 hour is that you get to pick who inbox you land in. You get to pick the opportunities you wanna create. If you wanna get more speaking, you can pitch yourself for speaking. If you wanna get more business opportunities, you can pitch yourself for business opportunities.

If you wanna meet and connect and network with different people, you can pitch yourself for introductions. If you have an idea for a brand, you could pitch yourself for that. If you wanna be interviewed, you could pitch yourself to be on someone's podcast. There's infinite opportunities when you get in in the habit of creating your own opportunities. So you being able to pitch yourself.

Right? And so that's opportunity hour. That's our trademark process. And then the last thing is advertising. Believe it or not, you gotta pay to play.

Right? Especially now with engagements down. I'm not saying that, you gotta go out and spend an arm and a leg, but what I am saying is the days of just thinking that you can grow your brand to a gazillion dollars with no money invested is over. It is over as we know it. And the more and more you you fight against it, the more and more you lose the opportunity to get in front of the people you are meant to serve.

Because if everybody is complaining about, oh, I don't wanna spend money on ads. I don't I just wanna go the out you know, the organic route, blah blah blah blah blah. Let me tell you, my business wouldn't be what it is or be as far as it is if I did not spend money on advertising, and that's the god honest truth. If I spent all my time trying to grow my business strictly organic, 100% organic without spending a penny on advertising, you probably wouldn't even be listening to this audio newsletter. A good deal of my community, my email subscribers, my SMS list, and my following has come through paid advertising, and that would not be true.

Right? I wouldn't have you all having access to me if I wasn't willing to spend the money to get you to even know I exist, and that's the beauty in advertising. Right? So a quick recap, you wanna make sure that you are sending more emails to your email list or your SMS list. Not only are you sending more emails to your email list and SMS list, you're inviting people to get on the list.

You wanna make sure that you are bringing people together in some type of event format, ideally a lunch. But if not, it could be something as simple as, like, hey. I'm hosting an ask me anything on Zoom. Hey. I'm hosting a virtual meetup.

I'm hosting a virtual chitchat. I'm hosting a virtual discussion. There's a lot of cool things you can do on Zoom if you don't wanna do a challenge, right, or a webinar and so on and so forth. Live streaming. You literally hitting the live button.

Literally, you can go live anywhere. You can go live on Instagram. You can go live on Facebook. You can go live on LinkedIn. You can go live on YouTube.

You can go live on x. You can go live on Twitch. I think I said LinkedIn. Like, literally, there are so many places that you can go live. So all you gotta do is build up the courage to go live and activate your voice so you can get in front of the people who are looking for you.

And then you can do opportunity hour, which is our trademark process where you pitch yourself 1 hour a day by you identifying opportunities to get yourself, engaged with. Right? People you can pitch. Opportunities you can pitch. Brands you can pitch.

Ideas you can pitch. And then last but not least is advertising. Right? You being okay with spending a little bit of money to get seen by new people who really wanna be, engaged with your brand, but they just simply don't know that you exist and advertising it advertising allow us to do that. So hopefully, you found value in today's audio newsletter and that you don't beat yourself up because the engagement is down, and you just get proactive.

You just get with it. When you get active, you get excited, You pull your people together. You email your people. You bring them together on Zoom. You livestream to get in front of them.

You pitch the people you wanna target, and you advertise to the people who need to see you. Do not make this a thing where you stay in this, like, dark place and you're not putting your brand out there. So let me know your biggest takeaway inside of our free uncloned marketing free Facebook group. If you are listening to this, you should be able to get the link to our free Facebook group if you're not already a member in the description section. And until next time y'all, let's go live an UnCloned® life and build an UnCloned® brand.

Bye y'all.