Creating a Social Media Strategy that Doesn't Lead to Burnout

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Ever felt burnout from forcing out content because you felt you had to? Running a business is a marathon, not a sprint! In this episode, Katrina and guest expert Allison Sugahara discuss how to get back to creating content that feels fun and easy while having a strategy to attract those dream clients.

Allison Sugahara is the founder and lead creative at Polygon Market, a creative marketing agency. For over a decade, Allison has obsessively honed her expertise in branding, design, and content strategy, helping creatives and business owners confidently showcase their passions through thoughtful digital marketing. Her mission is to continue to create space for purpose-driven entrepreneurs to expand + prosper simply by doing what they love and being who they are.

Website // Instagram // TikTok

THE EPISODE:

Katrina Widener: Hello everyone and welcome back to the Badass Business Squad podcast. My name is Katrina Widener and I'm really excited because today we have Allison Sugahara on. I'm really excited because today we are going to be diving into social media sustainability. We're talking about how to create a social media strategy that does not lead to burnout, which I feel like is so important as entrepreneurs. So thank you so much Allison, for coming on.

Allison Sugahara: Thank you so much for having me. I love the internet for this reason! Being able to kind of get to know other people on a deeper level outside of just our social channels. Should I go ahead and say a little bit about who I am?

Katrina Widener: Yeah! Yes, please dive in!

Allison Sugahara: Okay! I'm Allison. I am the owner of Polygon Market, which is a creative marketing agency based in the bay area. We focus mostly on building brands, websites, but also a heavy focus on marketing strategy. And so that kind of put me in a position of being more of a community builder and content creator now. So what I'm doing is transitioning into being a full-time creator so that I can kind of help our small business community.

Katrina Widener: I am really excited about the fact that you are a marketer with a marketing agency talking about "let's avoid burnout in our marketing". Because I feel like normally the topic is like, "All right, I'm going to teach you something new to add to your to-do list." And instead we're going to really be diving into how to I don't know, maybe take the pressure off of what you're doing?

Allison Sugahara: Completely. Oh my goodness.

Katrina Widener: Yeah.

Allison Sugahara: Yeah. And I could talk about this stuff all day, because I live in the marketing world where all we're getting is people telling you how you should be doing something, and all of the things you need in order to create a successful brand. Because we have so many resources available, I just don't think that there's only one way to do something anymore. And especially since we all operate so differently, and there's a lack of accessibility in the way so many people preach about how to show up on social media? I want to make it more approachable for people. Because as long as you're showing up authentically, however that means to you, you can have success.

Katrina Widener: Yes, yes, yes, yes! I agree with everything that you're saying right now. So my very first question is just where did this passion really start from? Was it a personal experience? Was it seeing a lot of your clients suffer through this? Or maybe a combination of both to be perfectly honest?

Allison Sugahara: Yeah it was kind of a combination. I think COVID really jump-started that feeling because I used to be the marketer that was so gung-ho and would teach people how to curate the perfect Instagram feed. "Blugh" like barf, right? Which if you do that, by the way, that is amazing and that's so awesome. But I realized that's not my cup of tea, and I realized how limiting that is for a lot of people as well. And so I think reaching a level of burnout pre-pandemic was kind of the spark for me. But then once we got into COVID specifically where people are having to be online all the time, now we're spending so much time on our phones. There's this kind of desensitivity almost, we've all become desensitized to real connection I think. So it took a mental toll on a lot of people.

Additionally my grandma had passed away, and I immediately went into this dark hole where I wasn't able to perform. And a lot of what we're doing when we are showing up online it's taxing, right? To have to do, and perform for so many people in order to get sales, and it just became this rat race that felt exhausting. I was kind of like, "Where's my creativity again? I need to tap back into that." And so having that experience myself, but then also understanding the pain points of our clients and realizing, "Well, I'm not the one that lives in your day to day as a business owner. I can't pull the magic. You're the magic. So maybe there's a way for me to help empower you as a creator, versus us trying to suck it out of you and put it on social media just to be there, you know?" And so it was a combination of a lot of things.

I think it started to really resonate when I started venting about it on TikTok.. That's really how I started going on this path of just, "You know? I'm going to vent!" It's really therapeutic for me to get on TikTok and scream into the void about all the things I hate about social media as a marketer. A couple of videos went viral and I'm like, "Okay, there's a lot of people who feel the same way I do. Thank goodness."

Katrina Widener: Honestly I'll even say, this is validating for me to listen to you, because I've had instances where I have vented on Instagram about Instagram and been like, "Do you guys know what I'm talking about? Do you know how I feel?" And I get a lot of validation. People being like, "Yes, yes, yes." But I also get people who are like, "I don't understand, you own a business. Why are you annoyed with the fact that you have to market your business? That's just part of your business."

It's not the fact that I don't like talking about my business, but it's the rat race, right? It's the pressure. I show up on Instagram now and I'm like, "This is literally a unthought habit, right? This is not intentional. This is just mindless." I pull up Instagram and I'm like, "There's nothing on here I want to consume."

Allison Sugahara: Yeah.

Katrina Widener: And it's become this thing where it's a habit that has no purpose, but even further than that, it actually isn't bringing me what it used to bring me. Because I'm just feeling like I'm getting bombarded by "Buy this, buy this, buy this, buy this." Even the people who I'm like, "Oh, I find it fun to follow you." And then there's 30 ads in there and I'm not like shitting on anyone's career where you want to make money. You want to market. I totally understand that! Market yourself!

If you're an influencer, have ads and get money and support yourself and your family and your dreams and your lifestyle. But it means that I don't love being in those places anymore.

Allison Sugahara: Yeah.

Katrina Widener: So I love this topic both on the marketer side, but also from the consumer side, because it can lead to burnout as a consumer too.

Allison Sugahara: Totally. Yeah that's such a good point because we're consumers as well, right? And understanding your own habits and then realizing how you're consuming the content, and realizing, "Okay. If I'm not even enjoying it, then how can I create a space, one, where I'm having a good time showing up. It feels good to me to show up. But two, it maybe makes other people feel good because you're living in that feeling and good, you know?" That's the sweet spot for me, because I totally agree with you. I think that when you have platforms like Instagram, where now they're trying to implement all these creator tools, which is fantastic. It again though, is kind of taking us into this place where our lives and everything we do has to become content. And I don't necessarily feel comfortable doing that all the time.

Katrina Widener: Right! It's funny cause I was talking to someone earlier about the fact that I have several Instagram accounts. Like I have my work account, obviously my @katrina.widener account. And I'm a member of some communities, I'm a Tuesdays together co-leader so I've got a Tuesdays Together account. I have my private personal account that is under a different name that's not super easy to find. I also have a Bookstagram where I just post about the books I read, cause I'm a big book nerd. It's so interesting when you get into that world and you're like, "I'm not loving what I'm putting out and I'm not loving what I'm taking in." I love the way that you described that! "How can I have fun creating content, but also how can I create content, that's fun to consume?"

Allison Sugahara: Yeah, definitely.

Katrina Widener: Yeah. Okay so we could probably wax poetic on this forever.

Allison Sugahara: I know!

Katrina Widener: If we are actually talking about implementing this idea of creating a strategy that doesn't lead to burn out, where would you start giving advice to someone who's like, "This is what I want. This is what I'd like to actually have for myself and my business"?

Allison Sugahara: Yeah. I don't like to tell people exactly what to do because again, there's no one size fits all method, right? So I'm always just expressing here's what I did, and maybe you can take something from that. So when I kind of got into that mode of, "I don't want to do this anymore," I started thinking about reprogramming my mind and how I show up on social media, how I consume social media, how I want to present my information, whatever. And that in and of itself was already a journey because I had already been posting sparingly. I left the platforms for like months at a time. And I would never recommend that to my clients, but honestly if you're feeling so burnt out, sometimes you have to step away for a long period of time. We forget that as artists in a sense, right? Because I think a lot of business owners tend to be very creative people. So when you are pulling from this place of creativity, you don't know when it's coming.

So I think having to reprogram your mindset around how you originally thought, or were taught about how social media operates, take a break for a second. Just reconnect with that person back in your childhood days that used to love painting, or get back into things that spark your creativity outside of thinking about it from a content perspective. That's the first thing that helped me, I think. And then now I feel like I'm in a groove, but some people go faster, some people go slower. It took me like whole year to get to a point where I'm finally feeling good about the content I'm creating and posting. And I still have a problem with consistency.

So I would say tap back into your creativity, and also figure out what your capacity actually is in the beginning. You can always build up, but especially when you're implementing habits, right? You want to start with one thing.

Katrina Widener: Yes!

Allison Sugahara: Not like 10 things.

Katrina Widener: This is exactly how I approach it. So you're saying all these things, and I'm just like, "Oh yes! Yes. Yes." Because we never really think about this idea that content creation can come from a place of inspiration, right? Coming from creativity. When we think of artists and their muse, right? It's not just like. "All right. I'm cranking something out because I have to, and we were told that we need to post consistently. And there needs to be X amount of this type, of X amount of this type, and X amount of this type. And are you posting a reel every single day? Cause that's how you're brain is going to get big."

Instead I never posted a single reel on my account until I saw something that felt really inspiring. And I was like, "Oh, that's fun. I have an idea for how to do this."

Allison Sugahara: Yeah.

Katrina Widener: And doing that allowed me to dip my toe into it, and then I still didn't post another reel for like two years. I have a couple of reels from 2020, and then just recently started diving in more because I found things that connected to me, and that inspired me, that made it feel fun to approach as opposed to "I'm doing this because I feel like I'm being told to, and I feel like I should."

Allison Sugahara: Totally.

Katrina Widener: And when we're looking at the energy of what you're doing too, not only is it not exciting or exhilarating, or you're not in that flow state when you're doing it so you don't feel great. But the people are looking at it are going to be like, "All right. Well, this wasn't my favorite. This doesn't grab me because that energy exchange isn't there."

Allison Sugahara: Totally.

Katrina Widener: And if you're pushing and forcing and putting pressure on yourself and doing all these "shoulds", it's going to feel bad for everyone really.

Allison Sugahara: Yeah! And I think too, because we're inundated with so much content, it's like we don't need to just put content out for the sake of putting content out.

Katrina Widener: Right!

Allison Sugahara: We don't need any more content. We have enough content. And then when you think about too, like what you said in terms of "You have to post every day in order to grow." Well why are we so fixated on vanity metrics?

Katrina Widener: Right!

Allison Sugahara: If this is a lifelong journey? If I'm trying to be a business owner up until the point that I want to retire, cause I'm not trying to go back to a full-time job at this point, right? It's a marathon. You can't actually sustain posting every day. And if you can? Wow, that's amazing.

Katrina Widener: And if you can too, I also always want to normalize for people. That account that you're comparing yourself to, who does post every day? You don't know what their life's like.

Allison Sugahara: Yeah.

Katrina Widener: You don't know! Maybe they're posting literally to become an influencer where their content is their product, right? For someone like you or me, we're posting to get awareness and possibly get people to purchase, but maybe that is their content. Or maybe they are the type of person where this comes really naturally, it comes really easily, and this is their fun thing to do when it's not your fun thing to do. Or

Allison Sugahara: Yeah.

Katrina Widener: There's so many different parts of this too, where also maybe that person who's posting content every day has amazing numbers and zero clients. They got a lot of followers, but no one's converting. And so to make those assumptions just feels like it's not serving you and your best self, and your goals to be like, "Well, I'm going to operate based off of what someone else is doing."

Allison Sugahara: Completely. I think it's interesting too, because with social media now, and the opportunity available, everyone can thrive in their respective spaces. So actually, it doesn't really matter if somebody posts every day. That wouldn't compare to you because if you don't create content that way, then you're already automatically put in a different bucket. So I think it's easy to be able to get sucked into a vortex where you feel like you're different, or you're alone in that way. Or other people are growing around you and nothing's happening for you. But really it's like, No, no, no! If you don't see the space where you can thrive, that means you have the opportunity to create it. I understand the opposition because we all live in that world sometimes, but the other side is that the internet was created so we can have all these opportunities to share information with each other.

Katrina Widener: Yep! It's really just going back to the basics in some ways. And I feel like social media is one of those things that we like started rolling this ball down the hill, then all of a sudden it got away from us and now it's over in the next town and we're like, "Wait a second. That was something I initially was trying to have control over. At least trying to make work for me, and now it's just completely has a life of its own and is going off doing its own thing." And I'm just like, "All right. I get to choose how I operate from here on out."

Allison Sugahara: Yeah.

Katrina Widener: And when we think of how social media first started, it was just such a different landscape.

Allison Sugahara: Completely.

Katrina Widener: And I kind of enjoy when I get back to the roots of that. I have an Instagram account that is just a Bookstagram because that's fun.

Allison Sugahara: Oh totally!

Katrina Widener: Do you remember when Instagram was just fun, and there was no pressure to put any marketing out there, or "I have to do this many posts," or whatever it is? It was just fun.

Allison Sugahara: Yeah.

Katrina Widener: And it's been funny because creating this quote unquote "fun account" has allowed me to have more fun in my business account then.

Allison Sugahara: I love that. I think being able to compartmentalize it too helps a lot. You know, because we manage social media for other profiles, and I have a couple of profiles as well,

it's helped me really detach from just the way that we've gotten in the habit of mass consumption. I feel the same way.

Katrina Widener: I know the whole point of this episode is to talk about creating a strategy that doesn't lead to burnout, and I guess a strategy is just like do whatever you want!

Allison Sugahara: That's seriously is my motto. My videos on TikTok are just kind of debunking what other people are saying, or just reiterating many times that whatever you hear is not the sole way to do something. And I usually end with "Do whatever the fuck you want."

Katrina Widener: Yeah. Yeah.

Allison Sugahara: You can do whatever you want on these platforms. Just do it and then go out willy nilly. I actually do like a chicken before the egg; instead of creating the content on a piece of paper, and some people work that way too that's totally fine, I create the content first based on what I'm inspired by and just do it in the moment. And then I take my content library that I've created, and then I go, "What can I do with this? How can I repurpose it, you know? Where can I put it now?"

Katrina Widener: I am the exact same way! I'm like, "Ooh this sound that I heard in a video that isn't even in a reel made me think of a reel I could do, so I'm going to make up my own sound for this reel. But now how am I going to fit into my marketing calendar? What am I going to make out of this, et cetera, et cetera." It also reminds me of when I talk about marketing with people. There are so many very intense, advanced marketing techniques out there, or even just intimidating marketing techniques, or just the sheer number of marketing techniques. The way that I book sales is you get a consult call and then you book the sale from the consult call. It's actually very, very simple, the way that you have a sales funnel.

Allison Sugahara: Yeah.

Katrina Widener: You have a consult call and then you book people from the consult call. And we don't have to if we don't want to, have this five email welcome sequence. Or be like, "I have this incredibly complicated funnel that goes through Dubsado and leads through X, Y, Z." Or "I'm showing up on Facebook and I'm doing YouTube and I'm doing all these things." When we boil it down to what a sales funnel actually is, it's like booking a call and getting the sale.

Allison Sugahara: Exactly.

Katrina Widener: And so it's like, "Well what's a social media strategy?" Well, let's just make content and putting it out. It doesn't matter what type of content. It doesn't really matter when or how or where, as long as it's something that feels really good to you and feels really aligned to you.

Allison Sugahara: Completely. And based on your capacity, right? If you're super overwhelmed, but you have the energy to create enough content to get traction, you don't have maybe the budget or the bandwidth to create a website for instance, all you'd have to do in your call to action in your bio is like DM me, you know?

Katrina Widener: Yeah.

Allison Sugahara: Right? There's just so many ways you can simplify the process based on your own capacity. And I'm such an advocate for simplifying any process, but I envy the people that have the big workflows and I want to get to that point. I can't tell you how many times I've taken courses on building workflows. So I know how to do it, and I've done it for challenges, but then the amount of effort that goes into it too, you're like, "Do I really want to do this every time? Because it's going to change again? Not really." So I stopped doing that and now it's just a link in the bio and an intake form. It's the easiest thing, right?

I just purchased product from somebody who doesn't have a website, local business owner who has lip gloss. I commented a question, she immediately DM'd me and I purchased three lip glosses.

Katrina Widener: Yeah, I love it. Everyone's like "marketing made simple" and I was like "marketing made simple is just doing simple marketing."

Allison Sugahara: Marketing made simple is like a conversation and being like, "Hey, want this bracelet I made? Cool."

Katrina Widener: Right, right! It's like, "Hey! I think you'd be a good client. Cool. You do too? Excellent!"

Anyway, if you had one last message that you wanted to give to anyone who's listening to this, what would be like the ultimate takeaway for them?

Allison Sugahara: It's so cheesy, but seriously if you want to find a way to be a little bit more authentic, again, tap into the things that make you happy and really assess your own capacity. I think we live in a very unique time right now where humanizing a brand is more exciting for people, because we're craving connection so badly. So be yourself, wholeheartedly be yourself. Show up as yourself.

Doesn't mean you have to be transparent about everything. You don't have to show everybody your entire deck of cards, but it's okay to show up on camera in your pajamas. It's okay to do something that has nothing to do with your business for the sake of seeing if it works, or for the sake of bringing you joy. So that's probably my ultimate takeaway is always go back to not just being yourself, but cultivating your own joy. That has never steered me wrong.

Katrina Widener: I really appreciate that final note, cause I feel like it's very, very important and also just so aligned with a lot of the values that I love to hold for myself, but also share with my clients. So thank you so much for coming on here, I really appreciate it.

Allison Sugahara: Of course! Thank you so much for having me, I love talking about this stuff.

Katrina Widener: Okay! So really, really quickly before we hop off, would you mind sharing with everyone where they can find you if they'd like to connect after the call?

Allison Sugahara: Of course. So I'm definitely on TikTok, @suginofilter. S-U-G as in grandma, I, no filter. That's also my personal Instagram. If you want to follow my business though, that's Polygon Market, www.polygonmarket.com.