[00:00:00] Mia Fileman
Are you tired of empty promises and stolen ideas? Me too. Got. Marketing is a podcast for marketers and small brands who want real talk and clever strategies without the bs. Running an online business is hard, but everything gets easier when your marketing starts performing. I am Mia FileMan, your straight shooting campaign loving friend here to talk marketing, running a business, pop culture, and everything in between. Let's dive in.
Hello friend. We are in 2025 and marketing has evolved, but too many small businesses still rely on outdated tactics that just don't work anymore. In today's episode, I'm breaking down the biggest marketing moves that are past their use by date, why they're failing small businesses and what to do instead.
Some of these might sting, but I'd rather give you the truth now than what you waste months or potentially years on strategies that just don't move the needle in your business. Alright, so let's dive right into it. What doesn't work in 2025 anymore? Number one, transitioning from a one-to-one to a one-to-many offering without a marketing plan.
Let's have a look at this scenario. You are a service provider. Maybe you are a pelvic floor physio and you work with clients one-on-one in a clinic type environment. Or maybe you are coaching, consulting, or you're a skilled professional like physio or copywriting. You love what you do, but you've hit a ceiling because.
If you don't see patients or clients, you don't get money. So you decide that you'll launch a group program or an online course, and that you'll move from one to one to one to many, amazing.
But then reality hits, nobody buys. Or if they do, the sales are trickling in at a pace that's not going to sustain you.
You thought that you would package up your knowledge, put it online, and boom. Passive income. But here's the cold hard truth of it. Selling one to many is way harder than selling one-to-one. When I ran a marketing agency for seven years, I could go have a coffee with someone in Darwin. An hour later they would be on a $3,000 a month retainer.
That is not how I make money as an online business owner. If you are seeing clients, let's say four days a week and trying to build a scalable offer, fricking hate that word, it gives me the ick. In your leftover time, you really only have two options. Number one is to pay someone thousands of dollars to do your marketing for you and reposition you as somebody who is now known in the one to many
space who is now a serious player in the online course online workshop. Space or you are going to need to sacrifice some client time to free you up to actually market your new offer. But assuming that you can just take what you were doing in practice one-on-one and magically transform that to one to many, it doesn't work like that. And I'm really, really sorry to burst your bubble. Creating an online course or group program is not the same as selling one-on-one services. Your clients know you as somebody who works with them one-on-one. Selling at scale requires so much marketing. It will make your eyes water trust building and then demand creation. People have to really want this online course or workshop or one to many offer that you've dreamed up. So what do you actually need to do? You need a pre-launch audience strategy so that you can drum up demand before you build this offering. You need a clear [00:04:00] transformation so that people can see that they're getting something out of your online course or online workshop, and you need a real marketing plan because it's not going to sell itself.
Number two of what's no longer working in 2025, the online course Gold Rush is over. People are so burned out from mediocre online courses with no support. The only courses that are really making money in 2025 are established courses that have a really great reputation of many, many years of being in the market, like hack Your Own PR by Odette Barry Hybrid models, where you get a course plus a community plus coaching as part of the deal. High ticket transformation focused programs that are a lot more intimate. So you are not just doing an online course with 1200 other people at the same time, and you are literally just a number and courses within inbuilt accountability and tailored one-to-one support. So if you are coming to the market in 2025 with an Evergreen online course because you think that we are still living in that gold rush, then I'm really, really sorry to disappoint you.
Please go out there and sense check and validate this offering before you take it to market. Because I know a lot of people who are trying to sell online courses in 2025 and they are not getting a single enrollment. Does your marketing feel like guesswork? Be honest. Join Marketing Circle the membership for female entrepreneurs who wanna nail their strategy, boost their creativity, and create marketing that actually pays off No cookie cutter templates and broken dreams.
Just practical marketing, training, mentoring, and support. Support to help you grow your business, you'll work directly with me, a [00:06:00] legit marketing expert, and tap into a brains trust of clever business owners who bring their expertise, ideas, and support to. We are capped at 45 members, so apply to join today.
Okay, number three, tricking people into opening an email. Subject lines like, re, Colin, or Oops, or, I made a mistake Mia. Such click bait, bullshit. Customers today come with immaculately tuned bullshit detectors and are no longer willing to take brands at their word. And when you pull these kind of single use tactics on them, you erode what little trust is left in online business today.
So please don't do this. Don't use single use plastic and don't use single use tactics. Instead, use curiosity driven subject lines like open loops without the clickbait. Use [00:07:00] personalization on real data and be consistent. If you are only emailing people when you are selling something, you are doing it all wrong.
Number four, too much automation and a lack of personalization. The problem with marketing, tech developing and getting more sophisticated is that customers now come to expect it. They know that our websites and our CRMs and our email service providers have automation and personalization functionality built in, and so as a result, the customers are like, well, now I want it.
If you can do it, there's no reason why you shouldn't be personalizing your emails to me because I know you have that feature. So nobody wants to feel like they're just another number in your funnel. For example, my doors are open, and then you start receiving daily emails, which is leading to unsubscribes at a staggering rate.
Segmentation today is not optional. If I have not [00:08:00] shown any interest in your offer, adding me to a 10 part sales sequence means that I'm going to self-select out. I'm going to take myself off your sales sequence, but I'm gonna take myself off your entire list. Instead, what people need to be focused on is getting me interested in the offer, being able to have some sort of homing beacon or signal that says, oh, Mia has just taken a step that shows me she is interested in my offer, and then you put me into a sales sequence.
Can I also just say that one well placed personal video is going to Trump 10 automated nurture emails every time. Okay. That's it. That's all I have to say about that. All right. Number five. Educational only content is just not cutting it anymore. For years, experts were told just give value and sales will follow.
[00:09:00] So businesses churned out tip based content hoping that it would naturally lead to conversions. The problem is that the internet is now flooded. With free educational content and chat, PT can give you all the advice that you could possibly look for. You ask chat, GPT, how do I improve my SEO? And it will tell you, people don't actually pay for this information anymore.
What they're paying for is meaningful change, for lack of a better word, transformation. They wanna see the dollars in their bank account, or they want a product that solves a problem for them. Giving away all this free content without addressing why they need to know this information or how they can apply.
This information is no longer converting. So this is what you need to do instead, blend your educational content with your opinion, with your insight, with your approach. What people are buying is you. There are a million marketers. [00:10:00] I mean, I work exclusively with marketers, small business owners who market their brands.
They're all marketers. I'm a marketer. We are drowning in marketers. The reason why people work with me is because they like my style to marketing. And let's be clear, not everyone does, and that's fine too. So make sure that your content features your approach, how you do marketing, or how you do whatever, that's what people are gonna buy.
I've got some bonus ones. A little few extra Easter eggs quickly. 'cause you know your time is valuable. What's not working? Cross posting, sharing the same thing across Instagram and LinkedIn and Twitter. Sorry. But the platforms have just made this almost impossible now with different aspect ratios, hashtags.
LinkedIn Bio link. In the first comment, platforms favor native content, and each platform does have its own culture, for lack of a better word. So be very mindful how you repurpose [00:11:00] content. I don't use a scheduler for LinkedIn. I post it natively in the app. I only choose maybe one or two posts that went on Instagram to go on LinkedIn.
The rest I write specifically for LinkedIn. So my advice to you is fewer, bigger, better, fewer social media channels and better content on those channels posting and ghosting. Actually don't think this ever really worked. I mean it did when engagement rate. On Instagram, we're at like 10% in 2014, but in 2025, the latest data shows that the average engagement rate on Instagram is less than 1%.
So if you are going to Instagram to share a post and then you. Piss off and you go about your day and you don't actually respond to comments and respond to dms in a timely fashion and like really engage in meaningful conversations and you are just broadcasting out content, then it's not gonna go so well for you.
The way that I approach it is that my content is a conversation starter. I create a post intended to start a conversation, and then I hang around to have that conversation and invite other people's perspectives. The big swing, three years on from Lush, leaving social media. So I don't know if you're following this, but in 2021, lush, who sells those, uh, bath bombs and soap products?
They took a really radical stand. They quit social media. No Instagram, no Facebook, no TikTok. People said it was brand suicide and it was going to fail spectacularly, and they gave them six to 12 months before they rejoined social media channels, but it has now been three years. So let's have a look at how it's going for them.
Email is their biggest revenue driver. No surprises there. They built a 6 million person direct audience outside of algorithms, and their app is their most [00:13:00] major channel with 1.75 million users. Social media is not the only way to grow. This could work for your business. The key is owning your audience instead of just renting it from social media platforms.
My advice is if you're going to use social media, use it strategically to drive people to an owned audience. All right. That's a wrap on today's episode of What's No Longer Working in 2025. I'd love to hear whether you agree, whether there's any that I've missed. Please shoot us an email and we'll get back to you.
I'll see you next week. I've started a substack as the ideal companion to the podcast. It's packed with extra insights, visuals, and nuggets that didn't make it into the episodes. Plus you can revisit past editions anytime. If you want more or just prefer to read, you'll love it. Plus, it's a place for us to connect.
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Thank you. You listened right up until the end, so why not hit that subscribe button? And keep the good marketing rolling. Podcast reviews are like warm hugs and they're also the best way to support a small business. You can connect with me, Mia FileMan on Instagram or LinkedIn, and feel free to send me a message.
I'm super friendly.
