What to Let Go of in Your Marketing When It Stops Feeling Aligned

Marketing isn’t supposed to feel like a constant source of guilt, pressure, or exhaustion — but for many founder-moms, it quietly becomes exactly that.

In this conversation, Ruthie Sterrett explores why marketing starts to feel heavy as your business grows and how to decide what’s actually worth carrying forward — and what you’re allowed to let go of.

This episode isn’t about trends, algorithms, or what’s “working right now.” It’s about capacity-aware decision-making. You’ll hear honest examples from Ruthie’s own business, including why some strategies stay even when they don’t convert on paper — and why others get paused even when the metrics look good.

You’ll learn how to evaluate your marketing through both data and energy, how to recognize when a strategy no longer fits your season of life, and why conversations — not dashboards — are often the missing piece.

If you’re a founder and a mom who feels stretched thin, resentful of marketing, or unsure what actually deserves your time right now, this episode will help you breathe a little easier — and make clearer, kinder decisions about how you show up.

Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast so you never miss an episode, and follow along over on Instagram!
@ruthie.sterrett
@theconsistencycorner

Transcript

Ruthie Sterrett (00:00.108)

Welcome back to another episode of the consistency corner. And I'm going to share a little behind the scenes with you before we get into the meat of today's episode. So I when I plan out my podcast content, I sit down and I look at my launch calendar and I say, OK, what offers are we focusing on in the next month or so? What is maybe something that we're introducing and launching that's new or what existing offer are in my focusing on in my content?

And then I kind of come up with topics that help support the problem that that offer might solve, right? So you're gonna hear over the next few weeks in February as we get ready to open the doors to something new I've been working on behind the scenes. And as we gear up for our next marketing mixer on February 19th, you're gonna hear me talk a lot about community. You're gonna hear me talk about alignment with your marketing plan.

you're gonna hear me talk about letting go of the things that are draining us or that are not working. And all that being said, one thing that was not working for me today was my friend ChatGPT. Because I had outlined these four episodes with what I wanted to talk about and I gave it to ChatGPT and I said, hey, here's the outline. Can you help me write a script?

so that I can record these episodes. And I often do that for podcast episodes. And what I'll do is I'll kind of brain dump and talk to chat. Jpt, I love the voice memo feature and I'll talk through like, here's what I want to say. Can you just help me organize that in a way that makes sense for somebody listening and the flow of conversation? And it just, I don't know, today it must've been like having a sick day or maybe it's to having a snow day because the garbage that it kept giving back to me,

I even told it, was like, dude, we have conversations all the time and what you are writing doesn't sound like anything I would say ever. So I'm coming to you without a script today. I'm coming to you with just some notes that I have made and this topic that I want to have on what you can let go of in marketing so that it feels aligned again. And we're just gonna work through it together because.

Ruthie Sterrett (02:18.486)

I had to let go of working with my friend Chat to organize this episode today. So we're gonna get into the conversation around why marketing often feels heavy and what to do about it so that we can actually enjoy it again. Because I'm guessing when you started your business, creating things for your business, content, coming up with strategies, that...

felt fun, it felt energizing because it was new and exciting and different. And as you got busier and your business started to get up off the ground and you became so busy working in the business that it became harder to have time and energy to work on the business. And marketing is working on the business. And so now what might be happening is you're carrying around this like

guilt and shame and weight of expectations that maybe made sense in the early stages of your business or in a different season of your life, but are not aligned with your current capacity. And that might even be that your current capacity is being taken up by the emotional and cognitive drain of, I don't know, being a human in the United States in 2026.

or just being a parent or being a business owner or being a wife or being a friend. Like there's just a lot on your plate. And so when you get through all of those things and it's like, my God, now I have to sit down and write content or like, my God, what am I doing with this funnel or this lead magnet or this thing I want to launch? Like, thinking about all of that just feels so heavy. That is normal.

That is totally normal. And so what I want to talk about today is not like what's working in 2026 and what the latest guru is telling you to do. But what I want to talk about is how to decide when to let something go and when it's okay to stop a specific marketing strategy. And when stopping

Ruthie Sterrett (04:35.882)

is maybe not the right decision because it's not always the right decision. Sometimes there's other paths that we can go down. So to give you an example, my email newsletter, I send an email newsletter every Friday and we cover like a little bit behind the scenes story, almost kind of what I shared with you at the top of this episode with chat GPT getting on my nerves. I share like extra sparkles, things that are bringing me joy right now. I might share.

an outfit I got at Target that I love or my new favorite flavor of poppy, soda, or I don't know, all kinds of fun stuff like that, because your girl likes to shop. And then I typically will also share a little bit of like a marketing takeaway or like a lesson, a marketing lesson or an insight that I'm seeing in the online space right now or something that's come up with a client or something like that.

a community connection and invite you to an event or share something that somebody else in our community is doing. And then the funniest thing on the internet, which I share reels and memes that made me laugh out loud. My email newsletter, to be totally transparent, I would say does not contribute to my business goals at all. I average about a 40 % open rate. I have a click rate that is less than 1%.

And I could easily look at that and say, this isn't working. This isn't working, nobody likes it. Why am I even spending my time on this? Who cares? Let's just stop doing this. Okay, but what are the metrics actually telling me? Well, number one, one metric is telling me that 40 % of my email list is opening this email. Okay, well, that's encouraging. And.

Usually once a week at least one or two people replies to my email. So it's starting conversations. So there's metric that maybe isn't gonna show up in a dashboard, but matters. But here's the final metric that definitely doesn't show up in a dashboard, but really matters is I like writing my email newsletter. I like to talk, which is why I have a podcast.

Ruthie Sterrett (06:45.942)

And my email newsletter is often like the voice note that I would leave you if we were Voxer buddies. And what I typically do is I speak to ChatGBT, I leave it a voice memo and I say, is what I want to talk about in my email and it helps me write it. So it's fun. And then it gives me other content ideas for stories, things to post in care cells or other emails that I could write or podcast topics. Like it gets my brain going.

So even if it's not overtly obvious that it's working in my business, because it brings me joy, I'm going to keep doing it. But I'm going to continue to experiment with subject lines, the time of day or day of the week that I send it. I'm going to make sure that I'm doing list maintenance and cleaning up my email list. If I've got people who have been on there for six, seven, eight months and have never opened an email for me, like you don't need to be here. I'm going to go ahead and unsubscribe you.

And on the flip side of that, a marketing strategy that maybe looks like it's working on paper or in the dashboards, but drains me, is engaging on LinkedIn. So I get a decent amount of impressions when I post on LinkedIn, but I don't like hanging out there. I just don't. I don't find the content engaging. typically...

feel like when I'm scrolling LinkedIn, get down, I end up going down rabbit holes that like don't serve me in terms of what I need to be doing with my time that day. And so I just decided like, okay, if I can't be social over there, I'm not even going to worry about it. I'm not going to post there. I'm not going to worry about it. And even though the metrics say when I do post there and I engage there, I do get impressions and I do get reach. It doesn't feel good to me. So I'm not going to do it right now.

Now that doesn't mean I won't ever do it. It doesn't mean I won't come back to it when maybe I'm able to take something else off of my plate and I'm able to give it kind of the energy and creativity that it deserves. But right now I can take it off a to-do list and that's okay. So what I want you to think about for 2026.

Ruthie Sterrett (09:05.256)

And when in terms of your marketing strategies and the channels that you're on and the places that you're creating content for and what you're doing is I want you to think about what energizes you, what feels good, what feels aligned, what feels fun. And on the flip side, what drains you? What do you just dread doing? And think about

If you could stop doing those things that you dread doing, would you have more energy for the things that you enjoy? Would you have more energy to do other things and ideas that you have for your business? And when I say stop doing them, that could mean just stop doing them. It could also mean delegating those tasks and finding a way for someone else to do them. It could also mean creating systems so that doing them

becomes faster, easier, batching, using AI, whatever it might be, or it could mean we're not gonna do this right now in this particular season. But all of those things are not always gonna come from looking at a dashboard and making those decisions are not gonna come from looking at a dashboard. Where the answers to those decisions and those questions often can come from is having conversations.

And I don't know about you, but I have a spouse who is not an entrepreneur, who is a W-2 employee. And while he tries very hard to listen and be a sounding board for me when I want to talk through a decision, he literally, he doesn't know what questions to ask to help me get to the decision that I maybe need to make or help me gain a new perspective or think through something. And so it's typically not super helpful to have a conversation with my husband.

about my marketing strategy, but having conversations with other business owners who get it and who are in the season and the trenches of moming and running a business at the same time does help me process those decisions. And so I'm really excited to invite you to our next marketing mixer, which if you're listening to this live is on February 19th. I had to look at the calendar to remember the date.

Ruthie Sterrett (11:20.672)

which is a networking space for founders, mom founders to have conversations about marketing with other people who get it, who get the mental load of motherhood, get the mental load of marketing. And in our networking space, we're going to be in small groups. So you don't have to feel like, my gosh, I have to do a presentation in front of 10,000 people. Nope, we're in breakout rooms. We're in small groups, three, four, five people at most.

and we're just having real human conversations. Because sometimes talking through it out loud helps you make a decision. Sometimes hearing somebody else talk through something out loud can help you make a decision. And so you're gonna have an opportunity to maybe shift your perspectives and let go of some of those things that don't feel so good with marketing your business right now.

And if networking is something that in the past maybe like didn't feel good because you've networked in rooms that were super pitchy and transactional or with people who just didn't get it, this is different. I mean, I created this networking event almost two years ago, year and a half ago, because I wanted, this is what I wanted in a networking space. I wanted to talk about business, but I also want to talk about life. I want to meet people on a human level and a business level.

And I wanna have thoughtful and insightful conversations with other women who are moms and founders and who get it. And so that's what we're gonna do on February 19th. And then we have a little teeny tiny workshop inside of it where we'll talk a little bit more about what we discussed today of letting go of the marketing strategies that are maybe not serving you and how to realign your strategy so that you fall in love with marketing all over again. So.

The link is in the show notes to register. It's the consistencycorner.com slash mixer. And I'll see you on February 19th.