You Are The Media (YATM) is the home for marketing misfits. It started in 2013 at the seaside, in England 🌊 The community is built around creativity, interdependence, visibility, experimentation and co-learning.
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Hi YATMers, I’m Erin Buck aka BizzyBee Virtual Assistant.
A Northerner (North East born, now Cheshire based) who loves music, cold-water dipping, creative hobbies and dogs.
I also help freelancers and small business owners stop feeling stressed, overwhelmed and alone by assisting with their social media, email marketing, tech support, organisation and accountability.
Of course you know the stuff I am talking about, the stuff you want to throw your laptop out of the window over! Yeah, I help you with that
Here's my recommendation for you. It's ‘Bookish’ on Sky. I love watching and reading murder/crime dramas and I often solve them quite quickly and look for ones that can keep me guessing (without keeping back any clues) and this does. Set in 1949 and starring Mark Gatiss.
PS. If you'd like tips from any of the areas I work (mentioned above), get my monthly email where I share them. Leave your email here.
People rarely make the whole decision the moment we ask them to decide.
The groundwork you put in, which you might not notice at the time, can become your strength later.
I took a month away travelling, when arriving back in the UK, there was just over a week until the first Lunch Club of the new learning year in Poole. We had 11 people booked on.
For Lunch Club Poole, with a capacity of 50 in the restaurant, that was very low.
A little over a week later, every chair in the restaurant had gone. Much of that came from DMs and emails to people who had been to previous Lunch Clubs or were already familiar with YATM.
50 people were coming and for some people who made a last minute decision, they had to be pointed to the next event in November.
It would be easy for me to look at that and say we sold 39 places in a week, I don’t think we did. We’d been selling them for years.
Not literally those particular tickets, what I mean is that the familiarity, confidence and reasons people had to say yes had been accumulating for a long time before I sent the message asking them to come.
The work you do over time matters. The newsletter, regular live events, the narrative you share publicly and the relationships you have with people all become support pillars.
In isolation, they may not give you the immediate return you want, but together, over time, they make commitment easier.
The outreach was selling. I wanted people to buy a ticket and I asked them to come.
People won’t act when you publish a post. Outreach matters, and when the message comes directly from you to another person, it can make the decision to commit easier.
If all I had done was post on LinkedIn, there would not be a magical organic surge where another 39 people suddenly discovered Lunch Club and decided to come along.
We underestimate the value of reaching out. When you have something worthwhile for people, don’t hide from the ask. I did it three ways via WhatsApp messages, LinkedIn DMs and email. These were all messages to people who had come before and people I thought would enjoy being there.
The messages weren’t the beginning, I wasn’t approaching strangers. They were the final visible part of something that had been developing for much longer.
If somebody received a message from me saying, “Lunch Club is next Thursday, can you come,” they didn’t have to work everything out from zero. They might already subscribe to the newsletter, have attended before, know me personally or simply have a sense of what the atmosphere is like.
That changes the nature of the ask. Some activity captures demand, while other activity creates the conditions for future demand.
We naturally notice the first one because we can see the result. The second one is much harder to measure.
The Moment That Gets The Credit
Marketing loves the final interaction because it’s the return we can see. Someone clicks and buys, or reacts to a post and makes an enquiry. These are immediate outputs that we can track through clicks, messages and transaction.
What is harder to measure is everything that made somebody ready to act.
They might have read ten newsletters, or attended an event three years ago, followed your work for years without ever liking or commenting, or heard a friend recommend you.
Then one message from you arrives at the right time. We measure the moment somebody acts because we can see it. We struggle to measure everything that made them ready to act.
The longer you stay at the wheel, the more people have to associate you with. That doesn’t mean refusing to adapt, but it does mean remaining recognisable for what you stand for and what you offer.
Years of visibility, reputation, showing up and being useful gradually become an advantage. The final interaction still matters, but it shouldn’t take all the credit.
You Still Have To Sell
There is another side to all of this that we sometimes avoid.
You can spend years building relationships, publishing useful work, helping people and creating goodwill, but when the time comes to selling something, you cannot expect everyone to automatically know what you want them to do.
People are busy, they miss posts, forget dates or assume something isn’t for them. Sometimes they simply need someone to say, “I think you’d enjoy this. Come along.”
There is a danger in community-led marketing where we romanticise the relationship and become uncomfortable with the commercial part.
Goodwill matters, but goodwill on its own isn’t a business model. At some point you still have to ask someone to buy the ticket, join the membership, book the call or work with you.
The difference is what happened before the ask arrived. Relationships without an ask can leave opportunity sitting on the table, while an ask without a relationship can feel like a sales pitch. Put the two together and it starts to feel more like an invitation.
That is how I think about the messages I sent before Lunch Club. They were still sales messages, but they were going to people for whom YATM already meant something. The groundwork created the possibility and the ask made it happen.
Let’s Round Up
You still have to reach out, remind people and make the invitation. The groundwork makes the conversations easier because people already have reasons to feel comfortable saying yes.
Keep producing useful work and sharing your perspective when there is nothing immediate to gain. Stay visible, build familiarity and give people reasons to know what to expect from you.
Then, when you have something worthwhile to offer, don’t sit back and hope people notice, you have to ask.
The work you do over time makes the ask easier later.
Being around other people is what I love. It's not just welcoming people back into the YATM space, it's making the first step for others feel comfortable too.
I want people to feel at home whenever they make that promise to step in. It means a lot. No one wants to feel ignored or try and figure it out themselves when something feels new.
That's why this all works, it's about building the space so it feels right and we can be ourselves.
The more together mantra does work.
Come and join in...
If one of these locations look good for you to get to, let's meet at the table:
You Are The Media (YATM) is the home for marketing misfits. It started in 2013 at the seaside, in England 🌊 The community is built around creativity, interdependence, visibility, experimentation and co-learning.
