The Balanced Marketing Strategy: 3 Components That Keep You Top of Mind for Your Best-Fit Clients

There are two ways entrepreneurs and small business owners with ADHD typically get it wrong when it comes to marketing, and they look like opposites from a distance. 

The first is chasing everything at once. Four social media platforms, a newsletter, a lead magnet, a networking group, and a podcast started in a burst of enthusiasm and abandoned a few months in. It feels like coverage. It's actually one energy source spread so thin that all of it goes silent at the same time.  

The second is locking onto a single channel and treating it as the whole strategy. That one at least produces results — up until the week you can't produce anything, and then your visibility drops to zero with nothing underneath it.

Neither is actually a system. Both are one drop in capacity away from total collapse.

Three categories, not one channel

The answer isn't "pick one thing and commit." It's intentionally building across three distinct types of marketing strategy, so that when one requires more energy than you have, at least one of the other two is is still working.

This is where business strategy and ADHD-specific support meet.  

Algorithm-based strategies

Algorithms are what get you found in SEO and GEO (organic search and in AI-generated answers) as well as with virtually every social media platform. The algorithms in social media change regularly, making it necessary to keep up to date on those changes. 

But with SEO and GEO, once you’ve built these strategies,  they're largely passive: a post you wrote three years ago can still be bringing you clients today without you doing anything additional to make that happen. They compound over time, like the money you parked in a savings account years ago and it accumulated value without any added effort on your part.  So if you are wondering if algorithm-based strategies work, think about this. This post, the one you’re reading right now - is part of the SEO and GEO strategy that helped you find me.  Cool, huh? 

When it comes to marketing strategies, the trade-offs are real. SEO and GEO are slow to show results, which is punishing if you need feedback in order to stay engaged. And they depend completely on platforms you don't control, especially when it comes to social media, so a rule change somewhere can alter your reach without warning. There is no perfect strategy.  That’s why I recommend balancing three of them in three different categories. 

Content-based strategies

Hosting a podcast, speaking in person and online, writing a blog, creating a YouTube channel, sending regular newsletters and doing livestreams on social media are all examples of content marketing strategies. 

This is high-control and high-voice — the category where your expertise, POV and original thinking is visible in a form no algorithm can flatten, and where people get to decide they trust you before they ever speak to you. This is where the know, like and trust process creates relationships with people you might not know anything about, until they are ready to raise their hand and let you know about them. 

Content based strategies are my primary marketing engine. 330-plus episodes of the ADHD-ish™ Podcast is how the majority of my clients made the decision to work with me, and it's the single most valuable asset I've built.  My digital clone, Di AI is quickly becoming my second most valuable. 

The trade-off with this category is that it requires consistent creative output. Your output. Which makes it the category most directly exposed to your capacity. If your capacity is moderate and steady, you can crank out a blog post, podcast episode or  YouTube video on a regular basis, whether that is weekly, every other week or once a month.  If your capacity is high at times and really low at other times, you can batch your content creation when you are energized and then edit and post during your lower capacity times.  You also want to bank a few posts, episodes or videos for when you have unexpected events that would threaten the consistency of your content, or re-release older content with minor changes as a low lift option. 

Relationship-based strategies

In-person events like conferences, networking meetups, referral networks, community building, strategic partnerships, affiliate marketing and being a guest on other people’s podcasts make up this category.  This group is for the people who tend to get clients and customers through their relationships with others and it an often overlooked category due to the influence of the internet.  But when you think about it, being known to others who can recommend or refer to you is been how most small businesses operated for the past hundred years. 

Slowest of the three to compound, and the least dependent on your own daily output — which is exactly what makes it worth building before you need it.  If you think you need to be an extrovert or live in a big city to use this category,  I disagree. All you need to do well with this category is to find individuals and groups who work with the same types of clients that you do, in a non-competitive way.  It can take time to identify these folks and form relationships with them, but they do tend to be some of the best sources of business because many people trust referrals over other forms of marketing. 

A referral partner who genuinely understands your work keeps sending people during a month when you produced nothing at all. A guest appearance you recorded in April airs in July while you're on holiday. That's someone else's momentum carrying your visibility, and it's the closest thing there is to marketing that runs without you.  Definitely worth considering, and even if you are a socially awkward introvert, there are ways to do it that won’t stress out your nervous system. 

The point isn't balance. It's redundancy.

Balance for its own sake just means being mediocre in several places at once. That's not the goal.

The goal is coverage. When your content creation capacity drops — and it will — the algorithm-based work you built last year is still pointing to you in search results, and the relationship-based work is still generating conversations about you and your work that you didn't have to show up for. Your visibility stops being contingent on you having had a good week.

That's redundancy, and it's the same principle behind a having a backup generator: nobody plans to use it, and its entire value is that you bought it before the power outage, instead of after.  I learned this lesson the hard way after moving to the Oregon coast where “extreme weather” is a regular occurrence and storms can knock the power out for days.  

How to know where you're over-indexed

Time for a quick self-audit. Open your calendar, go back ninety days, and write down every marketing action you actually took — not planned, not intended, not felt guilty about. Actually took.

Sort each one into algorithm, content, or relationship.

If almost all of it lands in one category, that's your gap. Not a strength, not “specializing” — a vulnerability and a risk, because everything you've got is riding on a single type of effort with a single mode of failure. Don’t assume you’re golden because you are on Facebook, Instagram, X, LinkedIn and TikTok. They are all algorithm based so you still have all your marketing eggs in one basket, or at least one aisle of the grocery store. 

The fix is not abandoning what's working. Your strong category is strong for a reason and it should stay that way. The work is deliberately building out whichever of the other two is thinnest, to a functional minimum rather than to excellence. One evergreen searchable asset. Three real referral relationships. A quarterly guest appearance. None of it impressive on its own, and all of it still working for you on a week when you aren't able to do much more than show up for client conversations. 

What this looks like in practice

My own portfolio is lopsided on purpose and by choice. 

Content-based is the primary engine — the podcast, week after week, for years. Underneath it sits algorithm-based work, so that my POV and perspective is findable by people who've never heard my name. And relationship-based work runs alongside both: speaking for ADDitude, referral partners who know exactly who to send my way, guest appearances on other podcasts, live streams and YouTube channels that keep generating conversations without any additional effort on my part. 

Not balanced. Covered. No single dip in my energy takes out the whole system, because no single category is carrying it alone. And don’t jump to the conclusion that you need to make content-based marketing your primary driver, either.  I have a podcast because I love teaching and love having conversations with people. My bachelor’s degree is in communications and I thought about going into  journalism, so it comes naturally to me.  It might not be the right thing for you and that’s OK. 

Promoting is the fourth pillar of The ADHD-ish™ Method  and this is where that pillar starts — not with tactics, but with the decisions about what your strengths are, what you enjoy doing and what your capacity can handle, during good weeks and bad ones.  Every small business owner needs to figure these things out, but if you have ADHD, not figuring them out can make all the difference between thriving in business and shutting things down. 

Once you know where your gap is, the next question is how to build in that gap in a way that survives a bad week: [LINK: Low-Dopamine Marketing System post]. And if you'd rather figure out your balanced marketing strategy with someone who does this for a living, book an appointment with me for a free consultation