Marketing without shouting, with Mia Fileman

Rachel Smith: Hello and welcome to The Content Byte, a podcast for freelancers who use their words to make money. I’m Rachel Smith, a freelance journalist, copywriter, and content producer. I’m also the founder of Rachel’s List, a jobs board and community for Australian writers and other creatives. 

Lynne Testoni: I’m Lynne Testoni! I’m a journalist and content writer as well. Rachel and I are your weekly co-hosts, and every week we bring you all kinds of tips, tricks, and some fabulous guests to help you make the most of your freelance business.

Hey, Rach, are you finding the way you pick up clients is changing, or do you think that people are just less responsive to the old ways of marketing? 

Rachel: I think we’ve probably all heard that we’re in this trust recession, right? And I am definitely finding. 

Lynne: I hadn’t heard that; it’s a good name.

Rachel: I’ve heard that from a couple of marketing experts, and I think people are more reticent to buy. Or just sign on the dotted line. I’m seeing a lot of ghosting in my freelance business, and I know other freelancers are as well, so it’s weird out there. 

Lynne: It is huge. We are hearing it a lot. I certainly finding it on the media side, a lot of the editors just don’t get back to you anymore. 

Rachel: Is that new though? 

Lynne: No, it’s newer. I think it’s happened to a lot of people. It hasn’t always happened to me as much, so it’s definitely happening a lot and that’s why I’m really excited about the guest we have on today. It’s Mia Fileman. She’s a marketing legend and she now mentors and teaches others. And at the time of recording, Mia is in the last-minute throws of putting together the fabulous Ripple Festival in Melbourne, but she’s made time to talk to us about marketing, how it’s changing, and the new ways writers and creators are getting noticed.

Rachel: I know. I love this topic. Okay, let me introduce Mia and we can get started. Besides having earned the nickname The Campaign Lady, Mia is an expert marketing strategist and founder of Campaign Del Mar. You’ll love her hard hitting no BS marketing expertise honed by twenty years in the industry.

She’s a widely published writer for publications, including Social Media Examiner, Umbrella, Marketing Mag Smart Company, and Better Marketing and the first decade of her career was spent in brand management roles for global consumer brands, Vegemite, Kraft, Maybelline and Bic in France. Now she’s a full-time trainer and mentor who works with SME’s and marketers to drive business results. Strap in for your journey to marketing glory. 

Love it. Welcome Mia!

Mia Fileman: Thank you so much for having me, friends. 

Lynne: Oh, so great to see you. 

Rachel: We’re so glad to have you. And before we talk marketing, let’s quickly talk Ripple because Lynne and I did the Content Byte Summit. We were just talking about that offline. We did it back-to-back for two years. So, we know the sheer amount of work and stress involved. Tell our listeners a bit about Ripple Festival and when it’s happening. 

Mia: We trauma bonded over major events, didn’t we? Ripple Festival is a two-day mashup of small business conversation, but live music, standup comedy and art. So, no biggie. We’re just trying to create a new genre of business events because we found that inclusivity and diversity was really a token throwaway thing that people would say and that a lot of business events in Australia are geared towards the top end of town – the tech bros, e-commerce, but small business owners, which is everyone here – we are 98% of the Australian business community, and we are so underrepresented when it comes to events. So, we wanted to shake things up and we took on this mammoth project. 

Lynne: And it sounds like it’s a different kind of event for small businesses. I like the idea of blending music and comedy and things. That’s what intrigues me. It looks so cool. 

Mia: It’s very different. It’s not stuffy auditorium, sit down in a conference room style and listen to six hours straight of TED Talks and panels. We’re incorporating movements so people can absorb what they’re learning. We’re bringing in social enterprise with small business. So, our keynote speaker is Kon Karapanagiotidis, who’s the CEO of the Asylum Seeker Rescue Centre. We have Jordan Evans, the founder of Mingle Seasoning, but we also have one of Australia’s sharpest standup comedians, Tom Ballard, who’s doing a set at Ripple Festival.

The venue is undercover but open. We are having gourmet food, so it’s a music festival, meets a business event, and it really is a celebration of small business, not this doom and gloom, everything is hard, we are getting ghosted. That’s of course happening but choosing to focus on the positives of being a small business owner.

Rachel: I love also bringing in the comedians, bringing in the musicians. It does give your brain a bit of a break and a laugh, doesn’t it? So, you probably can absorb stuff more. I think that’s the whole thing with conferences, like you say. We struggled with that. How do we lighten it with some things and change the experience for people so that they are able to still absorb the big stuff. So, it’s a real challenge. 

Mia: And also, how do we inspire them creatively to go and swing for the fences? Because as a marketer, I know that the future of business advantage belongs to creativity. So how can we use arts and music and comedy to inspire people to take more creative risks in their marketing because all I see all day, every day, and I’m sure you are the same, is the same old tired Instagram trend regurgitated for the millionth time.

Rachel: And the AI slop on LinkedIn. Doing something different is huge. Well, can people still get tickets? How can they get tickets? 

Mia: Absolutely. We are going to keep tickets open right up until the day, so it’s happening 12th and the 13th of November in Melbourne. And the venue is Grazeland, which is a foodie’s playground, and you can head to ripplefestival.au to get your tickets and you can do one day or both days.

Lynne: Awesome. And we’ll put it in the show notes for sure. 

Mia: Thank you. 

Lynne: It sounds so inspiring and I do think creativity is the future. That’s definitely what keeps us all going. That’s why we’re here really, isn’t it? 

Mia: Absolutely. 

Lynne: So, let’s dive into today’s topic, which is a bit about marketing without megaphone, which I like that, and I know you believe there are three new marketing weapons working better than anything else right now. Tell us about those. 

Mia: Well, I kind of cheated by saying they’re new. They’re not in any way new. 

Lynne: We like a good cheat. 

Mia: Good. It sounded really good in a pitch. They’re like, oh, I’m going to tell you like three new things. They’re actually as old as time and they are connection, creativity, and conversation. So, we are absolutely seeing a shift in marketing that people’s appetite for being broadcasted to or spoken at has completely dried up, and that’s really coming from a lack of results. We were promised that if we enrol in a hundred-person online course cohort, we would start to make $20,000 of revenue a month. We are not seeing that, and online course completion rates are criminally low. One study that I saw said that 12.6% of online courses are completed. So, people are like, I’m done with that. And I would like everyone to say that I called this early, that I told them that this was not going to work because people crave to be heard. They want a two-way conversation. Yes, I do believe that. Everyone thinks that their business is so unique and so different, and it’s not necessarily true. There are some universal principles that do apply. However, it is our job to tailor that information to those customers, and it’s very hard for them to take advice that’s for everyone and apply it to their own businesses. So, people are really chasing that connection with the people that they’re willing to invest in. And then creativity, we’ve spoken about briefly, but the brands who are winning right now are the ones who are swinging for the fences. The ones who are coming to market with something that is exciting, that is unpredictable. There is so much predictable marketing. 

Rachel: That’s interesting. You say the volume model is dead. The thousand person on demand course that you do, where you work through the modules one by one, and you don’t meet anyone else, and it’s just all on, that’s dead as well. Or you feel that it is what’s replacing it? What’s working? Can you still have a course as long as you have a community? Or how does it all work now? 

Mia: I will say that the gurus, I call them the gurus. The seven figure megaphones, they ruin everything. They took online learning, which is absolutely a beautiful thing, and they ruined it because they took out all the value, which was support, accountability, and community. And it was this faceless, kind of like you said, Rach, enrol in this course, don’t ever speak to the lead trainer, you are lucky if you are able to get your question answered in a hundred-person q and a. And honestly, that model was always doomed to fail. 

But online learning is still very much alive and kicking, but we need to meet people where they are and I’m an online course creator, what I’ve seen with a lot of success is that we just bake in that support and accountability. So is it a hybrid live on demand model so that people can watch the videos. But then we come together and there’s that accountability piece. Is it more of a retreat or an in-person workshop where we can facilitate that community conversation and connection? Is it a membership? Because people do things in their own time. So, I had a nine-week program, and some people were able to get through all the course content in nine weeks. Some people were still at week three in week nine, so I repositioned my business to be a membership model and now people can work at their own pace. And so really thinking about what people are craving and it is those three things, connection, creativity, and conversation, and meeting them there. Whereas what I’ve seen happened post COVID are these very self-centric models. I want passive income. I want a lifestyle business. I want to make money in my sleep, so I’ve built a model that works for me, but it doesn’t actually work for the paying customers. And they were willing to go along with it because there was some pretty manipulative marketing that was happening at the time. You are not willing to back yourself if you don’t invest in this course and look at all these shiny testimonials that we have, in fact manufactured. But now the chips have fallen, and we can see that the results are not there. So, you enrolled in the 25K Mastermind, you did the hundred-person online course. Show me the money. Where is it? It isn’t there?

Lynne: Interesting. So interesting. So, I’m big on networking and that’s a real thing of mine and meeting people in person and I think it does result in work. But the other thing that I get, which I don’t think people talk about enough, is I get invigorated by that. I learn things. I think it makes me more creative. It makes me think of things in a different way. But when you all get invited to things or we see things online, do you have to be quite intentional, or do you think it’s good to go out and try lots of different things? What sort of questions should you ask before you commit to an event? 

Mia: An event or a community? 

Lynne: Either. 

Mia: That’s a really interesting question. I think it really comes down to your values. I would be trying to find values aligned humans. Whereas there seems to be a lot of communities or events that are specifically for retail, or specifically for e-commerce and specifically for tradies. But I think what’s more beautiful is cross pollination. I could learn from e-commerce for my service business. I could learn from tradies. As long as we share similar values, why can’t we be in the room in the same room? I think that’s probably what people don’t look for when they’re joining communities or coming to events is that they’re just like, well, I’m a retailer, so I’ll go to a retailer conference, and this is how we end up with legacy advice and that kind of same, same thinking because we’re in an echo chamber and we’re all bouncing around the retail community. Whereas what I see within Marketing Circle, we have product-based businesses, online businesses, service-based businesses, bricks and mortar businesses is that we are learning from each other, from industry aligned, but values aligned as being the number one thing.

Rachel: That’s really interesting because I run two businesses and once, I started writing about business, for trade magazines and interviewing business owners, a lot of dentists and chefs and veterinarians, it’s so interesting to see what they do in building their business and how you can apply that to your own. That’s interesting because as you say, communities do end up being a community of copywriters, and there is this echo chamber, but how can you put together something meaningful that leads to those referrals? Is it about broadening the scope of the kind of community you’re setting up?

Mia: I have an unpopular opinion about this, but I actually think that joining a community can net you more referrals than building one, right? Because there is so much effort that goes into putting on an event like yours and mine or building a community. Whereas if you get to just come along and enjoy the fruits of somebody else’s labour.

Rachel: Plug yourself in.

Mia: And make a little bit of effort to find out who else is in the community, you can walk away with a lot of referrals and clients, and I can illustrate this with an example. So, there is a group called One Roof and they’re a digital entrepreneurship community, and they asked me to run a masterclass for them. I ran the masterclass and I was like, wow, these people are my people. The kind of questions that I got, the kind of engagement that I got, so it comes back to that values aligned piece. They were my people. I decided then and there that I was going to make One Roof my community and be really active there, invest in it and I’ve worked with over forty people in that community as paid clients. So, I’ve made that work for me as a paid member as opposed to needing to be the community manager, having to sustain this community. 

Rachel: Interesting. 

Mia: I’m don’t know if I really answered your question there, Rach though. 

Rachel: No, I like it. I was in One Roof for a while as well. I went in as a copywriter, but also as Rachel’s List, and it is a really lovely community in a lot of ways, really busy too, and lots of female, small businesses. I know a lot of people who have a lot of success in there, so that’s interesting.

Lynne: So, when you join or even create a community, and I know Rachel’s seen this happen with little sub communities coming out of Rachel’s List. When you join a group, how do you get the value out of it, and you talked about engagement. What are good ways to engage? 

Mia: They have a Facebook group, and they also have a Mighty Networks community. People are asking questions. I don’t do this anymore, but when I was really engaging the community, I would set aside ten to fifteen minutes every day to go in and answer people’s questions without me self-promoting. I would just be like, hey, I know a thing or two about campaigns, so, I’d like to give you a really thoughtful, personalised response to this question that you have asked. And as a result, I became a top contributor in that group. My name was popping up all the time. I made sure they had a community call. Every Monday it was in my diary. I would rock up, and I would be on that call for a whole hour, and I would meet different people. So, you get out what you put in. 

Rachel: That’s interesting. 

Mia: But I wouldn’t be able to do that with ten different groups, right? You need to choose the one that you are going to bet on strategy is about sacrifice. I felt a connection to One Roof. I thought that there was a lot of potential there, and it was a bet that paid off for me. And now my business has evolved quite a bit since then, and that’s less the kind of people that I want to work with. I don’t generally work with people in the first year of business, second year of business. I’m sort of beyond that, which is a lot of One Roof members and that’s okay. Move on to another community that fits me where I am now. 

Rachel: You chose One Roof because it had businesses that needed marketing help. So, you found that useful. Are you also in a community of marketers?

Mia: I run a community of marketers.

Rachel: Okay. So having both, possible referrals, community, and then also having your peers is important. 

Mia:  It is really important. I’ll say that I think that every small business owner in 2025 and beyond is a marketer. Whether you’re a web designer, copywriter, content creator, graphic designer, I consider you to be a marketer. 

Lynne: It’s interesting, isn’t it? 

Rachel: I think we touched on the trust recession earlier, which keeps coming up every time I’m talking to people and that seems to be a big problem for people wanting to market their businesses right now. So, if people know all the marketing tricks in the book, what are some new ways to build genuine trust with potential clients, do you think? 

Mia: I’m working on this body of work called The Honest Marketing Method, which I unveiled in a live only session a couple of months ago. But I want to co-create it with my community because I 100% agree that we are in a trust recession, and it’s because brands lie to us all the time. And customers today, they have lost trust in brands, and this is actually statistically the case. I’ve got the stat; I can bring it up. But The Honest Marketing Method is really about rebuilding trust and rebuilding relationships with audiences through honesty. And so, this idea of sharing un-validated income claims, like I made seventy thousand dollars in my last launch and talking about cherry picking testimonials, this is what has eroded trust. Meanwhile, if we can be more concrete in our language, this is one of the components of The Honest Marketing Method is not using wishy washy ambiguous terms, but using pineapple words like, when I say pineapple, you know what I mean? It’s a fruit. So how can we, in our marketing, use really concrete terms so that people really know what they’re buying, right? Like they’re like, okay, great. Also admitting who it’s not for, and the limitations.

What this can look like is, campaigns build brands. Every major brand runs campaigns. You should definitely be running campaigns. However, let’s not beat around the bush – campaigns are a shit ton of work, right? They require at least six weeks of planning, and then people are like, oh, okay, she’s telling me that I should run a campaign, and I believe her because she’s admitting that it’s not all Easy Street. Whereas we’ve been told that you can start a business with no money. You can scale that business to six figures in your sleep, and it’s going to be relatively painless that you can sip mimosas and work four hours a week. And it’s all bullshit, right? So, it’s about bringing back the transparency and the honesty in our marketing, so that we can rebuild that trust.

It’s also about getting over ourselves and going back to actually having one-on-one conversations with people through a discovery or a sales call. I’m going to say this unequivocally – if you are considering working with someone and they are not prepared to get on a fifteen, twenty, thirty-minute call with you in order to discuss whether you’re a good fit, please run. You are paying for proximity to that person. They are not some messiah that you want to be close to. If this person has value, then they should have time for you, for your hard-earned dollars. So, this is the shift that I am seeing is that we’re moving away from auditoriums and we are wanting court side seats, and people are prepared to pay more for that. So, there are marketing memberships that are fifty dollars a month or a hundred dollars a month. Mine is six hundred dollars a month, but it’s full because people are like, well, no, I can spend one hundred and fifty dollars a month and get zero value and never speak to the lead trainer that sold me into this whole experience or I can spend six hundred dollars a month and have a one-on-one call with Mia every single month. So, that’s the shift that I’m seeing. 

Lynne: We’ve talked a little bit about in-person things, which is what Ripple’s all about, isn’t it? And do you think that also helps to build trust? You tend to connect with somebody, or you don’t, which is just as a fine, when you meet them in person or even on a call sometimes. 

Mia: It fast tracks it. So back when I ran a marketing agency, I could sit in front of someone at a cafe in Darwin. We could have a conversation, and at the end of that hour I could walk away with a three-thousand-dollar retainer to do that person’s marketing. That would take, six, nine months online to get to that level of connection. So, I 100% agree with you, Lynne, that if you can incorporate some in-person elements into your online freelance business where you’re having meetups, then you’re going to fast track that trust building process for sure. 

Rachel: I definitely think people are kind of converting more if you are on those discovery calls. I’ve been experimenting with lots of different things like sending services guides or doing like lots of different things. And ultimately the thing that works the best at the moment is if they hear your voice and they talk to you about their problems and all of that. So, I think that’s really important and meeting in person, going to a cafe, meeting them in person and because people want to know who they’re working with and it can fast track that trust, for sure. 

Mia: It’s about the path to least resistance. I can send eleventy billion sales emails, or I could save myself the effort of writing a hundred lead nurture emails and I could just spend twenty minutes on the call with someone and usually at that point, I’m not selling them in any way. We are just having a conversation and they’re just saying, oh, what time are the calls, Mia? And what happens if I go away for a month? And it’s really the meat and potatoes at that stage. If they’ve booked a call with you, they’re ready to work with you.

Lynne: I always say that people want to work with people. 

Mia: Yes. 

Lynne: No matter what stage they’re at. But what if you’re getting to that proposal stage and then you’re getting ghosted to that? There’s a bit out there. 

Rachel: And you’ve been on the call with them and sent the proposal. 

Mia: Okay. I’m going to give you the hottest tip ever.

Lynne: Okay. 

Rachel: Yes.

Mia: It is called the post proposal nurture sequence. So, I’m an email marketer to my core. Love it. And it’s very hard to do a follow up after the first follow up. Like what do you say? Like, hey, just following up again on my proposal, or just checking once more whether you’ve had any further thoughts about joining this thing. So instead, after you have a discovery call with someone or you send a proposal, you put them into a post proposal nurture email sequence. And there’s a few things that I think make for a really successful post proposal nurture sequence. But one of my customers did this and she started converting at 80%.

Rachel: Wow. 

Mia: And so, they get tagged in the CRM as proposals sent. Some of the inclusions is like, our services guide and how we like to work and how quickly we can start working on your project from acceptance. Because clients are so delusional, right? They think once I get around to accepting this proposal, I’ll be able to start working with Mia the next day and it’s like, no, that could be four weeks, that could be six weeks. So, managing those expectations and saying, hey, I only have one spot left for October, and then it’s a four week wait period before we can start. It can actually notch things along a little bit. 

Rachel: The urgency – that’s good point. Love that. Okay. What about also sending a video, doing a Loom video or something, taking them through the proposal? Would you put that as a separate email in your, in your nurture sequence? 

Mia: I love including video in my nurture sequence. I’m not a huge fan of the Loom video walkthrough proposal. What I will say is that I am very unlikely to send a proposal unless I can do it live on a Zoom call. 

Rachel: Okay. 

Mia: So instead of a three or four-minute Loom video where they cannot watch it. I’ve got the proposal ready, but I would like to walk you through that and manage that really early, even in the discovery call stage. So, guys, after the discovery call, I’m going to go away and I’m going to pull together a proposal. But actually, we’re going to get together and we’re going to go through it together because I know that if I can get face to face with them and to try to simulate that coffee in Darwin situation, I can walk away from that meeting with the sale much more than I will just by sending a Loom video.

Rachel: Okay, cool. Well, you just said that you’re an email marketer to your core. So, I really wanted to talk to you about storytelling because you mentioned that shouting louder isn’t working right now. We’re seeing lots of AI slop people shouting on LinkedIn. Everybody’s tuning out and I know that storytelling really worked for us with the summit in the run up to the summit. So should we be weaving more stories into our marketing right now. Can you overdo it? 

Mia: The answer to that is always yes and there is no limit there. Oh, that brand tells too many good stories isn’t a problem that anyone’s had. The problem though, Rach, is that people are afraid to try. They hear the word storytelling and they think, I need to write like J.K. Rowling. Otherwise, I’m not going to be a storyteller. They think they need to be a great writer, and that’s simply not true. Some of the best stories I’ve seen are told through images or told through memes are told through anecdotes. And the thing is that you guys know this probably even better than I do – the only way to get better at storytelling and writing is to freaking do it. 

Rachel: And isn’t it weird how some people are the most amazing storytellers that you wouldn’t consider. I am a subscriber to a lawyer’s newsletter and the stories that she writes that are connected to a clause in a contract that drove the business into the ground because of X, Y, Z happening or something. But the way she weaves it, it’s so dry and boring stuff, but she weaves it into these incredible tales, and you can’t help but read it. It’s like, wow. Even though it’s got nothing to do with my business.

Mia: It reminds me of Fidan Tok. Are you across her? 

Rachel: No. 

Mia: So, she’s a family lawyer in Sydney. Her name is Fidan, and her channel is Fidan Tok and she sits at her desk, and she changes the names of her clients, but she talks about really, really interesting family law cases. Were they in a defacto relationship and taking out all the legalese and the mumbo jumbo. And it’s so fascinating and I’m watching this five-minute family law video, and I’m like, this is incredible. Also, Freely is a travel insurance company. For goodness sakes, if anyone is going to spectacularly suck at marketing, it’s going to be insurance. However, they focus less on insurance, more on travel, and they create the Freely Travel Briefing. And every EDM is incredible. Like photography of animals in the Sahara or a podcast out of Japan talking about the Japanese American cultural experience and I’m sitting there going, Mia, you are reading an insurance newsletter. What are you doing? It’s sensational. 

Lynne: Wow. So interesting. 

Rachel: Because the stories draw you in. Love it. 

Lynne: Can we talk about collaboration, because I’m a big one for that as well. Who should you think about collaborating with if you’re a freelancer. Do you go for somebody who might be doing similar work to you or complimentary work? Different industries, same industries. How do you work it? 

Mia: I’m a huge fan of collaborations as well. It’s how I’ve built my business without having the ad spend, and it really comes back to someone that has an overlapping audience with you, but you don’t cannibalise each other. And the most important ingredient is values. And then anything becomes on the table then, if you align on values. You could have say, Zero Co who make cleaning products collaborated with a wine grower, which makes no sense, but they have a massive sustainability overlapping of values. And so, the segue or the story that tied all of this together was the sustainability piece. And what I would urge people to do, coming back to creativity, is please make it unpredictable. Don’t just think, oh, I’m a copywriter, so I could collaborate with a graphic designer. You could that – that’s cool. But we’ve seen it a hundred times. Think about really out of the box collaborations. Even a copywriter collaborating with an illustrator could just take that up a notch.

One of my favourite collaborations is Absolute Vodka with Hines pasta sauce to make pasta ala vodka based on that TikTok trend, and it’s like, what’s a vodka company doing with the ketchup brand? But the visual art direction of this campaign was so nostalgic, so lush. If I showed you, you’d be like, oh yes, I saw that. It was very reminiscent of those like Italian travel posters. It was such a great collaboration. 

Rachel: Can we dive a little bit deeper into collaborations and talk about what are some good collaborations to set up? What are some that are really, that could really work for you? I’m thinking email marketing or socials, but are there any that you’ve seen work well, on a freelancer type level?

Mia: Oh absolutely. Well, that’s the collaboration between Fi and I. So, my business partner at Ripple Festival, she’s a money coach and a business strategist. So, she helps people with their money psychology, money management, and also business model design. And then I’m a money trainer, so overlapping audience, but low level of cannibalisation. It goes back to that. Generally, Fi and I sat down and strategise this and we’re like, okay, they need to start with Fi and then they need to come to Mia. So then how can we make that happen with our offers and our email marketing. And then as a result of that, we have quite a few members who are in both Good Money Club and Marketing Circle, or we know that this person is about to graduate from Good Money Club and then they’re joining Marketing Circle.

We co-host Money and Marketing retreats. She’s got a podcast. I’ve got a podcast. Because there’s quite a bit of overlap without it being a complete substitute. I’ve been good friends with Fi as a collab and as a friend and as a collaborator for three years now. So, you would think that at this point we have tapped out each other’s audience, right? We basically are business partners. Still, every time we do an Instagram live or we have a podcast episode together, or we just do a collaboration post on Instagram, I still gain followers. So, it’s like, we still haven’t tapped this out. Another good example is Odette Barry, who’s a publicist.

Lynne: We’ve had Odette on the podcast.

Mia: She’s a great collaborator of mine as well. She’s done a lot of coming into my programs to teach small business owners how to hack their own PR. So, there are so many opportunities to collaborate within the freelancer community. 

Rachel: Love that. 

Lynne: So interesting. 

Rachel: I know. Well, we do like to ask all our guests about their favourite apps and services, so what would you be lost without?  

Mia: Squarespace is unbelievable. I cannot get over how easy it was to build the Ripple Festival website with Squarespace. But there is one app that my community cannot stop talking about, and it’s Rounded, which is the app for sole traders, an accounting app.

Lynne: Did you know that’s our sponsor? 

Mia: Yes. 

Rachel: It’s fabulous. 

Mia: Honestly, every second day someone says to me, I couldn’t live without rounded. 

Rachel: Oh my God. We know our sponsor will be listening to this and getting very happy about it. It’s true. It’s very cool. 

Lynne: And it’s ideal for solo businesses. You are talking two small business owners. It’s ideal for that. 

Mia: I can’t make heads or tails of Xero. I just can’t. It’s too robust. It’s too overwhelming. I never log in, and I can’t believe how many people talk about how much they love Rounded; there’s actual love there for this one.

Rachel: I use both. Rounded for my freelance work, Xero for Rachel’s List because that’s, and I just let my bookkeeper our handle Xero. I hardly ever touch it or do anything with it. 

Lynne: Rounded you can be quite interactive. It’s great.

Rachel: Amazing. 

Lynne: Wow. Thank you, Mia. It’s so lovely to chat with you and meet you. I really want to wish you all the best for Ripples. It sounds amazing. Tell us where the audience can find you and where they can snap up those last-minute tickets too. 

Mia: Thank you so much for the opportunity and letting me rant at you for the last forty minutes.

Lynne: Love it. 

Rachel: It was great. 

Lynne: My brain is now. It was a great.

Mia: I am very passionate about ethical small business marketing. Ripple Festival, we would love to see you there if you are a freelancer, creative, professional, small business owner that wants to make some really meaningful connections and walk away with actionable tips on how to make small business easier, then we’d love to see you there. 12th and 13th of November in Melbourne and you can get your tickets at ripplefestival.au. 

Rachel: Great and where can people find you? 

Mia: Everywhere? I get around, LinkedIn – Mia Fileman, Instagram – Campaign, Del Mar, and of course the Got Marketing podcast. 

Rachel: Fantastic. 

Lynne: We’ll put links to all of that in the show notes. Oh, what’s your podcast?

Mia: It’s the Got Marketing podcast and I’d love to have you on that show. I’ve got so many ideas now that we’ve had this chat, so, let’s organise that too. 

Rachel: Let’s do that. 

Lynne: Interesting. Okay. 

Rachel: Well thanks again. That brings us to the end of the show. Thanks to everyone who’s listening. If you like the show, please leave it a rating and review on the platform where you find your podcast, and we will put everything that we’ve talked about into the show notes so you can connect with Mia, grab a Ripple ticket. It sounds amazing. 

Lynne: All the things. 

Rachel: We will see you next week. Thanks. 

Lynne: Bye.

Rachel: Bye.

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Credits:

Find out all about the Ripple Festival at https://www.ripplefestival.au/

Connect with Mia here: https://www.campaigndelmar.com/

and download her amazing Marketing Calendar (handy for 2026 planning) https://www.campaigndelmar.com/marketing-calendar

Find Lynne www.lynnetestoni.com 

Find Rachel www.rachelsmith.com.au 

Rachel’s List www.rachelslist.com.au 

If you have questions you’d like us to answer in our next Q&A episode, just send them here.

Thanks (as always) to our sponsors Rounded (www.rounded.com.au), an easy invoicing and accounting solution that helps freelancers run their businesses with confidence. Looking to take advantage of the discount for Rachel’s List Gold Members? Email us at: hello@rachelslist.com.au for the details.

Episode edited by Marker Creative Co www.markercreative.co