Martin

So, tell me, what were you doing before becoming a psychologist? Would love to hear the story before that and how you got into it.

Tammy Schamuhn 

Yeah, well, I was interested in veterinary medicine. And then my chemistry grades were not high enough in university. I was in pre-vet med. And then I was good with kids. So I was like, well, I’ll be a teacher. So I got a bachelor’s of education. But I also did a double degree in psychology because I was interested in psychology. And a lot of my family members are psychologists. So I thought, well, we’ll see. One of them is going to work out. I can’t be a vet. So I’m either going to be a psychologist or I’m going to be a teacher.

So I went down the teacher route initially as a kindergarten teacher and I taught third grade for a while. And then I just got a scholarship to go down to the United States for my master’s in psychology. So I thought, well, I’m not gonna say no to free education. So I went down and studied psychology for three years as a post-grad and I was gonna be a marriage counselor. I studied marriage therapy.

And I was a sex therapist and a marriage therapist before I became a child psychologist. So it was this really weird trajectory in my career where I was doing all of these really interesting kinds of therapy with couples. And then when I graduated, I was hired by a nonprofit to work with kids, but I actually had no training in working with kids, but I was a teacher first.

So I was like, I guess I’m gonna give this a shot. I know kids, I’ve worked with kids my whole life. was a swimming coach, I taught first aid, I worked in summer camps with kids. I did my first session with a little guy with ADHD, eight years old, and I was like, I’m supposed to be doing this. Okay, so this is what I’m, that was the first time I think in my whole life where it clicked.

where you feel like I’m in the right place at the right time and everything was leading me towards this, it just took me like eight years to figure it out. So from then, I moved back to Canada and I started private practice and working with kids and teens almost exclusively in therapy. And then I just developed this love for working with parents. And most psychologists who work with kids don’t like working with parents because the kids are the fun part, the parents are the hard part.

But I loved working with parents because I saw the biggest changes in kids when I worked with the parents. So to me, I was like, this is the way through. If you can get through to the parents, the kids naturally start to make changes. Like if this just makes sense, you need to make friends with the parents, get them on board, teach them about what’s going on with their child, and teach them what to do differently at home. And then the therapy kind of, you almost don’t even need the therapy at that point. So I started teaching.

Tammy Schamuhn 

Libraries, local colleges, universities, and from then I realized it was something. So I brought on one of my best friends who was also a psychologist in my former private practice. I had started a group practice and we had about three locations in Canada and brought her on as a separate business venture to start teaching. So we started flying all over the world actually, went to Africa, the United States, different parts of Canada.

and started presenting mostly childhood anxiety and trauma. Those were the biggest ones, but we did talk about discipline, which we wrote a book that included kind of a big section on that, just to teach parents how to discipline and parent kids with the brain and mind, so we’re not undermining their development. And yeah, it turned into a book and turned into a podcast and it turned onto an online learning platform and memberships and now conferences and summits, and yeah, it just kind of

Social media we do a lot on social media. So I don’t know. So it’s an interesting journey actually into this from Wanting to be a vet, but now I’m an animal-assisted therapist so that the animal love of animals I run a ranch is a therapeutic ranch with their six therapists out here and we own a hundred acres and we do Animal-assisted therapy out here. So I mean we have horses and goats and sheep cats dog geese chickens And they’re all part of the therapy for kids. So I didn’t give up on that

Martin 

No both.

Tammy Schamuhn 

But I did sell the big practice and just specialized in animal-assisted therapy out here. So yeah, it’s kind of a kind of where that went.

Martin 

Okay. Okay, I’m gonna get back to the transition from the private practice to the online education stuff. But first, I just wanted to ask for animal-assisted therapy. Can you talk a little bit more about that? What does that look like? That’s for kids? Is it or? Yeah.

Tammy Schamuhn

Yeah! Yeah!

I use it with seniors. Usually, it’s kids just because of their impulse control, like six or seven years old and up, right? Because we’ve got big animals, big horses that weigh 1200 pounds,and  little children, we have to be careful. And not to mention little ones can scare animals, so we have to be careful. But once kids hit about seven, we bring them out here. And I mean, I think kids, we talk about the mental health of kids. One of the biggest issues we’re seeing is that kids have natural deprivation. People aren’t spending enough time outdoors.

Martin 

Yeah.

Tammy Schamuhn 

They need to be around animals, need to be in their trees and water and sunlight. And when kids spend all their time indoors, this takes a huge toll on their mental health. So part of what we do is nature-based. The kids are outside doing the therapy, not in an office. This is particularly important for boys. Boys don’t do well sitting on a couch talking about their feelings. That’s not how their brain works. So actually the nature and animal-assisted therapy speaks to boys in particular and I think it’s really important when we look at brain differences there.

But I think it’s a way for kids to connect when they’re scared to connect with adults. Adults have hurt them a lot. They don’t trust a lot of adults. So the animals make them feel unconditional love. They learn how to handle really large animals. And so that teaches competency and self-efficacy, autonomy. It’s biofeedback. So when you work with prey animals like goats and sheep and horses, if you’re angry or anxious and you’re

think you’re too much in your head animals don’t like that. They’ll move away from you because you’re acting like a predator. Humans are predators, but for some reason when we ruminate and we’re too much in our heads, animals move away from that. It’s very disconcerting for them because we’re not present in our bodies. So when children learn to regulate their feelings and their thoughts, the animals are more likely to connect with them. So it serves as this animated tool for our kids to learn to work with their thoughts and their feelings.

Martin 

Yeah.

Tammy Schamuhn

And regulate their bodies and then they’re rewarded with this beautiful attachment relationship with this, you know, sometimes huge animal. So it’s, think that’s, mean, there’s all, could go on and on about why we do this, but those are some of like the main premises of why it’s just very rewarding for, think for anyone to work with animals, like they love it, but there’s some pretty hard science wired into why we do it.

Martin 

Yeah, that’s lovely. And how are you sort of creating the connection of the animals on the farm are you partnering with local clinics and organizations to get people to come out or yeah, how does that

Tammy Schamuhn 

I’ve been doing this for quite a while. So I mean, 10 years in this community. I think we’ve, it took time to develop that awareness with different like we have like family and community support and child and family services and different towns in the region and schools. And then it just word of mouth kind of spreads at that point. So, a lot of the girls who practice out here have their profiles online and they advertise that they do this work.

Martin

Yep.

Tammy Schamuhn 

You know, especially in a rural community where there is mental health, there’s a stigma. When you come out to a ranch and there are cabins instead of offices, it has a very different feel than people sitting in this clinic where it’s, those are medicinal and it’s very private. Like you’re not going to see anybody out here. Typically there are only two therapists and their place at a time and they’re placed in different areas of the property. So you don’t run into people you might know either.

Martin 

Yeah.

Tammy Schamuhn 

So it’s just, I feel like it just helps when there’s that maybe a rural stigma still with mental health in this part of Canada and some areas, not all areas, but this area.

Martin 

Gotcha. Yeah, No, that’s fantastic. Sounds lovely. So just getting back to the, you know, the transition from when you were, you know, you mentioned you had the private and group clinic there. What was that point where you decided, Hey, I want to start teaching? And what did that start to look like? Were you starting to speak, you know, at local events? Did you start to create content online? Yeah, what was that? Because there are a lot of probably listeners out there who may have a service-based business already. And they’re thinking about

Martin

Okay, how do I start to teach online? What’s the progression that you took?

Tammy Schamuhn 

Well, my progression was teaching in person. So for me, I have an educational background. I’m used to talking in front of big groups of people. So this all started with me teaching in libraries and universities. And I don’t mean as an, well, I have been an instructor in a university, but that’s not what I mean. I rented out space at universities and advertised through Facebook or Instagram, through schools where I was doing this.

I think the online part came as a result of the advice I got from a media consultant. This was before people were doing courses, a lot of courses. And I was just told like, you need to get on the bandwagon with this. This was like eight years ago. And this is before, again, before people were doing free webinars and summits, like we started doing this and then COVID hit. And then we had to shift our business model online. But before that, it was in person. And to this day, like, I don’t mind doing this, but I would much rather be teaching to an organization now, 100 people in the seats, getting to talk with them, learning about their lives versus, you know, being online teaching. It’s not my favorite actually. Tanya, my business partner, loves it. I prefer to connect with people in person. It’s more extroverted, so sitting in my house doing this is not nearly as fun as, you know, being with a group of people. But I think what it came down to is it really lit me up. Like, I was so passionate about it. I enjoyed the interaction with people.

And knowing that I could help hundreds of families instead of just one at a time. To me, that was huge. And then they’re going and teaching this stuff and then their kids are gonna heal and those kids are gonna be better parents. So the ripple effect was so much bigger globally for me. It just was  exciting to make that big of an impact versus, and not to, we need people to work one-on-one with families. I am not saying, I don’t wanna discount that.

Martin 

Yep.

Tammy Schamuhn 

But for me, I had a bigger vision for how we could make an impact. I didn’t want to limit that to the town I was living in at the time, or the city, I should say. I started moving away from therapy. just wasn’t feeling, it wasn’t lighting me up in the same way. And I felt resistance to it. And I realized I was just happier working as a consultant and teaching and working with parents and some coaching too. It’s not, I still like teaching better than coaching, but.

Martin

Yep. Yep.

Tammy Schamuhn 

I guess there’s just a fire that lights inside of you. And that’s where I was at. I like making things. I like connecting and I like the global impact piece. So I think that for me that was what I did.

Martin 

Yeah, no, that’s great. And what does that look like now for the business? Are you still doing sort of lots of events in person? The teaching side, yeah, what does that look like? Because yeah, I understand that’s a massive impact if you’re getting 100 parents in a room, and then they go home and they all get to implement those learnings to their children. Yeah, there is a massive ripple effect there. So what does it look like now for the business? I know you’ve got the summit coming up as well, but are you also still doing workshops in person as well?

Tammy Schamuhn 

Yeah, not in the same COVID really, and that’s if we’re talking about business, COVID changed people’s mentality about education, it shifted. And what we noticed was after COVID was done, not that it was done, we’re still feeling the effects. But when it was done, it was more difficult to get people in a seat. Like they wanted the option of live streaming, they wanted it recorded. And it was quite tedious to run an event where we paid for it in person.

Martin 

Yep.

Tammy Schamuhn 

So what we had to do is switch to a B2B business model where we do more, people hire us to come speak for an organization or for an event, if that makes sense, versus us. We used to plan all of our own speaking events in different cities in the world, and that definitely shifted. Plus money, like the economy, like people had, you know, they spent money during COVID because they’re bored at home. And now, I mean, I’m pretty sure this is global. Cost of living have skyrocketed so high that people,

It’s difficult for them to take time off work and to pay for something where they have to invest in sitting there in a seat versus when they can learn. On a weekend, it’s recorded. If they can’t make it, if their kids are sick, they still have the recording of what’s going on. And then, of course, we have the option of passive courses that people take as well. So it’s self-paced. So we tried to provide as many options as we could. But COVID shifted everything for our business, everything.

Tammy Schamuhn 

I prefer the old business model. I liked teaching in person. I liked traveling when we got to set up events, but you know, that’s the way of business. You just have to pivot and just say like, what does the consumer want? What is most helpful for parents? Where are they at resource wise? And so we just have learned to just shift. It’s since COVID it’s about every eight months. We have to make a big pivot in terms of what the market trends are and what is most helpful for parents and trying to figure that out.

Martin 

That’s a really interesting point because, you know, getting to work with a lot of education businesses like yours, we hear the same thing and saw the impact of COVID as well, obviously, during that period of the boom and online core sales, online, you know, workshops, events, you know, there really was that one two year period there, where, yeah, but exactly, and it’s a different landscape.

Tammy Schamuhn 

It was a really good period, but the market is flooded now.

Martin 

What have you seen in your business? Is that sort of in the last, particularly in the last 12 months, because we’ve seen a different trend occurring of a lot of people starting to look for more in-person live events as well? So have you also noticed that trend? And if you have like, how are you pivoting and starting to, what trends are you seeing that you’re trying to tailor for right now? Yeah.

Tammy Schamuhn 

Absolutely. So we’ve had talks with multiple creators online because we are for our niche, right? We keep in touch with people who are on Instagram, on Facebook, who sell courses and memberships. And I joke, we sold memberships before memberships were cool. So we really benefited in the beginning from offering memberships, which was like seven years ago. And then everybody started doing it. We’re like, darn it. OK, so now we’re competing with all of these digital creators that came up during COVID, especially TikTok. Instagram was huge.

Tammy Schamuhn 

you’ve just got to think about what the market looks like. So for us, the shift was podcast. And so the shift has been, we’re moving more towards YouTube, and we’re moving more towards B2B marketing. So again, that’s yes, in person, but it’s through partnering with organizations so they carry the weight of the funding. So we as government contracts work with people who have seen us speak or we can show them videos, because we’ve done so much speaking in person, that they can take a look and we have videos of it. And then they say, yes, we want to hire you, if that makes sense. So understanding that I think the trends in memberships and courses is tanking right now. It’s not that you can’t make money doing it.

Martin 

Yep.

Tammy Schamuhn 

It just means it’s harder to be seen and to stand out because there are so many courses and so many memberships. So a lot of creators I’m seeing are moving more towards passive income through monetizing so if they’re a creator, which I am on Instagram, we do a lot of videos. And so we monetize our videos through Meta and YouTube. when you can create favorable content and you have something to say,

If you have an AdSense account with Google, you can make money that way where you don’t have to sell anything. As long as people like what you’re teaching, you can just teach and put these eight, I think optimal view times eight minutes, like eight minutes plus so you can put ads in your videos and people can start consuming your content on YouTube. And that’s where I’ve seen a lot of creators start to go.

They offer the membership, they offer the course, but now they’re moving more towards monetizing their content in passive ways through, you know, if it’s a blog, you know, there’s ads on their blogs. Like, you just have to think of, I hate that people will stick to one avenue. I only sell courses. I was like, well, now everyone’s selling courses, so you need other ways to bring in passive income. And so just, I think, diversifying what you offer and looking at different platforms and how you can bring in income that way.

Martin 

Hmm.Yep.

Tammy Schamuhn 

Is important.

Martin 

Yeah, absolutely. I’d be curious to learn a little bit more about what you’re doing there. You said you’re sort of partnering with organizations. Is that then to host events and stuff like that? get organizations to fund the events okay, is that how that works? Yeah.

Tammy Schamuhn

Yeah, it’s professional development for their teams. So whether it’s a school, community groups, know, whatever, usually for us it’s like government groups. in Canada, for instance, it would be indigenous groups, especially. So when they’re, you know, especially since the orange, we have this big movement with residential schools in Canada where we looked at, you know, all the children who have been found, passed in residential schools and all the abuse, that intergenerational trauma that’s been passed down.

We now do a lot of training in these communities on how to recover from that kind of trauma. So that’s an example where that’s a niche of mine particularly, I’m a trauma therapist. So I come into communities and then we talk about what you can do to heal these patterns of what has happened over the last 100 years when colonization happened, how do we move forward, da da. So think about finding your niche and then partnering.

With schools, for me, it’s schools and government agencies and nonprofits and saying this is what we offer and this is how I can be of benefit. And then, yeah, I mean we have certain rates that are suggested in our field as psychologists so we kind of know what we can charge for that. But the more you do it, the higher you get to charge, right? So that’s kind of a trend where we’re moving more towards that which is a higher price tag and it also just

Tammy Schamuhn 

It gives me space then to create, which I love to do. I love to create videos infographics and guides and free webinars. And I love that stuff. But you still have to make money to pay for your time to not be seeing clients to do that. So that’s where we’ve shifted the business.

Martin 

Yeah, no, that’s a really good point. And I think, it’s timely for a lot of people running an online education business that you can’t just rely, well, oftentimes it’s hard to just rely on one digital product or online course these days, particularly if you’re not seeing the traction that you want. There’s still a lot of businesses that do quite well with just that, but yeah, there’s so many other ways that you can start to monetize, you know, your content creation, your education and…

I think there’s always a really strong byproduct of doing these in-person events and direct coaching. You build such a strong relationship with that audience that, you know, a big byproduct of that, you get a lot of content out of it, but you also get people that are gonna become repeat purchases. I think the relationship you build with them versus them doing a self-paced course is a lot more meaningful, and a lot more impactful. And yeah, that translates through the business. So that’s cool to hear that you’re finding a mix.

between all of those. Yeah.

Tammy Schamuhn 

Yeah. We’re also seeing people’s attention span shrink. So before COVID, it was really popular for people to purchase a course. Like ours are accredited. So they’re like sometimes six hours long, like six hours worth of content. People now are hustling. It’s harder to make a living right now. Things are very expensive. So people don’t have a lot of time and parents, in particular, don’t have a lot of time. So what we’re also finding is it’s more helpful to sell something shorter in length.

and a smaller price tag in larger quantities. So that’s something to also consider if people want to sell a big course, but people don’t have time. So if you can sell something that is a value that is a smaller price tag, but packs a big punch, you can then make a lot, I feel like a lot more money that way than selling something with a higher price point on it that’s longer in duration. So that’s something just to consider we are starting to reduce. 

Tammy Schamuhn 

the length of our content and then the price tag, but people are more likely to buy because they can afford it. And it doesn’t seem so scary to finish it if that makes sense. So we also have to take into consideration how technology has messed with people’s ability to focus. Plus they’re more stressed and less resourced. So we have to pivot in terms of how we’re delivering, I think our content as well, depending on what niche you’re in. For me, it’s education with parents. So I mean, I’m a parent, I have three kids at home.

Tammy Schamuhn

I don’t have time to take a six hour course right now, but I do have time to take something that’s an hour long. And that to me is manageable. Or a quick little ebook that’s 25 pages long that was $5. I’ll buy that all day long. Yeah. Do you have an example of something recently that you guys have shrunk down or created a sort of, yeah.

Tammy Schamuhn 

Yeah, so I’ll give you an example. So we wrote a book. It’s called The Parenting Handbook. We released it in March and it’s more generic. It talks about basically all the things I would teach parents if their kids were in counseling with me. These are all the components of mental health we have to consider. Like when we want kids to be healthy. Now, what we found is we wrote three chapters on discipline and a lot of parents, just because through social and sitting with parents,

They’re like, my kid’s acting out and they have these big behaviors, and my God, I don’t know what to do. So what we did is we took three of our most popular chapters on discipline, just on discipline with kids, which is practical. This is what you do, this is what you say, and sell that as an ebook. And my goodness, that has sold almost as much as our original book has. And if you think of the cost to print one of these, think about it, like it’s quite steep.

Tammy Schamuhn 

To do an ebook with three chapters we’ve already published, it’s already been formatted, the profit’s higher for us. Isn’t that crazy? To sell three chapters of an ebook from the book we published. That’s just one example where it’s like, actually, it was more profitable for us just to take a couple of chapters of that book and sell them as individual products. So I mean, this is not the reason we wrote a book too was to get more speaking engagements, it does help. not saying everyone has to write a book, but that was one way we condensed something like a long-form product we made that people maybe don’t have time for. And we made it into a smaller, cheaper option that sells for, you know, $8 American versus 25, right? Or 20, think it’s 20 American versus eight, but it was already formatted. We just put a different cover on it.

Tammy Schamuhn 

But that’s what parents wanted was specific. They didn’t want to go through the whole book. They just helped me with this one problem.

Martin 

Yeah, sorry, what was the problem again that the three chapters were focusing on?

Tammy Schamuhn

Discipline was just discipline. It was like discipline with kids. Like how do I handle big behaviors like my kid lying throwing a tantrum or hitting the brother? Like what do I do with this? And so it’s very practical and it just solved a quick problem and it was affordable for them So that is something we upsell on our website for every time someone clicks on our website to go purchase something We upsell them on that one small very inexpensive and it gets

Martin 

Yeah. It does well. 

Tammy Schamuhn 

bought more times than I can count because it’s just $8. So they might not even buy the course, that is an option as an add-on. They’ll sometimes just not take the course and they’ll just buy that. But to me it’s like, well, that was easy. And it’s affordable. And if they find value in it, they’re going to come back to our organization for maybe a bigger ticket item down the road. But they can only afford $8 right now, which is fine by me. If they think it’s a value and I think it is, when something else comes up,

Martin

100 % no it’s such

Tammy Schamuhn 

they will be more inclined to trust us and say, I’m going to try that product that’s $100 versus the $8 purchase.

Martin 

Yeah, 100%. I think it’s such a good example of just showing that a lot of people out there are looking for short, as you said, short, specific solutions to their specific problems. And it sounds like that’s what you’ve done. You’ve taken, you know, specific knowledge from your book and just broken it down into one particular niche area of discipline and priced it at a competitive price point. And that’s cool. Is there a particular digital product?

low ticket item that’s also working well, because I know you’re running Facebook and Instagram ads. Is there something that’s working well on the advertising side of things or when it comes to ads for your brand? What do you tend to focus on? What’s your strategy around that?

Tammy Schamuhn 

We pretty much either boost our content, so just to get more eyeballs on the account. So we take popular organic material that we’ve created. We make sure most of the time it’s organic. Sometimes we boost other people’s work if it’s done well. Simply just getting eyeballs on our account through sequenced reels and things like that. There’s the odd one. I usually boost one. And then we also…

Martin 

Yep.

Tammy Schamuhn 

I’m sure many of you listening to this I’m are familiar with what iOS did a couple of years ago is it two and a half years ago now three years Where before we could create a $900 campaign and I could sell out a whole lecture hall with 250 people No all day long because we could retarget people who are interested in that particular event very easily Because it takes somebody seven times to see something before they’re willing to buy it

Martin 

Yep. Yeah.

Tammy Schamuhn

Meta and iOS and all these changes that have happened, we can’t target people in the same way anymore, which I get, data privacy, it’s a whole thing I understand. But as an e-commerce business, it was a very painful switch, very painful. So marketing trends have impacted whether somebody will see a direct ad. Does that make sense? And take action on it.

So my advice to anyone doing this is to offer something of value for free and get them in an email marketing funnel immediately. because at any point, Meta could disappear. There’s a whole legislation around TikTok right now. We may not have it anymore. You know, I’m not huge on TikTok. We do have an account, but that’s our demographics on Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook. So Meta’s still around. I don’t think it’s going anywhere. TikTok might. So we’re, know, so you never, you could have a million followers on Meta.

They close down, you’re hooped. All that money you’ve poured into that platform is gone. And I was told this six years ago. Yes, you want followers to ingest your content, but what’s most, and you want that pixel, but you don’t own that data. And at any point, your Facebook account could be shut down. We’ve had that happen, and it was horrible. You start all over again. And guess what? Meta can just do that, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

So to me, what makes more sense is to get someone’s data, and no, and we do not buy data. We only use it by offering printables and free webinars. And we’ve been doing this since the start of our business. And that is how we make a very big bulk of our money through campaigns, through MailChimp, where people enter a funnel and it offers them different products and events. it just makes sure when you’re doing this, you don’t just catch a cold.

emails, they’ll unsubscribe if you’re constantly selling something. You sell something once in a while, but most of the focus is on value add. Like, give them something, a blog entry, here’s a video tip on how to do this. Like then they keep opening your emails. You want that open rate to be 25 % or higher. Like if you constantly just sell them something, you’re gonna unsubscribe. That’s really, and I’ve learned that the hard way with this business. And so now we’re very careful about our emails and how they go out and that they’re not.

Martin 

Hmm. Yep.

Tammy Schamuhn

just inundating people with bye bye bye. It’s more passive. It’s like, hey, I hope you like this. By the way, we have this course or by the way, we have this event. And once in a while we’ll be like, yeah, we have a sale or this, but we try to make sure that we space those apart very intentionally.

Martin

What would you say your frequency is now between like a sales-oriented email and a content value first sort of email is it sort of like two to-one? Yeah.

Tammy Schamuhn

Two to one, two to one, sometimes three to one. It doesn’t mean that there isn’t a sale in it, but it’s at the bottom. It’s not the first thing they see. So it’s usually, you know, an article, or here’s a tip, or here’s a video, or here’s a free printable. Like, you know, on our eight, in our work, that’s the best strategy we have found. And we’ve talked to a lot of creators in our field. So I can only speak to our field that this works, but.

Martin 

Yeah. Yeah.

Tammy Schamuhn 

And it does well that way. Like we’re really happy with it. But you know, these funnels, you’ve got to constantly update them. They’re a lot of work because you have to be constantly changing them and editing them and updating them. And you don’t want your free resources there forever. So you also have to change them. And this is only available for 24 hours. And then the printable is no longer there. you don’t want to give all your stuff away for free. So again, there a lot of nurturance kind of goes into these campaigns.

Martin 

Yeah, totally. Have you built them custom for each E-Guide or do you have a generic nurture sequence that if anyone comes onto your list, they get a broader?

Tammy Schamuhn 

We have different, different, we tag them. So when they come in, they have to tag, am I a parent, an educator, and also the subject. So we have different printables based on different subjects. So the funnel they go into is based on the type of resource they downloaded. but then we just, sometimes send stuff out just to our general audience too, right? Like there’s just stuff that we send out to everybody, like our events, like our summit, things like that. But yeah, we have different funnels.

Tammy Schamuhn 

For different, different things.

Martin 

Yeah, no, that’s great. That’s great. Yeah. And that’s something we encourage our clients to do as well as sort of, we always say, content first make the content of the emails based first, you can always have the call to action towards the bottom of the email. And yeah, try and do like a three-to-one ratio, at least because I agree. If you’re just selling to them the entire time, you’re to lose respect, lose, yet lose trust. 

Martin 

They’re trying to be made to get a quick buck for the business. Yeah.

Tammy Schamuhn 

just unsubscribe. It’s just you’re just going to lose all that money you put into your funnels is going to be gone. And so yeah, it’s not easy. Like if we think about pre-COVID before iOS made all those darn changes with the freaking data privacy and people opting out of anyway, was a big kick. It was a huge blow to our agency. It was huge. Our ads couldn’t be targeted in the same way. Now Google’s nice. So Google ads are much more efficient than Meta. Meta is horrible now.

Tammy Schamuhn 

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be on there, but I feel Meta is more for free things or like brand, trust, trust in brands, and organic content. But for selling cold, Meta is horrible, like horrible. It used to be like the best place to do that, but now because of targeting and we can’t retarget, we can only retarget like 20 % of people now, like before it was 70 to 80. So it’s just not great, but it’s great for funnels where somebody just gives their email and they get something for free.

Tammy Schamuhn 

So that’s where it’s kind of at.

Martin 

How are you using Google Ads then? Are you doing a lot of Google searches? Is it YouTube? Are you doing sort of a, yeah, okay? YouTube and.

Tammy Schamuhn 

YouTube, Yeah, because we’re global. You’d have to be a pretty big organization to, I mean, you can target Google ads if you’re a local business, much better. But if you have a niche on YouTube, that’s where you would kind of spend some of your Google ads. It’s you’re more likely to do the in-feed kind of ads is where I would spend it. Like we have a podcast, so we have an ad that we spend a lot of money on.

campaign on promoting our podcast every month on YouTube. That’s a huge one. Yeah, and we’re moving more towards YouTube now. So we’re playing with this. It’s a big part of our 2025 focus is we’re moving a lot of content onto YouTube for monetization to see how it does. I’ll let you know if you talk to me in six months how it’s going. I can’t speak to it yet. I do know we’re trending that way though. And I know a lot of creators who are.

Martin 

Gotcha. Yep. No, for sure. I mean, I’ve also got the podcast here. That’s also a lot of the intention behind this as well is, you get people listening to a 45-minute hour-long podcast with you on that particular topic. Just, yeah, that sense of relationship someone gets with you is obviously a lot stronger than, yeah, maybe the free e-guide that they get, you know, not to say that that’s not as, not valuable, but for sure. It’s, it’s, yeah, it seems to be a trend. So let’s see if it gets even more saturated. I’m learning a lot more. yeah. Yeah.

Tammy Schamuhn 

Yeah, I’d be curious what happens because there’s some changes happening as I’ve been told with different browsers like Firefox and explore and a few other browsers, they’re changing the cookies. Like there’s a whole legislation around data privacy. Google isn’t trending that way. So hopefully that doesn’t impact. But if somebody came in through a browser that is changing the cookie kind of data privacy, that could impact how, how, how laser targeted you can be with your,

Martin 

Yeah.

Tammy Schamuhn

promotions. So that’s something I work with a marketing company like I don’t run my ads. I design them, but like somebody else runs them and they’ve been just telling me, they just kind of give me this feedback. And I would tell people if you can hire somebody else to run your ads, you can help design them. Some people like that. I like designing them personally because I know my brand well. I use Canva. It’s super easy. I’ve split-tested so many freaking things. I know what parents tend to like and professionals.

Tammy Schamuhn 

But I don’t want to split these. I don’t want to do any of that. I don’t want to retarget. Having a company that specifically ups our SEO is a huge one. So I always have somebody who, and you can go to Upwork to find someone inexpensive to do this. Upwork is great. So I have someone in India who does our SEO on our website. And then I have another company that is Canadian that does all our ads. And they’re very affordable. And they are the ones who just take care of these campaigns. I don’t want to stress about that. And I just found it, you know,

Martin 

Mm-hmm. Yes.

Tammy Schamuhn 

I have been with many companies and this company I trust the most because that’s all they do. They don’t do anything else. They just run ads on Google and Meta. So they’re good. So I always say, “Hire someone smarter than you and do what they do. I don’t do my accounting. I have an accountant. I have someone who specializes in SEO. I have someone who specializes in web development. There’s, you know, we do our email marketing campaigns. I would love someone to do them for us, but we do our right now just because I have someone in-house who’s great at designing them.

Martin 

I’m glad you said that because that’s our main service as well as Google and meta ads in this space as well. And, you know, we hear it a lot, too. It’s just the founder of Educated the Creator. You know, there’s so much on your plate already, you know, getting down to the nitty-gritty of split testing an audience or a creative on ads and looking at the daily reporting, you can do it, but you know, it’s like everything in your business. can’t be everywhere at every time and you’ve got to pick which ones and having, yeah, you know, obviously my opinion is biased, but having, you know, as you said, someone specialized on the ads, it’s such a high leverage activity of the business that you can’t really, if you if you’re serious about growing and, Keeping up, you can’t afford to be slacking on that side of things. If it’s a part of your growth, yeah, yeah.

Tammy Schamuhn

No, I would and I started doing them myself for the first three years of our business. I did all the split testing. So I have a good entry knowledge of how to do this. So at least I can look at the campaigns being like, I know what those numbers mean. I can say like, can you send me the result of the split tests? Like, because I need to know what to make. But that’s back when it was so easy to retarget though. Like that’s back when it wasn’t complicated. somebody saw the thing seven times they bought it. But that is not the trend now.

Martin

Yeah.

Tammy Schamuhn 

So that’s why you need someone who understands Meta, and it’s always changing. Data privacy laws are always changing. you need to know for your, I think, business, should you be using Google Ads or should you be using Meta? It depends on your business. If you have good organic content that you can then, I think, change it to a funnel, then Meta’s great. That is a great way to get people in a funnel. But if you don’t have good organic content to do that, you might be better with Google Ads. I think it…

Martin

Yeah. 

Tammy Schamuhn

It depends and maybe get them on your YouTube channel because you have good long-form content. So I think it just depends on how you as a creator too, where do you hook people? and if you’re, do you use funnels? Are you using a, you know, what, and we probably should be using funnels? Like, so I tell everybody to use a darn funnel. my gosh.

Martin 

Yeah, I like what you mean there. Where are you hooking people? And I think you’ve touched on it perfectly there. Like there is a short-term and long-term strategy with your ads. I think what you’re doing with promoting your podcasts on YouTube, that’s fantastic. And then you’ve sort of isolated meta is more of like a top-of-funnel entry-level point with the guides and stuff like that. So I think once you combine all of that, you’ve sort of got that short-term and long-term.

Tammy Schamuhn 

Yeah.

Martin

play in mind. Yeah, it sounds like you’re on a great path there. So lots going on for you. What’s next for your brand? What’s coming up? Any big sort of next moves for the brand? We’d love to hear.

Tammy Schamuhn 

Yeah, we’re writing a second book right now with a fairly big author. we decided, because Tanya and I, you know, we’re in our early 40s. And in terms of being authors, we’re pretty young, if that makes sense in our field. Most people are writing books a little later. I mean, it’s getting younger, but we wanted to partner as part of its strategy. Hopefully, he’s listening. I’m not listening to this, but he’s a very well-known author and he has a huge following. So, as we said in our next book, I think part of the strategy is pairing with someone who has a good brand as well.

So we’re gonna co-write a book with someone. We both have good platforms. We both have good brand recognition. And then I think together it makes the marketing very easy for a book when you both have big platforms. So we decided to write with him instead of just writing it on our own. So we’re in the middle of doing that. We’re about halfway through the book at this point. So hopefully it’ll be done by June and then on the bookshelves by next Christmas is our plan. Once we get the editing done.

Martin 

Hmm.

Tammy Schamuhn 

And then the big move is we’re doing more B2B and then YouTube is really where we’re going to try to shift right now. So this is, we’re playing with different types of videos, different generations of parents, like different formats. So that’s a hard one too. The older generation, my generation in their forties, likes more polished videos. Gen Z, so the parents in their late twenties, or early thirties like really organic, unedited, raw videos.

Martin 

Yep.

Tammy Schamuhn

We’re serving two different generations of how they ingest and trust content. So that’s also a shift is thinking like how old your audience is because one will like this more, like more B-roll and you look at your, dressed like in a jacket and something very polished versus a younger parent wants to see me in a ponytail and no makeup on and just talking about how like hard parenting is and here are some ideas. Like it’s different. So that’s another thing that’s starting to shift our market trends towards like.

what age demographic you’re hitting. So we’re split-testing the types of videos on YouTube. People of different ages, like if we need to do both or we should do one, like now we’re starting to test the types of videos. We already know this on a meta right now that people want or they don’t want a b-roll. They want some B-rolls, okay, but they generally want something more organic. So that’s fine. Like they just want to see your face outdoors in your kitchen, like just talking, you know, like not

kind of standing here with everything poised and like they don’t want that. They don’t feel like you’re reading or you’re teaching in the lecture theater basically unless you are actually in the lecture theater which is ironic because they like that. But it’s still raw, it’s unedited, you’re just talking, right? So I think that’s another thing is taking a look at how old your audience is and what kind of videos are speaking to them which means you have to pivot. i have to analyze this every six months. What age, what kinds of things are they really enjoying? and then your content has to change.

Martin 

Yeah, absolutely. It changes so quickly. I refer to it a lot as just being on the hamster wheel in this podcast speaking with everyone. It’s, it’s sort of, you know, it’s a love-hate relationship. I feel because you know, it’s so powerful. But also, I think a lot of people feel sort of like,

Tammy Schamuhn 

Make your head spin as a creator, my god.

Martin 

the platform’s peril, now, like it’s always just sort of something that you also need to do to sustain the business, but also can have, yeah.

Tammy Schamuhn 

You never used to have to be like business owners, never had to be creators. And now it is like a requirement, which is tiring, honestly, as a business owner. And I think there’s a high level of burnout in our industry. Because I know for me, there’s times I’m like, I don’t want to make a bloody video. I just want to share someone else’s things like there and there are people I’m, I’m decent, but I know I’m not going to be like that isn’t my main job. Like, that’s not where I shine. I joke that I’m very left-brain. So like, I’m not

Martin 

Yeah. 

Tammy Schamuhn 

I’m creative enough, if that makes sense, that I can get away with it. But honestly, eventually, we need to hire someone who that’s all they do. Honestly, the dream is I can step away from the creator mode. I like creating courses. I’ll always speak. I’ll always do it. I’m fine with writing content like that for funnels. I’m good with that. social media. my gosh, that would be wonderful.

Martin 

Yeah. Yes.Yes. Hmm. What idea, what ideas do you have for that? Like, and, just in general, cause I think that’s a great point you made. There are a lot of business owners who are not content creators and never might, might never excel at that. So what have you done in that area to help, you know, sort of bridge the gap? Like, have you brought in help? How, how have you, have you got in extra people to sort of take on a lot of the editing part of you for you, or yeah, what have you done?

Tammy Schamuhn

That’s probably the biggest strife in our business is finding people who are aligned with our brand to create. So I have let go of a lot of people who have tried my role in social media and it has not gone well. So yeah, because it’s just, you know, it’s hard when you know your audience from day one of the business, you know what they like, like you just, and then you’re, kind of watching. I spend time on social media I’m not social personally, hardly ever. It’s only for work. And then I want to put my phone down and

Martin 

All right. Yeah, it’s tough.

Tammy Schamuhn

throw my computer out the window because I’m so sick of being online. But the one thing we’re looking at doing is partnering. And I don’t mean paying people when I say partner. I mean, we have big enough brand recognition now that people would be happy to have us feature their content on our social media. So we are now looking towards smaller creators and saying, you want to co-create something? Can I feature this? Or can you create something similar to this and I’ll feature you?

Tammy Schamuhn 

I’m leaning more towards that. Someone who is upcoming but doesn’t have 200,000 followers at this point, maybe they have 10, but I can see they have a lot of talent and their brand looks similar to the kind of videos that our audience likes. And most people, want that exposure. So to me, guess, I don’t know if that would work for anyone else, but for me, that is where we’re leaning towards now is partnering with other accounts to make this easier.

Martin

Yeah, that’s cool. I like that. And is your plan to, I mean, can feel free to answer this or not, but like, it be to take, you know, existing reels, for example, that have done well for them organically and say, hey, can we tweak that and just make one a little bit more specific? Or do you try to take that exact format, just post it on your channel, and get a collaborative request? Yep.

Tammy Schamuhn 

I’ve already done the latter and unfortunately, Instagram liked that for a while, it doesn’t like it anymore. So sequencing and what do you call it, the other one. There’s sequencing and then there’s another thing on meta. Anyway, sorry, it’s like repurposing, I just forget what it’s called. There are two different ways you can share content and you have to change it quite a bit for meta to push it. Like you’ll lose your organic following. So it would make sense that someone would have to like

Martin 

Yep.

Tammy Schamuhn 

Create a different reel or maybe the beat I reused, I changed the audio with my voice for someone else’s and we just used the background and then we catered it. So we just change it to some degree is what I would do because we worked with so many creators where I found a good piece of content that they made. They sent me the video and we reposted it but because it wasn’t organic and they had already posted it, it doesn’t do as well.

Martin 

Yeah.

Tammy Schamuhn 

So I have tried that strategy. It was okay. It’s not great. But it helps, like for sure. I don’t have to make the content. All I had to do was can I post your video. And now that Instagram has sequencing, you can change videos, and just you don’t need permission as long as their privacy settings say that you can share their content. You can do that yourself. You don’t need permission. The time we needed permission, was about a year and a half ago.

Tammy Schamuhn 

So I mean, even that strategy is Instagram has changed some things in the last three months, two months. I’ve noticed a shift in August, so something shifted and sequencing reels is not doing as well now. we hit some million.

Martin 

Yeah. Okay. This is the part where you’re saying you’re just grabbing their content.

Tammy Schamuhn 

And adding something to the end of it or putting stickers on it or adding a commentary, they still prefer organic meaning you made it, which.

Martin 

Yep. How are you downloading those? How are you getting access to their content? Are you using an external app like Instagram? Yeah.

Tammy Schamuhn 

no, it’s on Instagram. There’s a feature you can just, yeah, you can just, yeah, that you just share. It’s like sharing, but through editing the reels, you have to edit them. You have to do something different to them. You can’t just repost them. And it was doing well for a while. And then, yeah, the algorithm shifts because it does. Every couple of months, the algorithm shifts. So you can. It does. I see lots of accounts. That’s all they do. And I think it worked really well for a while. And now we’re shifting again. So I recommend finding some.

Tammy Schamuhn 

creators who focus on what the trends are on social because they do shift, which is very frustrating as a creator, is every three months, meta, in particular meta, will completely flip the algorithm. And you’ll be like, this worked and now it doesn’t. And it is very frustrating for a business owner when they do this. And I’m not sure why they do this, but they do it. And you just roll with it. So I think…

Martin 

Yes.

Tammy Schamuhn 

Yeah, I follow a couple of accounts that give you tips on algorithms and they say this is the trend. so find those creators on Instagram. They will give you tips all the time on what is shifting.

Martin 

Okay. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Keep up with it. Cool. Well, Tammy, thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure to have you on the podcast. If anyone wants to learn more about your resources, where should they go?

Tammy Schamuhn 

just go to the Institute of Childpsychology.com. We have a free summit coming up for any of you in business. This is a great way to build your followers and we make money doing this. But it’s also a give-back. We know a lot of parents who can’t afford mental health help. They want to be better parents. So this summit is a way for parents to be able to access this information. It’s just time-limited. So you have access for 24 hours for each day of the summit.

So if you go to the InstituteofChildPsychology.com, you’ll see there’s a tab at the top that says Summit Registration, and people can enroll. And even if you’re a business enroll and see how we do it. See how we run it and see what that looks like and the emails you get, like please take a look at that. Like we weren’t the first people doing this. For sure other people were doing this long before we were. But it’s a great way to connect and to get to know and develop relationships with other creators and other professionals. And we get repeat business with these creators and you do podcasts with them, it’s a wonderful way to collaborate. And that’s a really important thing. You have to collaborate in this business. You cannot do this by yourself. So find other similar accounts, work together. Everyone’s frustrated with Meta. So if you can find ways to partner, develop these funnels, promote other people’s work, you know, it’s not a scarcity mindset, right? We want to promote.

Martin 

Yeah. Hahaha. Yeah.

Tammy Schamuhn And say I want to help other people get their work out there as well. I think that collaboration is very important to the success of your business.

Martin 

No, 100 % really good advice. yeah, thanks for mentioning that as well for anyone listening, go jump in, have a look at the summit, and have a look at what Temi and the team are doing in terms of marketing. sounds like you’re all over it. So cool. Thanks for having you on the show and wish you all the best with the event and the book launch. Yeah. Thanks, Temi.

Tammy Schamuhn 

Thanks. Take care.