Leveraging Instagram To Grow Your Side Hustle: What Works For Lagom Body Co. Founder Kristen Runvik
By: Tara Mcmullin
Tags: Marketing, Work Life Balance, Business, Podcast, Business Strategy

The Nitty Gritty

How Kristen Runvik is scheduling her life, job, and business to make sure she’s spending her time the way she wants to

How she divides her time to find balance between her side hustle with her day job

What she does to get the most out of Instagram marketing without letting it consume her

How Kristen takes what she has learned at in-person events online

More than 44 million Americans have a side hustle to earn extra money for living expenses, savings, and investments. But having a side hustle doesn’t necessarily mean you have a plan for quitting your job and going full-time with your business.

In this week’s episode of What Works, Lagom Body Co. founder Kristen Runvik shares with us how she divides her time between life, job, and business, how she finds new customers without spending all of her time marketing, why she has a love/hate relationship with Instagram, and more.

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Marketing your business without marketing your life away

“I have this notion of being anti-hustle. I don’t want to be working 50 to 60 hours a week. I want to be really intentional about the way I am approaching my business and my work.” — Kristen Runvik

Kristen Runvik is a holistic clinical herbalist and the founder of Lagom Body Co. And… she’s also our Member Experience Specialist at CoCommercial. She teaches workshops on holistic seasonal health and creates nature-based skincare products that nourish the skin and spirit.

She does all this while going to herbalism school.

Some people might think that this is insane.

But Kristen approaches things differently. She intentionally creates space for the grounding self-care that makes working full time and growing business on the side possible. She does all this by avoiding the bad habits that are prevalent in the content marketing world and maintaining healthy boundaries.

Whether she is working from home, from the coffee shop, or the top of a mountain, she is balancing strategic thinking with the creative process. She sets up operations aspects so that she can keep the product in front of the right people, in a way that is consistent, comfortable, and meaningful. In this way, Kristen can maintain her passion for helping women optimize their health and live their purpose.

Using Instagram to drive sales

“I have a love/hate relationship with Instagram but I realized when people don’t see my content and they don’t see my stories they’re not clicking over to my profile and then over to my website.” — Kristen Runvik

Kristen, like many of us, hates feeling like she has to be on social media 24/7.

She experimented with going off of social media to see what would happen. When retail sales completely dropped off, she realized how much Instagram was sending customers back to her website. Kristen came back to Instagram in a healthier way, with more intention behind her process.

Instagram is now where some of her most engaged customers are coming from.

Translating in-person event success to online events

“An interesting thing about in person events is that you never know what’s going to happen. Sometimes events are really busy and you make no money and sometimes they’re dead and you still make money. You just never really know what is going to happen.” — Kristen Runvik

Kristen does a couple of different types of in-person events. She sets up a table and gets face to face with a potential customer at vending events. She also gets direct engagement with a target audience at curated events that that often include an educational element. While she has love for both, for her, the curated events are much more effective in terms of sales and building her email list.

Yet, Kristen still likes doing a little of both. It is a lot of work but she still sees value. This is where she can actively be part of the community she loves and where she can keep an eye on what happening seasonal living and natural skin care industry.

She’s learned to translate her successes with in-person events to online events, too. She takes these lessons and eliminates the components that don’t work. When teaching online workshops–DIY skin care, setting goals and intentions for the year–she can drop the inventory aspect and can showcase the educational element and make this more profitable as a business.

Listen to this episode to hear more from Kristen Runvik and how she finds new customers without marketing her life away.

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