CONNECT with Sheila Botelho Podcast

The Power of Value-Based Marketing That Feels Right with Shayah Reed | Ep 428

• Sheila Botelho

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Shayah is the Founder and CEO of Virtuwell Balance, a woman-run holistic design and marketing agency that specializes in creating holistic brands and websites for health practitioners. 


Since 2019, she’s worked with over 400 clients, some of which have been featured in CNN, Yahoo and Thrive Global, helping them craft authentic, professional websites, brands, and organic marketing solutions that genuinely reflect their practice’s spirit.


Shayah and her team are on a mission to empower health practitioners to make a transformational impact in the lives of their patients by harnessing mindful marketing techniques and value-based branding.

In this episode, we dive into the powerful connection between marketing, intention, and purpose. Shayah shares her journey from working in health information management to building a heart-centered agency that empowers health practitioners to grow their brands authentically. 


If you’ve ever felt uneasy about marketing or selling, this conversation will help you shift your mindset and see it as a powerful tool to serve your mission and help more people.


What you'll discover in this episode:

  • The importance of aligning your marketing with your values and purpose.
  • How to embrace selling as a way to create positive impact and growth.
  • Practical steps to integrate value-based marketing into your business.


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https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/connect-with-sheila-botelho/id1527363160 I would really appreciate it. Thanks!





Shaya:

Marketing and selling is not a bad thing. It needs to be done, and I think it's just really all about the energy and the intention that you bring to it, and you are helping people do great things. You're helping people heal and your marketing can just help you help more people.

Sheila:

Hi, welcome to the Connect with Sheila Botelho podcast. I'm an entrepreneur, self-care strategist and creator of the Seasons self-care app. I'm committed to helping you reconnect to your purpose, elevate your well-being and build your version of a happy, successful life. It's interview day, and I am thrilled that I have with me the founder and CEO of Virtual Balance, and this is Shia Reid. This is a women-run holistic design and marketing agency that specializes in creating holistic brands and websites for health practitioners. Since 2019, shia's worked with over 400 clients, some of which have been featured in CNN, yahoo and Thrive Global, helping them craft authentic professional website brands and organic marketing solutions that genuinely reflect their practice's spirit. Shaya and her team are on a mission to empower health practitioners to make a transformational impact in the lives of their patients by harnessing mindful marketing techniques and value-based branding. Shia, it's so wonderful to have you here. Thank you for being on the show.

Shaya:

Hi Sheila and listeners, thank you so much. I'm excited to be here today talking about our purpose in life and business and finding our passion in mindful marketing all things that I love.

Sheila:

So good. So we met actually over on the Instagram and it's so interesting how you get to meet people and connect like across the world or across town, and often it's online and I love the in-person experience as well. But there's something really cool when you can start to build some kind of depth to a connection online and then you never really know where it leads. Do you find that happens a lot for you in this online space?

Shaya:

Yeah, absolutely. There's some people that I've been connected with through LinkedIn and Instagram for gosh years, and then you know, we end up building relationships and friendships online and meeting in person one day or collaborating in business, which is always really fun and same with in person, like you bump into someone at an event or a co-working space and you never know where that leads either.

Sheila:

So yeah, yeah, it's really cool times we're in, so I'm really happy that you're here and I'd love as I always love to do on my interviews is to start with really your journey. And so how, where did you start and how did your journey lead you to?

Shaya:

focus on holistic branding for health practitioners. Okay, this is a really fun story that I love sharing. Um and uh. I've actually done a lot of podcasts recently like a strong marketing focuses and we kind of just like diamonded the topic. So whenever I do get to share my journey into like how I got to where I am, I do get a lot of good feedback that people really connect with it and find it inspiring. So I'm excited to share that with you guys today.

Shaya:

So, okay, I'll make my long story not too long, but I studied marketing and medical administration in college and I was lucky out of college to get a job in the hospital. I had a career for about five years in health information management, which is also where I met my husband. He was working in health records at the time and you know that was a very rewarding career in terms of, you know, opportunity to advance and pay. It was very structured and stable. But I was just finding something missing and a little bit boring in the repetitiveness and I was always interested in holistic health and wellness and, yes, the hospital is a great place to be in. Acute care has is also obviously very important, but I really wanted to focus on preventative health and wellness. So what I decided to do was study yoga. So I took a leave of absence from work to go to India and get become certified as a yoga teacher and this is obviously a very transformational journey for me. And I came back and I was like, oh my gosh, I have to teach yoga and share all of these you know unique healing modalities with people. And as I started teaching yoga on the side while I was still working in the hospital, I had a lot of people start asking me about nutrition, which is very common in the yoga space, because many people want to become vegan or vegetarian, because that kind of fits in with yoga in some ways right. And people would always ask me, as the yoga teacher, am I getting enough protein in my diet? And I was like I don't know how can I support my yoga students with nutrition? And so I went back to school again to study holistic nutrition and after this I was really motivated to start up my own private practice and my own little side business, but with yoga and nutrition. So I started working with people online and in person. I was working one-to-one, doing group programs. I hosted day retreats in my town. I also hosted some yoga retreats abroad in my town. I also hosted some yoga retreats abroad, and my husband also my fiance at the time really wanted to start his own online business as well, and we had a big desire to travel. So we both just thought you know what? This is something that we really want to do. We're young, young-ish at the time like let's do it now before we settle down, get married, have kids. Like let's see if we can have these remote businesses and travel the world. So we quit our jobs at the hospital, which was a huge leap. We had no idea how this was going to work out. Our family and friends thought we were crazy. But this was in when was this? 2017, 2018. And we traveled the world for about three years, running our businesses remotely.

Shaya:

And through this time, when I was working in yoga and nutrition, I had a lot of peers in the industry and the health and wellness space reaching out to me asking you know, how did you build your website? How do you do your email marketing? How do you do your social media? How are you hosting these retreats abroad? And it was all things that they were struggling with that I really loved doing.

Shaya:

I found through running my own yoga and nutrition business that I really enjoyed the design and marketing aspects of it and those things kind of came easy to me and fun to me. So I started kind of telling people oh, I can help you with that, I can help you with that, and my husband's like you could start another business doing this. You're like helping these people for free. And I was like, oh my gosh, I can. You're so right. So I started. That was the inspiration to start virtual balance is helping other health and wellness professionals with their design and marketing, and so that was in 2019 when I launched and it took off so well that now you know yoga and nutrition and nutrition is kind of just a hobby for me. I'm full-time in virtual balance now, and since 2019, we've grown to a team of five six, including me. We've worked with hundreds of clients across Canada and the US, like you mentioned in my intro, helping them leverage their website and branding with value-based marketing.

Sheila:

Oh, my goodness, I love this.

Shaya:

A bit of a long story, I try to make it short, but that's all how I got to where I am now.

Sheila:

No, it's great. I love the details, I love the minutiae and I think it's just the whole idea of it's so common, right? Our friends and family thought we were crazy. How did it work? We had it all on the line and we did it. But I love that you trusted yourself and, knowing that it's never you take the leap. There's always a plan B that, even if you don't know what it is, it'll show up. So I just really am honoring the fact that you trusted yourself and you did it. What a great experience and what a launching pad. Who knew you didn't know you'd end up doing this work? And often I've seen that these types of things do lead to even more meaningful, value-based businesses, which is what you also help people do. And so value-based marketing it is something that I hear a lot in the ether online Can you break it down for us? Like how do you ensure that your clients' values shine through in their branding and their marketing efforts?

Shaya:

Yeah. So you know, first we can like bring this back to say, like you know, consider how your marketing makes you feel. When you're marketing your business and your services, how do you feel when you're doing it? If you don't feel good about a particular strategy, it's probably not going to be received well either. So I think that there's a big energy component behind this and people sense that, and especially in the health and wellness space and the helping space, like people feel really odd and awkward and weird about selling and marketing and like you shouldn't be paid good money if you are helping people. You know, which is like I think those should be the highest paying careers. It's very important work. Which is like I think those should be the highest paying careers. It's very important work.

Shaya:

So, considering how you, how you feel in your own marketing efforts, I think that's a really good place to start and the mindful, value-based marketing that we use with our clients really avoids like aggressive sales language and is not preying on people's insecurities to like force them into a sale. You know, some of these traditional marketing strategies use like last chance language and you're going to miss out, and things like that. We kind of even avoid the using nonviolent communication and marketing and really comes more from a place of truly wanting to help people and connecting them with the right services and products that will actually benefit them, opposed to having, like a growth at all cost sales mentality, which a lot of these you know large companies have and you know health and wellness businesses really have a big opportunity to make a meaningful difference on the world, and I think it's important to look at how our marketing approach also plays a role in that.

Sheila:

I wholeheartedly agree. I love sales. I think sales is a service and it needs to be aligned. So I love that you're also using that really mindful marketing communication and the way you're going about it. And so for those listening, who are maybe new to this concept too, what are some practical steps they can start to take integrating more value-based marketing in their businesses?

Shaya:

I would think, start with connection and, which I love, ties into your podcast Surprise and relationship building and relationship marketing. So not always being focused on making a sale right now, but more focused on making a connection right now and building a relationship right now and that can lead to a sale in the future. And if somebody has that good connection and relationship with you, they're probably going to refer you to other people as well. We get a lot of clients having referrals through this type of relationship marketing and also just leading with value. So, sharing your expertise, positioning your authority, you can do this through, like your content marketing, blogging, email marketing, podcasting, like letting people listen to you and get to know you. And, yeah, sharing your expertise to build authority, getting people to trust you. And again, this takes time. So this is not like a quick sales strategy. The holistic marketing, mindful marketing, relationship marketing usually is a little bit of a longer process but a much better, more aligned, authentic, genuine way to selling, if you ask me.

Sheila:

I totally agree, yeah. And so, speaking to the entrepreneurs, who are often wearing multiple hats, what advice would you give them, then about maintaining authenticity in their marketing without feeling overwhelmed? Because you mentioned a lot of different options there and it's like, oh, I want to be omnipresent and, yeah, maybe that's the goal at some point, maybe not, but how do you help people navigate that?

Shaya:

So I think, asking yourself like, does this feel, how? Just coming back to again how you feel, that's the, that's the authenticity piece Anytime you share something, say something, you agree to an event or you're signing up for anything, or you know, just asking, asking yourself first, like, how does this feel for me? Is this in alignment with my goals, with the practices, mission and spirit? Is this, how is this thing that I'm going to say or do, like, how is this going to make my community think of me or see me? And is that in alignment with, you know, the values of my business? So, really, just being very intentional and coming back to the feeling that you have when you're, it's very emotional feeling based, I guess, but that's something that we always start with.

Shaya:

And also, when we are figuring out what type of content marketing we're going to be sharing for our clients, we base this in seo research. So this is a strategy that we've developed with a lot of our clients in our digital marketing package. When people are, you know, don't know what they want to share about or what they want to talk about, um, first we say, before we get into the SEO research, there's always, like, so many topics and questions and comments. You just have to be listening and be paying attention in your area and your community, and even on your like, through your competitors or collaborators, looking at comments. Um, anytime there's like questions or conversations around certain types of things, you can always recreate your own content on that, with your own spin on it, with your own expertise on it.

Shaya:

So we encourage our clients to keep an eye out for those types of things that we can share in their content marketing and then also going into the SEO research. So, again, this is leading with value, because we know for sure it's something that people are interested in, it's something that they're looking for and it's something that they need help with. So how we do this is we conduct a little bit of research into what people are searching for on Google as it relates to your services, your industry or your local area, and then we create content, blog posts specifically based around those topics. And that's how the kind of like the value-based content comes about, because we know it's stuff that people are searching for and it's also in alignment with you know, your services and the mission of your, of your business.

Sheila:

That's amazing, and so you've worked with a wide range of clients in the health and wellness space, and so I'd love for you to share. Well, first of all, how much do you do for the client, like in terms of you know writing pieces, like, do you actually dig in and actually do some of that content for them, or is it like a kind of a done with you experience, and then maybe just share, if you can like, or if you'd prefer to a success story where value-based marketing made a significant impact on a client's business, like, if someone comes to mind, you probably have many.

Shaya:

Sure, yeah, so we do. Actually it's our digital marketing package is like a full, all hands on deck package. So you work with our entire team. Our SEO specialist conducts the SEO research, writes the blog post outlines, and then our holistic health copywriter writes the blog posts. Of course, the client always gets to review and make edits, because they are still the expert in the area, even though we are very skilled and passionate in health and wellness and creating this type of content and then we publish the blog post for you. Our website designer designs them and schedules them out.

Shaya:

We also another piece that goes into our value-based content marketing is email marketing. So with this, when we create these blogs, we also have a monthly newsletter that we send out for most of our clients. And, again, we help create all the content, write it, schedule it, design it and send it out. But I would say, out of our clients who are doing the email marketing, every single email that we send results in increased client bookings. So I think that is a really important piece, that email marketing.

Shaya:

I mean you always hear business owners your email list is your most valuable asset, but are you actually making use of it? So I know that it's really hard to compete on social media these days with algorithms and you know new things changing and coming out and ways to do things and staying on top of trends. But your email list is one way that you can make sure you're popping into people's inboxes. You know email, I think where did I read this? Hubspot said that email is the first thing that people check in the morning, even before social media. So you're getting right into people's heads in the morning if they're opening up your emails, and that's just something that I find really interesting.

Shaya:

But the biggest ROI for our clients always comes from email marketing. Yes, they get increased traffic from blogs and people. You know they get higher rankings on Google from blogs. It brings people to their website. They download a freebie or book a discovery call or, you know, join their email list. But sometimes those metrics are a little bit hard to track because they come to the site and they move around to different places. With email marketing we can see directly like one email resulted in X amount of client bookings. So that's a really nice statistic to see.

Sheila:

Oh yeah, I love the metrics you can see in your email marketing and really it is that deeper level of connection. It's like an inner circle. That's really how I have always viewed it with my email list.

Shaya:

Yeah, it's a little more special.

Sheila:

Yeah, your deeper community and you're sharing more deeply. You also know that they've got that it's there waiting for them for when they can see it, whereas sometimes and I know we need our social media feeds, but depending on which platform you're on, people like boop scroll by. If they miss it, it's gone, like they're not going to go back searching for you. But this way you're reaching out to them. So now one of the challenges value-based marketing may I feel like sometimes people can come up against is just balancing the purpose with profit piece. Right, like any kind of marketing, we want to be giving and we want to be also selling because we're a business. So how do you guide your clients in finding that sweet spot?

Shaya:

Yeah, I really think that with content marketing, it's you like I said, it's a little bit of a longer process, but it feels better, it's more authentic, it's more aligned with you and your business and what your clients need. And also, when it comes to that, finding balance with that ROI. You're like, yes, this feels good to me to be marketing this way, but it's taking a long time for me to start making money this way. That can be the case, but we've also had people who invest in something like ads. I guess I can talk here on the difference of, like, organic marketing versus paid ads. So paid ads, paid marketing or paid advertising is when you are paying a platform like Google ads or Facebook or Instagram. You're paying them to like, boost you up in the algorithm, right, and then which can be great you can get a lot of leads and sales from that. But as soon as you stop paying them, your ranking goes down, right, um. So you kind of have to keep paying and, especially with google ads, you have to have like a decent uh budget to see any kind of roi on there. So with organic marketing, we're not paying any platforms to boost you up. We're doing it organically through valuable content. This is like same with Instagram, facebook, linkedin, google.

Shaya:

We're mostly talking about Google here, because we do all of our content marketing through our websites and creating your website kind of like a content hub. So, yeah, what we need to do here is switch our thinking of creating all of our content for social media because, also, we don't own those platforms, we don't own the content, we don't own the followers. If one day those platforms shut down, we don't have them anymore, which I'm sure everyone has heard say and if you've heard of anybody who's had their account hacked or locked out of, it's a nightmare. So what we try to get our clients to do is switch to using your website as your content hub. So all of your content goes on your blog, which is going to naturally organically boost you higher in Google, especially when we're doing the SEO researched blog topics, because that's naturally going to bring in more traffic because people are searching for those topics.

Shaya:

But Google loves active websites too. So the more that you're posting on there especially if it's valuable, original content because they do say that Google is starting to understand when you use AI so original content and then repurposing that for other areas, so you're getting a lot out of this. So, then, using that to inform your social media strategy. You can take pieces of your blog posts to create social posts or turn them into reels, but it all comes back to starting with your your website and then tying this back to with the ads. Like I said, when you stop paying for ads, your ranking goes away with organic marketing. This just builds and builds and builds and builds, and it can never be taken away from you, especially once you're ranked really well on Google.

Sheila:

It's hard for somebody to to outrank you. That's so interesting. I love that philosophy and does that work? The same for I guess it's really any pages that are going onto your website, cause I know for me it's often my podcast, it's like my podcast slash, you know, whatever the description is is kind of the blog post of of the time. You know, yeah, and and it's so, it's so important, and I have blog posts and all that kind of stuff. But I really shifted when I got into podcasting. But I do love that. I I also love to repurpose content because it's all about simplicity, Like you, and let's, let's face it, a good message needs to be repeated. We need to be reminded the same thing over and over, and, and I feel like, too, people are looking for one piece of content or one piece of information and then, boom, they get distracted.

Shaya:

So hearing it especially if you're also going to say people don't see everything that you share. So, like when you share something 10 times, you feel like you are repeating yourself and being robotic. But the 10th time you share it is going to be the first time somebody hears it and you're like oh, there's still people who haven't heard what I'm saying.

Sheila:

I've said this 10 times, so that's also why the repetition is important it really is, and it's kind of like if you notice any successful brand, they're often saying the same things over and over. But don't we need to hear that If we really want transformation to happen? For a habit to take hold, it takes repetition. So sometimes that's like hearing it changing our mindset, helping us grow, and so I notice also, you've had the unique experience of helping brands get featured in high-profile outlets like CNN and Yahoo. How does value-based marketing contribute to this kind of visibility and recognition?

Shaya:

Oh, good question. Yeah, so we don't help them get featured in those places, but they just have been featured in those places.

Shaya:

So we don't offer like PR services or anything like that. But our clients are just doing some really amazing things and you know they have beautiful standout brands. They have lovely websites that guide their visitors through a unique healing journey and they're positioning themselves as authority figures and leaders in the space through their blogs and what we're sharing on their website and I think that just helps contributes to them having a really sound brand. I mean, those things are important when you're going through, for you know, pr features and things like that.

Sheila:

Yeah, absolutely. So. You're really like helping them set the stage, create a nice solid foundation for it. I love it. It's so great when you can say like look, these are our clients who are getting this type of visibility. And so, as we go through all of this, like this is like very technical, very specific. And then there's like really what's going on behind everything, which is the emotional aspect. How do you help your clients navigate these emotional highs and lows that come with putting their brand out there authentically, because they got to come to you with, like I don't know, should I really be pivoting this way? Like how do you, how do you handle that?

Shaya:

Yeah, I think a lot of the time it's it's easy because they're giving it over to us. We used to do more of a mixed service, where we did have like some coaching in terms of, like you know, we would take care of some strategy, but then you still need to do this and I, you know, I would have to reassure people, like just to change their mindset and their perspective on marketing and selling, because marketing and selling is not a bad thing. It needs to be done and I think it's just really all about the energy and the intention that you bring to it and you are helping people do great things. You're helping people heal and your marketing can just help you help more people. So I think that's why we always encourage people just to come back to that space of their intuition and their feeling of what they're selling and knowing that they're helping people and they're coming at it from a good space and a good place.

Shaya:

And that's where we're not using the aggressive marketing language, telling people like last chance or, you know, only one day left to join. We're always saying things like you know, there's still space for you, if this feels in alignment for you, if this is the right time for you. That's kind of like the language we're using with our sales, like CTAs, calls to actions, opposed to like. You know, last chance, don't miss out. It's a much more softer welcoming messaging that we're using. But yeah, really just changing the mindset and the perspective on selling and marketing, I think is really important.

Sheila:

Speaking of which, how do you personally stay grounded and aligned with your values while leading such a mission-driven business? I imagine you enroll a lot of your own certifications and your time at that beautiful yoga experience when you were really starting out, but, like maybe talk to me a bit about that.

Shaya:

Yeah, I still come back to a lot of those yogic and mindfulness practices and you know, now that I have a team is the like the most amazing thing.

Shaya:

I never actually saw myself as a leader or a CEO in this way. It just kind of developed as my, as my business developed and I had to jump into this role. I feel like before I was ready because the business did did grow very quickly and so I always just love my self-care practices. You know like this has changed a little bit for me now as well. So now I can actually afford to treat myself to going to a nice spa day, but I used to do my self-care practices at home and I would just like soak my feet in warm water or take a bath, put on some nice music. I love painting my nails, I love having nice nails, so just like it's so mindful and relaxing the process of like filing my nails and painting my nails and just taking care of myself physically, like that is always a way for me to just stay grounded and and give back to myself in my downtime, and I think that that's really important to to prevent me from getting burnt out as well.

Sheila:

Yeah, and we're all looking for that. But I love how the thread coming through this whole conversation has been about your trusting your intuition and doing what aligns, and that includes how do you care for yourself and what are those things that really help you feel filled up so that you can go out and serve. So thank you for sharing that I would love for you to share. Where can our listeners learn more about your work and get connected with virtual balance?

Shaya:

Absolutely so. We do have a weekly newsletter called the mindful marketer. So if any of this resonated with you and you'd like to learn more about, like our mindful marketing techniques and strategies, we send out an email every Monday and we're sharing actionable, up-to-date holistic marketing techniques that will help you to resonate with your audience and focuses on building connections and not just clients. So that's our mindful marketer newsletter, which maybe we can put that in the in the show notes If you'd like. It's virtual balancecom slash mindful marketer. And then on my website. I'm always hanging out on my website, which sounds funny to say. Usually people say they're hanging out on social media but, as we were talking about in this conversation, I really love creating content in a place that I have more control over. So my blog and my email newsletter. So we're sharing blog posts, usually weekly or biweekly, on all this type of content that we've been sharing in the podcast today, and then the Mindful Marketer goes out every Monday.

Sheila:

Love it. Oh well, thank you so much for being here. I so appreciate you sharing this perspective. I actually felt so relaxed and refreshed hearing you share what you are doing in the ways that you're serving people in this community and I feel like, yeah, like as more of us, people are getting smart right. We know we love to buy things, but we don't love to be sold to, so we want people to be treating us like the smart, savvy people that we are right. This is what it is, and you get to choose, trust your intuition. I think that is really attractive for a lot more people these days, at least the people that I'm talking to. So I appreciate what you're doing. I wish you all the best as you continue to grow and expand.

Shaya:

Thanks, sheila, it was fun to chat today.

Sheila:

So, everyone, thanks for tuning in to the podcast today. I hope you found this conversation with Shaya as inspiring as I did for really what can happen in this really crowded, loud marketing space that we find ourselves in. And if you are ready to step into your next level of business success with ease and alignment, head on over to SheilaBatellocom to explore our resources there, and also I'm going to include all of Shaya's information in the show notes so that you can learn if maybe this could be something that you could A take some wonderful tidbits for for your marketing, or if you're wanting to work with her and her team to really take the next step in your wellness business. So, thanks for being here, don't forget to leave a review and I will see you next time. Until then, big blessings.