Marketing For Those Who Hate Marketing
What to do if you want to grow your business but you hate everything about the thing that will actually help you grow your business :(
Photo by LOGAN WEAVER on Unsplash
Marketing is from the Devil and I don’t want any part of it. This is what a successful business owner told me the other day. She was physically recoiling. She does not like marketing. To her it means spending lots of money and doing bad things to people. So she avoids it altogether.
And I thought this was really interesting.
How can someone run a successful business for over twenty years and not engage in any marketing? To run a business, to serve customers, means you’re engaging with “the market” — and therefore creating “marketing” of some kind — all the time.
So what’s going on?
And as I thought about it, I realised there’s two approaches to marketing: there’s Telling and then there’s Being.
My friend was talking about the Telling approach to Marketing, the kind we see around us every day. The shouty stuff that most businesses send out into the world—telling us how great they are, telling us to do something. This is the part my friend does not like.
But there’s also a less obvious, more intrinsic part that happens under the surface. This is the Being approach to Marketing. It’s how you operate in life and how you interact with your customers, and it’s also part of marketing.
Maybe if we tease them apart, we can find a way to do marketing that doesn’t feel like the work of the Devil.
The Telling Approach to Marketing
This first kind of marketing is probably most common. The Telling Approach is what businesses do to get themselves noticed. A business card, an Instagram post, a clever promotion, all designed to tell the world how great they are. Or simply to “raise awareness”.
Mostly it’s advertising. Tactical stuff to drive sales. Nothing wrong with that necessarily. Except that mostly they’re purely designed to get a reaction out of someone: I’m the best! Click here! Buy this!
So while some elements of Telling are subtle, like a nice logo painted on the side of a truck, often they make your eyes bleed. Like those thirty page junk mail catalogs in your letterbox. Also YouTube ads and those flat belly diet banners that follow you around the internet.
Ready, interrupt, FIRE!
It's noisy out there. And when everyone’s fighting for attention, they can’t be complacent. So the obvious thing to do (at least it seems) is to shout as loud as possible to get your attention. Then when they’ve got you in their sights—BANG!—they pull the trigger!
First they tell you what they’ve got, then they tell you what to do. All day long. It’s exhausting and it feels manipulative because people don’t want to be told, they want to be understood.
Of course, there’s a huge difference in the tone and quality of a subtle logo and a blinking banner ad. But essentially they’re both designed to get your attention and cause a reaction. This is the Telling Approach to Marketing.
Telling has its place, but if that’s all you’re doing it can get a bit soulless. After a while, all anyone knows about you is what you’re telling them. If you spend no time listening to your customer, your reputation will be purely based on those selfish, attention seeking ads.
And it makes sense that my friend doesn’t want any part of that game.
Do we have a choice?
So what can she do? Is she right to give up on marketing? Or is there another way?
I reckon the reason business owners say they hate doing marketing is because they don’t want to seem pushy and selfish and they haven’t come across another way.
And that’s where the other kind of marketing comes in.
The Being Approach to Marketing
The other kind of marketing is way more generous and it all starts with who you choose to Be.
It’s your identity, or your posture—where you stand and how you behave.
What kind of person/business are you? How do you treat people? Do you show up on time? Do you make promises and keep them? What are you like on the phone? How do you react when things go wobbly? All that.
It’s the unconscious part of you that actually drives your behaviour as you (generously) seek to understand and help other people.
It’s probably less tangible than a 30% off coupon, but potentially has more impact.
And I think the reason my friend has been successful for over twenty years is because her posture (who she chose to Be) is the part of marketing she does pay attention to. She just doesn’t think of it as marketing. And that’s okay, most people don’t.
The thing is, your business does become more powerful when you get more deliberate and conscious about where you stand and how you show up. And particularly when you start to see your posture and your generosity as strategic choices that can help your business grow.
The Power of Posture
When you think of your identity, or who you want to Be, as part of — or even a driver of — your marketing, things can start to open up.
For example, consider the passionate florist, wondering whether to pop that little sachet of plant food into every bouquet she sells.
Instead of asking herself, “Can I afford it? Do I want to take a 50c hit on every bunch that goes out the door?” she says “I’m the kind of florist that cares how the flowers look in my client’s home, even five days later”.
It becomes a question of identity, rather than finance.
Instead of thinking about short term profit, she’s clear about her values and how she wants to be perceived (who she wants to be) in the long run. People actually notice the difference.
It would be easy to say that Apple became a trillion dollar company because they made a fancy phone. But it would be more useful to see that Apple became a trillion dollar company because of their posture.
Because they’re the kind of company that wants to make life better for their customers. While all of the other companies were more focused on outdoing each (a 250MB MP3 player… a 500MB MP3 Player… a 1GB MP3 Player…) Apple simply offered “1000 songs in your pocket”.
When you know where you stand, and you’re clear about who you’re helping, your posture becomes the strategic guiding force that drives your business forward. And people start to notice.
Then it’s your posture that gets the attention, not your little discount coupon.
And Then Your Posture Shapes Your Approach
So instead of telling everyone what to do and then wondering how am I going to create all this content, to interrupt people and increase traffic and drive them into my sales funnel and convert more sales (yuk!) you simply ask, who do I want to be?
And if the answer is you want to be the kind of person that helps people out, it’s just a matter of asking “who can I help?” and “what do they need?”.
If your customer typically needs a five step process to get the result they need, but they always get stuck on step three, then that’s where you come in. Not to force the sale at step five, but to bridge the gap at step three, so that more people actually get what they need.
Instead of creating triggers to drive your own sales, you start creating stepping stones to get your customers the outcome they want.
And then your “marketing” starts to look a lot less like pestering sales tactics, and a lot more like the helpful kind of person you actually are in real life.
Putting it all together
Just to be clear, you do need both kinds of marketing. You can’t sit back in your office being all lovely and anonymous and hope to run a business.
The key is to get the two parts of your marketing balanced.
Start with who you want to Be. Make it clear where you stand and who you stand for. That helps you to see who you’re helping and where they’re trying to get to.
Then Tell them how to take the actions that will move them along on their journey, rather than distractions that mostly help you.
As people start to notice what you’re like and what you do for people, you’ll start to gain a reputation for your generosity and understanding.
A different kind of marketing
It’s obvious why people like my friend avoid doing marketing. Most of what we see out there is pushy and selfish and we don’t want any part of it. We’d rather keep things simple.
But I think it’s also clear that there is another path. That we can do a different kind of marketing. The kind of marketing that’s based on who we are and who we serve, that helps us build a reputation, a brand, that is centred on helping others which in turn helps us build our own business.
At the end of the day, Marketing is about making change happen. Changing perceptions, changing behaviour. Transforming your customer from a state of pain or need, to a better, happier state.
But that doesn’t mean you have to join in the shouting match.
If you care about the impact you have on other people and you care about your own reputation, it would be worth thinking about your posture first.
When you’re clear on who you are and who you want to serve, your approach and your marketing will feel a lot less like the devil’s work.
