The light side of marketing
For people who, for want of a better phrase, work consciously – people who are trying to make a living at what they love – marketing often feels like a really dirty word. It's yucky. It makes you think of cold-calling, and aggressive salesmen, and nasty, invasive, manipulative, fear-based advertising. It makes you think of networking, and selling yourself (which sounds far too much like 'selling out'), and telling big fat lies about what you can do for people. It sounds like the mentality that many of us have worked so hard to get away from – the one where it's all about the sale, and once you've got the sale, you don't care any more.
But that's just the dark side of marketing. We don't have to do that. We can deal with this side of business with the same heart and integrity that we put into the rest of our work.
Marketing has a light side, too – let's reclaim it! Here are a few ideas.
Giving
If I gave you free cake, wouldn't you like me more?
If you're a big fat hippie like me, you may believe that giving makes space for receiving, invites abundance, creates flow, and all that lovely stuff. If not, well, giving is also just nice, and ethical, and golden-rule-y, and makes us feel good.
And fortunately for us nice and ethical people, giving is also a great marketing technique. If I wanted to talk like a marketeer, I could say that it creates goodwill for your brand. My friend Tim Harford, a very clever economist, likes to talk about 'gestures of confidence'. What does he mean by that? In a lot of situations, the problem is that you know you don't have all the information you would like to have in order to make a decision. If I need to buy a used car, the dealer knows it's whether it's a good car, but I don't. That's not just a problem for me, it's also a problem for him. If he has a good car to sell, how does he let me know that? He needs a gesture of confidence, a way to prove that I can trust him. All of us small business owners need that. People will feel much safer hiring our services or buying our products if we can give them a gesture of confidence.
Free stuff makes great gestures of confidence. For example, if you're a massage therapist, your website could give free tips on self-massage techniques. If you're a hypnotist, you could offer free downloadable relaxation tracks. These things show your potential customers that you know your onions, and that you're a principled person who cares about more than just taking their money. It builds trust.
Sadly interweb technology hasn't yet developed to the point where I can distribute free cake via my website, but one day, my friends, one day.
Trust
As well as showing your customers that they can trust you, you can actively trust them. One way to do this is to be generous with your guarantees. This is easiest to do with things that cost little to produce, like downloadable products. With that kind of thing you can offer people their money back and let them keep the product. It's true, there will be some people who will take advantage. But this will be more than compensated for by the fact that a lot more people will buy it.
Thoughtfulness
Genuinely good customer service is one of the best marketing tactics there is (second only to having a really great product, which hopefully is obvious enough that I don't need to write about it here). Your website is a great place to start that relationship with your customer. Think about all the questions they may have, and all the fears or concerns they may have, and then make sure you answer them on your website. FAQs are a great place for this, and can be developed and improved gradually as you discover what kind of questions people (frequently, natch) ask you. The little extras will also make a big difference – a video tour of your workshop or demonstration of your service, for example – anything that makes people feel more comfortable about the idea of working with you.
Gratitude
Another much-discussed spiritual principle, and another little extra that can make all the difference. Erin Donley recommends sending beautiful, personalised thank you notes to your customers. It continues that sense of a personal relationship with a valued customer, and gives them one more reason to recommend you to their friends. You could include a nice recommendation card with the note, in fact, with a code for a discount, sampler, or free gift.
Respect
The essence of the dark side of marketing is fear. Fear is the path to the dark side… fear leads to anger… anger leads to hate.. hate leads to suffering… Where was I? Oh yes, fear-based advertising. Have you seen that ad where a groom is snuggling up to his bride, nuzzling his way up her arm, and then the voice over cuts in with 'It doesn't take much to spoil a moment like this.” That's right: they're trying to tell us that if we don't use their brand of deodorant we're going to destroy our wedding day and repulse our new husband. It's stuff like this (I'd like to use a rather stronger word than 'stuff') that makes people think that marketing is just plain evil.
We don't have to do it their way. We don't have to try to make people feel small so that we can look big. Nor do we have to buy into the old idea that the customer's always right, and we should do whatever they want. There is a third way. We can acknowledge that providers and consumers are equals, that both are adults with wisdom and experience, and create interactions based on respect. And business owners can talk to our customers accordingly, acknowledging their power and respecting their knowledge.
For a nice example, have a look at the copy on Havi Brooks' site The Fluent Self. Havi is a habits expert; she helps people get unstuck and develop habits that better suit them. But she doesn't patronise; she doesn't try and tell us that we're doing things 'wrong', or that we're weak, or stupid. She acknowledges, right from the start, that we are the experts on ourselves, and salutes the work we've already done; then she just offers us some new techniques.
Enthusiasm
If you're anything like me, one of the most squirm-making parts of marketing is the idea of talking up your business. We have this idea that we have to throw modesty to the wind and announce to the world that we're the best thing since sliced bread. And if we try to say something strongly positive about ourselves, that little voice of fear in our heads starts shouting that what we're saying isn't really true, because there was that time that that customer was unhappy, or that day last week where we were tired and didn't quite give 100%, or whatever other stupid 'I must be superman/woman' notions we aren't quite meeting.
One day, we'll be so serene that we don't have these nagging voices and groundless fears any more. In the mean time, try this for getting around them: next time you have to talk to someone about your business, don't try to tell them why you're great. Instead, focus on what you love about what you do, and let yourself enthuse about it. You don't need to make any value judgments about your skills if you're talking about how much you love to see a bride beautiful and happy in the dress you made, or how satisfying it is when your Pilates clients find themselves pain-free for the first time in years, or how privileged you feel to be able to do something you love for a living. Your passion for what you do is a far better advertisement than any amount of self-aggrandisment.
Honesty and openness
I'm going to mention the B word now – branding. If you don't come from a marketing background, that word probably makes you squirm. It makes us think of insanely expensive logos. It sounds manipulative.
But we don't have to think of it that way. Really, branding is just a question of letting people see who we are. Your 'brand' is just the personality of your business. It's nothing to do with logos. It's expressed in every single thing you do.
Often we're afraid to be who we are right out loud in business. We worry that showing our personality may lose us customers, because different people like different things. Actually, the opposite is true. For example, let's look at this article. There will be a lot of business owners out there who will read this and decide I'm not for them, because I'm talking about gratitude and personality instead of ROI and USPs. But, the people who see things in the same way to me will be much more likely to want to work with me than if I'd kept quiet.
It's good, with your business, to be you out loud. It's how you let your right people know they're in the right place.
Here's an example. Remember Havi Brooks of The Fluent Self? She has a duck. Selma. Selma is her business partner. She's very open about the fact that she has a duck for a business partner. There will be a lot of people who will think that's crazy, and they'll just turn round and leave straight away. But the ones who get it, really get it. They say, 'Wow, you have a duck! That's so cool!' They send fan socks and knit scarves for Selma. They know that Havi is the person for them, because she has a duck for a business partner!