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What is marketing in business?
Something I hear OFTEN from students and clients is that they struggle with the idea of marketing and selling online. In fact, I had someone once tell me that they were fine with educating others and sharing tips and information, but they felt dirty putting out actual marketing pieces. But, likely they haven’t stopped to ask themselves – what is marketing in business?
If you can relate, this episode is a must-listen for you. I’m sharing what it means to market something, a mindset shift or two that you’ve got to have around the idea of marketing, AND a way that you’re already marketing even if you don’t think you are.
Links and Resources Mentioned in This Episode:
- Learn more about working with me 1:1 on your own strategic marketing plan!
- This week’s action step: If you’re ready to get intentional with your marketing; go back and listen to episodes 084 and 085!
- This week’s book recommendation: Again, But Better by Christine Riccio
- Find me on Instagram and tell me you completed this week’s action step: @mrsamandawarfield
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Have a comment about today’s episode, or a topic you’d like to suggest for a future episode? Shoot me an email over at hello@amandawarfield.com!
Rather Read? – Here’s the Transcript!
*Just a heads up – the provided transcript is likely to not be 100% accurate.
Something I hear often from students and clients is that they struggle with the idea of marketing and selling online. In fact, I had someone once tell me that they were fine with educating others and sharing tips and information, but they felt dirty putting out actual marketing pieces. If you can relate to this, this episode is a must listen for you.
I’m sharing what it means to market something, a mindset shifter to that you’ve got to have around the idea of marketing and a way that you’re already marketing. Even if you don’t think you are welcome to the Chasing Simple podcast, I’m your host, Amanda Warfield. And you’re listening to episode 86.
Let’s dive in.
As always the nerd in me wants to start off by talking about. The definition of marketing, because I think this idea, I don’t , I know that this idea of marketing feeling gross and dirty, it comes from misconceptions about what marketing is and what marketing isn’t. So I looked up what’s the definition of marketing and just doing the whole Google thing.
It comes up with the action or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research. But I also found a website, Heidi cohen.com that has a blog post that lists out 72 definitions of marketing. Now I’m not going to read all of them because that would be crazy. But I want you to understand that marketing is an extremely broad concept.
In fact, when I first started my business, which this might be surprising to some of you because I’m a content marketing strategist. But when I first started my business, I was so confused by marketing and so overwhelmed that I thought that I was bad at marketing. I thought I’m terrible at marketing. I don’t understand marketing.
I’m never going to be good at this. I need a marketing coach and I did all this research from marketing. Come to find out I wasn’t bad at marketing, I just wasn’t patient, but that’s a whole other episode that we could talk about. But I was overwhelmed by marketing because it’s such a broad concept now, content marketing, which is what I speak on specifically, content marketing is using content.
And this is, this is my definition. Content marketing is using: blogs podcasts, YouTube videos, email newsletters, social media, et cetera to market yourself or your business. Now I make that note yourself or your business because so many of us are personal brands. And that’s, I think the way to go, because you can evolve and change over time.
Whereas if you started a business. And you hid behind the business name. It’s really hard to make any changes. So for example, when I very, very first started a business way back in 2018, I started teaching about simple living and capsule wardrobes. If I had created a business name that was. I don’t, I don’t know, I’m not creative with names, but let’s say it was the simplified capsule wardrobe.
And that was my business name. It would have been very, very difficult, not just logistically, but marketing wise. It would have been very, very difficult for me to transition into teaching about simplified business and content marketing strategy. But because. I am a personal brand. It really wasn’t a difficult at all.
I had to change up my website and start posting about different things on social media, but all in all, it was fairly easy for me to evolve from a capsule wardrobes to simplified business, to content marketing strategy.
So that’s what I mean when I say marketing yourself or your business, we’ll talk about this a little bit more in a second, but. I wanted to make that distinction because you are not your business and your business is not you, but at the same time, your personal brand is part of your business.
Now, when it comes to marketing, it can be educational. It can be inspirational. It can be relatable. It can be promotional. But it’s all still marketing. If we go back to that very first definition of marketing that I pulled straight off of Google, it said the action or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising.
So marketing, isn’t just selling it. Isn’t just promoting a product or a service. It also is simply doing things like market research and asking questions of your audience, putting up pollsthat we love to do on Instagram stories, because it gets us engagement. All of that stuff is still market research or all of that stuff is still marketing, also promoting and selling products or services.
And there’s a distinction there because they are two different things. Now, I think what most people find. Gross and feel gross about when it comes to marketing is the selling. It’s one thing to just mention your product. That’s fine, but it’s another thing to truly go all in and sell it.
now I don’t think that it should feel gross, but I think that this is a mindset shift that we need to take all of the things we put. All the content we’re creating, it’s still marketing. So even if you’re just creating and sharing a real about your cats, that’s still marketing. You know why? Because you’re building your brand, your personal brand, even if I’m just putting up a video of , that’s still building my personal brand, even if you’re not being intentional about it.
So. Maybe you decide, oh, I’m going to put up this funny, real about my pet. Maybe the idea behind that isn’t to build your brand, but you’re still doing that regardless of whether that’s your intention or not.
Now back, oh, when was this? Was it 2020? It must’ve been 2020. I was doing a lot of club content batching and my husband Russell, and I made this deal that if I hit a certain number of sales, I want to say it was like 50. If I brought in 50 new students with that launch in particular, we could go to Disney for a weekend.
Now I talked about this on my storiesand this actually ended up being kind of controversial for a lot of people because when I put it up on my stories, I mentioned that it wasn’t really a realistic goal and that’s a whole other topic of conversation, but it got a lot of traction and feedback. And because I had so much pushback, all these other conversations on my story spawned from that.
And on of the conversations that spawned was this idea of how do we feel when people talk about their launch goals? So I asked how do you feel about other people sharing their launch goals? Do you enjoy seeing it or does it feel gross to you? Because I know, I love hearing about that. I want to know all the details about your launch.
What is your goal? How did you actually reach it? Did you reach it? What does that look like? I want to know all the things, all those things, but I wanted to know how other people feel about this. So I put up a poll and the overwhelming majority of people said, yes, I love hearing about other people’s launch goals.
It’s not gross at all. But then I asked a second question. I asked a follow-up question and I said, how do you feel about talking about your own laundry? And the overwhelming majority of people said that it felt gross and spammy to talk about your launch goals, that it feels manipulative, but those same people that feel manipulative in that field grows in spamy when sharing their own launch goals.
Want to hear what other people’s launch goals
I want you to remember that you aren’t forcing anyone to follow you. You aren’t forcing anyone to look at your content, to watch your stories, to listen to your podcast, to watch your YouTube videos, to read your blog. You’re not forcing anyone. The people that are following you are following you for a reason, we have got to get out of this mindset.
That marketing is gross. That marketing is promotional only that marketing is only selling. It’s all marketing. And based on that pole, it is very, very, very clear that we only feel that marketing is gross and spammy when we’re doing it ourselves. Now. That’s not to say that there aren’t gross and spammy marketing practices out there.
There are 100% there are, but if you’re listening to this, I would say that it is 99.9% likely that you’re not doing those things. If you are worried about feeling gross and spammy, you’re probably not feeling gross and spammy because it is a concern that you have. We’ve got to stop feeling like marketing is just selling.
We’ve got to stop feeling like marketing this gross, and we’ve got to remember that it’s all marketing, that everything you’re putting out there, content wise is still marketing because you’restill putting information about your personal brand out there. So if you’re just making a silly video with your kids, you’re still putting out this idea of I’m a mom and my kids are important and we like to have fun.
That’s building your personal brand, whether you were intentional about putting that message out, that message out there or not. That’s what you’re putting out there. So we’ve got to get out of that mindset. The marketing’s gross. It’s all marketing. If you’re putting content out there, you’re market.
Whether or not, you’re talking about your products or services and you should be talking about your products or services. And we’ve also got to start getting intentional with our marketing so that the things we’re putting out are building our brand, building our business in the way that we want to.
Then this week’s action step is to go back and listen to episodes 84 and 85 in those episodes, if you haven’t listened to them already, I’m first talking about how you can make time to create strategic content. And then we’re talking about four steps to take, to create strategic content and to come up with content that is strategic.
This week’s book recommendation is Again, But Better by Christine Ri, Ri, Riccio shoot. Sorry. Y’all know. I’m really good at butchering names. This book is the first book I’ve given five stars to on Good Reads in a very, very, very long time. It was so good. And the premise is all about. the idea of do overs in life and getting do overs a and chances not take in and things like that.
And it was so good. It was well-written, it was easy to move through highly recommend. So again, but better by Christine reshow, R I C C I O again as always, the link is in the show notes. If you want to check that out, my friend, I really hope that you found this episode. encouraging.
I hope that you’ve been able to reframe how you think about about marketing, or at least start taking steps to reframing that mindset, because it’s so important that you realize that if you’re putting content out, if you’re on social media, you are already marketing yourself.
And so I want you to do it in a way that’s intentional without that guilt of worrying about whether or not you feel gross or spammy, because. That is 100% a mindset that you have that’s holding you back. It’s not a mindset that our people have about you when you talk about your products, your services.
So I hope that you’ll go forward and uncomplicate your life in business, and I’ll see you right back here next week.
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