Unlearn marketing and reboot back to creative

Marketing? Blech!

Do you dislike words like leads, sales, and marketing? If so, you’re not alone. Lots of creative people do. But they ignore their distaste, put on their business hats and go to work.

Does this sound familiar?

• You know certain tasks have to be done to promote your business, but you don’t really enjoy telling everyone how great you are. You’d rather show them.
• You’ve trained yourself to be more businesslike. You’ve learned some of the jargon, like ‘marketing funnel’ and ‘return on investment.’
• You try to shut off the creative part of your brain when you deal with customers, in an effort to be more professional.

What if you didn’t have to think in such businesslike terms to get results?

Let’s think about things differently, and define a few things in non-marketing language.

• Prospects – people who might like your work, if they knew about it.
• Leads – people who have expressed an interest in your work.
• Sales – what happens when people like your work enough to pay you for it.
• Marketing – the process of you letting people who might like your work know enough about it, and see enough examples, that they want to pay you for it.

Unlearn marketing and reboot your mindset

Assuming that you’ve been forcing yourself to think in business terms, rethinking things in this simple, but smart, way puts you back in your natural space of an artistic person who creates things for others to enjoy, and allows you to focus on the needs and wants of those who might become customers.

It’s not that you won’t do the things that put your offerings in front of customers, but you will stop thinking about them as an entry on a spreadsheet and think about potential buyers as real people again. 

Adjusting your mindset this way makes it more likely that you’ll communicate as your unique self and generate fresh ideas for pulling in new people, so you don’t just end up spouting a bunch of typical marketing messages that they already get everywhere else. Put the focus on your audience and what they want, then talk to them in your unique voice.

Play to your strengths as a creative person

Communicate with people while wearing your creator’s hat and tell them your real, human story. That’s probably the reason they liked you in the first place, and it’s part of the biggest advantage you have over mass marketers. Be whatever delicious treat that you are, not standard bland fare.