292: I hate marketing

Hate marketing at the moment? 

You aren’t alone - I have heard many people mention this to me recently. 

And to be honest - that energy isn’t going to get us anywhere! So I have created this podcast episode to help you check in, reassess and realign. 

Once you have a listen you will feel more energised, I promise. 

If you LOVED this episode, make sure you share this on your Instagram stories and tag us @contentqueenmariah.

⁠⁠⁠⁠LEARN THE DETAILS OF A CONTENT STRATEGY WITH MY FREE AUDIO GUIDE⁠⁠⁠⁠

KEY EPISODE TAKEAWAYS 👇

✨ Why you hate marketing right now 

✨ How you can learn to love marketing 

✨ What marketing ACTUALLY is 

SHOW RESOURCES 👇

If you like this episode, don't forget to share it to your Instagram stories and tag me⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ @contentqueenmariah⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠!

Other than that, enjoy - chat next week 💕

PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION

This is episode 292, and I hate marketing right now, so let's talk about it. Welcome to the Content Queen podcast. I'm your host, Mariah, entrepreneur storyteller, digital nomad, creative content bootcamp, and founder of Content Queen. I'm here to teach you how to share your unique story, create content, and market your business with strategy through the channel.

That work for you. Each week, I'll deliver a story to help you connect to a powerful strategy around marketing, business, and content creation. I'll also be joined by amazing souls and entrepreneurs who are here to share their own journey, along with actual steps, help you take your business to a whole new level through amazing storytelling.

Powerful aligned marketing and content strategy. Let's do it. Hello? Gain. Alright. Do I actually hate marketing? No, but this was something that I've been hearing a little bit. Many of clients. Many people just talking about how marketing just feels hard, like it's not working. All of the things you might relate, right?

You might see people getting, saying that they're making all of this money on social media, and you might see all these businesses and their videos going viral and all of the things that we see, and we just sit here and we go, well, why isn't that happening? So I hate marketing. I hate doing all this. Bs. I don't like to create content.

We, we tell ourselves all these stories, right? We get ourselves into a funk. I have had this happen to me so many times. You're not alone in this, and marketers would even hate marketing. There's tiktoks out there of, you know, trending audios. It's like. Talking about how you have a dysregulated nervous system, and it's just because you work in marketing, there is so much expectation on one thing.

I don't hear this around sales ever, but the interesting thing is marketing isn't sales. Sales is sales, marketing is marketing. So why do we have this hatred or this confusion around something that is purely there? To capture attention of people and funnel them down into buying from you. Sales, right? And we see this all the time in corporate companies, right?

We have dedicated departments, marketing and sales. To be honest, I see it in corporates where marketing sales don't even work together and that doesn't make sense. But you're a small business owner, so you have the power to have these both work together. But if you're telling yourself this story, you're not alone.

I've had calls, I've had conversations. It's happening. It's really people feeling very uninspired, very unmotivated by marketing. So we're gonna talk about it and the first thing we're gonna talk about is reassessing your goals and your energy. So. What am I trying to achieve by being on Instagram, by being on TikTok, by having a blog?

What is the desired outcome? And I've had conversations with clients all the time that go, yes, like I hate this. It's annoying me, da da, da. And then we go, okay, why are we here? Oh yeah, we are here because. This is a really good chance for me to network. So Instagram is a networking platform, or I really wanna run ads.

So it's a place where I'll run ads and I need organic content to, as a consequence of that, like I need it to work together. I wanna create brand awareness because I've started this business and I've got nothing out there, and I need to at least show. So when I am pitching and selling, I have stuff to show that the lights are on.

Everyone has a different reason. But what happens is in the process of shiny objects and social media gurus saying, and, and, and just the vanity and the dopamine hit of seeing those numbers go up, seeing a post reach thousands of people, millions of people, even seeing those like notifications come in, if anyone has seen the social dilemma as a documentary, this is why the social platforms exist and this is why we keep coming back to them.

It's the dopamine. Unless you're like me and has an absolute obsession with TikTok, not because of, and the dopamine hit, not because of the likes. 'cause I can't remember the last time I posted on the channel that I actually scroll on, but because of the things that I see on there. So that's my dopamine hit.

But a lot of us get it from the engagement,

but engagement's one element and the numbers. Of impressions and reach and how many likes you have is one element of building your business and creating impact. I've said this before, I've had many clients that have a really decent following on a channel from years of creating, not from five minutes of creating and their engagement.

You'd look at it and you go, oh, that doesn't suggest engagement of someone that has upwards of 10,000 connections on this platform. But they get the messages, the emails, the confessions, because on platforms like LinkedIn or even on Instagram, now, you can actually see who's liked what. So if people are private people, some people don't wanna see other people seeing what they're like and engaging with.

In the LinkedIn space, if you like something, people know because it goes into your news, like their newsfeed, and that could be really detrimental to your personal brand or your career. If you like something that. Your company doesn't stand for, or et cetera, et cetera, whatever it looks like. But if you check in with your goals of what am I trying to achieve on this platform?

It means, oh yeah, I have to keep reminding myself that every time I see something, does it align with my strategy and my goals? Does that make sense? Then you can go, oh, that's why I'm doing it, and you settle back down and you can go. I know why I'm here. And then you hate marketing less. I, I promise. The second one is, if you are hating marketing, because it feels boring, it feels same, same.

You're not inspired to showcase your brand and your business for the magic that it is and the magic that it creates. Find. Content you like or find a type of marketing that you like, so it could be a certain style of content. I just got off a meeting with a client and we were talking about LinkedIn and how we could potentially explore a certain specific style of content for that channel because we wanna reach a different audience a little bit differently.

We wanna talk about things a little bit differently. We're not gonna be posting like a full, you know, every day on there. We're gonna post a couple times a week, maybe once a week, but we wanna create something that really stands out. So we're exploring some different styles of content that we could create on LinkedIn that we know will stand out.

Whereas on Instagram, it might just settle in with, you know, what's currently on there, because LinkedIn is a bit of a different channel. So finding that, is it video? Is it cool infographics? Is it a carousel? Sharing a story? Is it. Just check back in and go like, what do I like to do? What do I like to create?

I remember this time last year, Mitch and I had to sit down and rework my content strategy 'cause I was feeling really uninspired and yeah, I could say I hated marketing at that point. Generally throw it in the bin. I'm over it, I'm done with it. And I to do it for clients. So I sat down, I looked first at my vision, my North Star as it's now called, new terminology for vision, as Mitch alerted to me the other day on our casual beach walk.

But I checked back in, what's the vision? What do we wanna achieve? Yep. Cool. And then I could see my business vision, what I wanted to do. And then it helped me with the marketing. 'cause I could go backwards from there. So that's kind of iterating the first point too. And then I went, okay, what do I like to do?

Oh, I could really talk about this and I wanna do this. And then I started using my iPad and like doing things, which actually, to be fair, I haven't done that in a little. Because at the moment I'm traveling, so I'm really inspired with when we're on a bike ride or when we're in the car driving. Like I feel really inspired by my environment.

So it's a lot easier to create, but if you're not find that style or even the type of marketing. Maybe at the moment your social media, again, if you go back to your goals, it's about brand awareness. It's about getting yourself out there. Maybe you love networking, maybe you love writing a blog. Maybe you love joining other people's podcasts, like whatever it is.

Then you double down on that and have. Obviously you don't want to just put all your eggs in that basket, but you have the other channels that feed off the thing that you love doing. If you love networking, how can your social media be a place where after the networking people go, which spoiler alert, next week's episode is a guest about networking.

So that's gonna be fun, but. If you go, yeah, I love networking. Okay, someone follows me on Instagram, what's on the page? It might be lots of people. Really something that it describes your business. So it acts as a, as a bit of a funnel. People meet you at the marketing event, or sorry, at the networking event.

They go onto your page, they see some content that they like and they keep engaging with your content. You might tag them and keep them re-engaged. When you do a post about the event you went to, whatever it is, find it. It's a challenge for you. If you are on Spotify, there's a comment section. Tell me what it is.

I can reply back to you and we can have a little chitchat. And the third one is, remember, this isn't sales. You have to sell as well. Now people will argue, of course you share sales type content in your marketing for sure, but you can't just post, uh, something on social media and go, oh, yep, sales activity is done.

We can, you know, put that in the drawer for another day. No. And I saw an amazing video from a woman that I absolutely love, and she was on the podcast a few years ago now, Suze Chadwick. And she said, you don't have a sales team. You are the sales team. You can't avoid selling. It is what it is. Do I particularly like selling?

No, not really. Do I wanna message people? And I mean, cold dms not a vibe anyway. But do I like doing the sales activities that I need to do? Not always do I like asking people for things. No, but it's part of business. And you'll be very surprised when you send those emails out to potential clients or customers or message them, engage with them that.

They were probably just forgotten about you and your message went, oh yeah, I need to buy from them. I've wanted to buy from them for ages. Happens all the time. I put an email out last week to a woman that engaged in my services and then didn't go through with the ongoing work, and I've thought of something new that I'd like to try, and I asked her if she would wanna learn more about the beta round.

Yeah. I've just put it in the drawer 'cause I've forgotten about it. So just as much as you are putting social media, you know what? The sales in the drawer, they're putting the thought of buying from you in the drawer because outta sight, outta mind, they've just parked it somewhere, forgotten about it. So marketing, yes, you can have emails go out that share what you offer.

You can have social posts that share your latest sale or your event or whatever it is you're promoting. You can have it in a banner or on your blog. You can talk about in your podcast like I've shared when I've had bootcamp running, but that is like the marketing element of sales. You've also still gotta do selling activities, be in front of people via engagement.

Do any types of outreach go to those networking events with business cards or whatever it looks like. I don't know what we're doing these days. You still have to sell. So marketing is marketing and sales is sales, but we do often blur them and meet. They work really well together, but they're not the same thing.

So if you're hating marketing at the moment, hating show up on social media. Because it's not generating sales. Maybe go back a few steps and warm the people up so then you can engage with them to buy your products or service. And that's it. That's all I have for you. Hopefully it's ignited a spark in you to go, oh yeah.

We love marketing. And remember, energy is energy. If you say, I hate marketing, I hate social media, I hate content, then yeah. You will and you will for the whole duration of your business until you either decide to like it or you outsource it or whatever. But even if you outsource it and you don't see the power in it, it's still not gonna work.

You have to know it's gonna work for you. I've had people where, you know, they say no marketing gonna outsource it, and then they still don't bring the energy to it, and then when they learn to love it, that's when they get the results. I've seen it happen. I've seen it happen with a client before when we work together.

And they didn't really see the benefit of marketing. And then, you know, at least I sort of talked about it in a different light, then they could start to see, oh, okay. So then when we finished working together and they went on to do their marketing, they found this love and passion and I can see it's really working well for them.

That's just what happens. You have to have the energy for it. So where can you learn to love it? Maybe it's none of these things that I suggested here, but it most likely may be. Have a think about it. Let me know what comes up and be a content queen or king, and remember that developing a strategy and story, develop your business.

Thank you so much for joining me today, and please don't forget to share this with all your business and entrepreneurial friends. Maybe we've had conversations and everyone, everyone hates marketing at the moment. Share this with them. You can share it to Insta Stories and tagging me at content. Queen Mariah, this could be your commitment to say, I love marketing again.

I'm gonna market. What I'm listening to and show a bit of behind the scenes of my business on my Instagram stories. You can tag me, I'll share it or just tell 'em about it. And if you do rate and review on this platform, it does help me get amazing guests. I've got amazing guests lined up, but we want more.

We need more. We always need more. So if you wanna see amazing guests continue to be on the show and me on the show, please leave a rating or review. Follow me on TikTok or Instagram and if there are any topics, anything you're struggling with, please reach out. Let me know. I would love to cover them, and I'll talk to you next week.

Bye.

PodcastMariah MacInnesmarketing, marketing advice, how to be authentic online, business ownerComment