Like a lot of writers, creators, and entrepreneurs, I have a hard time with marketing. It isn’t because I don’t know “how.” I’ve studied marketing and all its trends for years starting in college when I got my business degree.
I hate marketing. It is so exhausting!
It feels manipulative and false. Marketers are all the time trying to find the biggest pain point we have and dig in, trying to make us feel like we are not enough, or creating a false urgency that is arbitrary and only designed to get us to ACT NOW.
So, in a lot of ways, it doesn’t just feel manipulative. It is manipulative.
I’ve used these tactics in the past and felt icky about it the entire time. I thought it was something I would have to get over. Or perhaps I didn’t believe in what I was trying to sell. I didn’t have the confidence, the extraverted behaviors, or a loud enough voice to do marketing well for myself.
And that might be true to a certain degree. But a lot of it had to do with the fact that I just don’t like the way traditional marketing is thought about and done.
Mindset is important, so if I didn’t like the way traditional marketing made me feel, then I was less inclined to do it. I started trying to think of it in terms of sharing and creating community because that is what I want. I want to share information that builds community. But that M-word kept looming over everything I did, making me less inclined to do any type of sharing.
I looked up synonyms for “marketing” and found words like “propaganda.” That’s a nope from me.
Then I found “growth.” That word made marketing a little more palatable, but it still didn’t seem quite right. I searched for synonyms of “growth” and that is where I found the word that replaced “marketing” for me.
Expansion.
Expansion is a word I’ve already used often because of writing and teaching about goal setting. Goal setting is often created from a place of lack — just like marketing.
We aren’t good enough, so we need to meet this goal to be better.
We aren’t good enough, so we need to buy this thing to be better.
*Eye roll*. We are good enough right now. We don’t need to improve or be better versions of ourselves, but there is always room to learn, grow, and expand.
Expansion allows for growth in all areas: personal, business, and community.
It doesn’t begin from a place of lack. It starts from where we are and builds, allowing us to expand our knowledge. And as we grow and expand, we are able to show up in our communities in new ways.
Changing that one word allowed me to think about marketing expansion in an exciting new way — like why not have fun with it? I am sharing and learning and growing along with my community.
We are expanding together.