How to Reclaim Your Power in Marketing

The Conscientious Professional’s Dilemma

For the last fifteen years, I’ve been working with sensitive, creative professionals like you who have something tremendously valuable they want to share with the world. I see how often these soul-based business owners struggle with what feels like a conflict between their desire to be successful and their discomfort with marketing.

If this is you, you may know in your heart that you simply aren’t marketing yourself actively enough to create the results you want. Or, if you are taking steps to put yourself out there, you may not be happy with the results you’ve produced.

And since you are a conscientious human being, who doesn’t want to do harm to others, you may also have fears, concerns, and reservations about replicating some of the marketing techniques you see other people using. (You may even be thinking that you don’t like some of the things I do in my marketing, and that’s ok too. My goal is not to get you to do what I do.)

You may have decided that certain marketing practices (you know, long sales letters, frequent emails, special bonuses, big launches, etc.) just aren’t your thing. You may have labeled those practices as pushy or manipulative and that’s the last thing you want to be!

But, without those techniques in your repertoire, you aren’t left with that many other options to bring in your ideal clients and make the most of your promotional efforts. Unless you are solely focused on growing a private practice, that could be a problem.

Reclaim Your Power in Business and Marketing

Your effectiveness as a business owner and marketer is about more than the actions you take. There are underlying energetics that also impact your presence and your power at showing up in the world. If you want to begin to shift your energy around marketing here are four steps to take:

1. Focus on the job of helping your audience make good buying decisions.

If you aren’t making yourself visible, your prospects won’t know you exist. If you don’t extend yourself in making a case for your services, your audience will be interested, but won’t buy. And if you apply too much pressure, people may stay away, or say yes, and then regret it.

Not sure if a particular marketing strategy is right for you? Ask yourself this: does this help my prospect make a good decision about whether or not my stuff is for them? Yes, go for it. No, try something else.

2. Be a powerful consumer.

Take responsibility for your own buying decisions. Stop blaming anyone for what you say yes to. Notice where your buttons get pushed. When you feel frantic and desperate.

3. Refocus any energy you’ve invested in judging and blaming how others market.

I’ve seen firsthand how smart, gifted people use their creative energy to knock what I am doing, critique how I am expressing myself in the world, fantasize about how I might be manipulating them, instead of creating their own marketing campaigns.

When you demonize someone else for marketing that you find less than warm and fuzzy, you cut off your connection to that part of yourself, to the part of you that wants to make money, and get sales. Without that part alive and integrated in you, you won’t have full access to all of your internal resources for creating success.

4. Choose to believe that the world is full of good-hearted people with great services to offer who are experimenting and exploring for themselves how to best bring in business.

I don’t think anyone out there has all the answers about how to market. They are doing their best to serve their audience, and serve their business. Celebrate their efforts, vote with your dollars and your attention, and give yourself the same permission to experiment and stretch.

This is an excerpt from material we’ll be expanding in 2011 for a product on transforming your relationship with marketing.

© 2010. Isabel Parlett