LIKE MARRIAGE, MARKETING without passion falls flat. It begins with a whisper: You start going through the motions, engaging in the same habits day in and day out, having the same conversations, and eventually, both parties tune out. I suspect at this point at least some of you are reaching for your phones, ordering flowers and making reservations to take your spouse on a date. That’s a good impulse! But as soon as you do that, let’s turn the same attention to your marketing.
How much attention are you paying to your messages, the visuals you use to support them, and ways you communicate with your customers? If you’re not able to dredge up any strong emotion or enthusiasm for your marketing outreach, it’s possible that you don’t need a marketing adjustment . . . you need a passion adjustment.
No judgement if you’re feeling a dearth of passion for your business. Last year was a tough year, and 2021 hasn’t exactly started out easy. Even if your business did quite well in 2020 (and many jewelry businesses did), the ongoing health, social, and political stress drain our energy. It takes intention and focus to put the passion back in anything, so let’s review a few proven methods of passion-infusion.
6 Steps to Reclaiming Your Marketing Passion
Start with your main motivation, which is the answer to the question:
1. Why do you market? You market to find new customers and stay top-of-mind with existing customers, so you can increase revenue, so you can do more of the things you want to do in both your business and your personal life. The day-in-day-out grind of having to come up with marketing causes us to focus on the what and the how. But it’s the why that helps us realign with motivation and reattach to our passion.
2. Go beyond why. What is your bigger purpose for owning your business? Is it to contribute to your family legacy? Be a job-creator within your community? Maintain personal autonomy? Contribute a collection of beautiful jewelry for posterity? Remember that marketing is a way of delivering your over-arching purpose, and suddenly each advertisement and social post takes on a higher meaning.
3. Articulate your values. Each business has a set of values, sometimes simply driven by the owner’s personal values, and sometimes intentionally created as a group effort. Those values mean something to your customers and prospects, and your marketing should convey your values consistently. Post your values in a conspicuous place, to reflect on each time you create marketing. Make sure your marketing staff (internal and external) understand those values. If you insist that each marketing element convey your values in some way, you’ll produce more meaningful and interesting messages.
4. Use good memories as fuel for marketing ideas. Every business is filled with frustrations and mistakes large and small — and we tend to focus on those irritants. But your business is also filled with good memories; customers whom you love and who love you, past and present relationships among your team, practical jokes played, meals shared, and accolades earned. Start a memory project by inviting each of your team members to contribute to a memory book. Every time they think of a good memory, have them jot it down. Then, use those memories to fuel marketing ideas large and small. Just looking at the memory book before doing your marketing activities will put you in the right mindset to create passion-infused messages and promotions.
5. Which brings us to the next way to reclaim your passion: Stop overthinking. Your next ad isn’t running in the Super Bowl, and unless it’s a billboard or being run for many weeks on repeat, it won’t make a significant impression on your audience. That may sound terrible, but that’s the nature of most advertising; your goal is to make hundreds of small, consistent impressions over time, not to make one giant impression. So stop overthinking it! Align each message with your immediate intention, your higher purpose, and your values. Infuse your messages with the energy of good memories, and put something out there! One of the biggest reasons for failure-to-market is not being able to decide what to do, for which overthinking is the most common cause.
6. Think of the good you’re doing! That’s right — marketing does good. When you reach a client or a prospect with a message that resonates and a product they need, you are helping them. We tend to impose our own feelings of burden on others, because we get tired of spammy email and jam-packed-with-ads news feeds. But stop for a moment and think of the ads that reach you and make you think, “That’s exactly what I need! I’ve been looking for that!” That’s the goal of marketing. And the more consistently you do the things in this list, the more likely you are to reach the people who are, in fact, looking for you.
Interestingly, one of the most pronounced marketing and selling imperatives of the post-pandemic world is that brands with a clear expression of and attachment to values are more resonant with consumers. Not only will following this list make marketing easier and more fun, but rekindling your marketing passion will also help you connect with your audience.