Marketing Without Selling?

Im new to this, admittedly, but I find certain things about marketing intuitive. Its natural that you would want to show off the best parts of your product. It’s also natural that you should identify your target customer and show them why your product can fit in their life. What isn’t natural to me is how to do this in a digestible way with integrity.

The first couple months of taking my brand to the next level have been very educational. I truly thought that one could effortlessly tell everybody about what they stand for and how to be a part of that mission just by saying so. While I am sure there are ways to do this, including an extended time period. I realize that the best way to do this is through strong marketing. Tapping into the infamous Facebook and Instagram Ads.

Being more of a “creative / artist” type, the science of marketing was a mysterious “business skill” in my mind. When I was younger I didn’t give marketing the respect it deserved because I thought it was too “sales-y”. My belief was that as you increase marketing, you decrease the purity of what you’re trying to offer. While I may be right to some extent, the degree to which I am willing to die on that sword is the degree to which I limit my ability to tell people about what I have to offer.

So what did I do? I tricked myself. Instead of saying I was “marketing” I said I was storytelling, this helped a bit. See, what I didn’t understand about marketing at first was a marketing campaign which actually stands out from the crowd is artistic. This was a good realization.

As I said last week I shot 3 different types of “ads”. These were my attempt at storytelling in a couple different ways, all with techniques that I learned from marketers and researching their tactics. However as I was shooting the ads I found something interesting. I thought “Hey we spend a long time thinking of these different ideas and ways to tell this story… why should we only get one use out of them.”. After thinking for awhile I realized that the trick was coming up with the foundation that the story was built off of, that was the hardest part. Kind of like the prep work when you’re trying to paint a house.

My bright idea was to take one of these foundations and then see if I could repurpose it across different platforms. A video that may work for Facebook may not work for Instagram. Something that performs well on Instagram may crash and burn on TikTok, and so on. This is where the “foundation” came in. I took the same foundation that I used to build one of the ads last week and am now taking it across different platforms. I am using the story as the fuel and letting it manifest itself across mediums. Check out my Instagram for the video. 

Love y’all,

Bobby