If you clicked on this post, chances are you’re struggling to understand what marketing really is & how to apply it to your business or organization.
I can relate. The idea feels vague and slippery, hard to grasp. Like grabbing a fistful of jello.
You learn a little bit about marketing and you feel like you’ve figured it out. But then some new blog or social media post pops into your feed, and you realize you’ve only grasped a small part.
There’s content marketing, influencer marketing, social media marketing, PR. Then copywriting, sales psychology, SEO, Google ads. There’s Instagram, but you should really be on TikTok, but oh wait, Bluesky is here!
No wonder it feels too large to decipher. How is a regular everyday small business owner supposed to figure it out?
Conduct a simple search on Google for “what is marketing,” and a heap of definitions pop up to help. The problem is, none of them make much sense OR help you start to apply the concept to your actual, real-life business:
Instead of this, I’m going to give you a way simpler definition that will help you not only understand what marketing is, but also make it easier to implement in your business or organization.
Once you understand this, you won’t have to worry when you see the latest social media expert telling you that “all videos need to be under 4 seconds” or “this is the latest trend YOU need to follow.”
You’ll be able to relax & know that you’re doing what’s best for your business. You might even create new trends in your field instead of being spoon-fed trends from someone else.
I know I’m making some big claims here, but I’m honestly frustrated when so-called “experts” make marketing seem so complicated.
The truth is, if you know your target customer well, then you already have what you need to succeed in marketing your business or organization.
Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, let’s look at my marketing definition of choice.
*drum roll please* …
Marketing is the act of sharing ideas in order to help others.
That’s it.
In his classic book All Marketers Tell Lies, marketing expert Seth Godin writes, “Marketing is about spreading ideas.” In other words, “If you’ve got an idea to spread, you’re now a marketer.”
It’s not about selling stuff. It’s about sharing ideas so that people start to think differently.
When they think differently, they act differently and buy differently.
Now, in order to market your business or organization, you can share super simple ideas.
Your ideas don’t have to be ground-breaking, like a cure for cancer or a way to solve world hunger.
No, they can be as simple as:
These are all new ideas (you can think of them as new pieces of information) that your target market will benefit from knowing.
And by sharing these ideas, you can reap these rewards:
So ask yourself: what does your target market need to know to start considering your business and offer?
(By the way, you can use a framework called the Stages of Awareness to figure this out.)
Those are the ideas you need to spread.
Okay, so hopefully by now it’s clear that marketing is really all about sharing ideas.
Now you’ll need to figure out what ideas to share, where you should share them, and how to share them to communicate them in the best way possible.
Answer these 4 questions to figure that out.
Who is the target audience for your business or organization? What characteristics, desires & problems define your target market? How much do they know about you, your industry, and your solution? What do they *not* know that you can teach them?
What does your target audience want? What are they trying to achieve? What problems are they experiencing that you can help with?
What ideas will make a real, positive impact on your target audience? And importantly, what ideas will help them understand your offers and the value they hold?
You can:
Where does your target audience spend their time and consume information?
Instead of worrying about all the social media platforms under the sun, take inventory of where your unique audience spends their time.
Maybe they spend hours on Instagram but also read Vogue magazine, listen to true crime podcasts, and frequent their local farmer’s market. Those are all places where you could place content or advertise to try and reach your people.
This is the fun part of marketing!
As long as you’re focused on reaching your target market with ideas, you can do it any way that makes sense to you. No longer are you worried about SEO and email marketing and TikTok… it’s just what will give us the best chance of reaching our target audience in the limited time we have? And forget the rest.
(Here’s a word nerd side note: the word “marketing” came from ancient merchants who would go to the markets to promote their wares. They went there because, of course, that’s where the people hung out!)
The second part is, wherever we choose to share these ideas, how can we make sure they see it and consume it? That’s where you have to study your platform of choice and see what’s already working and how you can do something unique and different so people will take notice.
And finally, how do we communicate these ideas so our target audience can understand them? What do we say so they listen and understand and feel the way we want them to feel? This is a skill that you can grow with practice. But if you’re a good communicator in person, you can do it in marketing, too.
The key is to make your best guess, start sharing regularly, and iterate as you go.
(To be honest, that’s what all of us marketers do! We just pretend like we know what we’re doing.)
On this site, I hope to share more deep dives into each type of platform and type of content so you can get the basics quickly. So bookmark this blog and check back often!
I hope that this little essay will help you free yourself from the weeds of…
…and zoom out to what really matters.
Focus on going to where your people are and giving them good ideas that will help them achieve their goals. Your marketing strategy will figure itself out.