How to increase wellbeing in your business through aesthetic marketing.
As small business owners, our marketing is one of those things we always seem to feel guilty about. We rarely manage to keep on top of it, to keep it consistent and to maintain the quality of what we’re putting out there. Our own marketing usually gets left until last, landing at the bottom of our to-do lists while we prioritize our clients and forget about what our own business needs.
It’s easy to draw parallels with our personal lives in a modern-day society. We’re often prioritizing others, our family and our friends, and what they need from us. To the extent that we often forget to fill our own cups, and we end up feeling tired, frazzled and burned-out.
However, if you do want to maintain a steady flow of potential clients, whether that’s to increase or simply improve the quality of your customer base, you need to make sure you’re giving your own business what it needs to flourish and prosper too. This means consistent content marketing. And that’s not all. Giving your business what it needs also means giving yourself what you need so you can show up as the best version of yourself as both a business owner, and a creative.
Here, we’re sharing 3 content marketing tips to help you increase your wellbeing within your business by marketing it aesthetically.
Aesthetic marketing for small business owners.
In previous blog posts, we’ve discussed what aesthetic marketing is and how we can appeal to consumers by creating an emotional experience that feels good for them. But what about making ourselves feel good through our marketing too? This is a form of aesthetic marketing as well.
We’ve therefore created the following tips with a view to helping you feel good in your marketing. The idea is that if you feel good in your marketing, in turn, you can create the kind of experience you want for your audience.
Content marketing tips to help you increase your wellbeing.
1) Compare how you currently feel about your marketing with how you want to feel.
In her book The Desire Map, Danielle LaPorte suggests identifying your desired feelings to help guide your actions.
This is the first step. Ask yourself how you currently feel about your marketing before understanding how you’d like to feel in the future. Does your marketing leave you feeling guilty, exhausted, overwhelmed, or maybe even dependent on other people’s approval? How would you like it to make you feel moving forwards? Would you like your marketing to be a rewarding experience? Would you like to feel proud of what you’re putting out there? Or would you just like the whole process to feel easy?
If you’re able to observe how you currently feel and how you want to feel, you can more easily identify what you need to do to arrive at your desired destination and achieve your goals.
Identifying how you want to feel about your marketing will help you shape your marketing activities moving forwards. For example, if you’re aiming for a rewarding experience, you might use your marketing to give back to others. If you want to feel proud of your content, perhaps you’ll decide to focus on sharing less but on spending more time on what you create. Or, if you just want your marketing to feel easy, perhaps you’ll decide to outsource the creative process to an agency that understands who you are and why you do what you do.
2) Ask yourself which part of your marketing you enjoy.
The likelihood is that you want to feel more positive emotions towards your marketing. You probably want to feel proud, in control, or possibly excited by your marketing. So, the next step is to understand what will elicit these positive emotions.
Ask yourself what part of content creation you enjoy and make sure you do more of it. Which aspects will allow you to bring your authentic self into the process?
Being your authentic self is your biggest differentiator. Your uniqueness is what will make people do business with you. It’s what will stimulate consumers to buy your products or use your services. There are very few products and services nowadays that are truly innovative. But what makes someone invest in your product or service rather than someone else’s is what makes it different. And what makes it different is you!
How you present your product/service, the way you show your style, and how you respond to your clients on a human level will shape your company’s voice and reveal its values. And this is what will resonate with consumers because you’re being genuine. You’re being unique, authentic and unapologetically you.
There are many aspects of your marketing that might allow you to bring your authentic self into the process. You might find that you enjoy graphic design, content writing, photography, strategy, coming up with creative ideas, or anything else you can think of.
If you’re going to market your business consistently, it’s important to bring play into the creative process so your marketing feels joyful rather than a chore. You want it to be fun and dynamic so you can feed off that energy and bring a real sense of “you” to your content.
3) Outsource all the things you don’t enjoy.
The chores mentioned above are all those things you don’t enjoy that hold you back. They’re the tasks that feel like a burden and act as a stumbling block when it comes to sharing content you love on a consistent basis.
For example, you might not have an eye for detail and find you have to concentrate really hard to proofread your content. Proofreading might be a task you always put off, which might then prevent you from publishing content when you’d originally planned to. In the same way, you might have all the ideas and texts for your content ready, but you might find that presenting them visually in Canva so they look good takes hours of your time, ultimately delaying publication. Consider outsourcing whatever it is that seems to take you forever, that frustrates you, or that prevents you from sharing your content.
Not only will outsourcing these tasks help you feel happier in your marketing and able to keep on top of it more consistently, it will also improve the quality of your content, which will have a knock-on effect on your audience’s experience.
Think about your own impression and intuition when looking at other people’s content. When you’re consuming content, you can always tell how much the creator has enjoyed putting it together and how inspired they feel. At the end of the day, you want your audience to feel the same joy consuming your content as you did creating it.
A note on the emotion behind the numbers.
Previously, we’ve also explored why aesthetic marketing is about more than the metrics and why numbers aren’t an accurate reflection of success. This is particularly the case when it comes to how you feel about your marketing.
If you’re proud of the content you put out there and if it speaks directly to your ideal audience, you’re more likely to get a positive reaction. And by positive reaction, we’re not talking about the number of likes on a social media post but about who responds to your post and how.
When your content speaks directly to a very specific audience, the number of people it will appeal to is naturally going to be reduced. However, at the same time, by talking directly to your ideal client, you're more likely to receive a positive response, such as an encouraging comment, a conversion, or even a sale.
If you’re connecting with your audience through your content and receiving positive feedback, your marketing will automatically feel better and more fulfilling, which will naturally increase your wellbeing. Rather than focusing on numbers, focus on the outcomes and on building a supportive community.
Feeling good about your content is the first step towards marketing consistently in a way that will appeal to your ideal customer. Putting your authentic self into the process, bringing a little joy, and feeling proud of what you’re sharing are all things that will encourage others to respond positively to what you’ve created.
If you’re currently feeling unhappy about your marketing and are unsure how to turn it around, get in touch and we’ll help set you on the right path.