 In this video, I want to talk with you about reframing marketing as a benevolent activity. If you're someone who's had some issues with marketing and selling yourself, I believe that this video will help you to see it from a new light and allow you to actually enjoy marketing, and to do it in a way that feels really good, not just to your bottom line and to your business, but it feels good to your heart and to your soul. So let's get started. First of all, the way that people typically think about marketing is it's about persuading. And I want to say that instead of persuasion and conversion, let's talk about marketing as alignment and nurturing. So a great analogy for this would be hunting versus farming. The way that most marketing is taught is the hunting model, which is you are targeting an audience and then you are converting them. You're kind of getting past their defenses, right? Sales, getting past their defenses, overcoming, right? Overcoming, like in hunting, you're overcoming their objections, and then you're roping them in to your side, and you are basically treating your audience like objects to manipulate and to do with what you want. No wonder marketing and sales often doesn't feel right to us. Sometimes it also feels like you're trying to wear someone down, you know? And so that's kind of the hunting model, the chase and the hunt. But instead, let's look at it from the farming framework, which is that marketing, when it's done well, can be about planting seeds in the right soil that is the right environment. So you don't just scatter seeds on the gravel and expect them to grow. You find the right environments, you plant the right seeds, and then you nurture them with the right ingredients, right? You nurture them with care and compassion, observing what is working, what's growing, and then doing more of that, okay? So you see how when you're looking at marketing from a farming perspective, it is so much more nurturing, and also I would say it is more long-term thinking. When a plant is just starting to grow out of the ground, you don't go, oh my gosh, it's starting to grow. Let me yank it up, because I want it to grow faster. No, you nurture it, you let it grow at the right time. Obviously you don't just plant one seed. You plant multiple seeds, and you water them, and you look at which ones are growing well, and maybe you tend specifically to those. So let this idea of marketing as farming, not hunting, think about that, and try to do your marketing going forward from this way. Let me give you some specifics on how to do marketing from a kind of farming perspective. So first of all, marketing is about aligning, okay? Marketing means instead of trying to convince somebody that they must buy your thing, marketing is about aligning your skills and your soul's expression, really, with what the right people are happy to buy. So know this, right, that there is a lot of need in the world. There is, people have a lot of pain, and people also have a lot of yearnings, a lot of dreams, and marketing is basically the activity of aligning what you're good at, and what you love to do, with what are the specific pains and dreams that your gifts can address, right? It's not that your skills and experiences can address every single pain and need in the world. Maybe later on I'll talk about that, it's marketing greed, but your skills are particularly suited for particular pains from particular people, or particular dreams from particular audiences. So marketing as aligning is the practice of observing, experimenting, and observing what aspects of your skills align well with what problems want to be solved, or what dreams people are seeking now to reach, okay? So the question, the question is to keep answering in your marketing journey. It's a journey, it's not a one-time thing where this weekend I figured out my marketing and it's going to be the same thing forever. No, you're going to keep changing, you're going to keep understanding yourself better and better over the years, and also the market will keep changing, and the market will need you to describe what you do according to what is current, what people need at this time, what they understand the language to be at this time. So the question that asks is, what is so painful, okay, what is so painful that people are willing to spend money on solving that I can uniquely help with, okay? And another question to observe could be, and turning it around, is what's so entertaining or what's so interesting that people are willing to spend money to experience more of that I can provide, all right? So aligning is the first activity of marketing. The second activity of marketing is filtering. In marketing, you're not, you know, it's a waste of time to talk to everybody because not everybody is your right customer or client. There are certain types of people who you don't have to convince. They are much more right where they are in their life, where they are with their certain problems that are much more right and ready to listen to you, okay? So marketing is about filtering out who isn't right for you in your marketing and also filtering in who is right. So you do this through what you say on your website. You do this through what you write on your social media. You do this through what you, you know, write in any of your marketing communications including your emails. So for example, I'm not trying to reach every business owner in the world. I'm particularly trying to reach a particular business owner who shares a certain set of values with me. And you could probably get pretty clear as you watch my videos and consume my content. Some people are turned off by when I talk about, you know, spiritual things or my values. And guess what? I filter them out because they can be better served by other people who don't talk about maybe higher values in business or marketing. And that's fine. That's totally fine. I'm only talking with certain types of people, right? The other thing is, for example, I don't try to serve every level of business in the world. I'm not trying to reach the Fortune 500 companies to get me as a consultant. I have a particular passion and skill for helping the solopreneur, you know, the life coach, the executive coach, the therapist, you know, the counselor, the healer, the one who has a message to share and doesn't want an enormous staff to do it. They just want to be able to do a good business, a true livelihood and make a great impact with their message using free tools and also earn an income from serving clients, right? So I'm trying to serve a particular type of person. I'm filtering out those who aren't and filtering in those who are. And I invite you to do the same thing. Who isn't perfect for your solution and who is. And this is, again, something you will discover over time as you serve different types of people. You will start to discover who you want to filter out and who you want to filter in. So otherwise what happened is you're wasting your valuable life and energy serving those who are not really meant for you. And on the other hand, you are not spending the valuable time and energy to serve those, reach out to those who are perfect for you, right? So marketing is about filtering. Third, marketing is about nurturing, right? As I talked about the farming analogy, once you have known what the right situations are and planted the seed, now you nurture them. It's not enough just to having first met someone who's right for you, say, Oh my gosh, you're perfect for me. Please buy all my services, right? You need to nurture that relationship so that when the time is right, you can invite them. And what is nurturing? You give the world as much valuable free content as you are willing to give. And I hope over time, as you follow my free content, I'm hoping to inspire you to share more of your free content. And I will talk about that in other videos where it is so important to share your content for free because it grows you. It's not just good for your marketing. It grows you more than you can possibly imagine, and you're serving the world in far bigger ways than you could possibly imagine. So serve, nurture through valuable free content and also offer valuable free help that you can do sustainably, not all day long. You're answering free questions, but you design your life and design the way you spend your time so that you are offering some free help, but you're offering free content that is, guess what, it doesn't matter if a million people watch this video or one person, right? It's the same amount of time that I spent making it. So that's content is a very strategic way to help for free. Nurturing with, as you build enough trust, you can then go to the next stage of marketing, which is inviting. You invite those who have been filtered in to you and have been nurtured to then experience more, if it's right for them, to experience more than what you can give for free. Okay? And you offer it at a reasonable cost compared to all the benefit you're giving them and also hopefully compared to what they can find in the market as well. And the last thing that marketing is about, that a lot of people don't talk about, that I want to spend just a minute on, is that marketing is also about introducing your audience to the other types of services they need that you don't offer. Remember earlier I mentioned marketing greed. I want to talk a bit about that. We all can probably agree that greed is not the best thing in the world. Greed is where people accumulate a lot of things or money that they don't themselves need and therefore other people cannot have those same things, right? Gandhi said, one of my heroes, Gandhi said, live simply so that others can simply live. The earth cannot support everyone's greed. It can support everyone's need, okay? So marketing is about coming to a narrow sliver of whom and my best qualify to serve. Whom do I best love to serve and I make best good at serving and what do I best do for them? And it's a journey to find that out. And then as you get to know who they are, you get to know that they have other needs and other wants, that you are not best at serving, then you can then introduce other solutions to your ideal audience. Your ideal audience will be grateful that you're the one who introduced those solutions that they also wanted and you're also going to make more friends, the other solutions providers who may then introduce you to their audience. You don't make it up. You must reciprocate. Don't do that. You serve, you primarily serve your audience by bringing the right resources and then if it's right, if the friendship is right, then they might introduce you as well. So I hope that that is a helpful way to reframe marketing so that you can see it as a benevolent activity that you can actually enjoy and see as a service in and of itself.