How to Market Your Business (Without Selling Your Soul)

My full-time job (which isn’t filmmaking or writing blog posts, shockingly) is in marketing.

And if you had approached me years ago, when I was a bright-eyed college student studying film, and told me that I would be doing marketing for a living, I would’ve laughed at you.

And then I probably would’ve cried.

Because when I was in college, I took some marketing classes and considered marketing as a career path. I looked at advertising, studied PR, and investigated the ways that modern brands use their influence to market their products and services.

What I found was distressing, to say the least.

A majority of what I looked at in the world of modern marketing was predatory, invasive, and manipulative. And that’s putting it lightly.

Almost every school of thought surrounding marketing was based on the idea that the advertiser’s job was to convince the consumer that they absolutely needed whatever they were selling, and they were to do that through whatever means necessary.

And I think that sucks.

For a long time, that idea left a really bad taste in my mouth. I was absolutely opposed to working in marketing, strictly because the idea of manipulating someone for my own benefit was diametrically opposed to my sense of working with and relating with others.

So I tried to avoid marketing as long as I could. Then, pretty surprisingly, I ended up applying for (and getting) a job working as a marketing creative for a non-profit.

Then, on the side, I started my freelance videography business. And as you can probably guess, being a freelancer involves a lot of marketing.

So I set out on a mission to find strategies for marketing in a moral way that’s still effective. To build brand recognition without selling your own soul.

Please, for the Sake of all that is Good, Don’t Lie About Your Product

This is the first heading because it’s the most obvious one, and yet it somehow needs to be said.

Don’t lie to your customers. Ever.

I mean, you shouldn’t lie to anyone, but this is a post about marketing.

Please don’t make things up about your product or service and try to market it as something that it’s not. From an ethical standpoint, it’s obviously bad. But even from a business standpoint, it’s a terrible idea.

All business is built on trust. As a consumer, when I purchase something, I’m purchasing it based on the trust I have that the person or company who made it, made it in the way that they told me, and that the product will do what I expect it to do based on what I have been told.

It seems like a simple idea, but it’s unbelievably common in these days of digital internet marketing to straight up lie about a product.

We have entire websites dedicated to selling you one thing but sending you something very different (we’ve all seen the Wish ads on Facebook).

So as someone with at least enough experience in marketing to be writing a blog post about it (and if you’re this far into it I assume you at least trust me a little) I’m telling you right now: never lie about what you’re selling.

Instead, work hard to showcase what makes your product different or what benefit your customer will actually obtain by purchasing.

And if you can’t think of a way that your product or service makes your customer’s life better in some way, you should make a different product.

There’s no reason to be selling, let alone marketing, something that won’t make the world a better place. That’s another thing that should go without saying, but here we are.

Get Excited About What You Offer

Marketing, at its core, is all about excitement.

You want your customers to be excited to buy your product or your service, and you want them to be enthusiastic and happy about what they receive.

You should be excited, too!

If you expect your customers to be head-over-heels happy about what they’re receiving, then you need to be as or more excited than you want them to be (and if you don’t expect them to be happy or excited, then I would refer to my previous tip and tell you that you should maybe start rethinking your product).

Excitement is contagious. When I work with a marketer who very clearly doesn’t have any interest in what they’re selling, I lose any interest I might have had.

Being excited about your product is a sign that you like what you’re selling, which builds trust with your customers. And trust is key (I’m going to say that at least a billion times today).

One way to show excitement about your product is to learn more about it, and then to give your customers a taste of what you love about it.

For an example, I’m a videographer and an artist. I don’t offer many products (outside of standard things like photography prints), but I do offer several services.

In the services that I offer, I love every piece. Planning videos, writing scripts, shooting, editing, you name it, I love it.

And I’m constantly learning more and more about how to offer bigger and better things to my clients.

At the core of all of this is my absolute love for my craft and my joy for sharing what I learn with the people I work with.

When my clients have questions about the process, I chat with them about all the pieces that make me excited within that process.

I write blog posts about the parts of videography that interest and inspire me. I share parts of my process on social media.

Every part of this shows that I’m excited about what I do, and lets others know that, if they work with me, my passion will go into their project.

Whatever you’re trying to market, if you believe that it’s a good product, it’s worth getting excited about.

If you’re selling books that you really like, or a product that will make your customers’ lives so much easier, get excited and talk about what you love about what you’re selling. Share how easy it can make life or how much richness your books offer (obviously, without stretching the truth).

All this is incredibly easy to implement, too. Because all it takes is learning about your own product.

Your Audience Should Be More Informed, Not Less

This is related pretty closely to the last tip, but I think it’s pretty vital to the whole “ethically marketing and not trying to swindle people” thing.

You want your audience to know more about your product.

In fact, you want your audience to know as much about your product as you can get them to learn. As much as they care to know.

Because if you’re interested in marketing in an ethical way, then you’re probably pretty certain that you have a good product or service to get word out about.

If you don’t, then you should get a better product, because you shouldn’t be marketing something that you yourself don’t believe in.

Once you have a good product, you should educate your audience as much as you can.

As much as you know about your product, you should be sharing.

Share why you think it’ll make your customers’ lives better. Why it’ll help them do what they want to do.

Most importantly: don’t you DARE lie about it. What you are selling is a tangible thing. If you lie about it, your customers will find out.

So don’t even try.

What you SHOULD do is give everything about your product away, aside from the product itself. Give as much detail as possible, but don’t force it.

Care About Your Customers, Even More Than They Care About You

This last one is an idea that I think doesn’t get enough attention out in the world.

This isn’t just a rule for marketing, but it’s more of a rule for life.

You should care for others more than they care about you.

Your job as a marketer is to get the word out about something that you believe will make someone’s life better. You shouldn’t think of it as “trying to sell more of a product to make more money.”

Partly because that’s not a good way to approach marketing from a strategy standpoint, but mostly because that’s just kind of a crappy way to operate when your job is to relate with other people.

In a world that tries so hard to use brute force to get people to pay money for things they don’t need, you should work to be a voice that actually wants to help people.

There’s a lot of space in the marketing world for a little bit of caring.

I hope that, with these tips, you can make that happen.

P.S.: I’m TJ. I’m a photographer, videographer, and professional goofball living in Minnesota. I think too much about art, marketing, and philosophy, and I like to write my thoughts on my blog. I hope you enjoyed, and if you want to see more of what I do that isn’t writing (i.e. photos and films), you can check me out at www.tjbirnbaum.com.