How Marketing Efforts Can Work Against Themselves
Would you be surprised to know that one of the most popular search queries on Pinterest for content is “content ideas for Instagram?” Have you ever visited someone’s Insta and everything felt like a sales tactic, or like they’re doing things to boost their algorithm cred? I have. I’ve spend a lot of time on Pinterest looking at content ideas for creative businesses for Instagram. Now when I look at people’s feeds, I just find myself getting frustrated and I’m going to talk about why I get frustrated, and the impacts of marketing on marketing.
I can fit your content into a box.
It’s usually in a neatly organized box in an array of boxes suggesting content ideas like, “SHOW YOUR WORKSPACE!” or “DO A GIVEAWAY!”. It’s essentially a bingo card for all the content people put out. It’s cliché. Every list of content ideas produces a variation of the same suggestions, so when I see you doing something like that, I see a cliché and I wonder which of those lists you’re using. Maybe this is a curse of being in small business myself.
Raise your hand if you’ve seen something similar on Pinterest. If you didn’t raise your hand and you’re a small business owner, you’re probably lying.
I can’t tell if it’s genuine, and I can’t tell if that feeling will persist when I do business with you.
It’s aimed at pleasing the algorithm which is a marketing effort. That’s annoying to me because in the reel you just posted, it really feels like you are trying to connect with me. Now I can’t tell if you’re sucking up to the algorithm or actually trying to connect with me. It’s a marketing effort which businesses absolutely need, but when most of your content checks off a box on my bingo card, I get a little confused as to what you’re actually about. I want to know who you are for real. I want to know who the real people are in my community and your clients want to know who they are doing business with.
Enough people are using the same playbook where clients are going to pick up on that.
This is how stereotypes start. What do you picture when you picture a photographer? I picture a white woman in a wide brimmed hat, trendy clothes, smiling, laughing and holding her camera in *that* way, talking about how great her clients are and giving a few tips about wedding planning. Replace the smiling and laughing, the hat, and the camera with an attitude, sweats and a 15 year old Kentucky Wildcats hoodie and that’s me. I brag on my clients all the time, and I have a lot of insight on wedding planning because I just got married in 2023. Do I genuinely want to help my clients? Absolutely. But the way I present that is similar to the way other photographers present those things. Eventually, clients looking for photographers are going to pick up on the similarities on how we present information and what information we’re presenting, and it’s going to become part of the stereotype. We’re becoming less and less original.
Some of these suggestions are dumber than a rock.
I kid you not, one of them was “Show off your brand.” Really. I should be showing off my brand on social media? I can’t believe I didn’t think of that! This is brand new information that I am hearing for the very first time! Seriously, what are you doing on social media as a business if not show off your brand. The only way this makes sense is if, by “brand", they are strictly referring to the visual identity. I don’t think that’s a bad idea. If you’re not a designer, credit the designer, help another small business out. But your brand is more than your visuals. Your brand is your culture, your work ethic, your customer experience, your reputation, your voice, your everything that customers experience and can talk about. Of course you should be exposing your followers to your brand on socials.
“We need to work from our identity, not in pursuit of it.”
Where is your identity rooted?
I struggle with not letting my business become my identity. I took the advice “Use a powerful hook for a blog title and don’t forget SEO!” You know, like “How Marketing Efforts Can Work Against Themselves.” I did that, and I am thinking of SEO. I want people to be interested in my blog, but I also want my blog to be somewhere people can connect with ME. The real me. The basic-bitch me that cusses frequently, drinks way too much chai, and sells out to fandoms way too easily. But who actually am I anymore? I think that I’m being genuine, but a lot of my posts fit on the bingo card, too. Am I using tools to connect with people or have those tools and the marketing part of my business become part of my identity? Is the mold of what other people are doing becoming me? Because when you run a small business, it’s so easy for your work to define you and to fall into the trap of conformity. (And it’s not conformity if it’s who you actually are. It’s trying to be that to get attention on the internet.) Maybe creatives need to take a step back and reconnect with the things that are truly who they are. And maybe I need to do the same. We need to work from our identity, not in pursuit of it.
So what do we do about it?
Doing the things on these lists aren’t necessarily a bad thing, but often times they serve as a script when they’re combined with matching what other people are doing. Like I said above, its so clear which of these are being followed that I can put them on a bingo card. So what do we do about it?
Define your brand.
Don’t follow the script.
Work from your identity.
Stop kissing ass with the algorithm and be genuine.
Stop trying to be like everyone else.
The people we meet and do business with have a lot in common, but we’re also very different. A lot of creative businesses offer the same benefits and services to varying degrees. The thing that will differentiate you the most is you. Is this super cliché? Absolutely, but it wouldn’t be cliché if people would actually start doing it. Then it wouldn’t need to be said so much. Stop trying to cram your brand into what everyone else is doing and just do you. When I say that, I mean bring your own style, even if its a 15 year old hoodie and work sweats you got in the men’s section of Target. Show up with your personality in full and don’t apologize for it. Stop being so damn sterile all the time and show the hell up. And I’m talking to myself as much as I’m talking to you.
