Inbound is feminine
How can your marketing be more elegant?
It’s not the question you ask yourself on a warm mid summer evening.
Yet if you are a woman, finding her way in business, you value care for your customers, community…….you hope to present the version that makes your readers, clients, audience want to keep coming again for more.
Reader, now that my focus for this newsletter has shifted to marketing I find myself fantasising about creating elegant content & drawn to sharing you information I rehearsed and strategies I experimented with over the years.
What worked? What felt icky and meh!
What brought me pleasure and what felt effortless.
I have had moments in my life where my strategies have been criticised and the same ones have gotten appreciation from different people.
I have been naive, I didn’t gate-keep & shared every valuable learnings too freely.
It either made them not value my work/ideas/strategies.
Or it made them benefit from it which I am grateful about.
The title may sound strange, can marketing be masculine & feminine?
See, the systems of the world like corporate systems are built in traditional masculine settings.
Women are expected to perform, over-work & prove they belong.
It focuses on hierarchy, stiffness, too much competition, speed, dominance and assertion while the feminine ways are about nurturing, harmony, community-building, being warm & collaborative.
Both works and I in no-way believe there is one right path or we need to follow only one style of marketing.
I am both. I am fast and I am nurturing.
But what has worked for me over & over is my generosity, warmth, joy, my community building skills.
These have brought me leads when I wasn’t expecting. Referrals when I was about to go broke and sales when I was sleeping. 😴
A fun fact you may not know about me?
I have never used a résumé
Yes there were times I tried building a monotonous black & white resume and going on rounds of interviews for a particular role but I was never hired.
What has worked?
Personal branding, content creation, community building, inbound marketing.
I don’t like competition. I have never succeed at it. From college entrances to work-life. I have never been the chosen one among 1000s
I have been the chosen one among one.
People who truly did work with me or liked working with me.
It was a no-brainer yes. They didn’t hop around interviewing dozens of candidates for the job.
They worked with me because they wanted to work with me.
I eliminate 99% of competition through personal-brand building & community building.
Hiring me for them is like hiring a trustworthy friend who can pull off the work required.
I always get this compliment, your content is authentic, your content is authentic and I know it is.
I have learned to express my authenticity with clarity in my messaging.
I have learned to share parts of me online that weren’t always easy to share.
And I have experimented with my writing & marketing a lot.
Inbound marketing has always been my main source of leads and if I’m not inviting the right leads through my content I know it’s on me too.
Somewhere, it’s falling flat, needing tweaking or more research.
I am curious to know about you reader, what’s your favourite style of marketing and what makes you feel just …. meh
