How to Enjoy Marketing: Market from Your Strengths

If you’re like most people, you probably “play to your strengths” much of the time. After all, your strengths carry you while you develop and shore up your growing edges over time. For many mediators, the actions typically associated with traditional marketing feel more like they play to your weaknesses, or at least to your misgivings and self doubts.

Let’s look at this through a conflict lens. Engaging conflict is hard for everyone because, at least in some ways, it calls upon you to confront your fears. Conflict may “press your buttons” because you experience a real or perceived threat to some part of your identity…a threat to your view of ourselves as competent, autonomous, worthy of being included, and so on.

You may find marketing a challenge for similar reasons: Offering your talents for the world to buy or ignore puts your identity on the line. Mediocre (or worse) results from your marketing efforts imply judgments by others of your competence or value.

Kat, a new professional in the field, put it this way: “I’m already resistant to doing the kinds of things that most marketing books tell me I need to do. So, when I do them and then don’t see results, two things happen. I dislike doing those tasks even more next time. And my dislike of the tasks shines through, probably to the very people I’m trying to reach. It’s like a double slap in the face.”

No more slapping yourself in the face! Building a marketing strategy based on your strengths yields four immediate, compelling and irresistible results:

You’ll do it better.
You’ll enjoy it more.
And you’ll more likely follow through because it’s enjoyable.
You’ll attract others to you because you’re working from a place of enjoyment and ability.

This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t do marketing tasks that fail to capitalize on your strengths. It means that marketing from your strengths helps you gain real momentum from which to build. And, as we’ll discuss on a later chapter, the Internet offers you powerful and constantly evolving ways to leverage your strengths even further.

Marketing from your strengths is your launch pad and the Internet your booster rocket.