marketing with heart is an approach to marketing that supports the client to create a strategy for growth without compromising their integrity. You are the living, beating heart of your business and your most effective marketing strategy will emerge out of your love for your business, and needs to be developed around the resources you have at your disposal, and the values that you live by. By doing this, you can make sure you are sending the right message to the right market, straight from the heart. When your strategy is energised in this way, you can engage fully with marketing and business development.
Rather than just tell you how to market your business - because you could just buy a book on marketing for that - marketing with heart also considers why you’re not already doing this for yourself. Most of the people I work with give the following reasons for not marketing in the way they had anticipated:
- I don’t have enough time
- I don’t have enough money
- I don’t know how
- I’m not good at selling myself
- I’ve relied on word of mouth until now
The easiest way to market your business is to pay a professional to do it for you. But particularly for smaller, ethically-driven organisations, this is not always possible. If you are running your own business, you are likely to wear a lot of hats, and often the strategic aspects of running the business get squeezed out by day to day operational busyness. The problem with this is that it’s hard for a business to grow without vision and planning. And you are more likely to feel stressed and overburdened with work.
Developing a marketing strategy can be an enjoyable way of reconnecting with what you love about your business and communicating that to the world at large. The marketing with heart approach uses the imagery of the archer to teach marketing skills in a holistic, more creative way, without any scary hard sell tactics. We work with the archer metaphor to develop an understanding of corporate identity, brand, markets, messages and marketing mediums. These are broken down into bite sized chunks and balanced to create a workable strategy.
But it’s no good having a map if you never set off on the journey, so marketing with heart also looks at what you need to implement your strategy and any blocks that might impede your progress. As part of this we use the constellations tool, a helpful way of uncovering hidden issues that might need realigning in order for energy to flow freely through your business system.
A workable blueprint for business growth needs to be realistic about the resources available to implement it and you won’t know if your strategy is really successful until you can implement and evaluate it. marketing with heart encourages you to be aware of what resources you need. For any project you will need to assess human resources, financial resources, time resources and there is another aspect I refer to as the fourth resource, which is the underlying energy available for the project. That which grants or witholds the will to succeed. It is sometimes at this energetic level that we may encounter blocks to our progress.