Podcast Transcripts

Hi everyone! Welcome to the first episode of the Aligned Marketing Podcast, where we discuss an alternative to mainstream marketing and introduce you to resources, tips, and guests to guide you through your own aligned marketing journey where you will go from discouraged and uncomfortable with your marketing to connecting with your ideal audience as your authentic self, as well as building real relationships through your marketing.

So I’m your host, Jade Francesca, and if you’re like me and you need subtitles to understand what people are saying, you can get the transcript in the show notes.

So first, I wanna ask [you] a couple of questions.

Have you ever read a promotional email from a business that you liked, and then felt like you weren’t good enough and wouldn’t be until you tried their program?

Have you ever felt like you had to accept a new offer because there was only “1 spot left” and the offer would “never come back” and you were afraid of missing out, even if you knew the offer wasn’t the best for you right now?

Or, have you ever been in a coaching program or maybe even a membership, and you needed to take a pause, take a break, but suddenly the “cancel anytime” policy became “you can only cancel by scheduling a 30-minute call where you will be manipulated into staying because if you leave you will never be allowed to come back?”

If you’ve answered yes to any of these questions, I am sorry, I’ve also lived it.

These are only a few examples where manipulative marketing preys on your fears and insecurities.

And I don’t know about you, but I’m sick of it. As a marketing strategist, I refuse to advise my clients, or my audience, to manipulate people into buying their offers, and not just because it’s, ethically speaking, very wrong, but also because the truth is that manipulative marketing doesn’t work the way that so-called experts lead you to believe, and with time, those tactics will kill your business.

I know that might be a bold and maybe controversial claim in the marketing world, but let me break it down for you.

So first off, have you ever heard of the “know, like, and trust” factor in marketing? Well, trust is a pretty important one!

After being bombarded with manipulative marketing for years by big corporations and now even small businesses, we are tired of being lied to, and we are tired of being manipulated. It’s as simple as that. Yes, maybe preying on our fears and insecurities will get us to buy, but will we ever buy again after realizing that it wasn’t the right offer for us and we got manipulated into it? Or worse even, we were lied to? No, absolutely not. And will we be warning our community against that business so they don’t fall for the same trap that we did? Yeah, absolutely.

So in the end, if you break your customers’ trust, you have lost them. And everyone in marketing knows that it is much easier to make a sale to a loyal customer who loves your brand than to someone who has never bought anything from you and doesn’t know much about your brand in the first place. Therefore, wouldn’t it make more sense to keep your customers by offering them products and services they actually do want and need, rather than by preying on their fears and insecurities?

The fact that manipulative marketing is so normalized in the marketing world honestly shocks me. Why is it so widely accepted to manipulate a person into buying something they don’t need?

Or maybe they do need it, but, they’re not yet ready to make the time and money investment needed to benefit from what’s being offered to them. That means if they do buy, they won’t get the transformation they were promised when they were sold to, and they will lose their trust in the business and most likely won’t buy again. What is the point in that?

Trust is too important to ignore or simply disregard. So why do so many businesses do it? Greed, sure, but for a lot of small businesses it mostly stems from a scarcity mindset. I’ve had people tell me that they had been told by so-called experts to do manipulative tactics in their marketing, and they really reluctantly accepted the advice because of their own fears and insecurities. In a nutshell, they believed that if they didn’t use these tactics, they wouldn’t sell at all.

Not everyone who uses manipulative tactics does so out of greed. I would argue that most people who do it, they do it out of fear as well.

The scarcity mindset plays a huge factor and it’s so unfortunate because it creates a vicious cycle. A business’ scarcity mindset convinces them to use manipulative tactics that in turn trigger their audience’s scarcity mindset, which ultimately pushes them to buy something they didn’t need or weren’t ready for.

It really doesn’t have to be that way. Marketing can be done efficiently without having to resort to manipulative tactics.

Let me show you how.

The bottom line with aligned marketing is that it allows you to sell with integrity, alignment, and authenticity.

And guess what — those three things sell! People love when they find a business with integrity, a business that they can finally trust in the sea of lies they’ve been fed by other businesses. It is such a relief to find other businesses that sell from the heart and so many customers and businesses agree with this. Integrity is too important to disregard and when you want to grow or scale your business, integrity is necessary to make sure your growth will be sustainable.

Another important point is, of course, authenticity. There is a reason why TikTok is one (if not the) most popular social media platform right now. People show their true selves and invite us to do the same. People utilize the funny “meme” audios, the trending audios, and the entertaining dances, even if it might make them look silly. People show up in their pyjamas, no make-up, and they talk from the heart.

Why does it work? Because we are tired of the fake, and most importantly, we crave real. Humans want to see humans. They want to relate to others. The best way to relate to a person is to know who they really are, and what they stand for. Customers are much more likely to buy from someone they can relate to because guess what — they are more likely to trust them.

Authenticity is becoming more and more important and the best part about it is that you finally get to break free from everything in your business that didn’t sit right with you. No more having to present yourself as someone you’re not, no more having to do sales in a way that feels icky and stressful, no more having to show up in places that you don’t even like.

Authenticity is freedom, and not only is it good for you and your business, but it is also good for your audience, too. Because they get to see a real human that welcomes them to do the same and come as they are.

To be able to do all of that, you need to be aligned, and that’s where aligned marketing comes in.

So what is aligned marketing to begin with?

In a nutshell, it’s really marketing yourself and your business in a way that aligns with YOU, so much so that you feel happy and empowered by your marketing rather than discouraged, sales-y and uncomfortable.

Doesn’t that sound amazing and freeing?

And the best part is — there are even more perks.

So number 1 – Less overwhelm.

If you are aligned with your marketing and are able to show up as your authentic self, you will feel less overwhelm from having to keep up with the trends that don’t align and also less overwhelm from having to create content you don’t like doing to begin with.

I’ve had to create sooooo many content [posts] that I didn’t want to do when I first started, and honestly, it made me hate marketing; it made me so overwhelmed, it made me not want to show up anymore.

But when I’m doing things that are aligned, I don’t feel as overwhelmed, and it can be the same for you.

The second perk is less procrastination and more excitement.

So how does aligned marketing help with procrastination? Well, I don’t know about you, but when I don’t like doing something, I procrastinate it.

Case in point: my reels. If you know me, you know what I’m going to say next. But if you don’t, the short story of it is that months ago, I didn’t want to do reels, because recording a video that lasts less than 60 seconds was just too anxiety-inducing, and I felt like I wasn’t delivering any value when I was doing trends, so reels were just not for me. So, I procrastinated them…. to the point where I just avoided Instagram altogether, and I would delete all the reels that I would record.

And all of that, because I thought I “had to” do reels.

But the truth is, we don’t “have to” do anything except show up, one way or another. It doesn’t have to be reels. It doesn’t have to be graphic posts. It doesn’t have to be written posts. It can be whatever we feel most comfortable with and most importantly, whatever we feel most HAPPY doing.

It is entirely possible to go from procrastination to excitement, and when you’re excited about your marketing, creating it goes by so much quicker, because you won’t be second-guessing yourself as much or redoing your marketing a thousand times.

When I write a post – because for me, writing posts is the easiest way of doing marketing – when I write a post, I write it, I read over it to make sure I don’t have any typos, and then I post it! There’s no second-guessing, there’s no redoing it a thousand times.

But when I was doing reels, I was re-doing the reel, literally a thousand times. It would take me an hour to record a 30-second reel. I would just keep re-doing it, over and over and over.

At the end of the day, procrastination is your mind’s way of telling you that something isn’t aligned and you probably shouldn’t be doing that thing in the first place, or at least not in the way that you have been doing it so far. In aligned marketing, we listen to that sign, and we find out what lights us up when it comes to marketing, and then we do just that.

So what does that do? More confidence and less burn out.

Because the truth is, even if you see results with misaligned marketing, your confidence won’t grow and neither will your happiness, because you will keep doing marketing as a chore and showing up with a persona or a message that isn’t yours.

That happened to me, and so many others I know. I was becoming more and more popular on Instagram and getting a lot of new connections as well as clients, but I was never feeling confident, because I wasn’t showing up as my authentic self and instead had to keep up with a persona I thought was necessary for my business, to a point where I completely burned out and considered quitting like, a million times.

And at the end of the day, it just isn’t worth it.

Marketing is such a big part of your business, it is so so so big, and we don’t deserve to burn out over it. Because at the end of the day, if we do things in a way that feels aligned, we will be so much more confident, and we won’t burn out as much, because we’ll be showing up in a way that feels good, and in a way that’s not draining.

Another great thing about aligned marketing is that you get to connect with the right audience, and you get to build real relationships.

Because if your marketing isn’t aligned, you will be attracting whoever wants to work with the marketing you created, and those people will not necessarily be the ideal clients you wanted to attract.

But by making sure your marketing is aligned, by showing up as your authentic self, and by sharing your personality, your values, your expertise, you will be attracting the people who resonate with you, who share similar values, and who feel connected to your personality. That is your ideal audience, with who you can build real relationships, and isn’t that what we all want as heart-centered entrepreneurs?

We want to be able to deliver value for our audience, and that’s another part of aligned marketing: you know you are delivering true value and you feel accomplished.

And of course, that is not to say that without being aligned you aren’t delivering value, but what I mean here is that you will be satisfied with the value you are delivering.

Earlier I shared that I didn’t like doing reels on Instagram because they were too short and I didn’t feel like I was sharing enough value with them. This applies here.

If you don’t believe in your marketing and what you deliver to your audience through it, you will consistently doubt its value and this will damage your business, and honestly your confidence. It damaged mine pretty badly, and it took a long time for me to get back from that.

If any of what you’ve listened so far resonated with you and you are ready to ditch the old ways of doing marketing, you are in the right place.

This podcast will really be about ditching the old ways of doing marketing, ditching all those things that make us feel sleazy and that make us hate sales. Because sales and marketing can be so much more fun when we do it in a way that feels aligned and in a way that feels good to us.

I will be giving you a lot of resources in a lot of different ways, to really get that content in.

So maybe you like listening to podcasts; you will have the podcast. If you need the transcript, you will have a transcript. If you want to go in depth about what we discussed in the episode, there will always be a blog [post] that will be accompanying the episode; it’s gonna be really complementing the episode.

So that gives you different things that you can do with every episode. My goal is really to help people implement the content that I’ve been sharing. For me that is so important.

So: What do you really like about your marketing, and what don’t you like about your marketing?

Those would be really the first kind of questions to really ask yourself, because if you find out that there’s nothing that you like in your marketing, it’s really time to ditch what you’ve been doing, and get started on a marketing strategy that’s really gonna make you feel confident, make you feel empowered and make you feel aligned.

Because it is entirely possible; it has happened for me, it has happened for a lot of my clients, and a lot of people in my audience.

So, you wanna get started on that and… let me know what you think. Let me know what you’ve noticed.

So with that said, you guys will eventually notice that I am very bad at goodbye’s, I’m also very bad at hello’s, but, I’m saying goodbye, and thank you again for tuning in.