5 questions to ask yourself to start
your aligned marketing journey
so you can become HAPPY with your marketing
Have you grown dissatisfied and defeated with the progress (or lack thereof) you’re making in your business?
Have you noticed that your audience isn’t visiting your website, isn’t listening to your podcast, isn’t answering your DM’s, isn’t engaging with your posts on social media, and so on and so forth?
Often, that’s because your marketing strategy simply isn’t aligned with your business and yourself, and it’s not attracting the right audience. This isn’t sustainable, because the wrong audience will either not buy from you, or they will buy once and perhaps never again because your product or offer wasn’t what they needed.
Let’s change that.
If you’re ready to start your aligned marketing journey so your marketing attracts the right people to your business, get a notebook and journal about the following questions.
Question #1 to ask yourself to start your aligned marketing journey:
Set an intention for your marketing. What is one word you want to associate with your marketing from now on?
Often in business, we talk about the importance of goals.
Personally, I always thought that the word “goal” was a bit intimidating, especially since I always would wonder “but what if I don’t reach my goal?” and then “Does it mean I failed?”
Fear of failure hinders us in many, many ways, from procrastination to sometimes even complete action paralysis. Unfortunately, it prevents us from taking aligned actions that would have helped our businesses grow.
So, if talking goals is too daunting for you, trust me, I get it, so I’m offering an alternative:
Set an intention.
You can’t fail an intention. Life may and will take us in many directions, but that doesn’t change the intention we had, nor does it mean we failed it. To me, setting an intention, rather than setting a goal, feels like a much gentler option which will serve you the same way a goal would.
Another reason why you want to set an intention is because you want to be able to reframe your mind to have a positive relationship with your marketing.
Too often, we associate marketing with negative words and concepts (e.g. discouraging, tedious, confusing, overwhelming, tiring, draining, and I could go on), and it keeps us stuck in a loop. If we expect marketing to be tedious because it has been in the past, then it is likely that it will be tedious in the future, partly because we expect it to be.
So by setting an intention for your marketing and choosing a positive word you want to associate with it, you are taking the first step.
For 2023, I chose the word empowerment for my marketing.
Although I talk extensively about how I want to help entrepreneurs become happy with their marketing, I chose the word empowerment this year (rather than happy) because I noticed that a lot of people in my audience struggled with lack of confidence and major doubts when it came to doing their marketing. Even if they followed my advice and chose a strategy that was aligned with them, there was a barrier preventing them from feeling confident that they could do the strategy they chose. So, in the end, even if they were on the right path and had the tools they needed, there was still a barrier preventing them from being actually happy with their marketing.
This is why empowerment is my word for this upcoming year: I want to empower my audience to take action. Taking aligned actions for your marketing is so, so important. Sustainable marketing strategies often aren’t built in a day: they are fine-tuned as we go, because it is only when we do try out the strategies that we find out what works and what doesn’t.
So set out an intention for your marketing by choosing a positive word you want to feel, and a positive word you want your audience to feel. It can be the same word, too!
I encourage you to write a post about it. Start a discussion with your audience. Ask them how they feel about your marketing. You can even ask them how they feel about their own, if your audience includes entrepreneurs.
Question #2 to ask yourself to start your aligned marketing journey:
What type of content do you love creating? Why?
If you don’t love the content you’re creating, chances are, it won’t give you the greatest results.
Honestly, we can tell when someone loves or hates their content. Maybe not always, and it may be harder to notice in writing, but I am sure you have noticed the difference between two marketing posts on social media where one felt flat and the other felt extremely passionate.
The truth is, passion sells. As humans, we love passion. We love to see it, we love to feel it, and we tend to gravitate towards passions and passionate people.
Not only does it make your content often more engaging, but it also makes it much, much easier for you to create it.
I often mention the story of how it would take me an hour to record a 30 seconds reel on Instagram and yet only 15 minutes to write a long written post on Facebook that I could then repurpose in an email, as an Instagram carousel, and as inspiration for a future podcast episode or blog post.
“Trending” reels are supposed to be the best thing for your social media marketing right now, and yet? They were my least popular posts. My long written posts, in comparison, fared significantly better, and this is because I actually do enjoy writing them. I am passionate when I write, whereas when I’m recording a reel with trending audios, I’m nervous, self-conscious, and way too much of a perfectionist.
The result? Waste of time, effort, and for little to no results in return.
You truly do want to take some time in your day to ask yourself about what type of content you prefer creating, and why.
If nothing comes to mind, then perhaps it is time to start new forms of content, or doing microshifts to what you’re already doing so it’s more aligned with who you are and what you like creating.
Question #3 to ask yourself to start your aligned marketing journey:
Take a moment to go through your marketing by taking a step back and imagining you're a member of your audience. Is there anything in your marketing that you feel uncomfortable about?
This step is crucial. Because if there’s a strategy or tactic that you don’t like in your marketing, chances are, neither does your audience.
You might have been told to add countdowns to your emails, even if your offer wouldn’t disappear or end the moment the countdown was over, so that it would give your audience a sense of urgency and incite them to buy your offer now.
You might have been also told to tell your audience that there are only 2 spots left in your program, when in fact there are over 10 left, to simulate scarcity and give them a push to buy now instead of waiting.
There are more examples I could list. When it comes to marketing, a lot of experts will tell you to do these tactics and, unfortunately, they might also tell you that if you don’t follow through with these tactics, you won’t sell or be successful.
If you’ve already listened to the first episode of my podcast, you know what I’m going to say:
There’s a better way to do marketing.
Tactics that create a lie are not the way to go, and chances are, if you are reading this, you probably dislike seeing these tactics being done by other entrepreneurs.
Your ideal audience is similar to who you are (and/or who you used to be), which means that if you dislike a certain marketing tactic, chances are, so do they. So take the time to go through your own marketing and your own customer’s journey (i.e. the steps your audience takes before making a buying decision) and honestly ask yourself if you’d buy from you given only the information you receive through your marketing.
Then ask yourself if you’d buy knowing what goes on in the backend of your business.
If your marketing is transparent, then you know you are already on the right path.
But if it isn’t – the time is now to make a change.
I’m not here to shame you for having done a certain tactic or inserting lies in your strategy, because I know all too well how many marketing experts and coaches will advise you to do so and create fear within you that if you don’t do it, you will not be successful.
Instead, I’m here to encourage you to make a change, not only because it will be more sustainable since your audience will trust you more, but because you will like your marketing better, too.
And since I’m all about being happy with your marketing, this step truly is crucial. As a heart-centered entrepreneur, we can’t be happy with our marketing if it’s filled with scarcity and lies. We simply can’t.
Question #4 to ask yourself to start your aligned marketing journey:
What do you procrastinate most in your marketing? Why?
This next question is a good one, because what you procrastinate is often what’s misaligned for you.
Procrastination is often your mind’s way of telling you that something isn’t aligned and that you probably shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.
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.
I know that when it comes to our businesses and our marketing, we can’t avoid every task we dislike (unless we delegate it or outsource it, of course). There are days that are bound to be more annoying than others (after all, who likes to deal with problems with tech?!), but it is a misconception that your marketing should be making you feel miserable.
Often, it makes us feel that way because we feel that we “have” to do certain things, based either from our own expectations or, more often, from what experts in the industry tell us to do.
After all, how many times have you read that you “have” to do video content if you want to succeed in business?
The truth is, we don’t “have” to do anything except showing up, one way or another. It doesn’t have to be video content. It doesn’t have to be graphic posts. It doesn’t have to be written posts. It doesn’t have to be networking. It doesn’t have to be podcasts.
It can be whatever we feel most comfortable with and most importantly, whatever we feel most HAPPY doing.
It is really 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 before posting it.
Question #5 to ask yourself to start your aligned marketing journey:
What would make you most happy when it comes to your marketing?
The obvious answer to that question often will be:
More sales.
More money.
More success.
But those answers are far too vague and far too broad, and we need to define what happiness and success looks like for US. After all, everyone will have a different definition of what happiness and success will look like when it comes to marketing (or business in general for that matter).
For example, someone’s definition of success might be to make a million in sales. Or, it might be to have finally set up all of their systems (tech, automations, strategy, etc.) and have a sustainable customer journey that is now evergreen (for those who don’t know, “evergreen” in this context means a sales system that doesn’t have an expiration date and optimally runs by itself with the help of automations and tech).
For someone else, happiness and success in their marketing might mean being able to find a few new soulmate clients every quarter for their 1:1 program.
My point is: it looks different for everyone, which means it is worth it to spend some time to sit down and think about what kind of marketing makes the most sense when it comes to your business so you can get that happiness and success.
Because if what you want is to find a few new soulmate clients every quarter for your 1:1 program, you might not need a lot of automations, tech, or even a website to reach that goal. What you might need is to do some networking to get referrals, do some social media marketing, sales calls, and conversations with those potential soulmate clients.
On the other end, if what you want to open a digital product store and what would make you happiest is to create your products, launch your store, and then have it run on the back end without having constantly be present, then you might benefit more from having a website, automations, and eventually ads on Facebook and/or Google.
There’s no “one size fits all” strategy when it comes to marketing, because what we want will differ from business to business. Within your own business, you might even notice that you want totally different marketing approaches for different offers!
It’s all about finding what works for you.
So what's next?
If you’ve liked these journal prompts and would like some more aligned marketing prompts to continue your aligned marketing journey, take a look at these wonderful printable cards you can use to journal about your marketing for the next 21 days.
Get access through the Marketing Clarity Hub, which includes a TON of other cool resources (100+ reflection prompts, for example!) — only for a one-time payment of $27.
