Court your Creative – Takeaway from Today

What is your skill, your value, what sets you apart?

If you are successful at marketing in any sense, it is your creative tendencies, your ability to connect people to products with stories and explanations. It is your ability to leverage tools in your bag to create, implement, deliver, and manage your marketing efforts. Your creative thought is your gold, you need to court it. You need to cherish it, chase it, nurture it, and believe in it. You need to start breaking back the branches of the trees that have grown around your creative center, the accounting, the mechanics of delivery, the noise. Be creative, and not just in an arts and crafts way, search for tools that help you deliver more, examine what works and do more of it, scale back what looks good but does nothing for you. Think about what you can’t do, then do it. Yes make it happen.

I had a meeting today with a ‘just getting started’ independent social media marketer, to discuss the uncharted waters that many are entering as they try to help local small businesses launch their marketing rafts and steer them toward greater profits. Courting your creative was my message.

Find a way to deliver unprecedented value, proven results, and things that they didn’t know were possible. Do it to the point that they can not imagine going it without you.

That is the type of goal marketers need to set for themselves. Forget the money, if you destroy expectations money is easy to come by, if you deliver one of a kind creative thoughts and ideas to problems and goals you will not go hungry. If you leverage the tools and the knowlege you have at your disposal and bring it to your clients you will not have to worry about anything other than how are you going to deliver the same level of service to the potential clients that are asking you for your help.

The answer to that is simple too.

You will look to your creative for solutions, you will develop systems that work for you, you will implement them, follow them, leverage them, and profit from them. You will court your creative.

Your confidence will blossom, your fear of uncertainty will shrink, your value to your clients will grow exponentially, and you will flourish if you believe in the creative problem solving spirit of your mind. The creative idea factory that is begging for a chance to reach out and connect with other humans and deliver messages about the amazing things your client is doing in ways that entertain, enlighten, and enrich your audience’s lives.

A message to start up Marketers.

Mobile, web, social, location. They are your implements, your tools. they bring no more value to you than they do to your competitor, or your client. They are the conduit through which flows your creative thoughts, a channel where your ideas are put in motion and can be shared with people you have never met, they are the trappings of our modern day and not guaranteed to be here longer than cd players. You can not be a social media marketer, if you are not a marketer. It just does not work that way. You use tools to achieve your goals, they are not the focus.