Quiet Marketing: How I Came Across It and Why I Won’t Be Going Back

I came across the term ‘Quiet Marketing’ while I was looking for business strategies linked to the slow living ethos. The term instantly caught my eye because, as someone with quite high anxiety anyway and being naturally quiet and a highly sensitive person, it appealed hugely to me.

I’d worked in ‘classic’ marketing for almost two and a half years before I moved full time onto SOLEMNIKO and I found it draining, superficial and the antithesis of everything I loathed about the corporate world. The pressure and importance put on likes, on follows, on DMs, interaction rates, bounce rates… I didn’t want my own business strategy to look like that. But after two months of bumbling my way through being fully self-employed, freaking out over low engagement; having PTSD over the statistics from my website, Instagram and podcast, I realised I needed a different marketing strategy. But I needed one that worked for me.

My marketing strategy for the first two months focused on the ‘classic’ marketing and sales outreach. This manifested in the form of going into shops selling my products in-person to get them stocked, spending day after day on Instagram trying to create content I hoped people would like, coming up with visual content that ‘would do’, emailing companies for freelance work and doing the occasional post on LinkedIn feeling rather desperate as I hit ‘publish’.

Anyway, I found myself signing off for the Yule period feeling utterly exhausted. Not because I didn’t adore doing what I loved every day, and sales were happening, people were interested… but the marketing strategy I had been using was making me feel like a fraud. So I decided I wanted 2024 to feel more calm, more aligned with what I actually set up SOLEMNIKO to do and be about. Perhaps most importantly, to align my own personality with a marketing technique that didn’t make me feel like running a million miles every other day.

QUIET MARKETING

I came across the phrase ‘quiet marketing’ on Dani Gardner’s website I’d never heard of marketing being referred to as anything other than loud, annoying and superficial; so to find a phrase let alone an entire book titled ‘Quiet Marketing’ made me heave a sigh of relief. There were others out there!

Marketing is an essential part of owning a business, I should know as it was my career full-time for over two years. However, it’s gone from being a way to connect with returning and new customers who are human; to obsessing over the statistics and analytics created by a bot. It takes the human element out, and when you take the human element out of the equation your business will stop catering to clients and instead start revolving around algorithms. And algorithms don’t build businesses that last decades.

And that’s okay for some, there are loads of people out there who are more than happy to create a unicorn having studied all the numbers fluctuating, linking the economy with geopolitical occurrences etc etc. But I didn’t want my business to look like that. I wanted to build my business on a foundation that was healthy and for longevity, so focusing on algorithms was never going to work. Another thing I’m terrible at - and it is down to not wanting to know - is keeping up with trends. Tik Tok trends, audio trends, content trends, dance trends… I cannot keep up and I do not want to keep up. So again, I needed to build a strategy that didn’t make me feel I should be keeping up with all of these things.

WHY I WON’T BE GOING BACK

I have spent a lot of years, a lot of time and a lot of effort learning about marketing. I have read the annual Hubspot trends report, the Pinterest trends report, the Instagram trends report, the Google trends report year in and year out. I have learned about commercial marketing, paid marketing, organic marketing, sales marketing, corporate marketing, services marketing, social media marketing, content marketing, advertising, SEO - etc etc. And it never made any sense to me. I understood it, I learned it, I implemented it - none of it was particularly complicated. But I could not understand why it was so important to create content for the sakes of creating content, for getting those follows from people who never interact with your content, that tickbox that says ‘I have done this trend too’.

The reason I won’t be going back to ‘classic’ marketing is very simple: it doesn’t work for me or my business. Spending every day on social media, posting, uploading, creating reams and reams of content isn’t me; I hate how addictive it is and how none of it is really real. Similarly paying out for adverts isn’t me, I’d rather spend the money on more materials for my business or on doing markets. Organic marketing is great but there’s so much pressure to still be getting those statistics.

So quiet marketing it is.

HOW WILL I BE IMPLEMENTING QUIET MARKETING

I’m still researching into quiet marketing but from what I understand so far, I’ll be trying to understand how I work throughout the year and making a marketing strategy that reflects that. I work closely with lunar cycles in my personal life, I’ll also be working with syncing my cycle to my work pattern. The aim is to make it all as synced as possible with not only my personality but also the cycles of the natural world.

So watch this spot!