Time and headspace
When Rosy, founder of the interior design practice Studio Sturt, told me what a typical week looks like for her, she said something I knew straight away deserved its own episode. The procurement side of her business takes up the most time, but the marketing and social media take up the most headspace.
Time and headspace are two very different things. Time you can see… it’s in the diary, you can block it out, you can count the hours. Headspace is far sneakier (and far more tiring), because it comes with you everywhere. It’s the post you haven’t written yet, sitting at the back of your mind while you’re on site, or cooking dinner, or trying to get to sleep. It’s that quiet feeling that you really should be doing more, and that everyone else seems to be doing it better.
I think marketing takes up so much room for a few reasons. It never feels finished, for one. A client project has a beginning, a middle and an end, and at some point you hand it over, but marketing just keeps going… there’s always another post, another email, another platform someone tells you that you really should be on. And so much of what we’re told about marketing is about more. Show up more, post more, be louder, be everywhere. For most of the creatives I work with, that simply isn’t who they are, so it starts to feel like a performance, and performing week after week is exhausting.
I’m a big believer that if you hate marketing, and the whole thing feels cumbersome, that’s exactly what gets put out there. People feel it. When it comes from a place of excitement, and fun, and real positivity, that’s when it works really, really well.
What marketing really is
At its heart, marketing is storytelling. It’s you sharing your story, and the story of the work you do and the people you do it for, specifically for your audience, in a way that works for you, gently leading people into your world and towards what you offer. As creatives we’re natural storytellers… we notice the small things, we see the detail other people walk straight past, we feel things deeply.
It really isn’t as complicated as it’s so often made out to be. It’s one consistent message running through every single thing you share, and then lots of different ways of saying it. You’re simply reaching the right people, and saying something that is completely true, again and again, in slightly different ways each time. And you’ll need to say it far more often than you realise, because by the time you’re starting to feel a little bored of saying something, most people are only just beginning to hear it.
I made a note a while ago of a book called Breakthrough Advertising, by the American copywriter Eugene Schwartz. It came out in 1966, long before Instagram or any of the platforms we use now, and one of his best known lines is that copy cannot create desire for a product. I love that, because it takes so much of the pressure off. You don’t need to convince anyone that they want what you do. The right people already want it, there’s a natural need there, and your marketing simply needs to understand them really well, so that when they come across what you share, they recognise themselves in it, and see that you’re the right person to help them.
When you strip it right back to the absolute basics, marketing is understanding the right people, being able to explain what you offer in a way that feels completely relatable to them, helping them with a gentle next step, and being super honest all the way through. New platforms and tools will keep arriving, and some of them are wonderful, but it always comes back to that same, very traditional point.
Getting it out of your head
One of the simplest ways to take marketing out of your head is to get your ideas out of your head first.
We’re constantly coming up with ideas, on a walk, in the car, halfway through a conversation with a client. So have a notebook, or an app on your phone, and simply record everything as it comes. In the moment an idea can feel brilliant, and you might only end up using one in twenty of them, but you really don’t want to miss that one in twenty.
For a while now I’ve been using the simple Notes app on my phone, which links up with the Notes app on my desktop too. Every week I have one note, called week commencing and then whatever that week is, and I just speak everything into it (speaking is so much quicker than typing, and I get all my thoughts down). No tidying, no sorting, it all just goes in.
At the end of the week I send it to Claude, straight into Notion. I don’t worry about filing it or putting it into folders, because Claude is set up to go through every note and file everything into a really neat database, which means I can refer back to anything, ask questions of it, and find it all gathered in one place. You don’t need AI for this at all, a notebook works brilliantly, but it does help enormously, because the sorting is so often the part that falls away when the week gets busy.
Some really good marketing ideas come out of it. Other times they’re nothing to do with marketing at all… an idea for improving a product, or something a customer said that I want to remember. But because it’s all captured, nothing gets lost, and when I sit down to think about what to share, I’m never starting from a blank page. That alone takes so much of the weight out of your head.
A few things, done steadily
Marketing isn’t just Instagram, either. There are so many ways to market really effectively, and to make it a natural part of what you’re already doing… your website, your newsletter, the conversations you have, reaching out to one person at a time. I once spoke to a room of twelve people, and that week it brought in more new work than posting to my 125,000+ followers did. Social media has its place, but it works best quietly in the background, rather than carrying the whole business on its shoulders.
So rather than trying to be everywhere, find the platforms and the tools that work really well for you, the ones that fit the way you like to share, and use them consistently. A couple of things done steadily, week after week, will do so much more than trying to keep up with everything.
And the most important thing of all is gathering people’s email addresses. Platforms change, algorithms change, and you don’t own any of it, but your email list is yours. Let everything gently guide people towards it, so there’s a steady flow of the right people coming into your world, and you can keep the conversation going in a way that feels personal.
Inside The Bright Line, marketing is the fifth of six pillars, and people are often surprised it comes so near the end. It’s there because by the time you’ve understood what you’re brilliant at, exactly who you’re for, how to describe what you do, and what it’s really worth, marketing has become so much more straightforward. You know exactly what to say, and exactly who you’re saying it to. So often, when marketing feels hard, it’s because those foundations haven’t been put in place yet, and no amount of posting can fill that gap.
Marketing doesn’t need to be complicated, and it doesn’t need to take over your week, or your head. One consistent message, said in lots of different ways, to the right people… and it can become a very natural part of your week, that fits in neatly with everything you’re doing.
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