The seriousness of fun marketing

The framework for the Future Fun Finder model isn’t quite ready yet, so in its place I’m sending out today’s Daily Lab to weekly subscribers.

If you’re not already subscribed to the Daily Lab, this is a sample of what you can expect each weekday if you choose to sign up (which you can do here if you’re interested).

Why do I insist that you should have more fun doing your marketing?

Well, from what I’ve seen over the years, when business owners aren’t seeing marketing results, the culprit is often fairly simple:

1) They’re just not actually doing all that much marketing—so it can’t work

2) They’re doing it but they hate it, so they rush it or stick to “best practices”—blending in with everyone else

Marketing you aren’t doing, or don’t like, won’t work. That’s why I’m constantly going on about making it more fun.

Let’s face it, most marketing is a huge pain to actually do.

It’s basically impossible to change someone’s mind, you’re operating in spaces you don’t control, and feedback is so delayed you rarely know what’s working and what isn’t.

Oh, and then there’s the stress and pressure of doing all of this in public.

You can’t expect perfection in an environment like that.

Instead, you need habits. You need things you do because you want to do them.

Because here’s what I know about you: When you want to do something, you want to get better at it. And you want to do more and more of it.

And if you give yourself permission to have more fun doing your marketing, you’ll find more time, energy, and resources with which to do it.

So if you hate LinkedIn, experiment with other platforms that you do enjoy. I’m having an absolute ball on Threads of all places. You might find you can translate what you learn on other platforms into ways of making more “effective” places more interesting for you.

And if you don’t want to write blog posts, case studies, or a newsletter, have you considered focusing on another medium entirely? If all your competitors are making their content in one way, that might be all the more reason to try something else where you can stand out and have fun at the same time.

Take a moment to think about what’s holding you back from doing consistent marketing. What are you avoiding, rushing through, or procrastinating on?

And how could you make it just a little bit more fun to do?

I’m not saying fun is the only criterion. I don’t want to trivialize the hard and real work you do every day.

I just think that fun should be one of the things you consider—because it tends to hold veto power.

But if you take care of the fun, you’ll find your marketing starts to take care of itself.