If only I did not have to do marketing.

Many entrepreneurs, freelancers and creatives cringe when they talk about marketing. All they want is to do the work they are good at. Why do they even need to do marketing?

One factor that causes this distress is that they have not yet worked on building the skill of marketing. This includes understanding what marketing actually is when it comes to first principles. When most of us think of marketing, we think of social media, SEO and Google/Facebook ads and the thousand hacks shared by the noise on social media.

Marketing is simply creating conditions where people who we seek to serve are able to enrol in our services. It is about telling a story that a select few people can relate to. It is about helping them become better versions of themselves by engaging with our work.

When we don't do effective marketing, we leave the onus of creating those conditions on our potential clients. Since we do not want to deal with ambiguity, we expect them to cut through the noise and find us, which rarely happens.

Alternatively, we want the social media and search engine gods to find our work and take it to the people who we seek to serve. One, they are not capable of doing it and two, they don't have any incentive in doing so.

So, as a freelancer, a solopreneur, and a creative, it is upon us to choose our audience, the smallest viable audience, and to show up generously and consistently for them, doing work that's remarkable, so that they engage with us and enrol with us. It involves a lot of emotional labour, especially in countering our inner critic, but this is the ticket to the ride we are on.