Marketing... WTF Is It, And Do Freelancers Even Need To Worry About It? | Back To Basics

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, Episode 255

Welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, where our mission is to help you turn your creative passions into a stable, reliable income.

If you're in audio, video, design, photography, or really any other creative field, and you just want to learn from other successful creatives, you're in the right place. Hello, and welcome back to another episode of the 6 Figure Creative Podcast. I'm your host, Brian Hood. If this is your first time joining me on the show today, first of all, welcome. We're in the middle of a series right now called Back to the Basics, and today's episode is going to be about the basics of marketing, specifically what the fuck is marketing? When it comes to talking about the basics, this is about as basic as it gets. What is marketing? What is the definition of marketing? I think a lot of people either overcomplicate it in their heads, or they don't ever think about this at all, especially you creatives listening right now. They're like all creative, no entrepreneur. So today, I want to dive into what the fuck is marketing. Nice bleep there, thank you, Leland, for the bleep. So that we're all on the same page. And by the way, if you're a freelancer who's trying to make more money from their creative services and you want to do it without selling your soul, you're in the right place right now. That being said, you have to understand marketing. And that's why this episode is one of the ones that I've been looking forward to in this Back to Basics series, because we get to just talk about the basics of marketing. Now let's bring this back really quick. The definition I've said in the past on multiple episodes in our backlog for our returning listeners and our regular listeners for our long-time listeners, the simplification I've had for marketing for years has just been this.

Marketing, boiled down to its essentials, are putting the right message in front of the right person at the right time. That's basically it. And if you just understand what each of those pieces mean, you are on the path towards getting more clients, making more money from your creative skills, and you can market, by the way, without selling your soul, which is a wonderful thing. Marketing doesn't have to be this achy gross thing. Just like sales doesn't have to be this achy gross thing.

I want to find this quote. It's from an author named Alan Dibb. I think it's from his book, One Page Marketing Plan, which is a wonderful book for those creatives who are trying to figure out what marketing is at a fundamental level and put a plan together. I can't recommend that book highly enough. It may not be this book. He specifically got this quote from, but I read this from him and I was like, this makes a lot of sense. And it really clarified some things for me. Here's his definition of marketing as a whole. He said, here's the simplest, most jargon-free definition of marketing you're ever likely to come across. If the circus is coming to town and you paint a sign saying the circus is coming to the showground this Saturday, that's advertising. If you put the sign on the back of an elephant and walk it into town, that's promotion. Now, if the elephant walks through the mayor's flower beds and the local newspaper writes about it, that's publicity. And if you get the mayor to laugh about it, that's public relations.

And if the town citizens go to the circus, you show them all the different entertainment booths, explain how much fun they're gonna have spending all the money at the booths and answer their questions, and ultimately they spend a lot at the circus, that's sales. And if you planned the entire thing, that is marketing. So to just kind of zoom out really quick, marketing is the organization of all of these different elements.

Now, if you go to, I believe, any college class, I didn't go to college, by the way, so if I'm misquoting this, my bad. But if you look up any basics of marketing, like the fundamentals, I believe they teach this in any marketing classes at universities, they teach something called the four P's.

And the four P's are this, product, pricing, place, promotion. This is the four P's. There's different variations of the P's, but those are the four P's in a nutshell. And how we put together these four P's goes back to A, that circus story I just told you, and how all these elements come together to form marketing, and my original definition, which is marketing is the right message to the right person at the right time. Let's dive into what these four P's mean as freelancers, and then how they tie back to marketing as a whole.