You’re Marketing Like A Big Dumb Stupid Idiot… Please Stop

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, episode 367

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. Oh, hey, you big dumb stupid idiot, you're here because you... You're here because you market like a big dumb stupid idiot. Maybe you think you do, I don't know. That's what we're going to discuss today. Creatives, they have this weird marketing allergy. I don't know what it is about you. I've been you, I've been around you people, coming up on decades, plural. I've been around creatives, freelance creatives specifically. And we all kind of have this weird marketing allergy, and it's weird for a few reasons. One is you just, you hate doing marketing. And when you're pushed into a corner where you're forced to do marketing because you have no other options, you end up self-sabotaging. And then second weird thing is marketing works wonders on you. And I can say this after spending tens of thousands of dollars per month on paid ads, profitably targeting creative freelancers like you, maybe you specifically found me through ads. And so I know it works on you. So you're susceptible to marketing and that's okay, because marketing is not a bad thing. It's not evil. I'm literally marketing to you right now. This is a podcast. This is content marketing. So there's all sorts of weird junk in your head around marketing. And that leads to some pretty weird behavior. Some might even say dumb, big, dumb, stupid, idiot behavior. It's just the continuation of this entire three-part stupid series I'm doing. And here's the dumbest thing. You know it in your heart of hearts. You know you need to market your services. You know that people aren't going to magically find you, and you're not getting enough referrals to keep yourself booked solid. And yet, you don't take this seriously. That's dumb. That's big, dumb, stupid, idiot behavior. That's why this series exists. And you don't realize this should be a regular part of your life if you want consistency.

You want consistency in your income when you need consistency with marketing. If you want to get away from the Feast Your Famine roller coaster that you're going through right now, maybe you're in that famine right now. Hell, maybe you're in that feast right now where things are great, and you're feasting and you're feeling great, and you're like, I'm going to listen to the podcast today because I'm feeling so good. Brian's going to pump me up. I'm right here to tear you right back down, bring you right back down to earth. You're on a feast right now. Boom. You're going to be in a famine in like a couple months. So let's just talk about this right now. Let's get into this. If you're new here, hi, I'm Brian Hood. This is the 6 Figure Creative podcast. This podcast is for creative freelancers like you who are going on the ups and downs of life as a freelancer, and you feel like that's probably not how things should be. Well, I take influence from my background, 10 plus years as a music producer, my background in software as a service, my friends in other businesses, my people I look up to in other businesses, other industries, the 250 plus freelancers that we coach regularly on a month-a-month coaching program that we run where we learn and then get to see underneath the hood of what works, what doesn't work, what junk they come to us with. All this stuff, I bring to this podcast in order to help you, the listener, run a better business, make more money without selling your soul. If that sounds interesting to you whatsoever, welcome. And then this is the third part of the series, I don't know why you're joining for your first episode on a third part of this series, but you're kind of a big dumb idiot. So that checks out, it checks out. All right, so let's talk about, I got five different big dumb stupid behaviors I want to talk about when it comes to marketing, with the goal being, I'll tell you what to do instead of these five big dumb things because I don't want you to be an idiot, I want you to be big brain, not smooth brain. So the first big dumb idiot behavior is only marketing your services when you are desperate. This is what regularly happens. It disappears when you're booked up, feeling good, riding high, I'm fat and happy, I'm feast mode right now. And then when the inevitable crash comes, you come back down to earth, you start panic posting when that calendar dries up. You treat marketing like it's a fire alarm. You pull the alarm when things are burning down. You flip that switch. Anyone ever, you know, in high school, when someone would try to play hooky, flip the little fire alarm down? I was that kid, I was the one doing that kind of crap. I was truly a big dumb idiot in high school.