How to do Marketing as an Introvert

I have been running my mostly online business Selling from the Heart for over 14 years now. Now, that’s not bad going for an introvert is it?

Also, I’m no ordinary introvert, I’m an extreme introvert. In fact I’m the most introverted person I know! You could leave me alone with no human company for literally weeks and I wouldn’t even notice. The flip side of that is that being introverted can make marketing a business very challenging.

Especially if you’ve bought into the belief that you have to be “highly visible” and “put yourself out there” all the time which is what a lot of the marketing experts tell us.

But that hasn’t stopped me running a sustainable, and long lasting fully online business.

Today I’m explaining 3 distinctions that I’m sure you’ll find really helpful and will help you approach your marketing differently – especially if you are an introverted business owner.

I’ll also share the piece of advice I give all my clients that I think you’ll agree is good news for us introverts!

Watch the video below or scroll down to read the blog.

The first distinction I want to teach you when it comes to marketing as an introvert is the difference between:

1. Broadcast Marketing v Relationship Marketing

Broadcast Marketing

Think about traditional TV advertising, the adverts are being broadcast out to the ether, to the whole country, just hoping that they reach and have an impact on the right people.

That’s what you do when you post on social media hoping that people see you. You are broadcasting out to the big wide world of zillions of people just hoping that you get noticed.

There is nothing wrong with this sort of marketing, but it helps if you understand the difference because it might help you realise why you don’t find it so comfortable.

This is the reason that in 13 years I haven’t used social media as a core marketing strategy. I don’t enjoy broadcasting out to the “big wide world” with no idea at all if anyone is even seeing my content. And in addition I actually feel quite vulnerable and exposed at the idea of being seen by very large numbers of people and not knowing how those people might be responding to me.

After all, I’m an introvert, what I REALLY want to do is hide away at home!

Relationship Marketing

On the other hand, Relationship Marketing is where your marketing is based on building 121 relationships:

– This might be going networking and building a 121 relationship with a potential client.

– Or having a Zoom coffee with a leader in your industry and being invited to do a webinar or podcast interview for their audience.

This is the style of marketing that’s always worked best for me, because:

1. I am much more comfortable when interacting 121 than broadcasting to large numbers.

2. When I am offered an opportunity, almost always in a “teaching” rather than “broadcasting” role, and as an introvert, I feel very much in my comfort zone – even in my element – when I’m focused on teaching and answering questions firmly in my own area of expertise.

The second distinction is:

2. External Marketing v Internal Marketing

External Marketing

Is similar to Broadcast Marketing, where you are broadcasting out to the big wide world.  You don’t know who sees it, how they respond to it, is ANYONE seeing it? What if they do see it but hate you? What if that inherently doesn’t feel safe?

When I first started doing Facebook Lives a number of years ago, my fear of being visible was so strong it literally felt like “life and death”.  It was as if my subconscious actually believed I could die if I put myself out there very publicly.  This ran very deep for me, and I did invest in working with an EFT/tapping practitioner to clear some of the paralysing fear.

But of course, it didn’t clear the fact that I’m an introvert by nature – so I’m still not completely comfortable with this type of marketing!

Internal Marketing

By comparison, Internal Marketing is where you are marketing to a smaller audience of people who already know they like you and have in some way put their hand up to say that they are happy to hear from you.

This is why, particularly when I have an offer or a promotion, I do most of my marketing to my email list.

How this works in my business is that for most of the time, when I’m doing marketing “out there” in the world, I’m not trying to sell or promote things.

Instead, I have several Free Giveaways that provide genuine value, and all people have to do is give me their email address. This feels a lot more comfortable to me than trying to sell and promote to a huge world of billions of strangers, lots of whom won’t be in the least bit interested in what I do anyway.

So again, as an introvert, you will most likely be more comfortable focusing on building a community of people who you feel more closely connected to, and then marketing to those people when you have something to sell.

The third distinction is:

3. Online Marketing v Offline Marketing

Now I’m not about to say that if you are an introvert, don’t do any online marketing, but there is a difference, and as an introvert, you are likely to be more comfortable marketing offline, for all the reasons I’ve already stated.

Online Marketing

Is where you are “broadcasting”, you are marketing externally, you could say you need to make a lot of noise to get yourself seen – the opposite of what you really feel inclined to do as an introvert.

Offline Marketing

Is where typically, you are building relationships, networking, and creating partnerships. Even if you’re at the front of the room giving a talk, you are developing a relationship with the people in that audience that feels closer and more intimate than online – some of them will even come and chat to you 121 when you’ve finished, and you’ll develop a genuine personal connection.

The good news if you are an introvert

The good news is that you typically don’t need more than one core marketing strategy for your business to be successful, and definitely not more than two.

In my Business from the Heart membership, I encourage people to come up with 2 core strategies that they will focus on, and I normally recommend one that is online and one that is more offline/relationship-focused.

For me personally, for the past 13 years, I have generated most of my paying clients through activity that would come under the heading of relationship marketing.

But my secondary marketing strategy is content creation and sharing it online, through blogging and YouTube. I prefer these over social media, because to me it feels more like teaching than broadcasting.

Psychologically, I’m creating the content for the people who already follow me, and then it very conveniently doubles up as content that can help me reach new people.

This is much more comfortable for me than consciously going out there to actively broadcast to a huge world full of strangers – as I’ve said before, that can make us introverts feel very vulnerable.

To illustrate this,  I actually wrote this today to answer a question I was asked by someone on my mailing list. But if you’re reading it and it’s the first time you’ve come across me, then it’s also doubled up for me as online broadcast content too.

And what could be better than that?

If you found this useful, do type in the comments and let me know!

And if you enjoyed this blog, I’ve got another that I think you’ll enjoy:  Why Trying to Be Visible is Hurting your Business

You can also sign up for my free training:

How to get Clients when Marketing is Making you Miserable 

If you love working with clients, but find the marketing side of things a bit too much of a slog, then you’ll enjoy this free training focused on new ideas for how to make your marketing more enjoyable. Whether that is falling in love with sharing content on social media, or getting off the social media treadmill altogether!
Find out more and sign up here