Go ‘head, do it. Search for “attraction” and “marketing.” You’ll see that nearly every marketing guru up and down, left-right, forward-backward, is all about telling you how to make your marketing attractive.
I’m telling you: Stop! Stop… please stop. It doesn’t work. You can’t make your marketing attractive.
Huh?
Well, okay, sure. You can bring some beauty and aesthetics to your marketing. But that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about some magical power of AtTrAcTion that is supposedly going to hoover up new clients for you, sucking the money out of their pockets, and their loyalty out of their hearts, and sticking it to your business.
Okay, I know you don’t actually want to do that to people. But, looking at the number of people trying to create ‘marketing that attracts’ you’d be surprised how far desperation will take us. So let’s talk about it.
What is attraction?
Attraction has to do with love, yes? Attraction is the force of gravity, that unnamed, and never-understood province of the Divine, of Cupid, of lovers, and parents, and good friends. It’s the magical chemistry that is part pheromone, but only part, because the other part is that mystical bit of attraction that comes from love.
You can’t manufacture love. You can’t. You either feel love, or you don’t. You receive love, or transmit love, or give love. But you can’t create it.
So if you can’t create love, you can’t create attraction. Sorry, you’re in a spiritual realm now, and no amount of mumbo-jumbo is going to create love.
However, you can put yourself in a state of readiness to receive love. And that’s a far larger topic than this blog post will cover. So let’s move on to marketing.
If not attraction, then what?
If your marketing isn’t about attraction, then what is it about? Well, let me answer that question with a question: when you fall in love, what happens?
That’s right, you freak out. Love is scary. Connecting with the obliterating power of love, of that deep Divine attraction, however it’s manifesting in the world, scares the bejezus out of the ego.
That’s what’s happening to your clients. Your clients have felt some sense of attraction towards you. No… not THAT kind of attraction- and yet there is love involved. And perhaps they sense that their life will change in some way, large or small, through engaging with your business. So unconsciously they get scared.
That’s clue about your marketing.
Your marketing needs to provide safety.
Yes, safety. The ego is scared, or distracted, or busy. If your marketing, which is one of the physical manifestations of your business in the world, helps your clients feel some sense of safety, then they just might feel okay about trusting the attraction they feel to take the next step towards engaging with you and your business.
So, forget about attraction, except in terms of how your heart shines. Instead, let your marketing focus be on creating safety.
How do we do that? I’ll be exploring some of the most common ways over the next few blogs posts.
In the meantime, take a look at your own marketing. How are you helping potential clients and customers feel safe? Or are you? Can you spot anything that might scare them off?
Update! I just added a podcast of this post.
Click here to listen. (Less than four minutes).
3 Responses
Hi Mark,
Not sure how I got to his blog… oh yeah, looking for a link to your affiliate program. Anyway… interesting idea which at first I resisted and was ready to argue with, in part, because I often speak with my student coaches about developing attraction based marketing.
But then a thought came to me as I continued to read. In my work as a Life On Purpose Coach we make the distinction between people’s Inherited Purpose and their Divinely Inspired Life Purpose.
The Inherited Purpose is that which shapes a person’s life when they are coming from fear, lack or struggle, and the Divinely Inspired Purpose is who they really are and what shapes their life when they are coming from Universal Love.
The thought that prompted this post is realizing that most people who find their way to Life On Purpose Institute arrive with much of their life being shaped by fear/lack/struggle. In other words, they arrive at LOPI being their Inherited Purpose not their true life purpose.
And suddenly your point made such sense. It makes sense to give room for the fear/lack/struggle… to make that aspect feel ok… It’s ok to be a little fearful about identifying your true purpose… it’s ok to be fearful a lot… it’s very daunting stuff, this Universal Love.
It’s life transforming, and true transformation is scary as hell, and it can often feel like one is traveling through hell as one is transforming.
Ok, that’s my comment for now and perhaps the start of my next ezine article.
Exactly, Brad, exactly! It’s just how we’re wired as humans, to want to be witnessed and understood.
I”m glad you pushed back, and I’m glad for the realization you saw. Thanks for coming by!
I disagree with you as to “attraction has to do with love” and “it’s never understood”. I believe that attraction is what you like and want to see/feel. That is why a website has to be attractive, so that visitors would like to know more about it. You have to be very creative in order to make a website interesting and attracttive. And you may achieve trust using social media. That’s where you build relationships with your customers – the more they feel they are important the more they trust you.