How to Market Yourself Without Feeling Salesy (Instead Feel Amazing)

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Shouldn’t you stop struggling with your inner mean girl about how to market your business?

Are you tired of feeling bashful or boastful when talking about your services to potential clients?

I can relate. That was me when I first started out as a marketing consultant.

Let’s see if we can shift this whole I-hate-marketing-myself thing for you.

In this post, we’re talking about how to market yourself, a hugely important topic that impacts a ton of women entrepreneurs, life coaches, health coaches, consultants, solopreneurs, and business owners.

Read on for a rewarding, refreshing exercise you can do to change your perspective immediately and three quick ‘no-nos’ to avoid.  Let’s shift your conversations and your content to focus relentlessly on your clients and how you help them achieve goals, dreams and ambitions!

It’s not surprising that you might be concerned about coming off as self-promotional when talking about yourself, your talents, your services, your business. I sure felt that way when I was plunged into instant, overnight self-employment after a massive corporate downsizing. I was colossally unprepared to market myself as a consultant.

Working for big companies, I’d learned plenty about marketing brands, products, and services. But not a scintilla about marketing myself.  As a newbie entrepreneur, I made the classic mistake and talked all about my services when networking and in marketing materials—after all, that’s what big brands do, right?

It took me way longer than I’d like to admit, but I finally stopped. Clients began to tune in when I learned to talk about their problems, outcomes, dreams, and results instead of my services. Whew! That was a relief.

Studies show this about how women are judged

As a woman in business, you’ve been conditioned by society to feel uncomfortable about sounding even the tiniest bit self-promotional. Let’s not stop there. Once you left working for someone else’s company and became your own boss, the challenge came roaring back, didn’t it?

Studies show that women are judged more harshly for being self-promotional than men are. And that’s not the worst of it. According to an article published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, women are harder on other women. 

The study reports that both women and men…

“… perceive women, but not men, as less likable and less competent when they engage in self-promotion.”

That’s sucky.

How do you work through this? For starters, reimagine the way you think about how to market yourself.

 Journal about this

Open your journal and write about your aspirations for starting your business in the first place. Your ‘why’.

• To take better care of yourself and your family?
• Was it to have flexibility with your schedule?
• Were you looking to grow your side hustle so you can dump your day job?
• Did you have a superior solution, approach, or method that no one else in your field had?
• Like me, were you laid off?
• Fed up with the daily grind, leadership vacuum, and lack of control over your life that comes with millions of 9-5 jobs?

Now, use your aspirations for starting a business to refresh your thinking about how to market yourself and your business.

What do you love about your clients?

Next, write down how you feel about your clients, students, or customers. Journal your deep feelings that explain what you love about working with them.

Feeling stuck? Think about your biggest client success stories. Reflect on the conversations you had with them after they’d solved a super-big problem because they followed your program, coaching, training, or used your services.

Relive those conversations. Replay in your mind the words they used to tell you how great they felt, how happy they were, how relieved that their problem was solved. Their goal was achieved. Their longtime dream was now a reality. All because of your work! Drink that in.

Like many of my clients, as you recall those past client conversations, you may feel inspired all over again.

Be sure to capture the gold behind your conversations with successful clients. How?

• Jot down all of the exact words and phrases your customers used.
• Don’t change their words!
• Don’t polish how your clients described their outcomes.
• Capture clients’ words as you remember your conversation—or from the happy-dance emails or texts they sent you.

Doesn’t it feel great to recall those conversations? Wasn’t it fulfilling to hear them talking about how great things came out, and saying “thank you”? All as a result of YOUR work!

Now use their precise words in your messages, content, and conversations when you’re explaining how your coaching helps clients become the better person they want to be.

If you’d like more ideas about how to market yourself, check out this post, 7 Strong Steps to Market Yourself

A new view of how to market yourself

My friend’s husband occasionally asks her to love an idea for ‘at least five seconds’. She laughs, “It’s his way of getting me to buy-in to one of his new concepts—it often works!”

Be my best friend for a moment, and try liking my idea for five seconds. Okay? Great, here it is. A new way to think about ‘how to market yourself’.

Marketing your services is about describing the kinds of clients you serve and the kinds of problems you help them solve.

It’s storytelling about how you help clients get unstuck. Marketing is painting a picture of how they’ll feel once they get to where they want to be.

It’s not tooting your own horn.

I promise you, once you make this mindset shift, that marketing yourself is not about you, a ton of business growth actions become easier! For example, blogging, writing emails to expand your list, showing up on social media to share your awesome wisdom, and so much more.

How to market yourself better? Start here

If you want to learn pro lessons about how to market yourself, it all starts with your self-introduction.

Here are three quick tips about pitfalls to avoid when answering the (dreaded) question, “What does your business do?”

1) Don’t start with your title when introducing yourself at networking or business events. Instead, talk about the kinds of people you help.

2) Avoid reciting a list of your services, products, or programs. You don’t want to sound like a fast-food menu, do you?

3) Eliminate industry jargon and expert lingo from your self-introduction. Instead use your clients’ language. Paint a picture of how you help using the words your clients use when they talk about their problems.

Here’s a popular post of mine about self-introductions.

Final thoughts about how to market yourself

Like most things in business, the key to feeling amazing when it comes to how to market yourself goes back to your mindset.

Get really clear on how you feel about marketing yourself and your business. If you feel uncomfortable with marketing your business, follow the exercises shared above.

Translate those fabulous feelings about your incredible client successes into a new mindset about how to market yourself. Rewrite the story you’re telling yourself about marketing yourself.  Get excited about marketing your business—that way your potential clients will be excited to learn more about your work!

Marketing is talking about the clients you help and explaining how you help them become the better person they want to be. Marketing is not about promoting yourself.

Be Unstoppable!

~ Cynthia

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