I’m deleting my Facebook group. And it feels good.

There’s nothing wrong with the group. It had been growing without much effort on my part, it had ok engagement and I never struggled to think of content.

But managing the group didn’t light me up. It wasn’t a hassle as such, but it didn’t really bring me much joy either. I also can’t attribute business growth to it (so take with a huge pinch of salt if anyone tells you a Facebook group is a silver bullet for increased sales).

Paired that with the fact that I don’t want to feed the Facebook machine if I don’t have to (check out the Facebook Files for context), and it became clear to me the time has come to pull the plug.

In this blog post I want to chat to you a bit about how prioritising marketing that feels good to us - even if it goes against conventional wisdom or the advice of marketing experts - can be just the thing to unlock your potential.

What is feel-good marketing?

I wish I could say that feel-good marketing is about doing only the bits you like to do. But unfortunately that’s not the case.

If I only did the feel-good marketing bits in my business, I’ll have very few posts live on social media as I really don’t like the faff of actually uploading posts. I won’t be present at all on LinkedIn because it’s not a platform where I naturally hang out. I’ll never use a hashtag and probably just do ridiculous Reels which often have little to do with marketing.

So I’m not advocating total marketing hedonism. Nor am I in the business of toxic positivity.

Instead, feel-good marketing is about prioritising your efforts based on the elements of marketing you enjoy and the bits that have the biggest positive impact - on you, your business, and the wider world.

Big, positive marketing impact

First of all, get clear on whether something is genuinely contributing to the bottom line.

If you get most of your website traffic from Facebook, don’t pull the plug on your Facebook presence (or at least not yet - you need a plan for where you will get traffic from that isn’t Facebook). If your ideal audience love Instagram but you hate it, you’d be shooting yourself in the foot if you don’t post on the platform.

If you don’t love doing those things, change HOW you do them, which might involve a different approach or even outsourcing to people who LOVE doing that thing.

And if you find that something doesn’t contribute to the bottom line? For example, if you have a Facebook group and they don’t buy your stuff, or if nobody clicks on your sales link in your newsletter? Then you need a gear change.

Why I closed my Facebook group

Whether that is switching up the content or binning off the platform altogether will depend on your situation, if it’s feel-good marketing you’re after, stop doing the things that don’t contribute to your profits.

With my most recent launch (a course about doing Christmas marketing), I posted about it in my Facebook group, complete with discount code. But I don’t think anyone used the code I posted in the group. My newsletter, on the other hand, generated pretty much all the sales.

However, positive impact isn’t just to do with financial gain. Some marketing actions benefit your business in other ways (that can’t always be measured).

Take PR for example. Goodness Marketing has been mentioned in some high-profile publications (check out my brag page), but I cannot attribute any new business to any of that. Being mentioned on the BBC/Metro/Guardian didn’t even grow my social media following - please don’t pin your hopes of virality on a PR mention.

BUT! It gave me something to talk about on social media, and who knows if it nudged someone closer to becoming a client? Certainly in my case I still get people mentioning to me that they saw me on the BBC News homepage last year talking about going back to the gym.

PR mentions show your audience that you are a credible person whose opinion is being sought by journalists. That kudos sticks, and it helps.

Putting the feels in feel-good marketing

The positive impact can also be just on you. Yep, I’m serious. It can literally make you feel good and that’s all it has to do.

For example, I love sharing snippets of my day on Instagram Stories. It’s just a habit now and definitely not something I overthink. I love it not because I get a kick from everyone seeing my lunch, but because of the conversations I have off the back of them.

If you follow me on Instagram you’ll know there’s a lot a of silly sausage-ness going on in my Stories. It’s not my go-to place for sharing marketing wisdom - you’re more likely to see nice/unusual things I’ve seen while out and about. The other day I even shared a picture of my brand new boiler (and you’d be surprised how many people replied to that story!).

Sharing these snippets allow people to get to know me and bring them closer to me. It sounds quite cynical, but with marketing we are building relationships and with each of these snippets, I’m moving people closer to a sale.

It’s not a conscious choice - I don’t think “will sharing this picture of my boiler make people want to book me for marketing coaching?”. But I do think: “Will some of my followers be interested in this story about my day?” If the answer is yes, I share it, because I know people will send me DMs off the back of ti and I can build relationships with them.

I don’t want you to overthink this element of your marketing. It’s not about being heavy handed with strategy; it’s about meaningful connection with people.

But when you do marketing because you enjoy it, and you do it in a way that sparks joy for you, that’s feel-good marketing, and the energy will shine through and do the work for you.

Here for a good time, not for a long time

None of us have all day to spend on marketing. And even if we had all day, I doubt we’d choose to spend it doing marketing (even me, and I love marketing!).

Even with unlimited time, we’ll never finish our marketing to-do list (sorry). There will always be more ideas, more website fixes to make, more new channels and features and other things to try to master.

So why waste the time we do have on doing marketing jobs that don’t benefit the business or light us up? That’s a rhetorical question, but I’m going to answer it anyway.

We do it because there’s so much noise out there, and unfortunately the marketing “experts” who often shout the loudest are usually the ones that will benefit in some way from you believing their nonsense.

For example, if they sell a course on email marketing, they might say things like how your business will fail without email. Or they’ll happily peddle out-of-date SEO advice because that’s what worked 5 years ago and they’ve not updated their SEO knowledge/advice accordingly.

Bottom line is with all the self-appointed experts and noisy advice out there, business owners have been told to not trust their intuition when it comes to marketing and instead follow formulas, recipes and blueprints.

Shiny new things are dangled in front of desperate, time-strapped business owners, and in a haze of a million and one things to do, the idea that marketing is complicated, hard and expensive/impossible to do well seems plausible.

That just isn’t true.

Feel-good marketing journaling prompts

It is entirely possible to build a business fuelled by marketing that feels good to you. Here are a few journaling prompts that can help you uncover what feel-good marketing can look like to you.

• What’s the last bit of marketing advice you received and how did it make you feel? If you felt empowered or relieved, why was that? If you felt triggered in any way, what was behind that feeling?

• If you were told you can only use one marketing channel in your business, what would you choose and why?

• Conversely, which marketing platform would you like to see go under?

• On which marketing platform do you feel most connected to the people you sell to?

• If you won a competition that meant one element of your marketing will forever be taken care of, what would you choose and why?

• List marketing experts you follow on social media or whose newsletters you receive. Reflect on how you feel when you see their content and what that tells you about your feelings around their approach.

If you don’t want to do it alone, I can help you identify the feel-good marketing factor for your business. I offer various ways of 1:1 marketing help. Drop me a line and we can figure it out together!