To many new small business owners, podcasters, bloggers, and creatives of all stripes, marketing appears to be about nothing more than visibility.

You might see a flashy ad campaign from a big brand that catches the eye but doesn’t really say anything, and make the assumption that catching your audience’s eye is all it takes to start raking in the sales.

Big, household-name brands, however, are engaged in a very different type of marketing than the one you should be pursuing as a creator with a decidedly non-household name.

Yes, visibility is essential, people need to be aware you exist before they’re likely to follow you, engage with you, and ultimately buy from you. But visibility without saying something that resonates with your target audience won’t help you grow that audience much at all.

Beyond visibility, one of the most essential elements of effective marketing is displaying alignment on personal values.

We all want to support companies and creators who are like us, who believe the same things we do, who are working toward a common goal.

Too often, small businesses and creators feel that their personal beliefs and broader goals of their work are irrelevant, that the work should speak for itself. They may even think that by bringing their personal beliefs and values into their work they’re potentially turning away potential members of their audience.

And they’re right, they probably are.

But they’re also laying the groundwork for a relationship with the people who do resonate with their values that goes beyond transactional.

If you want to create raving fans, you’re going to have a tough time doing in based on the quality of your product alone. You need to inject emotion, values, and a bigger purpose to your work that your audience shares a belief in.

To start building that tribe of believers, you need to be intentional about sharing your values and mission publicly.

Put them on your website, talk about them on your podcast, create social media posts that ignore your content and products entirely, and simply talk about the change you want to make in the world, your vision for what better looks like.

You need to define what the in-group looks like for your audience so they can self-select.

The ones who don’t believe what you do? Meh, it wasn’t for them.

But the ones that do? You’ve just become their one and only.

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Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads.

https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/keep-your-promises-41ec6c1730b3https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/keep-your-promises-41ec6c1730b3