Your marketing makes a greater impact than your "real" work

Many soulpreneurs fall prey to the idea of “means to an end”… just let the marketers do whatever they need to get us an audience, so that we can do our “real” work with the clients…

Those soulpreneurs don’t understand that their marketing itself is impacting many more people, compared to the smaller numbers who eventually sign up to work with them…

Their public presence (messaging and selling) is influencing many more souls than they realize.

In other words, your marketing itself is a core part of your ministry.

Unsubscribed…

Some time ago, a client told me they unsubscribed from a well-known spiritual teacher’s email list.

Even though the client liked the teacher’s work, the marketing messaging had become too incongruent with their stated values. The subject lines were clickbaity and pressure-based — tactics that I always recommend avoiding.

My client felt a sense of betrayal. The marketing didn’t feel like the soulpreneur; it felt like a desperate salesperson. Because the “vibe” was off, the trust was broken.

Your marketing impacts many souls

Take a moment to consider the impact of your business. If your marketing is actually successful, your message and values will reach far more people than the relative few who eventually pay you.

If one of your videos goes viral:

• Your presence might touch 10,000 people…

• Yet maybe 50 people might eventually sign up for a paid offering.

If you only care about the 50, you are ignoring the 9,950 souls who were still impacted by your presence!

You don’t even have the capacity to serve 10,000 clients at once. But you do have the capacity to continually impact them through your content.

Statistically, the more successful a marketing campaign, the lower the percentage of conversion.

You are making an impact on many more souls with your “marketing” compared to your so-called “real” client work.

“Have to” do marketing?

If as a soulpreneur you are dedicated to helping as many people as possible, then you’ll have to use “marketing” and “advertising”.

I just hope that you see those actions as essential parts of your practice of service… not just to entice or seduce people into buying.

You are already serving them with how you do your marketing.

This is why I’m so passionate about spreading the message of authentic marketing, especially to businesses that say they are dedicated to higher values: service providers like you.

When your marketing is successful, a movement forms around your content. This helps everyone: less loneliness, more support in applying the wisdom you’re spreading, and of course, new people discover you.

What values are transmitted through your marketing?

For every one paying client, you’ll impact many potential clients through your marketing. Yet, what values are being conveyed through your marketing method and messaging?

This is why I recommend being very careful (and reluctant) to outsource your marketing too early.

You might have the dream that you could just let “someone else” take care of your marketing while you spend your precious energy doing “the real work” with your clients. Yet the sad thing is, the vast majority of marketers don’t understand how to implement your values in the marketing.

Learn the marketing before you outsource it

This is why I recommend that everyone learn to do their own marketing, at least the basics, to ensure that their values are deeply embedded in the impact they’re making on the world.

Think of this phase not as a burden, but as setting the energetic template for your business.

It’s not that you have to personally do the marketing forever. As your business grows, you’ll have the funds to outsource. However, because you’ve been personally doing it for a while, you will understand the process well enough to outsource properly and monitor your team to ensure that they are staying true to your values.

The deeper purpose of marketing

I often say that marketing is the process of a business finding its calling. Through the market testing of our messages (our content and offers), we discover the blessed intersection between our interests and what the market wants from us.

“The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” — Frederick Buechner

Let’s see our marketing and advertising not as a means to an end, not as a necessary evil to be able to do the “good” work with clients, but rather, let’s understand that marketing is a core part of our way of making an impact in the world.

Whether or not each person signs up to work with you, may everyone in your audience be blessed and served by your marketing. Whether or not you planned on it, you are actually generating a lot of transformational influence through your marketing!

This post was originally written in 2021, updated in 2025.