Digital Marketing for Creatives

Marketing. You can have all the tech-tools you want, but the basics of marketing never change. Look, the platforms change. The apps come and go. Today it’s a blue bird, tomorrow it’s a ghost, next year it’ll be a hologram of a lizard selling you NFTs from a digital yacht. But the core of this? The human transaction at the heart of it? That’s been the same since the first caveman tried to trade a cool rock for a better piece of mammoth.

It all boils down to three things that no algorithm will ever rewrite: See me. Understand me. Offer me something that doesn’t feel like a transaction. That’s it. You’re either building a megaphone, building a bridge, or building trust. The digital tool is just a fancier, louder megaphone. But if you’re just screaming generic garbage into it, you’re just the town crier for a ghost town. The medium is a vessel. The message is a handshake, or a punch in the arm, or a whispered secret. That’s primal. That doesn’t get a software update.

So you can panic about mastering the next TikTok trend or optimizing for some new search paradigm, and you should, because that’s the room you’re standing in. But the conversation that actually works? That’s the same as it ever was. It’s “I made this.” It’s “I see you.” It’s “This might mean something to you, too.” Everything else is just a different kind of telephone wire strung between two people who are, let’s be honest, just trying not to feel so alone in the universe. The tools just change how fast the static comes through.

Look, you can’t just yell your art into a void. I mean, you can, and a lot of us do that for years. It feels noble, or tortured, or whatever. You’re in your garage, or your weird little apartment, screaming your truth into a pillow, and then you post it online and it gets three likes from your aunt and a bot from Eastern Europe.

That’s not an audience. That’s an echo chamber with bad acoustics. Finding your audience is finding the people whose weird frequency matches your weird frequency. It’s realizing you’re not broadcasting from a lonely island, you’re picking up a signal on a shared, messed-up radio band. You’re not just saying “Here’s my pain, in E-minor.” You’re saying, “You too? I thought I was the only one.” And when that happens, it stops being a performance and starts being a conversation. It’s the difference between a monologue in a mirror and a dialogue that actually feeds the work.

Otherwise, you’re just muttering to yourself in a crowded room. And you’ll burn out. You’ll think the problem is your art, that it’s not good enough, when the real problem is that you’re handing out your raw, bloody heart to people who just came in for the free WiFi. Find the people who recognize the blood type. They’re the ones who will tell you to keep going when you’re convinced you’re a hack. They’re the reason you make the next thing.

Once you’ve found your people, you need to tell them something. A message. Alright, so you wanna write “copy.” You’re thinking headlines, features, benefits, calls to action. You’re gonna list the specs of your thing like you’re reading a robot’s grocery list. Stop. Just, stop.

Engaging copy isn’t about describing the widget. It’s about describing the hole in your customer’s life that the widget filled. It’s about the silent panic they feel at 2 a.m., the specific flavor of their frustration, the dumb little problem they’re embarrassed to even mention. Your job isn’t to say “here’s my product.” Your job is to say, “Oh, you too? I hate that. Here’s how I dulled the screaming in my head about it.” You’re not a salesman; you’re the guy who already took the wrong turn, hit the dead end, and is now holding up a flickering flashlight so they don’t bash their shins on the same garbage can. You’re adding value by proving you’ve been in the trench, you get the mud on the boots, and you found a slightly less terrible way out.

Value isn’t “10% more efficient.” Value is “you can stop feeling like a failure for ten minutes.” It’s not about the font on the label; it’s about the sigh of relief they’ll exhale when the thing finally, finally works. So look past your own product. Look at the human on the other side of the screen, white-knuckling their way through another Tuesday. Your copy should be a nod of recognition. A shared, weary eye-roll at the absurdity of it all. Then, and only then, do you quietly slide your solution across the table.

Why am I telling you all this? Well the basics to effective digital marketing, nay all marketing, will remain the same. So I’ve created a guide aimed to creators to get their marketing firing on all cylinders so they can spend less time figuring out algorithms and apps and more time making the thing they make. More details to follow, but if you want to keep updated on the guide plus receive notifications of all the free resources I post here, then simply pop your email address in the box below. You can unsubscribe at anytime and I guarantee zero spam.