You want people to find your work, understand how you can help and buy from you. You also want to close your laptop and get on with the rest of your life.
Yet marketing can become something that follows you around, with another post to write, another platform to consider, and the question of whether you’re doing enough.
Quiet Marketing is a calm, self-led approach to business and online visibility that takes your life beyond the business into account.
In this article, I explain the thinking and principles that underpin the approach, what it looks like in practice, and why you don’t need to market loudly first, even when you’re restarting or changing direction.
— In this article —
What makes Quiet Marketing different?
Much of the advice given to self-employed coaches, therapists, consultants and creatives begins with what they need to do to grow. Post consistently. Build an audience. Be more visible. Make it easy for people to sign up. Give them a reason to buy now.
Quiet Marketing begins a little earlier in the conversation.
What does success actually look like for you? How much time do you want to spend online? What do you enjoy creating? And what are you being advised to do that you don’t really want to do?
Entering this way makes a difference because the way you market greatly impacts on your everyday experience of being in business. A strategy might generate sales while also keeping you mentally logged on long after you’ve finished work.
I want time to walk, read, spend time in nature and enjoy my life away from a screen. That influences how I design my offers, communicate with clients and help people discover my work.
Quiet Marketing gives those considerations a place in your business decisions from the beginning.
We can spend a lot of time creating the external conditions for our business to work, through articles, videos and ways for people to find us. But the internal conditions matter too, and those begin with asking ourselves what success means to us and how we actually want to work.
What does Quiet Marketing look like in practice?
One of the first things I recommend is pausing to define your own version of success. Because if we don’t, we end up adopting goals from the business communities we become part of, and chasing metrics that we didn’t previously care about.
For me, success includes having mental and physical space, sharing my insights through writing, and having three days off each week. Knowing that helps me decide what to take on and what to leave alone.
Another practice is becoming more selective about the advice and content you consume. Seeing what everyone else is creating can make you question an idea you were excited about five minutes earlier. Quieting some of that input gives your own ideas room to develop.
It also changes how you approach marketing itself. I would often rather write a substantial article than come up with a short social media post designed to generate engagement. Following that preference led me towards writing that felt like a form of expression, and eventually became one of the main ways people discovered my work.
Then there are the decisions about accessibility and buying. Do you want business conversations happening in your DMs? Do you want people making quick purchasing decisions, or would you prefer them to pause and read the details? What happens if you design those experiences around your actual preferences?
Quiet Marketing involves paying attention to questions like these, experimenting with your answers, and noticing what happens.
Can you market quietly when you’re restarting or changing direction?
Something I hear from people returning to their business after a break, or changing the direction of their work, is a version of this thought.
“I love the idea of Quiet Marketing, but I think I need to market loudly first to get things going again.”
They can see themselves taking this approach later, once they have clients, an audience or some momentum. For now, they feel they need to go back to the conventional advice and do what they’re told will work.
But this is the exact moment to start how you mean to continue.
If you’re returning after a hiatus, you may already know which parts of your previous approach you don’t want to resume. If you’re pivoting, you have an opportunity to make different decisions about how people encounter and experience your work.
You can begin creating those conditions now. You can clarify what you offer, write about the questions your potential clients are asking, and create a way for them to explore your work.
The same applies if you are genuinely starting a business for the first time. You don’t need an established audience before you can use these principles.
Creating ways for people to find you takes time. You can put that effort into building an approach you want to continue, rather than treating your preferences as something you’ll accommodate later.
How do people find you without constant social media visibility?
An important part of my approach is making my work discoverable beyond social media.
Someone might search for a question I’ve written about and arrive at a blog article. They might come across a YouTube video, have my book suggested to them on Kindle, or hear about my work through another person.
From there, they can spend time with my thinking, explore what I offer and decide whether they want to buy something.
That is why I give attention to creating public work that can remain useful long after the day I publish it. It creates more ways for people to find me while I’m doing my client work or getting on with the rest of my life.
Publishing alone doesn’t ensure that this happens. The questions you address, how you name and organise your content, and where it leads someone all matter.
I explore the difference between visibility and discoverability in a separate article. It’s one practical part of Quiet Marketing, alongside the decisions about pace, attention, offers and how you want to experience your business.
Explore the thinking in Quiet Marketing
My book, Quiet Marketing, brings together the experiences, questions and contrary ideas that shaped this approach.
It’s intentionally a tiny book that you can read or listen to in around 90 minutes. In it, I share what happened when I began making different choices about everything from productivity and accessibility to writing, selling and becoming discoverable.
If you’d like to explore these ideas in more depth, you can find the eBook and audiobook here..
Finally, I’d love to know what’s been most useful for you here. Let me know in the comments. ⤵
Danielle Gardner
Founder and Author of Quiet Marketing
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