Fear vs. passion: The driving forces that can make or break your marketing

As I work with more accountants every day, it’s great to see so many of them embracing content marketing and recognising its place in drawing your prospects to you.

But even still, there are a lot of accountants out there who share the opposite mentality. They’re reluctant to dive into new marketing ideas, or even doing any marketing at all, and that’s because their decision making is underpinned with fear.

Fear can kill your marketing.

It can kill your ideas. It can kill your team’s ideas.

It’s can lead you straight to the dark side (bonus points if you get the reference!)

But what happens when you embrace that fear? When move past being afraid of everything, a new emotion begins to creep in, and that’s passion. And it’s the balance of these two emotions that’s needed when you tackle your marketing efforts.

Passion negates fear

When I was at Xerocon London in October last year, I met hundreds of accountants who were just exuding with passion!

They were lining up to speak to us about transforming their marketing efforts. They were passionate about learning something new, getting results and driving towards change – all because they knew it would make a difference.

It was clear that these accountants were truly open-minded. They had the entrepreneurial thinking nailed. Why? Because they’d moved beyond their marketing fears and turned it into a passion.

These are the accountants who have gone onto write one or more blogs every week, who take popular questions from a prospect meeting and turn it into a Facebook live video, who are active on social media, who make mistakes but learn from them.

Don’t get me wrong, they might still have some fears of getting it wrong or not getting results, but they had realised that they needed to move beyond that in order for their marketing to be much more effective.

Fear negates passion

If you’re doing the opposite, if you’re constantly overriding every decision you make with fear, your passion will dwindle, and your marketing will suffer, or worse: It’ll stop completely.

Fear is the start of a downward spiral for accountants, because it’s largely that fear of starting something new that stops you from doing it all together. If you couple that with the fear of the unknown, you’ve got a recipe that zaps all of your energy and prevents from taking any action with your marketing.

And that zap of energy and passion doesn’t just rest with you:

Your fear will in turn ruin other people’s passion

Fear is an idea killer, but that isn’t just your ideas… it’s the ideas around you as well!

This is crucial for those who hire an in-house marketing person. You’ve hired them and they’ve come in raring to go, beaming with passion and loaded with ideas.

And then this happens:

“Oh, no. We can’t do that”

“I don’t want to try that. What’s your next idea?”

And many more phrases just like that. What happens here is your fears of marketing, of the unknown, of trying something new, take a toll on your marketing person or team, and that in turn leads to their passion dwindling. They’ll leave disheartened and over time, their passion will drift away, their ideas will drift and they’ll ultimately leave the company.

Fear doesn’t just kill your marketing ideas. It can kill the passion behind those ideas and the passion of those around you.

Embracing the fear

If you’re in this situation with your marketing, then there are 3 steps you can take to embrace your fear and begin changing how you approach your marketing.

  1. Just do it: (Disclaimer: I don’t mean go a buy a pair of Nike trainers!) This may seem obvious, but the only way your attitudes towards marketing will change and the fear will drift away is simply by diving in and trying it. You don’t have to go in all-guns blazing, you can start with something small, like writing blogs. But simply trying the marketing task which you fear is the only way to overcome it and build a passion for it, which leads to:
  2. Be ready for mistakes: Yes, you can make mistakes and don’t let anyone tell you different. We’re avid promoters of the “not perfect, but done” mentality here at PF, and so should you, because when you’re trying something new, you’re inevitably going to make mistakes. And that’s ok! They’re a learning experience, as is your marketing: Treat it as one big learning curve.
  3. Sign up for our “Traits of an Entrepreneurial Accountant” guide: Being driven by fear is one of many traits that can betray you when it comes to doing great marketing. Luckily, Karen has written a brand new guide which covers all of this and how to overcome them, and you can sign up for your copy here!

Don’t forget, it’s ok to have fears. Everybody has them and it’s more prevalent with content marketing, especially if you’re stuck in the old-school ways of direct mail, telemarketing and so on.

But if you want your marketing to flourish, and if you want to drive about change, then your only option is to embrace that fear going forward and develop a passion for your new-found marketing efforts.