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I am really excited about this podcast today, also a little nervous. The reason why is because I want to talk about something that my friend and partner Kathy have started. Kathy and I run a company, business, brand, tribe, community, whatever you want to call it, called Funnel Gorgeous…

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and we talk about how to integrate design and branding with marketing. And we got together and we started to brainstorm, what is Funnel Gorgeous really? Because of course we drop super beautiful sales funnel template and we really help, especially people that are building funnels regularly, whether you’re a service provider or a business owner. We help you with the design side so you don’t have to become a professional designer.

And that’s awesome and that’s what we’re known for, but we got to talking on a deeper subject, and it sort of sparked this idea. And what realized, what we’re going after in our messaging with Funnel Gorgeous and what I want to talk to you guys about today is integrity in marketing.

Now I love marketing, I love it so much, it’s basically what I went to school for, although I didn’t realize it at the time. I went to school for clinical psychology because I was fascinated with human behavior. And Marketing is really just applied psychology. It’s understanding human behavior, understanding the wants, the needs, the desires of humans. And we talk about markets and core desires and sales messages and all this kind of stuff, so I love marketing.

But I also know that the industry of marketing does have a bad reputation, especially in internet marketing. Even in just the mainstream we see shows like Madmen on Netflix and stuff, and that’s like old school advertising. But we move into online marketing, internet marketing, it really has been the Wild West. And there has been a ton of people abusing, sort of, the lack of regulation, and there’s just been terrible scams and problems and spam, and all the things.

So internet marketing has gotten a really bad name. So I think the undercurrent of why people have just fallen in love with the Funnel Gorgeous brand and the beautiful designed templates and learning how to integrate marketing and design is because it really boils down to integrity. And integrity in marketing is when your product and your offer, whatever it is you sell, and the way you sell it, which includes not just the copy, but the design, which also aligns with the philosophy and your business mission, when all those three things are in alignment, you are in integrity in marketing.

So when you’re not in integrity, one of those things is usually out of whack. The most common lack of integrity we see in marketing is when the product or offer sucks. The service sucks, they’re not delivering and they try to use marketing to sell something that’s crappy. So we hear a lot of people talk about ethical marketing, like don’t use marketing tactics and strategies and leverage all you know, the power of psychology to sell something that’s crap. So that’s one lack of integrity, that’s probably the most common one.
But there’s another type of misalignment which I think we’re trying to get at, because a lot of our customers do have great products and services, and do want to change the world and do really help other people, but their branding and their design and their sales message isn’t in alignment with how awesome their offer is.

And I’m going to pick on somebody, I’m not going to name them but I love this person so much, they’re actually one of my clients. And whenever you meet her, she is just a firecracker, and she is amazing and she cares and she knows what she’s doing. And she is so good for the business owners who hire her, she’s amazing and the minute someone meets her and gets to know her, they want to buy everything. However, her branding, her design, it’s pretty basic. She didn’t go to design school, this is not what she’s focused on.

So there’s a misalignment there because, and she has said to me, “I’ve struggled to get into the mass market and I’m not really sure why.” And I think it’s because the brand and design help build that trust when you can’t physically meet with them face to face. So for this woman who I love, whenever somebody meets her face to face, they feel so attracted to her and attached to her they buy everything she has. But when she puts her stuff out in a funnel or online marketing and it doesn’t have the branding that matches the personality of who she is, there’s a lack of trust there. And it just becomes that much harder to confer.

So that’s a different type of misalignment in marketing. And it’s not really moral or ethical, it’s just she’s leaving a lot of money on the table. And so what I want to say about this is that people often, when you talk about integrity of marketing, in marketing, people assume that means you’re not going to make as much money. It’s like, “I guess I can’t use that tactic. I guess I can’t use this tactic. I guess this one’s out the door. I have to be compliant here and I’m not going to do this, and I’m not going to make as much money because I’m going to be in integrity.”

But the reality is that that type of integrity I’m talking about, where the amazing offer that you actually have and then the branding and design that’s like okay, but it’s not as good as what your offer is, that sort of misalignment, when you get that in alignment, you make more money.

So Kathy and I were talking about this, the integrity in marketing, making sure that your products, your offers, your design, your branding, your sales message, and the philosophy and business mission you have, when they all come into alignment, you make more money. And more money isn’t bad because more money allows you to serve more people. And when you have a good offer and you have a good product that really, really helps the world in some fashion, then that’s a good thing. They always say money amplifies who you already are. So if you already are a good, honest person, it’s going to amplify that. If you’re not, money’s going to make it worse.

So Kathy and I got so excited we actually started a Facebook group called the Marketers Heart, and we’re talking about integrity in marketing. And obviously the main problem with selling crappy offers is a problem, but we are also talking about the other stuff too. And how you don’t have to trade, you don’t have to get integrity in marketing and lose money.
And we started to count up the number of marketing tactics we haven’t deployed, and not because we don’t like them or because we’re against them, but just because we haven’t had time. And yet the amount of money our business has made anyway, literally we were staring at evidence that you don’t have to, like a lot of the tactics you can use are awesome, but you don’t, even when you don’t use them, if you focus on having integrity in marketing you will make money.

In fact, we joked that our funnel drops, which are our sales funnel templates, we were laughing because we’ve, they’re $49 so they’re not very expensive, we’ve already and without any real advertising at all, we’ve crossed over a hundred thousand dollars in sales. And for the first three drops we didn’t even have a sales page, we just had an order form. That’s it. We broke the cardinal rule of not writing sales copy, just having an order form, and then not even really selling to our, emailing to our list unless we were selling something. We broke all the rules and we didn’t do the tactics but we still made a lot of money. And I think that the reason why is because from the very beginning we’ve worked very hard to make sure that our offers are amazing.

We don’t anyone to be like, “Eh.” We want them to be like, “Holy crap, what can I buy from them next?” and two, we want our design and our branding to be like, as high end as we can possibly get, and that is all attributed to Kathy, 100%. And then three, we want to have a business mission and philosophy that’s actually going to have a good impact.

So we are starting the discussion of integrity in marketing. We want to talk about the things nobody else is talking about. Yes, we know that there’s a lot of problems in the industry. We don’t want to be afraid of them, we want to hold space for those uncomfortable conversations, but we also want to kind of break the lie that integrity, to have integrity means less money, because you can’t do all the cool, cheeky things that other people do, when it’s really just not true.

So if you’re interested you can go on Facebook and type in the Marketers Heart because that’s the group we’re starting. It’s literally just a free group to have these really gnarly discussions. I love controversial discussions, they’re my favorite. Kathy’s more like, “Can’t we all just love each other?’ But it’s super fun. And if this is something that matters to you, you care about marketing, you care about matching all those three things together, I would invite you to go check it out.
Anyway, as always I appreciate you all, and I’ll talk to you soon.