Nearly a year ago I designed a series of posters to advertise my coaching business around town. If you live in a city, you’re used to seeing such business and event posters on telephone poles, light posts and in every coffee shop’s designated advertising area. I decided I wanted to experiment with this method of promotion. So I created a series of four clever posters to get the word out. They rocked. They were fun, smart and playful. They became known to me as “my poster campaign.”

The only problem was, I never went campaigning.

It was four months, post-design, before I actually got them printed. And then they sat. They sat on my dining room table. They sat in my office. They sat in my husband’s office. It wasn’t until last week that I stuffed them in a shoulder bag along with a roll of packing tape, a staple gun and a box of tacks and hit the streets. Last week, people! Last week.

There are lots of “reasons” for this delay, many of which I’ve been vaguely present to during these 12 months of avoidance. But the heart of my resistance didn’t become clear to me until after I’d hung the posters. After all, my experience with marketing online – via email, facebook, my website, whatever – has generally been a positive one. Even when there’s no active support for what I’m doing, there is hardly active rejection. Rejection tends to show up as passivity. Additionally, I’ve been doing this long enough and have enough ego strength that even if I put something out there and no one bites, I don’t find myself insecure or troubled and anxious.

But here’s the difference between online marketing and said poster campaign: what I put online, no one can take down or deface; what I hang on a telephone poll, anyone can take down. Or tear in half. Or doodle on. People encounter my business online either because they’ve knowingly entered my space or because I’ve been given permission to enter theirs. Hanging posters around my neighborhood was an act of invasion, a way of showing up uninvited.

Photo © Scott Gleeson Blue

I didn’t seen this coming, oddly enough. I knew I was dragging my heels, but couldn’t fully see why this kind of marketing would be all that different than my other forms of marketing.  I hadn’t anticipated that I would cringe every time I saw a poster missing or defaced. Or that I’d have to coach myself through morning strolls in the neighborhood, knowing that I’d be getting a more public kind of feedback than I’m accustomed to.

This experience reminds my of an earlier post wherein I mentioned that owning a business is like creating your own personal and spiritual development incubator. It’s like a fast-track to growth. (Or a slow track, depending on how long you avoid your own ideas!) I’m pleased to report that my skin feels a little thicker this week and that I’m no longer compulsively keeping tabs on my own posters.

I do what I do because it helps people get to the stuff that matters to them. If showing up uninvited and having to sit in my own discomfort means that someone who needs my support actually gets what they need, it’s totally worth it. And if showing up uninvited and having to sit in my own discomfort means that no one responds to the poster campaign but that I learn to give myself the emotional support I need, it’s totally worth it.

Self-reflection aside, I’d like to offer one tidbit for those of you looking to spread the word in this manner. Leave your phone number off the poster unless you want to be drunk-dialed at 11pm on a Friday night, with the request to attend a dance party. Just sayin’.