Marketing The Marketer: How Comms Professionals Can Overcome Blocks Around Self-Promotion

“If you don’t toot your own horn, don’t complain that there’s no music.”

Guy Kawasaki

There’s a strange paradox in the marketing world: some of the people (ME!) who are best at growing other people’s businesses really struggle to market their own.

We can develop a strategy, clarify a brand, create compelling content, attract customers, and generate impressive results for clients—and then completely blank when it’s time to do the same for ourselves.

If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone. You’re experiencing a very human problem: it’s hard to work when your identity is attached to your outcomes.

Ask any marketer trying to promote their own business...The cobbler's children really do go barefoot.

Avoiding visibility can be our Ego's way of protecting our image and avoiding the possibility of failure, embarrassment, or criticism.

The Ego-trap

There's no way around it: marketing yourself requires intense vulnerability.

This is because there are many psychological fears, attachments and dynamics at play, many that almost never arise in direct client work:

• Fear of failure

• Fear of rejection 

• Fear of judgment

• Impostor syndrome

• Perfectionism

• Self-consciousness

• Ego protection 

• Self-worth

• Self-identity

• Self-perception

Reminder: Self-promotion becomes much easier when it stops being about proving yourself and starts being about making yourself useful.

Every day, promote your work without shame. Why? Because the alternative is spending your life being overworked and underpaid for the promoting someone else's work.

The Problem Isn’t Your Expertise

Self-promotion is a common struggle among marketers, creatives, and other service professionals, regardless of experience. You can be highly skilled at diagnosing a client’s problems, positioning them for success, identifying exactly what they need, while doing this for yourself feels impossibly complicated.

Part of the problem is that you’re living and working inside your own business.

When you’re working for a client, you can objectively evaluate their audience, messaging, strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities. When it’s your own brand, every decision carries more emotional weight and pressure. You know every gap, every insecurity, and every possible “what if someone asks me about this?”

That insider knowledge can turn something you normally do with ease into a self-sabotaging cycle of second-guessing, procrastination and avoidance.

You're not failing. When your business is the thing paying the bills, client needs naturally take priority over creating content for yourself.

Reminder to fellow marketers who are stuck in their own way: your clients hired you because you’re skilled, talented and. knowledgable. The solution lies in first manufacturing emotional distance, and then implementing key support systems.

“Owner’s bias” makes self-positioning and packaging quite challenging. It's harder to define your value, simplify your message, and diagnose and solve problems.

When Marketing Becomes Personal

Self-promotion and visibility can challenge our ability to be vulnerable. When you create marketing for a client, a lack of response doesn’t necessarily feel like a rejection of you. But when you’re promoting yourself, the line between “they don’t like this message” and “they don’t like me” can become blurry.

That can lead to self-censorship. You soften your opinions, avoid making bold claims, hesitate to talk about your accomplishments, or worry that talking about your expertise will sound like bragging. Suddenly, the person who confidently champions everyone else’s value is struggling to communicate their own.

Impostor syndrome and perfectionism can make this even worse. Client work comes with a brief, a deadline, and an external expectation. Your own marketing often has none of those things. There is always another sentence to rewrite, another graphic to improve, another strategy to reconsider, and another reason to wait until everything feels just right.

Perfectionism thrives in the absence of a deadline. When“I’ll share it when it’s ready” becomes “I’ll share it eventually." to "I still haven't shared this" you are only blocking yourself from success.

When it’s your own business the stakes feel higher. This pressure leads to decision paralysis and cognivite overwhelm.

One of the biggest misconceptions is that struggling with your own marketing means you’ve somehow lost your skills or expertise. You haven’t. The disconnect is more about perspective, emotional distance, and structure.

You already know how to do the work - developing and executing a strategy. You simply have a much harder time applying that info to yourself because you're emotionally invested in the outcome. The reason why someone can produce impressive results for a client while their own account barely moves:

You spend your creative energy solving everyone else’s problems, and when the client work is done, your own brand gets whatever is left. Because no client is waiting for your content, it becomes incredibly easy to postpone and delay. One week becomes a month, a month becomes a year, and eventually your own marketing disappears entirely.

Sometimes you don’t need another strategy. You either need to create enough distance to use the expertise you already have, or you need someone who can see what you can’t because you’re simply too close to it.

Clients have deadlines, deliverables, and expectations. What if you did too?

You Don’t Need to Do It All Alone

There’s another factor that often gets overlooked: you’re trying to solve the problem by yourself instead of as part of a team.

When you’re working on a client’s business, you have someone to bounce ideas off. You have feedback loops, questions to answer, deadlines, and contracts. Your own business may have none of those things. Without an outside perspective, every decision can become a never-ending mental debate.

If you’ve already figured out the strategy, you don’t necessarily need to personally execute every part of it, especially if you're low on time or energy. If you have the ability and resources to hire help, you should! Your marketing tasks can be systemized and delegated to another talented professional like a virtual assistant or online business manager.

The goal is to remove the "generic" or repetitive work that causes your own marketing to disappear whenever client work gets busy.

Reminder: Your visibility shouldn’t depend entirely on how much creative energy you have left at the end of the day.

Being an expert at marketing doesn't mean marketing yourself will be easy. In fact, it may be harder because you're emotionally invested, too close to the work, AND already spending your creative energy helping everyone else.

"Ignore the marketing industry entirely. The more you pay attention to what other people are doing, the more you become a vomit-spewing zombie who's trying to be like everyone else."

Tony Rush

How to Start Marketing Yourself Again

There are a variety of strategies that can help you put yourself out there:

Seek external support & accountability

You don’t have to solve everything inside your own head and body. Find a peer, collaborator, mentor, or accountability partner who can bring an objective, outside perspective and review your work to help you identify what you’re too close to see. Peer groups and mastermind groups can also be extremely valuable.

Pretend you’re your own client

Write yourself a proper brief that defines your audience, goals, positioning, key messages, tone, and desired outcomes. Then treat the project like paid client work, complete with a deadline and timeline. Giving yourself the same structure you naturally provide to clients can make the process feel much less personal and much more manageable.

Define your value

Look through testimonials, emails, feedback, and past conversations and pay attention to what clients consistently say you helped them accomplish. Their language can often reveal your value more clearly than your own self-analysis because it reflects the experience of someone who has actually benefited from your work.

Block your time

Another way to treat your own marketing like a client project is with dedicated, protected time on your calendar. Set a recurring block each week for activities such as content creation, strategic planning, networking, lead generation, follow-up, and reviewing results.

Affirm: Self-promotion is a non-negotiable part of running my business. I prioritize my own marketing so I can continue doing the client work I love. My clients don’t get my leftover energy and neither should my own business.

Wear different hats

Separate creating from editing from approving from publishing. Give yourself permission to write a messy first draft without judging it. Come back to it later with your editor brain. Trying to create and critique yourself at the same time often creates the mental block in the first place.

Set a “good enough” standard

Instead of asking whether something is perfect, ask yourself, “If this were a client’s post, would I approve it?” If the answer is yes, publish it. Your own marketing deserves the same practical standards you would apply to someone else’s work.

“Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.”

Alan Watts

Serve, not sell

Share what you know, answer questions, explain problems, break down your process, and offer useful insights. Ask, "Who needs what I know, and how can I make it easier for them to find me?" Education or service-based content allows you to demonstrate your expertise without feeling like you're communicating something more shallow like, "look how impressive I am. Pay attention to me. Validate me"

Build sustainable systems

Once you know what you want to say, you can create processes for capturing, batching, repurposing, scheduling, and maintaining consistent visibility. You can also delegate the parts of the process that don’t require your unique expertise, perspective, stories, and voice.

There is a difference between having a marketing strategy and having a marketing system. A strategy tells you what you’re trying to accomplish; a system makes sure it actually happens.

The hard truth: No matter how good we are at our jobs, we can still have problematic blind spots. Nobody is perfect.

“You have to be able to sell yourself, your ideas, and your product.”

Jay Abraham

At the Top of the To-Do List

Marketing your marketing business isn’t simply another task competing with client work. Your clients may be the immediate source of revenue, but your own marketing is what keeps the pipeline healthy for what's next.

If your business development disappears every time you get busy serving clients, you can easily find yourself caught in the same cycle: you get busy, neglect your marketing, finish your projects, panic about where the next client is coming from, scramble to generate new business, get busy again, and repeat the process.

The solution isn’t necessarily to work harder. It’s to build a business where your marketing continues even when you’re busy. To some that might mean developing repeatable systems and designating protected time. To others that looks like building accountability or hiring and delegating.

You don’t need to learn how to market yourself from scratch. You simply need to create the distance, structure, support, and systems that allow you to access the expertise you already have.

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Erin Ratliff is a holistic marketing mentor and creative consultant specializing in organic growth + visibility for heart-led soul-preneurs who value personal and planetary health.

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