In a world where every marketer seems to focus on scarcity, urgency, and FOMO, I want to change the conversation — because joy marketing is real and, more importantly, powerful.
The best marketing still makes people feel some kind of way — with over 90% of our decisions being emotional. But the word emotional gets a bad rap. The truth is that when you can form an emotional connection, it doesn’t have to be negative, and it certainly doesn’t have to make people feel bad about themselves. On the contrary, feel-good marketing is just as effective and can help you build a community around your brand.
But what does that look like for you?
As you can imagine, with a brand called Joyful Business Revolution™, I have a lot of thoughts on this. For the last decade, I’ve taught thousands of business owners how to find the intersection of joy and marketing in their lives so they can use it to grow a business that fuels their vision, their passion, and their purpose.
The first step is taking this to heart:
Joy is an inside job.
In other words, you need to choose joy and keep choosing to let joy guide your decisions. This means finding what’s joyful to you and using that joy in your marketing to nurture your community. I’m going to show you exactly how to define what that means for you so you can start today.
What is Joy Marketing?
Before we go any further, let’s get on the same page about joy marketing and what I mean when I talk about it.
Joy marketing is about simplification, tuning out all the noise, and creating marketing that MOVES the people, the purpose, and the profit. The first step to achieving this? You need to commit to creating content based on your Content Personality® and using messaging that resonates with your perfect-fit clients.
If you’re new to the term Content Personality®, it’s your natural marketing strength. Once you know what it is, you can simplify your marketing, deepen relationships with your community, and do more of the mission-driven work you are called to do. (Yes – this means LESS marketing!)
Ready to discover your Content Personality®? Take our quiz, and in less than 3 minutes, you’ll be ready to streamline your marketing.
Knowing your Content Personality® is an important part of the joy marketing puzzle. However, your marketing cannot be joyful unless your messaging is landing.
Why’s that?
You can be doing everything that brings you joy and still have no clients to work with or no extra money in your bank account. IF this is the case, you most likely have a messaging problem. That is why messaging strategy is one of the first things I work on with clients.
Once you’ve dialed in your messaging, you can practice — and experience — joy-fueled marketing.
And I want to be extremely clear — any brand can participate in joy marketing.
Here are just a few types of businesses/brands I’ve seen have a great deal of success:
- Coaches
- Consultants
- Experts
- Marketers
- Advertising agencies
- Cattle Ranchers
- Airlines
- Fitness companies
- Clothing companies
- Stylists
- Food and beverage manufacturers
- Technology innovators
- Politicians (yep!)
If you look at that list and have just one takeaway, I want it to be this: anyone who wants joy-filled marketing can use feel-good campaigns and messaging to reach their audience.
It’s my hope that every company learns how to practice joy, whether you’re a solopreneur or the head of a Fortune 500 company. When you lead with hope and a positive message, it shifts everything.
To be clear, I’m not saying everything has to be sunshine and rainbows.
But by acknowledging the desired end state and focusing on the possibility or motivation instead of fear, you can create demand, loyal superfans, and a community that craves being a part of your mission.
Who does Joy Marketing not work for?
Joy marketing might not be a fit for your company if you thrive on anger, sowing seeds of dissent, or leaning into people’s pains and fears to make them feel bad, worried, upset, or sad if they don’t take action.
And if this is how you’ve been marketing, consider this a learning opportunity. Most likely, what you’ve been taught until now is scarcity or FOMO (fear of missing out). It doesn’t have to be that way.
I will continue to put this flag in the ground, until my industry “gets it”: There’s enough negativity in the world today, and we don’t have to contribute to it.
Shifting from FOMO to JOMO
Instead of focusing on fear and scarcity, I teach JOMO — or the joy of missing out. If your marketing shows people how you’ll eliminate the BS, noise, and overwhelm (none of us want anyway), then you’re focusing on what motivates them, not what brings them down.
Consider this my personal challenge to you to focus on positivity and joy moving forward.
Why Joyful Marketing Works
Joyful marketing is about understanding that everyone is human and we need to focus on what resonates with humans, not buyer personas, but the actual people.
Illustrating this is as simple as answering a few questions:
- What types of things make you feel good about a brand?
- Why are you more likely to rave about a brand you feel good buying from?
- What makes you want to choose a brand your friends rave about?
While everyone will have different answers to these questions, most of the time, there’s a common thread — something about the brand or their marketing aligns with something important to you.
It follows, then, that joy-fueled marketing can lead to:
- Increased customer loyalty and brand awareness
- Enthusiastic word-of-mouth recommendations
- Positive media mentions and coverage
And I’d love to celebrate every one of these wins with you.
How to do Joy Marketing
Ultimately, joy marketing starts with great storytelling, and can show up in a ton of different ways as you connect with your potential clients and customers:
- Delivering on your values: People buy what you stand for—it attracts them to you and is the foundation of your relationship with them.
- Delivering on your big-picture goals: By illustrating the impact you want to make, you can highlight your mission and vision and show how you’re turning them into reality.
- Eliciting an emotion you want people to feel: When you know the outcome your audience wants and how you want them to feel while interacting with your brand, it’s much easier to create content.
- Giving back to your community: When you commit to supporting your community—specifically, the one you’re growing for your business, you’ll deepen your relationships with people and, in turn, create more loyalty and goodwill with them.
- Giving back to the world at-large: Whether you’re making donations or simply committing to making the world a better place, you can inspire others to give back as well.
What does this look like in our business?
My business supports my life mission by spreading messaging and marketing joy to business owners, so they can deepen relationships with their community, live out their mission, and grow a business that is fulfilling and profitable–ALL by sending one email per week.
With that in mind, I want everyone who works with us to feel hopeful about their future and that they have a true partner when they work with our team who can take their overwhelm and simplify it.
From deep in my soul, I want you to feel that whatever vision is in your heart is valid and that you’re worthy of it.
And that drives 90% of what we do — which means teaching people to find joy in their marketing and business is essential to what we do.
The 5-Step Joyful Marketing Blueprint
Our method is simple — 5 steps to help you find joy in your marketing. You can grab my framework here!
Here’s a short breakdown of how it works:
Step 1: Joyful Experting (yep, the ing is intentional)
Identify your one innate gift that moves everything forward. For me, that’s teaching and training. (If you don’t know, I was a teacher for 20 years before opening my business).
Step 2: Joyful Messaging
Joyful messaging is laser-focused, which means every piece of content talks to one person about their one problem or desire using one platform and one email per week. And you only propose one solution at a time.
Step 3: Joyful Pricing
Joyful pricing is understanding that there are things that fuel you to be your best person. Maybe that’s your fitness, maybe it’s eating organic produce, maybe it’s traveling the world. With that in mind, your pricing should be value-based in two ways — in terms of the value your audience will get and how it helps you live out your lifestyle values.
I talk a lot about this in my book Practical Joy: Simple Tools to Cultivate More Joy Every Day — get your copy (and some great bonus content) here.
Step 4: Joyful Connecting
This is where you really practice joy marketing. It’s about choosing one platform (email marketing in my world and community), making decisions based on your Content Personality®, and sticking to social media platforms that allow you to play to your strengths to grow your community and relationships.
For example, If your content personality is audio, you’d focus on audio platforms — but that doesn’t mean you can’t use email as a route to get more eyes on your audio content. It just means your primary content creation source is audio, meaning you could record podcasts and share them with your audience via email, or record audio clips of you reading your emails, like a bedtime story.
In fact, in the Content Personality® Club, we have people who do both things.
The Content Personality® Club is our community where we help coaches, consultants, and experts like you connect with your ideal clients, grow your community, and converts those on your email list to paying clients. Join us here.
Step 5: Joyful Selling
Joyful selling is enrolling people in the vision they hold for themselves.
For example, I’ve been working with a trainer for three years, and I keep working with her because I hold the vision of hiking and kayaking when I’m 70 and 80. And that it’s the future possibilities that I work out for. The trainer I chose knows my intentions for the next 30 years, and we’re doing stuff now so that I can continue to be active later in life.
It’s a different conversation than “Oh, you’re overweight, you can’t bend, or your knee hurts.” It’s a whole different vibe and philosophy.
Your marketing and sales all come together when you tap into that vision your ideal clients hold for THEIR future.
Putting Your Joy Marketing Together
There are a number of ways that you can follow joy-driven marketing. It depends largely on your Content Personality®, your brand voice, and what feels right to you.
When you’re telling authentic brand stories, you might:
- Tell your brand story and philosophy
- Illustrate why your mission is so important to you
- Highlight your clients and customers and their stories
I also recommend paying attention to your tone — everything we publish goes through a “joy lens.” While it’s not formal per se, I want to be sure we’re cultivating joy instead of FOMO. If you’re ever looking for alternatives, you can check out this list of brand adjectives.
When you share photos, illustrations, and videos, you can elevate the joy with:
- Bright, vibrant brand colors
- Images of people — you, especially — smiling
- Enthusiastic delivery
Make sure to focus on the aspects that feel authentic to you—however, remember it’s also about what resonates with your audience and their future vision for themselves.
Wondering how to make joy marketing work for you? Set up a call with Amy, and she will help you find the best solution.
Finding Joy in Social Media Marketing
For me, the most joyful part of social media is not being on it 24/7 — it’s one of those JOMO things I mentioned above.
Yes, I use social media — it’s an important part of my business, but I don’t have to be on it 24/7. More importantly, if social media disappeared for whatever reason, my business would survive — thrive, even.
Because I’ve focused on growing my community via email, it allows me to live my life offline, especially when I’m traveling.
However, I want to mention that if the idea of social media going away sends you into a tailspin, it might be a good time to rethink how you’re using it and if there’s an alternative.
All that out of the way, how can you find joy in social media marketing? Everything goes back to storytelling, and yes, “algorithm juice” and “engagement” as draining as those two terms can feel.
Content that triggers emotion is more likely to go viral, and angry content is often more likely than happy content because it contributes to “OMG-can you believe this???” outrage that people want to share.
But let me ask you — if you do want to go viral, why?
While viral means more eyes, it doesn’t mean that those eyes are your perfect-fit clients. And, more importantly, it doesn’t necessarily mean more income.
Instead, I’d encourage you to focus on happiness-inspired social media marketing with meaningful stories that help you connect with people and nurture those relationships instead of flashy FOMO-boosting clickbait content.
6 Joyful Marketing Campaign Examples
There are so many good, joyful marketing and advertising campaigns out there — I’m going to share a few of my favorites here.
Patagonia
I love Patagonia’s whole vibe and how they’ve dedicated themselves to their mission of supporting the planet. In fact, two non-profits are their principal shareholders.
Their content is great, from the brand story on their site to their YouTube channel.
In particular, I love their latest series elevating their customers’ stories, like this one:
The 2024 DNC Vibe
There’s no other way to say it — this year’s DNC was unlike any other political convention I’ve seen. Everything was about joy, positivity, and a vision for a better future.
Each state had its own vibrant walk-up song, but of all, I absolutely love the clip of Lil Jon doing Georgia’s.
Dove
I’ve loved Dove’s body image campaigns for years now — with their focus on using bodies of all shapes, sizes, and colors to highlight that every body is beautiful.
However, I love them even more in this day and age with their pledge to use only real humans — no AI — in their campaigns.
Ben & Jerry’s
There’s nothing more joyful than an ice cream company that focuses on fun. With a touch of hippie, a touch of modern flair, and a lot of doing what they believe is right to help bring their vision for the future into being, their YouTube channel is always bright.
This video illustrates how they’re encouraging their audience to stand up for what they believe in.
Peloton
Peloton has always marketed itself as a different kind of fitness company, with positive, uplifting messaging online and in their classes. Their latest campaigns focus on empowerment, customer stories, and working out your way — check out this one here.
Apple
Earlier in this article, I mentioned that joy marketing doesn’t always have to be sunshine and rainbows. It’s okay to acknowledge that life is hard. Apple is known for its inspiring, innovative “There’s an app for that” vibe. This ad, shot during the pandemic, took a different approach, showing how people found connection and creativity during an isolating time that was collectively a drawn-out trauma.
It might draw tears, but they’re tears of hope.
Joy is an Inside Job
Joy marketing is irrepressible.
It allows you to stand out, create hope, and empower your audience to build the brighter future they want. It starts by looking inward — and we’d love to help you get clear on how to create a plan that brings joy to your life and business.
Learn how you can work with us here.
