Marketing Is Matchmaking, Not Manipulation

Marketing has bad PR. And honestly, marketing professionals sometimes deserve their bad reputation.

When marketing feels gross, it’s usually because someone, somewhere is trying to push something that just doesn’t fit. The need to make sales can sometimes elbow out the deeper business need to make a connection.

Good marketing doesn’t feel like that. Done right, it’s just matchmaking.

When you’re doing good marketing, you’re not trying to lie, cheat, or deceive. You’re not trying to misdirect or manipulate. All you really need to do is find the right people at the right time and help them get what they need.

After all, you’re not just closing a sale. You’re helping someone solve an actual problem. And that’s a responsibility that carries weight.

And to be clear: I’m talking about small and mid-sized businesses here. Not the Buy n Larges of the world. I’m talking about the kind of businesses that live and die by whether people genuinely want what they’re offering.

With that in mind, let me give you a more specific sense of what I mean when I say “marketing is matchmaking.”

When marketing is at its best, here’s how it feels to me when I’m working on client projects.

I get to help a business that provides a valuable service or a founder with an interesting idea or passion put their best foot forward.

We can make modest tweaks to the message, format it clearly, and distribute it however it makes sense—be it landing pages for an SEO play, advertising to get direct attention, or email campaigns that go straight to inboxes (cold or warm).

When it’s working, the people working in the business automatically feel a greater sense of dignity for looking good and being able to present themselves in a positive light. Their offer looks good, sounds good, is honest and true, and lands with a real sense of integrity.

And even better, the people on the other side are grateful. People have problems and they seek solutions. A person covered in mosquito bites is thankful to find a pest control company ranked #1 on Google. Retargeting ads can remind someone to restock on a much loved product. A founder struggling to get traction for their business may be thankful to get a short, thoughtful email from someone who can help.

You don’t need to deceive or pester. This isn’t 1951 and it isn’t the age of Don Draper, three TV channels, and mass market spray-and-pray ads. You can get specific and our technology encourages that at every step. Play your cards right, and you can show up in a search or scroll when someone actually needs you.

Does every campaign I run land perfectly like this? Hell no! You have to test. You have to try things on a small scale first and then refine. But this is always the end goal.

So it’s worth talking about why this doesn’t always happen.

Like what you’re reading so far? Subscribe for more!

There’s the obvious reason, of course: product-market fit. If people don’t want what you’re selling, no amount of polish is going to change that.

But often, there are subtler things going on. Marketing can miss the mark for a whole bunch of different reasons, and you have to put some serious brainpower into figuring out why. This is hard to do because your clearheaded thinking is demanded in an area where it’s hard to be objective.

Testing feels vulnerable. People can tell you that you that your ideas are wrong and that they don’t resonate. And it can hurt quite a bit. Then there’s the matter of rethinking your processes and rebuilding parts of your business based on new information—that’s pretty scary in its own right. You find yourself pushed by feedback, often anonymous, into terra incognita.

Meanwhile, there’s also this simple fact: every business has to make money to survive. I know this, you know this, and every prospective customer you talk to knows this. So when you reach out to them, you have twin goals in mind: a) help them out and b) make money.

And if you’re not clear on how you’re going to help them out? Then the only message that comes through is that you want to make money. Even if you’re an honest person with good intentions.

To play matchmaker, you have to answer the ever-present and implicit question every customer has: “what’s in it for me?”

That is really tricky, so I’d like to break that down further.

“What’s in it for me?” is a hard question to answer on someone’s behalf.

You have to:

This is way harder than it sounds, and the only way you can reliably do this is by testing your messaging on a small scale until you get it right, and then scale up.

Our egos want to be right the first time. But good marketing has a way of humbling its practitioners.

That means writing messages, running small pilots, paying attention to what works, and dropping what doesn’t without drama.

I’d wager that most businesses skip this step. And they do this for a few reasons:

In short, incentivizing this spirit of experimentation and testing is very hard to do. It’s easier to send one-size-fits-all emails, churn out placeholder content, run unfocused ads, and blame conversion tracking if results don’t pan out.

There’s a real human cost to bad marketing, you know.

I get multiple robocalls per day, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you do too. How much does this distract you from your work or your home life?

When you look for a local service provider, and the page looks like it was written to please Google with keyword stuffing, does it make you want to reach out? Or do you feel resentful that your time was wasted?

And I think we’ve all seen our share of ads that make us like the brand less.

We’re all consumers in this culture and we’ve all been on the end of bad marketing.

What’s terribly unfortunate is that small- and mid-sized businesses can make the exact same mistakes, despite having good intentions. That’s why it’s so important to spend time testing your messaging to make sure you’re acting like a matchmaker and not a blowhard with a megaphone.

So I’d like to talk about the best way I know to make that happen in the day-to-day trench work of business.

Good marketing has a way of looking effortless. But underneath that ease is a disciplined, intentional process. It means listening to feedback, rewriting or refining until your words (and anything else accompanying them) ring true, and saying no to tactics that don’t feel right. That kind of polish is hard-won.

This all goes on behind-the-scenes and is ultimately an act of care. But it will pay off in ways that go beyond metrics. There’s something quietly joyful in setting up those special moments where customers finally feel seen by a brand that gets their problem. Or when a business owner sees the right people respond to a message they worked hard on.

These moments of mutual recognition are what you want to seek out, because that’s the heart of matchmaking.

And so to you, my recommendations are:

These actions alone can help you see the important things that have a tendency to get lost in traditional marketing reports in the short term. But if you do it, the results will compound—in better reputations and relationships, in lower churn, and, ultimately, in revenues.

This has always been true. But it matters more than ever now.

Right now, it is easier than ever to sling garbage online. Machines can literally write for you and you hardly have to think about what they say.

People are tired of noise and the fact that “slop” and “brain rot” are common terms for low-quality content is evidence of this deep exhaustion.

So you can’t just be louder. That’s not going to work. It’s a race to the bottom.

You have to be better.

Marketing isn’t purely transactional. It’s about deliberately choosing what you want to show people, or more broadly, how you choose to engage with the world at large. Respecting people’s time and attention will work much better in the long run than grabbing it at any cost.

When marketing works, it looks effortless from the outside. But that can only be because someone did the hard work of understanding what matters, who it matters to, and how to show up at just the right time. That’s not manipulation. That’s care.

That’s marketing as matchmaking.

Need help marketing? Book 30 minutes with me and we can chat!