What If Marketing Was as Simple as Sharing Your Opinion?
Prefer to listen rather than read? Listen to the podcast episode covering this same topic here → The Quietly Disruptive Business Podcast
Marketing has become a maze. Post three times a day. Use reels. Push the pain points. Add value. Be helpful. Be strategic. Be everywhere. The advice is endless, often contradictory, and it leaves most founders feeling like marketing is a code they can’t crack, something other people seem to get but they somehow don’t. So here’s a different question to tackle that maze. What if marketing was as simple as having your own opinion and sharing it with other people?
You Already Have an Opinion. You Just Haven’t Called It Marketing
Every founder starts a business because they have an opinion on something. You didn’t want the nine-to-five and the two-hour commute, so you built something different. You refused to sell ordinary products, so you created bespoke ones. You disagreed with how other businesses operate, so you built yours to run on your terms. Those are all opinions — personal views and beliefs about how work, business, and life should look. In marketing language, this gets called positioning, or your USP, or your secret sauce. But at its core, it’s simpler than any of those labels. It’s your take on the world and why you do what you do.
The Problem with Following Everybody Else’s Rules
The reason marketing feels so hard for so many founders is that they’re trying to filter their message through other people’s approaches. Secondhand tactics. Secondhand strategies. Secondhand language. The result is content that sounds like everyone else, because it’s built from the same templates and formulas. And the real cost is when your marketing is shaped by what you think you should be doing rather than what you actually believe, it stops being about helping the right people and starts being about performance. Reach. Engagement. Likes. Going viral. Suddenly you’re not trying to find and serve the right clients, you’re trying to optimise for volume, and that’s a fundamentally different game.
What Changes When You Lead with Your Opinion
When you strip marketing back to sharing your opinion, something shifts. You stop performing and start speaking your truth. You put yourself in the driving seat — saying what you believe, why you do what you do, and what makes the way you do it different. Your customers stay in the spotlight too, because your opinion exists in relation to them. It’s not controversial for effect. It’s a genuine perspective on a specific problem, shared with the people who need to hear it. And the people who resonate with that opinion? They’re your clients. They share your values. They’re already looking for someone who thinks the way you do. Your opinion is what helps them find you.
Marketing Comes Back to Its Essence
At its core, marketing is the simple act of finding and talking to your customers. Not the maze of platforms and metrics and best practices it’s become, just the conversation between a founder who believes something and the people who need what that founder offers. When you think about it that way, it’s quite liberating. You don’t need to crack a code. You don’t need to master algorithms. You need to know what you believe, know who you’re talking to, and then share that clearly and consistently. That’s it.
So here’s what I’d like you to sit with before we dive into the companion blog to this one- how to use your opinion in your marketing. What is your opinion? Not your tagline, not your elevator pitch but your actual opinion on your corner of the business world. What do you see that could be better? What do you believe about the problem you solve that most people haven’t considered? And what would your marketing look and feel like if you simply shared that? I would argue much simpler.
About the Author: Becky Benfield Humberstone partners with Quietly Disruptive founders to build businesses that change their corner of the world, on their terms. If you started your business because you believed things could be done differently, and you're ready to make that vision real, she gets it. Based in the UK and working globally via Zoom and in person, she's done this work herself, more than once.
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