Marketing by Artists: Human Creativity Drives Business Success

As a business owner, you are likely flooded with a constant barrage of emails and ads touting marketing companies that claim they are innovating (or you know, “disrupting”) the industry with a long series of technological gimmicks, making big promises on results, and using marketing-speak and lingo designed to impress without explaining. Their coded message is actually very clear: we’ve got technology doing the work for us.

When was the last time you saw an ad focusing on creativity, the needs of the client, or quality of life for you and your employees? Too many marketing companies look at the human factor of their job (and your business) as a problem to be solved or replaced. We Are Your Neon, LLC, takes the opposite approach, one centered around our experienced team and their unique talents and skill sets.

Is Your Marketing Team Talented or Just Eager?

The next time you speak to a marketing company, when you’re on a call with a salesperson or listening to a product pitch, take a moment to ask about their creative department. Do they even have one? Do any of the people who will work on your marketing have writing experience outside of ads and social posts? Are their marketing strategies something they created on their own, or is it a redressed version of something they copied from another marketing firm?

The way most marketing firms operate is to hire technicians who know the processes, then put them in charge of content meant to create emotional appeal and induce clients to hire you. They have no history with creative expression, no higher learning or degrees, and no exposure to the multiple disciplines and real-world arenas that provide the experience that makes marketing and advertising truly effective. Ask us how we know that. It is because we have worked for those companies. You can do the math.

Our team is made up of creative writers, artists, college professors, and multiple founders with Master’s degrees. We hired people with talent and spent time teaching them the technical processes necessary. Talented creatives can easily learn a technical process. Technicians don’t pick up creative talents as easily.

Any marketing company can tell you what you want to hear in order to get your business, and they’re more than happy to. You can find a dozen of them with a quick search. But you should want to work with a team that sees your business as unique and distinctive, and delivers high-quality work specifically tailored to you. We will warn you: we are a team that tells you the truth, even when it’s uncomfortable, because that’s what a paying client deserves.

Are You Paying Humans for Machine-Made Work?

Search for business marketing firms on Google and visit a few sites. See if you can find a single one that doesn’t splash the word ‘A.I.’ multiple times across the page. Or ‘algorithm.’ System. Automation. With all these terms, it’s important to remember that they’re all telling you the same thing: the power of our company comes from machines that any other company can also use.

And we’ll go one step further, so can you. Every marketing company that is pushing all their A.I. innovations is admitting that they’re simply using a system to do the work that you’re paying them for. If that’s the case, why can’t you do it yourself? What value are they adding that you can’t, aside from simply pushing the buttons themselves?

If you’ve ever felt the instinct that all marketing companies are the same, peddling the same ideas with different names, nearly interchangeable aside from their branding and their price, it’s because that’s often true. Now that A.I. allows companies to mass-produce enormous quantities of mediocre-quality content that all looks and sounds exactly like everyone else’s mediocre content, marketing firms have moved even further away from human-made work.

Ask any of those marketing companies who is writing their website content or their social media posts. Do they have freelance writers? Do they have writers at all? Or are they paying some part-time employee to type prompts into the same ChatGPT program you have access to?

There’s nothing wrong with leveraging technology to streamline tasks and free up more time. But when companies that claim to be experts in marketing start offloading all the effort, experience, and creativity to machines as well, they do you a disservice as a client, and they make themselves unnecessary. If marketing companies aren’t providing you with effort and creativity, there’s no reason to pay them to do what you can do yourself.

Are Marketers Selling Your Business to Clients or Selling Themselves to You?

You can tell the quality of work a marketing firm will do for you by the marketing they do for themselves. Did they focus on clear benefits, emotional appeal, and communicating with you through clear storytelling? Or did they push transparently fake discounts and ticking clock sales that end as soon as you close their ad? When companies use tactics that push their potential clients into signing on for products or services that they’re not fully on board with, they’re trying to tell you something. There are only a couple of reasons to treat potential clients that way. First, they see you as a transaction to be completed rather than a business to be helped. Second, they lack confidence in the quality of their work on its own without those tactics.

We have no interest in that. We don’t do hard sells. We don’t artificially inflate the cost of our services and then offer a discount (but only for a short time!) if you sign up right away. We get to know you and your company to understand what you need, then we create a plan and let you know how we will do it and what it will cost. And when you’re ready to work with a team of skilled experts and artists, you hire us.

Does Marketing Content Require Creative Talent?

Hell yes. No caveats, no complicated explanations. Of course, marketing requires creativity. Most marketers won’t tell you that all advertising is noise that distracts people from something else they would rather be paying attention to. The unspoken agreement is that consumers will tolerate ads as long as marketers don’t waste too much time, provide valuable information, and do so in a compelling and entertaining way.

None of that happens automatically or magically, and the high quality required doesn’t come from technicians or AI chat prompts. It comes from skilled and talented real people who understand and care about your business and its success. We are a boutique company focused on delivering personalized service to a select group of clients. We’re proud of what we do. It’s not simple, but we’re dedicated to delivering for business owners we like and trust.

If you like the sound of a marketing company that keeps their client list short and their focus on the creative innovation and human connection that leads to raised awareness and a consistent flow of new clients for your business, we invite you to talk with us. When you’re ready to start that conversation, reach out to us through the form below.