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1 like = 1 unpopular marketing truth

1. Please don't report on that frigging bounce rate just to report on something. You're not going to do anything with that information anyway.

2. HubSpot certificates are a huge waste of time

3. Google Analytics certificates are a waste of time too

4. Growth marketing ≠ digital marketing/performance marketing or growth hacking

5. Most 'Growth Hackers' are just glorified digital marketing managers

6. Most marketers are not "undervalued". They're simply not delivering results marketing should be delivering.

7. Having said that, most marketers are set up to fail but don't understand it: they get no resources, no budget, and no mandate/authority. Yet, they're expected to deliver outstanding results.

Side note: I think I was born to do this.

8. Most marketers lack data literacy

9. As a result, most marketers love copy&paste templates they can use for reporting. I've seen marketers report on inbound metrics, yet their marketing strategy was ABM.

10. Many CMOs expect agencies to deliver results faster that it's possible.

This one B2B company once expected me to deliver purchase-ready opportunities in the first month with Facebook ads (!), while it took their new SDRs ~60-90 days to deliver their first opportunities.

11. You don't need those 10+ tone of voice sliders (that no one else can interpret. What does "sassy" mean anyway?). In fact, you don't even need a tone of voice documentation unless you're a huge DTC brand.

12. Playbooks are typically too good to be true. E.g. Inbound marketing (the way HubSpot coined it) doesn't work for most companies. Not a single developer is going to download your ebook!

13. Most marketers are really just MarCom professionals. Working in SaaS/eComm/platform business kind of forces you to focus on other things too, such as growth loops, pricing, etc.

14. Literally NOBODY cares about your company's random updates ("Merry Christmas from our Seattle team!!1"). Or maybe your CEO does, but it's your job to keep him away from it. Unless you're not Bored Panda or alike (so in 97% cases), your blogging strategy should be "evergreen"

15. If you're a start-up hiring your first marketer, it's pretty much always a bad idea to hire a junior (even if you "can't afford to hire a senior yet). Newsflash: junior will be WAY more expensive because they don't add nearly as much value.

16. It's impossible to do a good website design or tech first. Ideally, content & design should go hand in hand. People don't come to your site to see an animation or enjoy a nice layout. They come for information in the form of text or visual content (e.g. product video).

17. It's not okay to tag yourself in your own LinkedIn post. Talk to someone.

18. Most marketers plan way too much and execute too little

19. Having said that, most marketers also plan the wrong things (e.g. content calendar, made-up personas, etc.) BUT fail to do the most important research (getting to know their ideal customers).

20. If you want to develop as a strategic marketer, join a marketing team with full mandate & no budget, rather than a team with huge budget but no mandate.

21. It's rarely (if ever) a good idea for marketing to sit under sales. If you're looking for a new job, that's an immediate red flag.

22. Good copywriters are a rare gem, but they're also incredibly undervalued and underpaid.

23. Most marketing agencies don't need an extra layer or account managers/directors & project managers. Actually, having that extra layer can hurt them both financially (AMs tend to be the highest paid employees) and performance-wise (they often lack in-depth understanding).

24. As a marketer, you're not given the ownership [of anything]. You need to take it yourself and prove that you're worth it.

25. If someone says they're a 'strategic marketer', chances are they're not.

Actually, it's very probable that they're not.

26. Don't do that social media Christmas calendar. Just... don't.

27. Are you the product owner and want "someone" to manage & proofread your translations? Don't look at me! I'm MARKETING. Not an assistant.

28. Not everything has to scale. Some of the best things you can do are extremely unscalable in the short term (e.g. high-touch onboarding for a self-service product for your first clients) but add value in the long run (you get to learn and can scale learnings fast).

29. Similarly, you can't (and you shouldn't try to) measure everything. There will ALWAYS be touchpoints in the customer journey that you can't perfectly attribute to a specific tactic or channel. Just live with it.

30. You're not necessarily a good content marketer if you're a good writer, and vice versa.

31. Sorry to break it to you, babe, but...

Ad hoc ≠ agile marketing
Not doing research ≠ agile marketing

32. As a rule of thumb: if you're a start-up, DON'T hire that marketing agency before you're able to narrow down your focus. In the early days, sales is great for validating. Marketing is for scaling. (There are some exceptions to this, but not that many.)

33. If you're in marketing and you have never attended a sales/CS call (or better yet, done your fair share of cold calls yourself, if applicable) you're doing it all wrong.

34. Nothing is "dead." Paid ads work. Billboards work. Direct mail works. Telemarketing works. Inbound marketing works. Social selling works. Drip campaigns work. SEO works.

You just need to figure out if it works for YOU.

That's the hard part, but also the fun part.

35. Nope, not every company should be doing SEO "because it's scalable." You need to figure out what is YOUR growth engine. And for that you need to understand your customer's journey. (And I'm not talking about made-up buyer personas here.)

36. Traditional buyer personas are mainly useless and often dangerous, because they're not based on right customer insights.

37. A marketing strategy is NOT any of the following:

Campaign plan in HubSpot
Your agency's creative concept
Blog publishing calendar
List of topics you want to blog about
Your CEO's vision

38. Having a well-documented marketing strategy does not mean you have a solid strategy.

39. There's no point in "implementing marketing automation" unless you have the basics in place. E.g. If you don't understand what progress your prospects are looking to make under specific circumstance, a random workflow is not going to magically convert anyone.

40. It's NOT a "quick win" if it's not going to help you reach your business goals. E.g. Building a nurture workflow for an existing ebook won't help if its readers are not potential buyers anyway. Consider it sunk costs instead.

41. NOBODY NEEDS TO KNOW THAT YOUR PRECIOUS BUYER PERSONA WEARS LEATHER SANDALS

42. "Link building" works for maybe 2% of companies doing it. The rest are doing it wrong.

43. Most good marketing is boring and invisible. Most flashy marketing is not good (in terms of business results).

44. No, your CEO, founder, or Head of Sales can't read your customers' minds. Just pick up the phone and call them yourself.

45. You're not "data-driven" if you can't tell a story with your data. And very few people can.

46. A lot of companies grow regardless of their marketing. Not because of it.

47. The fact that you're familiar with Google Analytics UI does not mean that you have analytics skills.

48. About those growth hacking case studies. Yes, they're great, but stop benchmarking them now. They're all more than 5 years old, and just won't work for your enterprise SaaS product.

49. Get your CEO on social. It will almost always pay off!

50. If you CEO doesn't get marketing, you're screwed. Leave asap.

Red flags?

They think marketing should sit under sales. Sales gets to decide on marketing budget, too (e.g. telemarketing or roadshows). You have no say in business/GTM/pricing decisions (in startups).

51. Explain me again how exactly you expect a marketing agency to understand your business and come up with new brilliant ideas after a 2-hour kickoff call, when it takes you 30-90 days to onboard a new FULL-TIME employee?

52. Not every company doing content marketing needs to produce ToFu, MoFu & BoFu content. It's a simplified guideline, not a rule to follow blindly.

53. A random collection of content ideas is not an applicable content plan.

54. A content idea is not a brief.

55. You don't have to gate all your content just to try and get leads. Just admit it: you're not going to do anything with those "MQLs" anyway.

56. A revenue target is NOT the same as business/marketing strategy or GTM. You also need to know:

WHO are you selling to (product, market, segment, etc.)

WHAT: Where that money is coming from (NB/upsell/expansion, etc.)

HOW you're going to get there (tactics, channels, etc.)

57. You company is not special.

I've worked with dozens of B2B companies, and at the end of the day they all struggle with same marketing issues: inability to focus, lack of strategic vision/customer understanding/roadmap/alignment, and so on. Only the details change.

58. It's not a pricing page if there's not price ion that page.

E.g. This is not a pricing page. It's a pitch. https://www.leadforensics.com/pricing/ 

59. You don't need to do that "2021 X trends" blog post. Nobody cares, and those who do, won't buy anything from you.

60. If you're in B2B, you simply don't need to know your persona's age, marital status or city of origin. And how is the assumption that the buyer is business-savvy or looking to get extra bonus going to help you sell CRM? Newsflash: it's not.

61. The problem with B2B buyer personas is that they assume that people with the same title (e.g. CEOs) are a homogenous mass, with the same motives and pain points —regardless of the context (e.g. a mature Fortune 500 company or a fresh hi-tech startup with novel technology).

62. Majority of marketers spend most of their time doing tasks which have zero business impact.

63. Most small marketing teams would be SO much better off if they outsourced certain parts of their jobs (e.g. web design or paid ads) instead of trying to do everything in-house.

64. You don't need to publish something every day, every week, or necessary even every month. Not even (or especially) if you CEO tells you to.

65. All marketers should join an agency at some point in their career. Working in a (good) agency forces you to focus on impact & outcomes and rather than outputs (added bonus: when you go in-house again, you'll be surprised by the time you're allowed to spend in onboarding)

66. Busy ≠ productive. You can spend literally HOURS perfecting that briefing template, publishing calendar, marketing strategy document or sales pitch deck without doing ANYTHING that affects the bottom line.

67. With that being said, it's not a good idea to skip planning either. Instead, focus on the big picture (e.g. for a content piece, it's things like prospect awareness stage, JTBD, content piece goal, readability, CRO, content-channel fit, etc. Not the # of social media shares.)

68. And following on from that... Most content briefs are RUBBISH. Newsflash: if you're unable to spell out your goals, so is the writer.

69. Most marketers go about content distribution and repurposing all wrong. It's NOT an afterthought after hitting "publish." Instead, channel choices should be baked into the content planning & production process already.

70. This has to be one of my personal faves: NOBODY is going to read those Employee Q&As in your blog. Literally NOBODY. Not even half of your employees. Just... don't do it.

(Instead, you can encourage social media use and benefit from yours employees' personal networks )

71. Employer branding software is always a bad idea.

72. I don't think I'm exaggerating a lot if I say that something like 3 in 4 marketers don't know their target audience NEARLY as well as they should.

73. You just CAN'T have 15 "main KPIs." Sorry to break it to you.

74. Marketing budget: Don't start with the budget and then see what you can do with it (the typical way). Start with the goal and explain what you need to get there. Here's a BRILLIANT thread on this: https://twitter.com/coreyhainesco/status/1334183508512804874?s=19

75. Choosing one of the company values for each month is not a content marketing strategy.

76. You don't need 500-700 workflows in HubSpot. You just don't.

77. Look, we get it. You like you "content strategy" and "SEO strategy" and all other sub-strategies you can possibly have in marketing, but your CEO has just one strategy and it's your company's business strategy. If you want their trust, speak their language.

78. The biggest reason for failure is the inability to narrow down your focus. Most marketers (and ESPECIALLY CEOs) fear they will miss out something if they don't do a little bit of everything, but it's exactly the opposite.

79. Good marketing is often not what's best for your founder's (or in some cases, CMO's) ego.

80. Most lead gen problems are actually positioning problems.

81. Having those 17 random exit intent pop-ups, sticky bars, and disturbing content offer pop-ups on your website is not going to increase your conversion rate.

82. "Nurturing" those "MQLs" is not going to help you capture demand, because typically there's no demand to be captured.

83. A B2B company's blog is NOT a media or a publication. People don't come to your blog or subscribe to your newsletter for funsies. They're typically looking for specific information, and your job as a marketer is to provide them that information.

84. Simply because something is easy to do does not mean it's a "low-hanging fruit." It also has to have a business impact.

85. Ad agency folks think they work in marketing. Everyone else thinks they do random ad campaigns.

86. Planning vs. executing: You don't need to know 100% when you start to do something. 50-70% (and an educated guess) is more than enough. If you wait until you have all the information you'd ideally have, you'll never get anything done.

87. If you work in a marketing agency, this one's for you: THERE ARE NO STUPID CUSTOMERS OR BAD BUYERS. There are just bad fit customers, and it's LITERALLY your job to know which ones you should & shouldn't work with (and/or educate them).

88. Being the only marketer in a start-up does not make you a CMO

89. Idk why but based on my observations, Dunning-Kruger effect seems to be especially true in marketing: the more you think you know, the less likely you're to deliver business results.

90. Best marketers have a broad knowledge and interests beyond their own specialty and MarComms. E.g. in SaaS, you need to understand things like monetization, pricing, sales models, growth models, funnel design, GTM, customer development, flywheels...

91. "Working together with sales" does not mean creating sales pitch decks for them. It means having a shared understanding & vision of your company's customer acquisition process, ICP(s) & customer journeys, and creating a sales/marketing SLA around that.

92. Most retention problems are actually positioning problems.

93. Retention improvement tactics don't help because they focus on fixing the cause (churn), not the original issue that causes churn.

94. Most marketers care too much about competitors and too little about alternatives.

95. Best copywriters are NOT the most creative people (sorry to break it to you, ad agency folks). They're the ones who know your customers & their JTBDs the best and are able to translate that into copy.

96. If your CEO says you should focus on "lead generation" (whatever that means), in 90% cases it's NOT what you should be focusing on. Most often these companies have basically no idea what their product is, who they're selling to and why. "Lead gen" is not going to fix that.

97. Actually, there is no such a thing as "lead generation." You can _capture demand_, but that demand needs to exist first.

98. Best copywriting does not come from "reading a lot" (I read a LOT, I should know). It comes from knowing your audience's pain points and understanding the context they're trying to make progress in.

99. Not a _marketing_ truth, but whatever:

Sales activity reporting ≠ sales reporting. Most sales teams have no idea what affects what (leading indicators --> lagging indicators) so they simply end up measuring sales activities and pretend that it provides them useful data.

100. Most marketing strategies are not aligned with product strategy. Either because product strategy doesn't exist, or because the organization & its processes are not rigorously built around customer value --> All functions end up doing whatever they _think_ makes sense.

101. Following on from #97 (you can only capture demand that exists first): You can't "generate" leads (it's called demand capture if anything), but you CAN generate demand (which will eventually show in your pipeline, too). It's a long game and requires more than just a few ads.

102: Nobody care's what's your take on growth marketing vs. growth hacking discussion and if you think someone's got it all wrong. At the end of the day, they're just terms.

103: It doesn't matter how fancy your website is if your marketing team needs to borrow a dedicated developer every time they want to make changes. It's 2021, folks. In 99% of cases, you're better off with no complicated headless CSM (unless you're a govt. service or such).

104: Your website simply can't sit under IT (instead of marketing). It just can't. Stop doing this right now.

105: This gotta be of my favorites: you can't learn everything in marketing by doing. I'm not saying you need an academic degree (because you don't), but you need to understand the bigger context, too. And that, my friends, requires studying. Not just learning by doing.

106: An average marketer is too busy to become very tech-savvy, and that's a problem: it doesn't matter what a tool can do if you can't use it.

We're not taking advantage of most tools that we have, yet we tend to think that adding one more tool will solve all our problems.

107: Most CEOs have very unrealistic expectations for marketing. It's your job not to follow their ideas blindly. Instead, help them reset their expectations.

Granted, some people just don't "get it" (a red flag), but most people will if you just help them to see the realities.

108: If you think you need to create a new category, the odds are... you don't.

109: Many marketers think too much 'marketing' (often in the narrow marcomms definition) and too little everything else (e.g. product, growth, ops, sales, even engineering) and end up doing random stuff in a silo.