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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