A marketer’s only true competitive advantage

Simon Jalbert
Jul 24, 2017 · 2 min read
2014, Tim Duncan wins his fifth NBA championship after a heartbreaking loss to the Miami Heat in 2013 .

In recent years, growth hacks have become synonymous with marketing. It’s caused many a marketer to focus on short term tactics while missing any semblance of long-term strategy.

Well, I hate to be “that guy” but guess what? Marketing is all about the long-run.

New marketing channels are always being created, the competition is always entering the market, and the needs of your customers are evolving as well.

No one growth hack will take you over the top if you those tactics aren’t part of a well thought out long-term marketing strategy.

So if the knowledge of tactics isn’t our competitive advantage, what is? As boring as it may sound, a solid process has always been and will always be our competitive advantage.

Much like the Philadelphia 76ers, Traction House’s motto is definitely #TrustTheProcess

(1) Optimize for learning
I assume you’re already running multiple marketing experiments over any given period of time. The magic is to make it part of your team’s process to ask yourselves two questions very consistently:

a. What happened?
b. Why did it happen?

Then, modify the current tactic and repeat until the learnings get murkier and you have a better idea of if the tactic is worth dedicating yourselves to. Also ensure that you modify any other tactics you’re running that may be affected by what you just learned.

Keep a file where all learnings are documented for all to see and refer to it often.

(2) Relentlessness
A marketing tactic didn’t work. Great. Let’s jump to the next one! We see way too many marketers get down on themselves when a particular tactic doesn’t work. Failure always sucks but is undoubtedly part of the process.

The thing to remember is that if you take into account everything you’ve learned and are relentless in executing different marketing tactics, you cannot lose (unless your business sucks, but that’s for another time).

At some point you will undeniably fall on something that works. The trick is to relentlessly keep attacking that marketing ideas backlog with everything you and your team have.

(3) Speed
We’ve seen a direct correlation with the strength of a marketing team and the number of different marketing tactics they attack in any given period of time. Speed without learning about each tactic is dangerous but if you relentlessly attempt new campaigns armed with the learnings of older tactics, you cannot lose.

Want to learn the processes behind building a great growth team? Apply to work with Traction House here.

Traction House

Traction House is a digital marketing and sales agency located in Toronto.

Simon Jalbert

Written by

Co-Founder @ Traction House.

Traction House

Traction House is a digital marketing and sales agency located in Toronto.

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