10 Sad Truths About Online Marketing

1. Product/market fit and knowing WHY your customer would want your product is everything. Example: People who had raised millions on Kickstarter with a Facebook ad agency referred them to my friend. She gave them thousands, zero results.
2. You can not get neutral advice from your internal team/your investors, or coaches you pay a lot of money to. That’s not to say it’s bad advice, but neutral advice comes from people who have little interest in your company (i.e. customers and coaches who don’t rely on you for their basic income!)
3. You already know what you should be doing, and yet you’re not doing. Normally because it’s hard work and involved some form of heavy management or selling. Plz stop writing this and go and do that thing NOW and come back to this article. (Example for me: When I started Planet Ivy in 2012, we had the feeling both mobile and Facebook were going to continue to rise, but we had it to good with other platforms. Then the fun ended, and any publishers who weren’t in Facebook’s pocket didn’t survive. Some would say it’s not good to be in Facebook’s pocket, but it’s the ONLY way ad-driven publishers can get the volume of traffic (10 million+ visits a month) to get more rounds of investment/meet an eventual acquirer
4. Most marketing advice is not for you if you’re starting out your business or have a very small team. Hence, 90%+ of current marketing advice starts with: “Ok, firstly, you’re gonna need a fairly large budget to do Facebook/Google ads. It takes a while to experiment until you can profit, but is scaleable when you do!” They’re not even wrong, it’s just likely irrelevant to you if you need a significant amount of traffic, or a lot of customers paying you a small amount of money, or in a high competition area. This marketing advice is aimed at getting money from big agencies and brands. There’s a famous marketer who does this a lot. His name slips my mind right now…
5. You probably have a sales problem not a marketing problem. There are so many companies who want to pay me for marketing help, so many I have to turn away. They generally need to pick up the phone/hustle/do public speaking/create partnerships/use influencers. And they come to me asking me to hype their Twitter and Instagram. They want to hide behind the screen, as ever. If you have a Saas product, hire Charlie Price to get the cold email bandwagon rolling, that has some serious scale to it.
6. You’re too scared to be your authentic self so no-one cares what you’re posting on Facebook. Quit looking at other groups and blogs and copying their generic posts. Remember THEY aren’t getting any traffic either, so why would you copy them? Like I always say, only get advice from people who have done the exact thing you want to do. For instance, my current mentor, Dan Meredith, is doing many of the things I want to do:

• Runs multiple businesses
• Can be authentically himself, i.e. swearing, personal life in the open, also not so much selling to brands/big companies so doesn’t need to pretend to be professional (I hope he gets what I’m saying here, haha).
• Core audience exists via his personal Facebook and Facebook group.
• Very talented at partnerships and mathematical understanding of the internet marketing space, and other relevant spaces he’s involved in.
• Writes all day long, everyday, and finds a way to get paid for it.

7. You don’t know where the “whitespace” is in your industry, i.e. the growing areas no-one is touching right now. Doing a music startup? Musical. ly has over 10 million users, low barriers to entry, can get crazy bang for your buck with influencers. Ditto Kik, not yet overrun with agencies like Instagram and (soon) Snapchat. Can you say where the future of your industry is going? This is critical. This all sits in the “strategy” level that goes ABOVE your marketing, and allows you to see past short-term marketing strategies.

8. The “top” people who teach online marketing- Russell Brunson, Ryan Deiss, Mie Dillard etc? Their formulas and systems likely work, you’re just too lazy to make them happen, or too lazy to fix your boring product.

9. You’re stuck inside your head and don’t have a coach or impartial person to tell you why your marketing ideas will fail (again, you must be speaking to someone who has done this before to make this a valid opinion).

10. You don’t make any changes when you read these posts. Some of you aren’t even writing these down. I take time out from working on money stuff to make these so you can win, so please do it!

Any more sad truths you guys can think of? Would love to know.