129 - The Marketing Advice We Disagree With

Zac: There’s no shortage of marketing advice online. Post every day, be on every platform, go viral, just run ads, SEO is dead, email is dead, everything is dead. In this episode, we’re breaking down the marketing advice we hear all the time and why we disagree with some or most of it.

Rich: All right. So welcome to another episode where we talk some shit. This will be a fun one. I love it. We’ll just get that little explicit banner ready to go on this one. We won’t be too bad.

Yeah, I love this topic. So we’re gonna talk today about marketing advice that works in the right context, but also the stuff that gets shared and you’re like, oh, that looks like a magic bullet, and it’s just absolute crap.

So we’ll walk through a few rules and discuss why they spread, when they might be true, where they usually go wrong, and what’s happening that you need to avoid.

This is a fun one. I’ve seen so many videos online of, like, “fire your marketing agency” is how a lot of them start. There was a woman that said, “You’re doing paid ads all wrong. It’s not about your targeting, it’s about your strategy.” And it’s like, well, targeting is kind of part of strategy, but whatever.

But she had, of course, a course to sell you that was 90 minutes where she would teach you her method that’s guaranteed to quadruple your results. And part of me is always tempted to be like, I want to do it just to see, and then just go hound her about how it didn’t work.

Zac: I was gonna say, a lot of marketing advice is just framed to sell you things. Snake oil. Nothing more.

Rich: We called it snake oil back in the day, in the 1800s if I recall.

Okay, so we’ve got a cocktail today, though. This one is named after my dog. Not really. My dog’s name is Cosmo, but we do call him cosmonaut or cosmonutter sometimes. But the Cosmonaut. My guess is there’s—oh, I thought there would be vodka in this because it’s kind of a Russian term, but it’s not.

Zac: So this is created by Sasha Petraske in New York City as a subtle tongue-in-cheek response to the rise of the cosmopolitan. So it’s kind of their riff on a cosmopolitan, and it’s another one of those really simple cocktails that I think sounds great. I mean, there’s not much to it, but yeah.

Rich: Yeah, I have all these things except lemons. I need to get lemons. So yeah, it could also be like a cosmonaut, like not a cosmo. A little play on words there, I think, with that. But cosmonaut like astronaut.

Okay, so just three ingredients. Two ounces of gin, three-quarters of an ounce of lemon juice—it’s like just a half a lemon probably is gonna give you that much—and one bar spoon of raspberry preserves. I have blackberry preserves that I would probably use. I’ll bet that would be amazing too.

So you combine those all in a cocktail shaker filled with ice. That’s gonna be important because your raspberry preserves are gonna be thick. But you need to get it infused really very quickly in all of that gin.

Shake it for about 15 seconds or until chilled, and then strain it into a chilled coupe glass and enjoy. Preserves are going to have seeds in them. So if you want to be cautious about this, your cocktail shaker strainer probably has holes that are too big for this, so you might want to run it through more of a sieve. I mean, you can put it through cheesecloth if you wanted to, or a fine mesh.

We’ve got a little round strainer that’s got a really tight metal mesh to it that I would use on this. It also just sets right on top of your glass because it’s designed for this. Otherwise you can have seeds in your teeth, but whatever.

This sounds great. Like, make me a pitcher of this and let’s just drink it on the porch every day.

Zac: I think most of these are ones that we can pretty confidently make at home, especially the ones that we’ve done this year. And if I ever wanted to get into cocktail making, I feel like this one would be a really easy start.

Rich: You know what? I would probably take two whole raspberries, like fresh ones, and just float them in it.

Zac: As an optional garnish, that’s a good idea.

Rich: Yeah. Or a couple frozen blueberries might be good. The blueberry-raspberry thing. That would be good.

Anyway, we’re embellishing the drink, but this one really does need a garnish, I think. I mean, it’s gonna be pretty, and cosmos usually have a lemon twist as a garnish. You could do that.

So this is from punchdrink.com. We love them. And it’s called the Cosmonaut. I think we’ll take a break and get into the episode.

Rich: All right, we’re back. Did I step on you? You were gonna introduce, weren’t you? I’ll just—you can say hi.

Zac: No, it’s okay. All right, we’re back.

Rich: We are, and we’re going to talk about crap marketing advice.

Zac: Yeah. Some of these are more broad. They’re kind of a collection of ones that I found across the internet. Reddit’s a good place to find bad marketing advice. So if you’re looking for that, go to Reddit.

But the first one we have here is: you need a big budget to compete. Like, a big marketing budget.

Rich: I mean, it helps, right? It definitely helps. You can be messy and sloppy when you’ve got a big budget.

But I’ll tell you, in my previous life, when I was working for a small regional wireless carrier that has now been swallowed up by the major carriers, we had a $30 million budget. When I started, we had a $10 million budget and we got it up to a $30 million budget, which was great. But we were competing with Verizon, who had a $1.2 billion budget, and AT&T that was spending $800 million a year. You just can’t compete with them.

And T-Mobile was spending less, but they were still on the four or five hundred million range. So you’ve got to really think through your priorities and where you go, but you don’t have to have those giant budgets.

There’s also the point that half of your marketing budget is wasted, you just don’t know which half. Well, if you’re doing digital and lead gen, you probably know which half and you can bring that in.

I think there’s a lot of noise for the big brands, right? Coke and Pepsi battle it out. But I guarantee you that Olipop isn’t spending what Coke and Pepsi are spending. Although did they get bought by one of them now?

Zac: Probably. I know Poppi did, I think. Poppi definitely did. I don’t know about Olipop, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

Rich: I had an Olipop grape the other day. I thought it was lovely.

Dollar Shave Club is a great example. They were not spending like what Gillette was. They’ve since been acquired by, I think, Unilever or somebody.

Zac: And they’ve done some really creative marketing too.

Rich: Yep. You can grow faster by focusing on a niche. Olipop isn’t trying to be everything to everybody. Dollar Shave Club wasn’t trying to knock Gillette and Schick off the top of the market right away. They were trying to go for this audience that was price-conscious about razors and blades because they were just ridiculously expensive, but just wanted a decent razor and a decent shave.

And that audience was a little bit irreverent. They were a little bit of a rebel, and they were able to focus on them with mostly internet marketing. I think it was the viral video that the founder did that took off first. But it was just engaging content.

Zac: I think where the bad advice is here is that you can’t just throw money at your marketing and expect it to work. Yes, with some of the paid advertising platforms—social and Google search stuff—having a bigger budget is advantageous, but I don’t think it’s gonna make the marketing that you’re doing better. You might have higher volume, but the quality of what you’re doing won’t necessarily improve just because you’re spending more money.

Rich: No. More money just amplifies whatever’s wrong or whatever’s right. If you’re getting the right leads in and you’ve got your targeting really honed in, incrementally adding budget to that is going to help. Throwing a whole bunch of money at that, if you don’t have it honed in, you’re gonna have huge impressions with a whole bunch of people that don’t care. You’re gonna have a whole bunch of clicks of looky-loos and people just wanting to come see what you’ve got, but your actual conversion rates are going to plummet.

Would your gross sales go up? Yeah, potentially. But your return on ad spend is gonna go down because you’re hitting too many people and it’s too broad.

In this day and age, that shotgun or buckshot media approach where you just try to hit everybody and hope that 10% of them are the people you want, it’s more like lasering in on who you want and getting those 10 people to do what you want them to do.

And that’s where you can really win as a small brand. You can be more efficient. You can be reaching the right people more tightly. You can be ignoring huge audiences, which is the hardest thing for people to do ever because every business owner thinks they have a thing for everybody. You don’t. Figuring out who you’re just not going to worry about and leave off to the side—that matters.

It reminds me of when I worked on Propel Fitness Water in the early days. It was a sub-brand of Gatorade, so it had some momentum, but flavored waters were mostly just for people who liked flavor. There was no real fitness aspect to them, no vitamins in them, nothing like that. So they were trying to build a new market to expand the Gatorade brand.

What they found was they went after people who were active but not athletes. So they were below the Gatorade brand, but they were active. More like “I’m an amateur tennis player in my town” or “I run every day” kind of person who really liked hydrating and preferred a flavored water over non-flavored, but wanted the benefits of it. So they went after very active people.

Now, one of the things they also did is they got on the shelf at Walmart. Gatorade is on the shelf at Walmart. Gatorade is about athletes and replenishing the things your body needs. Does Gatorade care that people who sit on their couch all day buy orange Gatorade at Walmart because they think it tastes good and can find it cheap? No, they don’t care. Do they advertise to them? No.

It happens to be there and they’re a bring-along audience. Propel had the same thing. It was just people like, “I like lemon-flavored water and they’ve got one and it’s easy for me to get.”

So there’s that distribution strategy. But when it came to advertising dollars, it was a much smaller budget. It was still a big budget, but a lot smaller than what Gatorade was spending or definitely what Pepsi was spending on flagship brands. And they made it work by really honing in on who they wanted.

That’s a really good example. If you can do it with a startup within a major company where you’re really limited on what you can do, you can do it as a small business. You don’t have to spend $2 million. You can take $2,000 or $20,000 and actually get something significant out of it.

Zac: And I think some of the best marketing is created or executed through those smaller budgets, or when you’re forced to think outside the box and be more creative with what you’re doing. Because it’s easy to make a campaign, throw a bunch of money at it, and then get a bunch of leads.

But going on to our next point, just because you get a lot of leads doesn’t mean that it’s better marketing. More leads doesn’t equal better marketing, for lack of a better term.

Rich: People love this one because it’s easy. Every platform used to give you impressions and clicks. Impressions and clicks. More clicks is better. And it’s like, well, no. Then it became the right clicks are better. And now it’s okay, the clicks that convert and turn into a lead are better.

If that’s all you can measure, people love seeing volume. They love seeing those numbers go up. It’s easy to optimize by number of leads on almost any platform. But yeah, it’s wrong.

Why is it wrong, Zac? Because I agree with you 100%. This one sucks.

Zac: Because a lot of people say—or a lot of companies sell to you—that you want more and more and more leads. You want a high volume of leads. But if those leads are crap and they aren’t gonna actually convert into real business, then it doesn’t matter how many leads you get. You can get thousands of leads and none of them are actually good for your business.

It’s like when people sell email lists that you can send stuff to, or buy big lead lists for contacts.

Rich: Yeah, it’s not a volume game. It’s a quality game. What’s really interesting is that better marketing equals revenue growth, higher return on ad spend. That’s what better marketing means.

That’s really where everybody can get to, because every business—even a nonprofit—is down to the dollars. It’s about donations, sales, how much money is coming in.

The other issue you have with a high lead volume, if you’re a high-touch business like us, is when we get someone in, we have to physically do a discovery call. We can do a little bit of qualification via email or a form, but we’ve got to sit on the phone with them. And a lot of sales organizations are like that.

If you can only be responding to quality leads, you’re gonna be much better off than responding to a higher volume of leads.

We would need four leads a year if we had the right leads. That’d probably mean two new clients. Great. Totally good. Golden. But does it do anything for me to have 5,000 leads this year? Yeah, it gives me a headache.

Zac: And there are so many tools people are trying to sell you that’ll get you a ton of leads, or “this will get you so many.” Everyone’s trying to sell on volume without wondering whether the volume is actually valuable for your business, like you said. Or are you just getting a lot of people learning about who you are that do not give a shit about what you do?

Rich: Yeah. And I think if you can measure your lead-to-conversion rate, your lead-to-customer rate, that’s gonna help you understand how tight your positioning is, how tight your messaging is, and whether you’re reaching the right audience.

If that number is extremely low for your industry, especially, and you can just Google your industry and what a lead-to-customer conversion rate should be, then you’ve got a lot of work to do in really honing in and optimizing your marketing.

It’s the old thing like, “We lose $2 for every widget we sell, but we’ll make it up on volume.” No, you’ll just go out of business faster. You can’t make up for poor positioning or poor targeting with high volume on leads.

Zac: Really understanding your target audience and your customer and aligning your marketing to that journey of how they actually make decisions with purchasing and buying services matters.

Rich: Yep. Next time I get an email for—there’s probably one in my inbox right now—“What if I told you I could get you 5,000 leads by the end of the month?”

Zac: I’m pretty sure we got one on LinkedIn that said, “Hey, Antidote71 and Zach, I can help get your podcast in front of more people.” And I was like, okay, why are you calling me out by name?

Rich: Yeah, this isn’t really a lead gen podcast. It’s more of a thought leadership thing and a fun project that we have.

So that one sucks. Volume isn’t always everything. Cash is better. Give me more cash, that’s great.

Zac: Work on your positioning and targeting.

This final one is one that I see a lot, and everyone disagrees over this. It kind of depends on who you are and what your business is, but a lot of people, especially influencers, say post every day to grow.

The reason this is so prevalent, especially in B2C and if you’re an influencer, is because of algorithm speculation. There are a lot of different opinions on what different algorithms value in your content. And everybody’s saying you need to post every day and have a consistent schedule.

That’s only half true, right? Having a consistent schedule is more important than posting every day. You might see some short-term engagement spikes from posting every day at first, but audience fatigue is super real. If you’re posting the same stuff every single day of every month, your audience is gonna get tired of it. It doesn’t matter how good the content is. It doesn’t matter if it’s perfectly targeted toward your audience. If you’re not respecting their time and focusing on creating good in-depth content that meets them where they’re at, it doesn’t matter how much you post per day.

Rich: Yeah. For me, it’s consistency. There are some creators that I follow, mostly on Instagram, who post once a week or twice a week.

There’s one set of guys that every Sunday at noon they do a vlog. Every Sunday at noon it goes live on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok, I believe. And I just know on Sunday afternoon I can go look for that. And it’s great.

Now they do other stuff during the week, but that’s kind of their wrap-up weekly thing. They do home renovations and food and family and decorating and a lot of stuff I find interesting. And they have huge numbers of people that jump in on those and watch it that afternoon.

A lot of times they’ll do a live chat during it too, which is nice. But if they did that kind of content every single day, I would go crazy.

And I think there are also people that I see post every day, but I get repetitive stuff, right? Like you said. You’re like, I saw this two days ago and now it’s back. Why? I don’t care. Why am I seeing this again?

Or it’s the three-parter: “Tune in tomorrow for more. Tune in tomorrow for the final story.” No, I’m not gonna tune in tomorrow. You’re not a TV show. I’m done with you.

Zac: I think people sometimes get caught up in listening to advice that’s not necessarily for them when it comes to social media. There are a lot of general catch-all things that large social media users will say that work for them, and they’ll sell you some social media plan that helped them grow this huge audience.

Well, just because it helped them doesn’t mean it’s gonna help you. Much like marketing trends, just because someone’s posting every day and it’s working for them doesn’t mean it’ll work for your audience.

Understanding that just because an algorithm might prefer a style of posting every day doesn’t mean it’ll necessarily resonate with your target audience on that platform. There are things you can do to fit within the algorithm that are worth following, but posting every day is not one of them.

Find what works for you. Find a cadence and consistency that works for you and go from there.

Rich: Yep, 100%. And I think that’s a really great place to wrap things up.

This whole thing is about quality and consistency. It is not about how much money you spend, how often you do something, or how much of X you get in. You’ve really got to figure out what works for you.

And I think the other piece is, if somebody’s telling you an absolute—“you must post every day,” “you must spend more than your competitor,” “you must have more leads this week than last week”—if it’s an absolute like that, and growth is the only option in spend or in whatever, there’s probably some crap there going on.

It’s really more nuanced than that. And we didn’t even get into some of the real snake oil stuff. These are pretty broad concepts and ideas that people share. And yes, they can work. Spending the most money in your market? Yes, you can absolutely win at that. Are you gonna waste a whole lot? Yes, you are. But if you don’t have the budget for that, being smart about it and being consistent about it is the way to go.

Zac: 100%. As always, you can find our agency at antidote71.com and all of our socials are there as well. If you have a question you’d like to send our way—or maybe some bad marketing advice that you got from someone that you’d like to share for us to discuss—head to ctapodcast.live to shoot us an email, or even better, leave us a voice message on our hotline at 402-718-9971. Your question will make it into a future episode of the podcast.

Rich: All right. And I think the one thing I will note is you’re playing with TikTok now, right? For us, we’re looking into it.

Zac: We’re testing the new integration for HubSpot to see how well it can do and if it will be effective, because there are still some things I’m curious about. I was looking at it yesterday. I don’t want to spoil it, but there are some things that they should probably add to improve the functionality.

Rich: All right, so if you want to follow that one, it’s not on the website, but it’s just antidote_71, just like Instagram and Threads, antidote_71. And you can see what Zach does to experiment there, and we’ll talk about it in a future episode, I’m sure.

Zac: 100%.

Rich: All right, with that, I had to throw that in. With that, we can be done. See you later, Zach.

Zac: See ya.