Here’s the Quiet Truth that Most Marketers Won’t Say Out Loud

Here’s the quiet truth that most marketers won’t say out loud… and why most people are thinking about marketing’s function all wrong. Marketing is really ineffective most of the time.

Think about it this way. Suppose we’re going fishing and all we need is to catch two fish (because that’s all we can carry). I then tell you that to catch these two fish, we have to do a dozen highly costly and complex things over and over that we’re unsure even work. We have to build and run a number of experiments, track everything in dashboards, constantly refine our approach, and report our findings. Oh, and we’ll be fishing in a pond with many other people who are also looking for the same fish…

… and we’re not even sure whether the pond even has fish…

… and if there are fish, they are wise to all our tricks so they will be actively avoiding us at all costs.

Would you go fishing with me?

Or would you suggest we try something entirely different, which is hopefully a little easier and more effective (and more reliable / predictable)?

This is exactly what many ‘capacity-constrained’ businesses (i.e. professional-service based businesses) are doing. They are constrained by the number of new clients they can take on given the size of their team. So we’re talking about finding 2-3 new customers.

You mean to tell me we’re going to go through all the time, effort, stress, and money of creating and running ads, building landing pages, setting up email nurture campaigns, writing, editing, publishing content, creating newsletters that nobody reads, optimizing our entire site, refining our messaging, doing competitive analyses, ICP research, posting on multiple social media platforms 3-5 times per week, coming up with content, filming editing, engaging with comments, going to and sponsoring events, running reports, having meetings… and a 100 other things…

… all this to find 2-3 new customers? Doesn’t that seem a bit wasteful and ineffective to you?

This is why you cannot apply industrial-scale marketing thinking to capacity-constrained businesses.

The result feels absurd because it is absurd.

You may be thinking, ‘Okay, what’s the alternative?’ Or ‘If we don’t do these things, won’t we become invisible?’

Ah, I’m glad you asked.

Marketing for a professional-services businesses are:

• improved clarity
• more trust
• shorter sales cycles
• less convincing
• higher confidence
• higher prices

Most marketing feels ineffective, because it is. The truth is, your marketing should be making selling easier. Otherwise, it’s just wasteful vanity. Marketing, therefore, shouldn’t be measured by how many customers you acquire, rather how many bad opportunities were avoided and how many good ones closed faster.