3 mistakes marketers make (part 2)

Hey 👋

(This is a 3-part series that will go over 3 major mistakes I made as a marketer for the past decade. Last week was lesson one. This week is lesson two. Lesson three is next week.)

“I DON’T GIVE A F*** ABOUT YOUR REPORT! WE HAVE NO LEADS!!”

With a lump in my throat, I muttered, “I understand.”

The call ended and I walked out of the conference room in a mix of sadness and anger.

Sadness that a grown adult screamed at my 21 year-old fragile ego. And anger that I was put on an account that made absolutely no sense to me.

It was only two months into my new job running ads at a marketing agency in Los Angeles and I already wanted to quit.

My angry client ran a VoIP service and I had no clue what VoIP even stood for. Let alone know who to target with what type of messaging with Facebook Ads. Was Facebook even the right platform?!

On my drive home in rush hour Southern California traffic, I began to think. “I’m not having fun. Why would I ever try to market a product I don’t understand? It’s seems so dishonest. No wonder the ads suck.”

A few months later, I left that agency, packed my entire life into my little Scion tC, and drove up to San Francisco in the hopes of “making it” in the tech scene. Somehow by a stroke of luck, I landed a job at my dream company. It was a product I used almost every day. And over the next few years, I became the happiest I had ever been.

As time passed, I began to see clearly.

I realized that if I wanted to be a great marketer, I had to market products that scratch my own itch. Otherwise, I’ll feel disconnected from the customer. I won’t be able to relate to them. And that will show in subtle ways in the marketing campaigns I work on.

My second biggest marketing lesson was this: It’s better to be your ICP than try to study your ICP. (ICP = Ideal Customer Profile)

Many agencies get a bad rap because of this. They study what products and services they’re promoting, but often don’t fully understand who they’re promoting it to. I’ve seen this both working at a marketing agency and also hiring marketing agencies.

Nobody knows you better than yourself. So market to yourself.

When you’re not the customer, you simply can’t create the best campaigns that help people. Or worse, if you don’t know how a product works, what key problems it solves, and what it’s limitations are, you won’t know how to be an empathetic marketer.

The last one is key because this is where customers can get confused if you say the wrong things — and this can severely damage your brand.

Empathy is the ability to recognize and share the mental states of others. What better way to do this than to understand yourself? At our core, we are all the same. Understand yourself and you’ll naturally connect with others like you.

Moral of the story: Be your target customer and use the products and services you promote. Better yet, try to sell the products to yourself. If you find that you don’t care about a product or service, find something new to promote. Whether that’s changing clients or jobs.

You do a disservice to yourself, and others, when you try to fit a square peg in a round hole.

When you create for you, and market to you, your work becomes fun. You’re honest about what you create. And, you won’t find yourself getting yelled at by a grown adult because you’re a sh*tty marketer.

In next weeks edition, I’m going to explain the mistake that almost got me fired at my dream job.

With that, let's get into what we have in store this week (lots of good stuff):

• Marketing news from the past week

• From almost failure to worth billions

• 9 expert tips to improve email performance

• Zapier’s decade-long SEO strategy

• British Airways’ clever branding campaign

• Ad from the past

• Website of the week

• Cool marketing jobs

• And much more

🗞 In the news

• Meta advertisers report system glitches are pushing up ad prices

• X automatically changed 'Twitter' to 'X' in users' posts, breaking legit URLs

• As Google embraces generative AI, news publishers chart courses into an uncertain future

• Inside X’s latest efforts to make advertisers believe it’s a platform that’s safe for brands

🚀 All things growth & product

How Airbnb reduces churn with personalization, how Webflow went from almost shutting down to worth billions, and real examples of why product messaging is important.

💌 Emails, sale, & ads

Litmus’ expert tips to improve email marketing performance, a 9 word email that can revive dead leads, TikTok’s guide on how to use their new promote feature, and Meta ad performances over the past year.

✍️ SEO, content marketing, & copy

6 lessons from Zapier’s decade-long SEO journey, how to align your SEO strategy with your client’s goals, the average content marketing salary in 2024, and how to write website copy that converts.

🤳 Social media, branding, & design

How the old social media is dead, British Airways’ new branding strategy, and 30 blog designs to help inspire your own.

🦖 Interesting stuff

📣 Ad from the past

💻 Website of the week

🏝 Cool marketing jobs

• Email Marketing Manager @ Instrumentl

• Growth Marketing Manager, SEO @ Figma

• Product Marketer @ The Browser Company

• Growth Marketing Lead, SEM @ Shopify

• Head of Content Marketing @ Ramp

Okay, that's it for now 💛. See you next Tuesday!

“Go looking for conflict, and you’ll find it. Go looking for people to take advantage of you, and they generally will. See the world as a dog-eat-dog place, and you’ll always find a bigger dog looking at you as if you’re his next meal. Go looking for the best in people, and you’ll be amazed at how much talent, ingenuity, empathy, and good will you’ll find. Ultimately, the world treats you more or less the way you expect to be treated.” — Bob Burg

Riddle answer: White papers.