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The greatest marketing skill
My entire marketing career can be summed up in just four words:
Reverse engineer what’s working.
And then, this is followed up by an additional five words:
And add your own twist.
I'm surprised this isn't talked about a lot. It's literally the foundation of how I taught myself marketing back in college when I was studying to become a mechanical engineer.
It's how I launched my first successful ecommerce store back in 2016.
It's how I launched my most successful affiliate marketing campaigns back in 2017 and was making $2-6K a day (a story for another edition).
It's how I went from working at a failed startup in 2018 to landing a job at a multi-billion dollar company right after.
You don't need some fancy degree. You don't need an MBA. You don't need credentials. You don't need to buy some fancy copywriting book.
Those are nice, and it never hurts to grow your knowledge.
But what you really need is to learn how to find winning campaigns and reverse engineer why they're successful.
Success leaves clues. And marketing is one of the easiest things to reverse engineer because it's right there in your face.
That annoying YouTube ad that you keep seeing? It's probably still running because it's making that person or company money. Reverse engineer the script. Reverse engineer the jump cuts. Reverse engineer the story. Reverse engineer the landing page that the ad leads to.
That blog post ranking really high in search engines? Reverse engineer the writing style. Reverse engineer the format and topics covered. Reverse engineer the website's domain authority. Reverse engineer the website's content strategy.
It's really that simple.
In the last edition of this newsletter, I created a poll asking what people needed help with as it pertains to SEO (my main bread and butter today).
The top response with the most votes was:
Knowing how to create content that actually ranks
While I have a dedicated section to this in my course, a free blog post on this, and literally a 49 minute free YouTube video on this, you don't even need to consume those.
What you need to do is search a bunch of keywords in different niches, click on the top ranking article, and reverse engineer everything you can see with your eyes (or hear if you’re using a screen reader).
This applies to everything in marketing.
Find what's working for others, understand the structure and flow, then fill in that structure with your own voice.
Use a tool like VidTao to find the best YouTube ads, and reverse engineer them with your own twist that applies to your brand story.
Use a tool like Ahrefs or Semrush and reverse engineer the SEO strategy of that huge website.
Search a topic on YouTube and sort by most viewed. Pay special attention to videos with way more views than the channel has subscribers (these are the breakout hits).
The only time I've bought marketing courses was to figure something out that wasn't so consumer facing. It was to learn the backend stuff (and the teacher’s way of thinking).
A course on how to write a blog post? Why? You can literally look at the top blog posts in Google and dissect them.
But a course on how to hire writers and build out an editorial strategy? Ya, that makes more sense. And that's what I did back in 2019 when I was trying to scale a writing team for the company I worked at. (Which eventually got me a promotion.)
Beyond that, you need to develop the muscle of observation. Look at what catches your attention. Look at what inspires you to take action. Those are the clues.
But, there's a BIG caveat.
Reverse engineering does not mean copying. It doesn't mean scraping a blog post and asking ChatGPT to rewrite it for you and "do it better" and "make it sound more human."
The best way to approach this is to reverse engineer stuff outside of your industry.
Study the angles.
Find winning blogs, videos, ads, emails, landing pages, etc. from different industries and bring that style and framework into yours. With your own original story.
The way I got good at writing blog posts that rank really well, outranking some of the biggest marketing companies that have a team of people working for them, was that I studied what solo food creators were doing.
I noticed these food recipe bloggers wrote from first person. They used their own real images. They turned their blogs into vlogs. They added a personal touch.
I noticed in the B2B space, nobody did this.
So I took that same solo creator approach (writing from lived experience) and applied it to B2B marketing. And that's been the result of my growth.
Branding inspiration? I didn't look at what marketing or tech companies were doing. I looked at what my favorite musicians and DJs did. And I brought that style into the B2B world.
My website design? I didn’t look at generic website templates. I studied the best web and graphic designers.
In fact, I never look at what my "competitors" are doing. I don't copy other marketing blogs and I don't subscribe to other marketing newsletters. It skews my own approach, and I will always come in second if I copy them.
I've seen it with bloggers that target the same exact keywords I'm ranking high for. They try to copy my approach, but it doesn't work as well because they're chasing what I already did instead of finding their own angle.
You need to be the first in your space to bring something fresh. Find inspiration in a different world and bring it into your world.
If you read this newsletter, I know you're not far off from creating the best marketing campaign of your career. It takes just one successful project to completely change the trajectory of your life.
But you need to look in places others aren't. And you need to study why people in those places are successful. Take their playbook and apply it somewhere you don't see others doing.
It's simple. Not easy, but simple.
And I truly believe it's the greatest skill a marketer can have. But unfortunately, it's not something that can be taught (at least not one I know how to teach others).
It's a muscle you develop through practice. Every ad you see, every crazy viral YouTube video you watch, every blog post you read, every landing page you visit — these all become a chance to strengthen that muscle.
The more you look for the patterns, the more obvious they become. And eventually, spotting what works and why will become second nature.
With that, let's get into what we have in store this week (lots of good stuff):
Marketing news from the past week
10 GTM tactics you can steal
How to become a copywriter
Pain point LLMO
A Reddit marketing guide
Ad in the wild
Website of the week
Cool marketing jobs
And much more
🗞 In the news
🚀 All things growth & product
💭 Guess the riddle
How much dirt is in a hole that’s 2 feet long by 3 feet wide?
Answer is at the bottom of this email
🤖 AI & copywriting
✍️ SEO & content marketing
🧠 Wild card
📣 Ad in the wild
Ro weight loss ad in the NYC subway
Celebrity endorsement, image of a person doing something intriguing, down 65 lbs, a simple call to action? Perfection.
💻 Website of the week
🏝 Cool marketing jobs
Okay, that's it for now 🩷. See you in the next edition!
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“You are already that which you want to be, and your refusal to believe it is the only reason you do not see it.” — Neville Goddard
Riddle answer: None, it’s a hole.
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