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Why Is Marketing So Cumbersome For Everyone?

I was reading a lot of great posts this weekend here in the community and elsewhere. A seemingly common thread revolved around "marketing" and I got pretty curious. Marketing is such a broad term for so many activities (content, etc.). But then I wondered why it's so cumbersome for people when there are a plethora of marketers out there and agencies and services, etc. So I'm just wondering why this seems to be the one thing people dislike?

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    Good question - one of my struggles with marketing is that the practice of it often feels to me like some kind of pollution - so many marketing best practices, when everybody follows them, seem to make the world incrementally worse.

    Content marketing has created a vast wasteland of low-effort SEO spam articles that get top SERP placement, so that it seems harder in 2020 to search and get honest reliable information on something than it was in 2010.

    Animations grab attention more, so the best practice is to animate your banner ads, making it harder for users to read and maintain attention on what they came to read, and also slowing down the page, consuming bandwidth, etc.

    Permission marketing was the hot new thing, and now most websites abruptly flash a popup in your face mid-sentence to sign up for their email list. And every company you transact with subscribes you to 6 lists, either overflowing your inbox daily and distracting you from what you were trying to accomplish, or giving you the extra task of unsubscribing, sometimes with a complicated process of logging in, finding the right settings page and unchecking a bunch of stuff. Regulations and opt-in have helped there thankfully.

    Of course, marketing is necessary, otherwise nobody finds out about your business - and there are more and less classy ways to go about it. But I don't know, there's an aspect of it that always feels a bit like petty crime.

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      Thanks Luke. I think you hit on many things I’ve been thinking as well. It’s extremely noisy out there, a lot of things being done at once, and all to get the audience to notice. Ironically, marketing is truly about trust and relationships, and using a lot of these methods breaks trust and destroys any potential relationship. Somewhere there’s a balance though.

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    Marketing is simple if you think about it. It is communication. You get to know people, look at the world from their point of view, listen to what they need, focus on them, create something that solves their issues, be valuable to them, help them notice you, remember you and keep in touch.

    Many startups and indie hackers confuse marketing with spending money on advertising, spamming, interrupting, shouting, being annoying, trying to steal people’s attention, taking shortcuts and following all the other hacks, tricks and best practices. So they get overwhelmed, cannot focus on any one of these to actually make it work and they fail.

    I wrote this last week on how we say no to the majority of best marketing practices in order to have marketing work for us.

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      I absolutely love this Marko. That post is now going to be in my bookmarks. What I love the most is that you are actually marketing by communicating what you don't do. I'm sure there are many people out there who would argue that you absolutely have to do all those things, but the reality is that if you go back to basics marketing is truly about communicating and relationships.

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        thanks Shane! exactly! i loved Seth Godin's latest book This Is Marketing which basically sends the same message: "marketing is truly about communicating and relationships"

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          Precisely. Seth has always been a champion for the basics and not doing what everyone else is doing. The Purple Cow really does say it all right there; be different and people will automatically wonder what you are up to. That starts a great conversation. You don't need to take the road everyone else is traveling to be successful. I'd even add that if you have the right solution to an actual problem, it will market itself.

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    this put a dent in my world view.

    i thought everyone loved marketing.

    but thats a bias - because i love marketing, i thought everyone else loved it too.

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      Yeah if you look at several posts asking people what they hate the most....it's marketing...then I was reading some other startup stories and founders always get to the marketing part and say it's the most dreaded part. I was 100% curious why and what people hate the most.

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    What I think many creators don't like is not so much marketing itself, but how doing marketing may negatively affect the perceptions others have of the creators.

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      Interesting point. I got that many people "dreaded" marketing as an activity; and it is fascinating to me but then I think about it and it is cumbersome to go out and try to find "people" to pitch your idea to. It's far easier to create something because you have 100% control over that. Marketing is tough because it takes longer and you aren't necessarily in control. Maybe I'm wrong though.

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