Sinner or saint, here comes a haint. 👹

There are 6 smaller marketing sins i hear almost every founder or not-marketer-who’s-marketing commit when i’m on fix-it coffee-chat calls.

So today on the docket - in order of the frequency that i see them pop up on calls - the 6 fixable marketing sins 👹

1. Being a spammy sandwich nobody wants 🥪

There are two founders-who-try-marketing;

• the one who would rather be emulsified than send a cold email

• the one who will spray, pray, and say “i have done my job”

I’m talking to the latter here.

Do not scrape email addresses and send out blasts asking for interviews with no context.

Do not slide into the hundreds of LinkedIn DM’s unannounced.

Nobody wants a slipperly spam sandwich 🥪 (although spam musubi slaps 🍙 )

Start with customer research (ahem, Reddit!) and then reach out to people directly 1:1 or in very small batches and politely ask to chat about their jobs. Better yet, have one of the people you’ve started building a relationship with do a warm intro for you.

Here’s the 3 steps when you’re starting from scratch:

Yes, cold email is technically sales, not marketing, but who cares when it’s one person doing both?

2. Being universal - and functionally useless. 🤷🏽‍♀️

If you do not know enough about your target audience’s wants, needs, pain points, and triggers to clearly define who you’re marketing to and why they should want to buy..

Then you need to go back to customer research to find out who you’re for.

OR

you need to stop waffling between 5 different potential use cases and clearly state the one group you’re gonna start with.

if there are multiple use cases/target audience groups, then narrow down to focus on one at a time.

I gave a whole talk on this at MicroConf in the fall, here are the slides with the worksheets inside!

3. Staying way too long when it’s not working out 🚶🏽‍♀️‍➡️

The Shim Sham is a swing dancing line dance, and the best part is this cute step in the middle:

“Push it and you push it and you… cross over!”

If you’re workin’ a marketing channel for 3 months and it’s doing nothing, it’s either not for you or you’re doing it wrong.

Take a sec.

Evaluate if you:

• have the right strategy

• are executing consistently

• need to ask for help because you’ve check both of those and stuff still isn’t working

Move to something else while you sort out that channel.

But don’t dance awkwardly in place going nowhere.

Push it, push it, then cross over.

4. Having useless text  🥱

If your copy is a wall of text and your images are for decoration only, they’re not solving problems.

And that’s what great marketing does. you need the words on your marketing and the images on your website to do.

Ask: would a 2-min Loom explainer video remove the need for most of this text to be here to explain what this product (or service) is or does?

If the answer is yes, then cut out every line of text you don’t need and replace that stock image stick figure with a Loom.

5. Asking ads for affirmation 💞

It’s like with people.

No amount of validation is enough for someone who doesn’t know who they are.

6. Playing Stare….and Compare!

• Hype Man Hydra is around every corner, whispering about how they have a hack that made them millions, you should try it too!

• Banshee of Busy shrieks that you should be doing more More MORE! in your marketing.

• AI Shell Guy is all up in the Slack and Subreddits bragging about the stupidly simple tool he built that’s clearly better than your product’s worthwhile contribution to humanity (i mean, he made $5K in a weekend of vibe coding)

You…are just trying to make your marketing making you money and get freedom over your time.

Stick on a path of stacked small bricks that build towards steady progress. 💜 

And speaking of bricks….

Throughout this year, I’ve been slowly coalescing my philosophy of marketing into a system and structure that makes marketing make sense to execute when you have zero background in marketing.

Here’s what it looks like right now:

There so much you can build upon and build out on each brick, plus the mortar that makes it all stay put, but this is where it starts.

In the next few weeks, we’ll talk more on how and when to do that, which how-to’s and templates galore!

Yes, you can do marketing, even when it’s not your job.

(Or you can hire someone (hiiiiii 👋🏽)

Have a marketing sin you need to confess? I just admitted my faulty sales system cost me 6-figures in the last 2 years (whoooooops) on LinkedIn.

We’ll see you and your inbox next week!

Cheers!

Sophia ⚡👩🏽‍💻 & Aelia ✨🧕🏽

Powered by the first fruits of my garden 🍓 & post-vacation blues