Why is Marketing so Damn Hard Right Now?

Marketing got too easy, so it got hard. At its core, marketing is simple, but at the same time I feel it’s never been harder to see results from a marketing campaign. Why is that? For the longest time, when thinking about this, I would just say to myself “AI, duh” and move on to the next thing, the next task, the next todo. But after thinking about it some more - well, the answer may not be that simple after all. It’s not just AI, it’s what we did with it - AI made everything easy, fast and frictionless, and the second-order effect of that is what makes marketing so damn hard.

Let’s break this down. What did AI do to us? (apart from the incredible productivity gains, am I right? 🙃)

Two major things:

1/ It saturated the everything - all the marketing channels, all the media, our attention, the memory our brains hold, our social media feeds. There’s too much noise, and there’s too much marketing for the limited capacity of human attention. AI saturated the everything.

2/ It made most of what we create worthless (I’ll explain).

Let’s talk about this. Good marketing always had the potential to bring you good results, at least until recently. You started at the basic principle - helping people find things that help them (e.g. have something that your clients need and make sure they know you have it, and trust you enough to buy), and you would plan your marketing campaign accordingly. You have the offer, you figure out the buyers, the problem you are solving for them, and why they should choose you over the alternative. Then you tell them - you run your webinars, post on social media, start some ads, publish newsletters, blogposts, organize a conference, interview the clients. Take care of the quality of the content you put out, remember about SEO, make sure the visuals you designed are stunningly beautiful, and after a while you’d see leads come in.

Phew, that was a lot of work, wasn’t it? But it paid off. You got that sweet, sweet slice of your audience’s attention, and among them, the right people, the buyers. That changed.

Today everyone gets a million emails, is subscribed to a thousand newsletters and is bombarded by hundreds and hundreds of LinkedIn posts. And reads none of them. And even if they read, odds are they don’t trust what they read, because why would they? AI wrote these posts.

In 2022 I got inspired and started my LinkedIn Newsletter. It took me hours to do research and prepare every issue, from curation of the content, writing up my commentary, creating graphics. It was a chore. It took time and it was hard. And it gave me great satisfaction to see it grow and to hear in calls with prospects that they read my newsletter and discussed some of the takes I had.

Today, there are a million newsletters (on LinkedIn or otherwise) because it’s just so very easy to create them. Research is one prompt away, copywriting happens automatically and you end up with a text more robust than anything I ever wrote (but oh so bland), the visuals come in troves and within seconds and are miles ahead of what I ever put together in Canva at the time.

And yet, it’s all worthless. There’s so much of it, the sheer abundance renders any value this channel had nonexistent. I can’t remember the last time I read a great LinkedIn newsletter.

The same goes for blogposts, LinkedIn posts, opinion pieces, Twitter threads… you name it.

If you enjoyed a lot of traffic from your blog four years ago, odds are it won’t work anymore. There is no more friction left in creating content, everyone does it at unprecedented scale, and the channel is oversaturated like never before.

(Sure, you can just say “skill issue” and show me the hockey stick graph of your blog traffic, but I’ve been talking to enough marketing folk to know I am not alone here.)

One more personal example: my own personal website and all of my pet projects (e.g. SkillCraft). Five years ago I could have made these websites, but I would have had to either pay someone a lot of money or spend long months learning all the needed backend and frontend skills.

It was very much possible, and yet I never did. Why? The friction, the hard long hours required were making it not worth the effort. Now it’s cheap, supercheap even. I can make dozens of landing pages in a day and they look beautiful.

And that is the problem. Anyone can and everyone does it, so they are all essentially worthless. There are now millions of great looking websites with perfectly written (and very samey) copy, and they are all competing for the same resource - very limited human attention. Organic traffic is mostly gone.

That’s the diagnosis, but how do we make it make sense again? What works? Does anything work?

At least for a while, things that AI can’t easily replicate do work. So what works? Offline channels, personal relations, network, connections, your own data that AI doesn’t have, unique opinions or points of view on things.

These are the things that still require effort and have a chance to stand out in the sea of sludge that the internet’s become.

Remember, if it’s cheap, it will not work. So invest your time and resources in the hard things. Talk to your audience, invest in community building, build and contribute to open source, publish original research, share unique points of view, have real thought leadership, write books and other long-form content (and don’t use AI for anything that’s not proofreading), record videos that give REAL value to customers, that nobody can replicate with a prompt. Oh, and invest in distribution, and a lot. Yes, that means paid channels too.

I know it sucks. It’s slow, it’s tedious, it’s boring, it’s taking forever, your teams won’t want to do this, the leadership will get dizzy just hearing about this and then get angry when they hear getting it shipped will take weeks and may not even work.

But it’s what you must do.

If you can’t make sure your newsletter or articles are so valuable, interesting, insightful that they displace something for your customers (another newsletter they read), they are most likely not worth doing, and they are certainly not going to be your growth levers. Because everyone is doing this and plenty of it!

Invest in networking and genuine human to human relations, interview your customers and center your marketing around their needs, the language they use and helping them. Do more of the boring and slow stuff and - most importantly - have patience. Play long games and accept that most things won’t work. If one out of five things hits, you are doing great. The failed ones become data, so the next experiments have a higher chance of being successful.

Oh, and don’t give up. You’re amazing :)