The 5 Marketing Truths I Can’t Stop Harping On
Marketing is hard, but not rocket science. Keep these fundamentals in mind and you’ll have the foundation you need to build a business based on trust and helping customers.
Read enough of my stuff — or talk to me about marketing or writing for more than ten minutes — and you’ll notice I repeat myself. A lot.
Why?
I believe marketing is simple. Not easy, but not as complicated as many make it.
There are a few basic truths about marketing that haven’t, and won’t, change regardless of the current angst about our looming AI overlords and whatever the hell Google and the various platforms are doing to keep traffic confined to their various walled gardens.
Reading through my earlier pieces here, here are five truths I keep coming back to:
Customers don’t care about you; they want you to solve their problem.
Trust compounds over time and can create reach.
Consistency crushes cleverness.
Write like a human.
Don’t build on rented land.
No One Cares About You – or Your Business
No one wakes up thinking about your company or how awesome your product/service is.
They wake up thinking about their deadlines, their inbox, their budget, their boss.
That’s your opportunity to be different. Over 20 years as an editor, I often couldn’t tell one vendor’s pitch from another. Under the logos, they all said the same thing.
The bar is low to show you care about THEIR problem, not selling YOUR product.
The moment you stop trying to make people care about your business and start showing how you care about their problem, everything changes.
Features don’t sell. Outcomes do.
Your audience isn’t looking for “AI-powered analytics.” They’re looking for something, anything that can help them make a business decision based on facts, not guesses.
My newsletter service isn’t about choosing someone to create a newsletter. That’s just the vehicle for building consistency and adding time back into their day through outsourcing while earning trust with their audience. The method is a newsletter. The outcome is customers who trust you (and buy more).
Every word of your marketing either makes you the hero or makes the customer the hero.
Choose the latter.
The irony is, when you stop shouting about yourself, people finally start listening.
Trust Is More Important Than Volume or Reach (and Creates Sustainable Reach)
Reach spikes up and down based on algorithms. Trusts grows over time and with consistency. Visibility and viability (that’d be making money) aren’t the same thing.
Every algorithmic “boost” fades, but every earned moment of reliability — every time you show up, say what you mean, and mean what you say — becomes a layer in the foundation of your brand.
It’s easy to treat marketing like a lottery: more followers, more impressions, more more more.
But when you stop chasing reach and start building trust, something weird happens.
People stick around. They open the next email. They tell their friends. Trust becomes your quietest, strongest growth engine — compounding in the background while everyone else is refreshing their strategy with the latest “new” tactic.
Trust is economic glue. It will always be central to building a good business.
It’s what made merchants in medieval Venice trade based on a handshake before contracts existed.
It’s what makes you choose the more expensive plumber who takes the time to listen to you over the one who comes in, takes a quick look, and quotes a standard price.
It’s what makes a reader open your newsletter even when they don’t have time — because they know it’ll be worth it.
Trust is the ultimate competitive advantage.
Features can be copied. Prices can be matched. But trust?
That’s personal. Earned. Fragile. And once you have it, do everything in your power to keep it with every interaction.
You can grow without trust, sure, but it won’t last. As Jimmy Hendrix put it, “And so castles made of sand fall into the sea eventually.”
Marketing Never Stops – You Have to Maintain It
You don’t “launch” trust. You maintain it.
Marketing isn’t a fireworks show – one big, beautiful flare in the sky is lovely. To keep customers coming in, you have to do it consistently — day after day; year after year.
It.
Never.
Stops.
You see it here on Substack. Folks start off like their hair is on fire. Then they slowly realize the consistent grind and hard work of creating content that people want to read is hard and start to drop away.
Go to any social platform. You’ll see the same pattern. Big launch, bunch of heat and noise, then a steady decline to maybe a dribble of content now and then.
Trust is built in the behind-the-scenes grunt work of keeping your lists clean, monitoring what works, talking to customers, serving customers, sharing useful information with them, etc. that keeps you from being invisible.
Think of it like this. Your date arrives with flowers. The date is flawless and well-planned. You have a great time. Then, silence. A week goes by and another invitation and wonderful date, followed by no communication.
Versus you meet someone for coffee or an adult beverage. The conversation is good and one beverage becomes two and then to dinner. Soon you’re making plans to meet again. The next day you get a “that was fun, can’t wait to do it again” message.
Which one of those is more likely to turn into a relationship?
Big gestures have their time and place, but it’s the daily upkeep that keeps relationships, and for businesses, your reputation and relevance, alive.
We love to glorify launches and rebrands because they’re visible. They’re big. They’re sexy. We can have opinions about them. The grunt work of ongoing maintenance is the opposite of sexy. Well, until you understand that bringing in new customers (and revenue) is sexy.
Here’s the one ironclad rule of the Internet I’ve seen over 30 years: you have to show up.
Showing up doesn’t guarantee success, but it’s the precondition to be successful. Show up daily or weekly; remind people you exist and that you care.
Over time, that care leads to familiarity.
Familiarity becomes trust.
Trust becomes conversion.
You don’t need to go viral. You need to stay visible.
Write Like a Human
If your marketing sounds like it was written by a committee with a thesaurus addiction, change it.
I’ve spent my career around people who are brilliant but terrified to sound unprofessional. Like if they use “use” instead of “utilize” the business gods will smite them for using plain English.
So they default to jargon and buzzwords and meaningless platitudes (world class, elite, best in class, blah blah blah.) — and end up sounding like everyone else.
Humans trust humans. Write like one. Write like you’d explain it to a friend over coffee.
And never make yourself the hero. Your customer is the hero; you simply are there to give them what they need to succeed.
Clarity is credibility. If you need to look up a word before putting it into your marketing or sales material, your customer will likely need to as well.
That’s friction.
Friction kills decision-making.
Clear, concise language helps to eliminate friction.
When you write like a person, you make it easy for people to believe you.
They can hear you.
They can feel the intent behind your words.
And when they feel that — that you’re not trying to impress, but to help — you become memorable.
Don’t Build on Rented Land
You don’t own your audience on social.
You borrow them.
Platforms are rented land — and the rent keeps going up. One change to the feed, one new policy, one algorithm “improvement,” and the attention you’ve earned disappears.
That’s why ownership matters. A newsletter is an asset you actually control — one that compounds through trust, not luck.
Social is a great place to meet people and even develop relationships, but you are at the mercy of the platform.
Email is a one-to-one relationship YOU own and control.
It’s direct, durable, and personal. You decide when to send. They decide when to read. No middleman. No panic when the platform moves the goalposts.
Use the rented land of the various platforms. Used well, you can build connections and amplify your reach.
But you want to own the relationship with your people by building an email list.
Which is why newsletters — good ones — still outperform every shiny new platform out there. They’re built on permission, not interruption.
They’re an ongoing conversation, not a one-and-done campaign, that you control.
Marketing, at its best, is just a promise you keep — over and over — until people believe you.
Do the work. Be worthy of that belief. Build your business on a solid foundation.
If you want a place to practice this kind of trust-building maintenance, start a newsletter. It’s the most human form of marketing there is — and I can help you build one from scratch with my Newsletter-in-a-Box service.
Background Music Selections
Of course I listened to this after I added the line from the song!
Always love this one when it pops up, makes me want to hop onto my Mongolian pony and pillage!
Love this song. So much good music out there that never gets airplay.