Not all marketing advice out there is good.
This week on the Small Owned Business (S.O.B.) Marketing podcast, Vivian and I are sharing bad marketing advice we found on Reddit.
Join us as we share the worst marketing advice we found, what makes it bad, and what you should do INSTEAD of following these crazy tips.
Have you heard some crazy marketing advice? Or have an opinion on a tip we shared in this episode? Let us know in the comments! We want to hear from you S.O.B.s.
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Chapters:
00:00 Thank You For Listening & Please Leave us a 5 Star Review
04:10 Convincing People of Marketing Funnels
06:04 Hiring Marketing Teams: The Need for Clear Roles
08:56 The Myth of Product Quality in Marketing
13:09 Advertising as a New Business is Essential
16:48 Marketing IS Important
19:34 Hiring Professionals: Is It Necessary?
28:28 โIf You Canโt Win Them, Buy Themโ What?
30:53 Confusion of Email Marketing Strategies
35:00 โSpam Worksโ NO!
39:16 โSocial Media is Freeโ The Reality of Social Media Marketing
42:30 The Importance of Differentiation in Marketing
43:48 Avoiding Spammy Marketing Tactics
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๐.๐.๐ (๐๐ฆ๐๐ฅ๐ฅ ๐๐ฐ๐ง๐๐ ๐๐ฎ๐ฌ๐ข๐ง๐๐ฌ๐ฌ) ๐๐จ๐ฆ๐ฆ๐ฎ๐ง๐ข๐ญ๐ฒ: https://www.skool.com/sob
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If you like the show, telling a friend about it would be helpful! You can text, email, Tweet, or send this link to a friend: https://sobmarketing.com This podcast is brought to you by THE SEASONED MARKETER. For more free marketing resources, follow us here:
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*Pre-Episode Clip*
Chelsea: "Spam works. It's why it exists." Y'all.
Vivian: It exists to annoy people. Yeah, that's why it exists.
*Intro*
Chelsea: Hey everyone and welcome to the S.O.B. Marketing podcast. Where we celebrate to S.O.B. you are, and if you haven't figured it out yet - we mean Small Owned Business, we don't mean S.O.B...
Vivian: Listen, we know that as a small business owner you are working hard on the daily to keep your business fully operational while trying to promote it. And while some days it may feel like the business is owning you, if we're being honest with each other I bet you would admit that you wouldn't give up the insanity for anything.
Chelsea: Our commitment here at the S.O.B. Marketing podcast is to give you the real talk, what works when it comes to advertising, marketing, and promoting your business. And then what doesn't really work.
Vivian: And Chelsea and I promise to always keep the conversation real.
*Beginning of Episode*
Chelsea: Hey everybody and welcome back to the S.O.B. Marketing Podcast. S.O.B. as in Small Owned Business. We would never call you guys names. I am here with my wonderful older sister Vivian. Before we get started...
Vivian: Not that much older. Okay, maybe a little older.
Chelsea: I was going to say. Well, let me... Let me keep my mouth shut.
Vivian: Luckily your birthday just passed, so you already got your birthday present.
Chelsea: That's true. Before we get started today, a little bit of housekeeping. Pretty, pretty please go leave us a review wherever you're listening. We can see the reviews that have been left, you know, so we know that you didn't leave a review. So go leave a review.
If you have any topics you want us to talk about, please let us know. You can email us at help@TheSeasonedMarketer.com. You can send us a DM on social media. We're on most platforms under The Seasoned Marketer. You can leave a comment on YouTube, whatever works best for you guys. But we just want to talk about whatever you guys want to hear about. Vivian, what are we talking about today?
Vivian: All right. So today's episode is going to be a little unhinged. I'm just calling it because of where we are getting our information from. This episode, we are going to be reviewing bad marketing advice from Reddit. Yes, you heard it here first, guys. Now, if you're unfamiliar with what Reddit is, it's basically just an online forum where people can go and...
It's categorized by topics, right? So let's say on Reddit, I wanted to learn more about small business marketing in particular. I would type that into the search field and I can then join that sub Reddit group. So anything related to small business marketing, I would get notifications for and I can read up on.
So that is just a quick overview of what Reddit is if you guys are unfamiliar. But here's the best part of it, is anybody can add commentary to it. This is why it's very unhinged because you get a lot of people that will, I don't know, just kind of say things out of their butt.
Stuff they don't even know about but they're giving people advice on. So today we've compiled the best...well, actually the worst marketing advice from people on reddit. All right, and we're going to talk through it and talk about why it's such bad marketing advice Chelsea, are you ready to do it?
Chelsea: Yes. I'm ready to do it, before we get started - again no TLDL for this episode guys, just because we are going through and quickly changing topics and stuff like that. So really nothing for me to summarize. So just listen to the whole conversation. It's going to be a good one.
Okay, so my first piece of advice that I found that I was like, yo, what? Here's the quote, "convincing people that funnels work is more important than knowing that they work."
What does this even mean? Like, what are, is the suggestion to just scam people? Like, I don't understand what we're talking about.
Vivian: "Convincing people that funnels work is more important than knowing that they work." Yeah. I have so many issues with this just because you're basically saying, regardless of whether you know for a fact that they work, just share the information and try to, I don't know.
Chelsea: The only thing I can think, first off, this was just like a small business owner was asking for marketing advice and this was a comment. And I'm like, how does this, what funnels? Like what are we...my thought process is convincing people that funnels work. Okay, you're a marketing agency and you're trying to convince people to use your marketing advice.
How is this helpful for a small business owner?
Vivian: Unless you're...they're specifically talking about an online business, right? Because that's where you use a lot of funnel work.
Chelsea: Yeah, but they're saying convince other people that the funnel works so that they'll use it whether or not you know it works or not. This entire comment was a great way to start off.
Because this is the first one I found and I was like, what are we talking about? Then the only thing I got from that was just scam people.
Vivian: I think you're right. I agree. Very, very bad advice simply because you are promoting something that you don't know actually works. Yeah. So let's not get in the habit of doing that. All right. My turn.
Chelsea: Yes, your turn.
Vivian: All right. So I'm going to try to simplify mine really quickly because it's a little long, but it's, it provides context. Okay. The post was "small business owners, what do marketing folks in your team do all day?" Then it goes on to say, "Okay, aside from content writing, publishing, SEO, social media, outreach and content marketing, what are some of the things your team does on a regular basis? Something that helps your marketing. I have a team of five and I've been thinking what else I could get them to do directly to help my marketing."
Y'all, the problem here, why do you have five people on your team if you don't have work for them to do? So the reason this is bad advice, I think, is because they're basically going to a forum to ask people, what should my team members do. If you have hired people and they do not have a specific job description, especially when it comes to your marketing? This whole thing is off. All right.
Just some good advice would be, do not take the leap and hire somebody to join your internal team and to handle marketing unless you specifically have a job description that incorporates everything that they are tasked with doing, right? Don't do it the other way around because the thing is, somebody that you hire to do your social media marketing is going to be very different or have a different skill set that someone that is going to be managing your website.
Sometimes that same person does not have the skill set to do both. Okay. So that's the advice here, which I mean, they weren't outright giving advice, but their whole thing of turning to random people on the internet to get ideas for what their internal marketing team of five should do.
And by the way, y'all, that's a pretty big marketing team, five people internally.
Chelsea: That's what I was thinking. Five is, for you to hire five people, you have to know what each one is supposed to be doing.
Vivian: Right, well, and think about the chaos that then ensues within the marketing team, okay? If Jill wants to show that she's valuable, but you haven't given her a very detailed job description, she's going to feel like Joe is stepping on her toes anytime he's like doing something that maybe she guesses and thinks she should be responsible for. So let's just get in the habit of not prematurely adding people unless you know exactly what the role and task is going to be.
Chelsea: Absolutely. So next piece of advice, bad marketing advice that I have from the same forum, just a business owner asking for some marketing tips, advice. If your products, this is a quote, "if your product sucks, no amount of marketing can help you." I'm going to say something controversial. I don't think that's true. I think there are a lot of bad products out there that are still alive and kicking specifically because the marketing is decent enough to convince people to make a purchase.
Vivian: So you think that if someone spends enough money, has the right messaging that bad products could be bought, like they could sell bad products.
Chelsea: I think if you have a really good marketing strategy, you can pull it off. Okay. I have a perfect example. Fyre Festival. Do you remember that?
Vivian: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Chelsea: Okay, y'all, if you don't know, Fyre Festival was a luxury music festival in 2017. That wasn't real. It didn't exist. Like he, it was all a scam to steal people's money. Y'all please. There are a bunch of documentaries on it. They're pretty good. This is crazy. Like it is, it's crazy. He never had a lineup. He didn't have any musicians or anything. He hadn't thought anything through. The day of the festival people are in just like random tents. They did not have food. Well, they had food, but it was like really bad food. And then some people didn't even have bad food. My point is, he made millions. Because the marketing strategy was so good.
Vivian: So back the train up though and tell people, I mean, this wasn't like you're going to a concert that cost $200. This was thousands of dollars
Chelsea: This was a luxury music festival. It was thousands of dollars.
Vivian: It was on an island.
Chelsea: Yes, on a private island. It was a whole thing. Celebrities were posting about it, sharing about it. Their marketing strategy, beautiful. If this was a real thing, it'd be amazing.
Vivian: To your point, he did the marketing extremely well to the point where he sold so many quote unquote tickets. People flew out, went to this island where they thought this festival was going to be, ended up nothing was really set up. It was like a huge debacle and he basically made out with all the money.
Chelsea: Yes, I think he ended up going to jail.
Vivian: He did. Yes.
Chelsea: Yes, he went to jail. But he's trying to do another Fyre Festival. And I'm pretty sure.
I'm pretty sure he has sold tickets for it, which, you know what, shame on y'all. Shame on y'all.
Vivian: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
Chelsea: Exactly. But I think that's a perfect example of marketing really matters. Even if you have like a not great product or maybe not even a real product, you can get away with it if you have good marketing.
Vivian: For sure.
Chelsea: Not saying you should do that, y'all.
I'm not saying you should scam people, but I'm saying, yes, your product matters. Your marketing matters just as much.
Vivian: I think I've heard you say this before. You could get somebody to buy once. You probably won't get them to buy twice if it's a bad product, right?
Chelsea: Yes. And that's a very good point too. You can get them in. You're probably not going to keep them if it's a bad product.
Yes, your product does matter. But I just want to say, good marketing has a really big play on what you can get away with.
Vivian: Like being bamboozled out of thousands and thousands of dollars. Which we're not, we're not victim shaming here. I mean, that's sad. I'd be so angry and I'm glad the guy did time because rightfully he should have.
All right. So my next piece of bad marketing advice via Reddit is coming from somebody, well, I'm not going to leave the handle, but their handle includes the words marketer pro, but I'm guessing from what they say, they are actually not a marketing pro, okay? This was in response to someone like, they had talked about they were a health and wellness business. They were new, and had just opened up in the last six months. So they were asking for advice because they're like, hey, my business just isn't growing. Like I just need marketing advice.
He says... well, I'm assuming it's a he just because of what was said, okay? Take that with a grain of salt. "You are not ready for advertising or promotion, especially as a new business owner."
The reason this is...
Chelsea: Real quick, this is the episode to watch on YouTube or Spotify because the faces I'm sure we're making.
Vivian: The reason this advice is so bad is, y'all this is when you should be advertising. Okay, when you're a new business because, it doesn't matter what industry you're entering into. There's always going to be other products or services that are going to compete with you. Okay, and let's say that's not true. Let's say that you have a product that has no competition, right? It's a new concept. Great, you still now need to advertise even more because you have to introduce this to people because you have to educate them on top of promoting your product. I think this was just bad on all accounts. As a new business owner, it is prime time for you to advertise and to promote your business.
I don't really know what this person was thinking when they were typing that. And what kind of worries me even more is that they had one person that kind of like, not thumbs up it, but you know, acknowledged it. So I'm like...
Chelsea: Up voted.
Vivian: Yes, up voted. So I don't know what two people are thinking in this scenario, but not rightfully so. And let me just say this.
It doesn't matter what stage of your business you are in. You should be promoting it at all times because you cannot leave your small business in the hands of established customers, right? You can't say, "oh, well, my customers come back". Okay, great. That's a pretty big assumption. And you're leaving money on the table if that's what you're doing.
So if you want your small business to grow and you're serious about that, at all points in time, even if you're not advertising, if you're not dishing out money to promote your business, there are free options for you to go out there. To be fair on the flip side, there were some really good marketing tips in the Reddit feed for this one question. People did go in and ask her, Hey, do you have the Google business profile?
Did you put all the meat and potatoes in there, right? Is it fully fleshed out? Yeah. So, there was some really good advice. This one was not it. Okay. This one missed the mark.
Chelsea: Yes. Okay. So in this same little discussion that I'm scrolling through, the business owner asked for marketing tips, marketing advice. I saw a lot, a lot of responses of people saying,
"You know, marketing isn't that big of a deal. You shouldn't lose sleep over it. Stop making a big deal about it." This feels very, okay, I don't know if this phrasing is correct. I don't want to offend anyone, but this feels kind of...
Vivian: Famous last words. I don't want to offend anybody. Let me continue on.
Chelsea: Well, it kind of feels victim blame-y.
Vivian: Okay.
Chelsea: Like the person is asking for help like, hey, I need help for my marketing. And all these people are saying you're being dramatic about it. Calm down. Marketing is not a big deal.
Vivian: Okay. I see what you're saying. Maybe the appropriate word would be like they're gaslighting somebody into thinking it shouldn't be as important as they're making it seem. Yes.
Chelsea: Yes. Yes. A lot of people saying it's not worth losing sleep over.
I understand. At the same time I feel like this is not something to say to a small business owner.
Vivian: Well and I'm going to challenge that because if there's anything you should lose sleep over it should be your small business. This is somebody's livelihood right? Okay so that would be like me in a work setting and I'm concerned that maybe I'm not performing well. And then somebody telling me, well, Vivian, just chill out. It's not worth losing sleepover. If it's directly tied to your livelihood, people are going to lose sleep over it. And also, can I say that small business owners, for the most part, I'm making a generalization - have type A personalities. I'm sorry, but like most people don't just start a business because they decide they want to do the quote unquote easy thing. It is not easy running a small business. So these are typically the people that have, you know, they've given up the luxury of consistent pay to try to do the one thing they love or to make it on their own. Right. So for someone to say like, hey, marketing your small business is not anything to lose sleep over. Okay, then what should I lose sleep over. Because the marketing part of it is going to be directly tied to how successful my business is. Or isn't.
Chelsea: Thank you. Thank you. Okay. You understood my problem with this.
Vivian: Now, if you guys can't see me, if you're listening to this on the audio, I just stepped off of my little soap box. Okay. So I was on it and I stepped off of it.
Chelsea: Okay, you have another one?
Vivian: Yes. Okay, so this one for me is, I saw it quite a bit on a lot of the marketing subreddits and it basically just says, "hire a professional or freelancer". Then it's got the emoji that's like, you know, with the hands turned up, like, I don't know. I don't know, hire a freelancer.
Chelsea: I saw that a lot too. Yeah.
Vivian: All right. This is the beef I have with it. It's not so much that you guys shouldn't hire a freelancer.
Chelsea: Mine, real quick, I brought that too. Mine says "you need to hire someone. This is a profession."
Vivian: I mean, it is a profession. OK, but let me make the case for why this is bad. You as a small business owner, you remember that first one I brought up where the person was like, hey, I have five people on my marketing team. What do I do with them?
Okay, taking advice, taking tips, even though these people are on my payroll now. Great, you have five people. If you don't know what they should be doing, you don't know enough about marketing. That is a problem, right? Because as a manager, as an owner, I need to know enough to be dangerous. I don't need to get into the details and the semantics of marketing. That's why I'm hiring an SEO person. But I should have an overview, a bird's eye view of what that individual is responsible for, what my metrics mean, and how well they are performing within their job role and also as a small business within, how my SEO is doing. Because the second that person moves on to another job opportunity, I'm going to have to replace them.
All right. You have to know enough to be dangerous when it comes to your marketing. The other part of it is if you're a small business owner and you are tight on funds right now, it may not always and hopefully it won't always be the case, but there's going to be a lot that you take on yourself. Okay. You just have to be willing to learn and to be able to do that.
If you are punting this out, and just saying, I'm just going to hire a freelancer for anything that's marketing related, you are doing a disservice to yourself because you also do not know how to gauge whether that person is ripping you off or they're actually doing the right thing. I'm going to say this because I've seen it in real life. I have seen endless small business owners who reach out to whether it's website people, whether it's marketing agencies. When they tell me what this marketing agency is doing, I'm like, my gosh, they're overcharging you. For the amount of time that it takes to do that, they're probably sending you a $2, $3 bill, which is outrageous. Yeah.
Chelsea: Also, even if they're not ripping you off, if you're getting a good deal, it very likely could be that it's not quality work. Then even though it's not a lot of money, it's still a waste of that money. You know what I'm thinking of? When you were looking for someone to design The Seasoned Marketer logo.
Vivian: Yeah, let me tell you guys...Chelsea, did I ever send you that graphic?
Chelsea: You didn't send me the graphic. You explained it very well, though.
Vivian: So I'm going to send you the graphic so that you can insert it right here.
All right, y'all, I went to Fiverr. I did what this person said, okay? I'm not a graphic designer, all right? So I was like, great, I have an idea for The Seasoned Marketer and I'm going to hire someone off of Fiverr. But the way this worked is it actually, I can't remember if it was Upwork or Fiverr, I think it was Fiverr. You would go in, you'd write the concept idea and people could kind of like pitch their stuff to you, okay? So I was getting stuff from different what do you call it? Different freelancers.
One of them was this thing that looked like it was done in clipart and it was a person wearing a chef's hat because I guess they were getting it from the term seasoned. So they thought it was seasoned, seasoning of a different kind, like a chef thing. So wearing a chef's hat and they were like putting spices on something.
I don't know, I kind of feel like I should have gone with that logo.
So this is the other part of it. I'm glad you brought that up Chelsea because when people say hire a professional or freelancer, that does not absolve you as a small business owner. It does not wipe your hands of responsibility for checking in and keeping up with the thing. And so that's the other part that I think not enough people talk about.
Great, even if you hire a freelancer to do your website, you still have to give them guidance. You still have to give them verbiage, maybe even copy, or you're giving them the bullet points so that they can create the copy, right? You're having to go in, double check the work. You're having to go in and sign off on things. So it's not like, I get that people think it saves them a lot of time. And it does in the sense that if you're hiring for like a website, it's easier for you to hire out and use a professional than it is for you to learn how to do this stuff and meal piece it together, okay? And then it looks janky. You want it to be professional, you want to put your best foot forward. And so we do recommend that you reach out to professionals when you need to, but don't get it twisted. That doesn't mean that you just hand it off to a website developer and they're not going to ask any questions. You're going to spend time helping them finish the project because they're going to come back and say, can you provide me a little more guidance on X, Y, and Z? What did you mean by this service line? Do you have headshots for me to upload for your team members? Blah, blah, blah.
Chelsea: Also, I find this response to be incredibly passive, incredibly privileged. Because what am I supposed to do if I don't have the money to hire someone? Just do nothing? I'm not going to just do nothing. How am I supposed to grow my small business to be able to afford to hire someone if you're telling me not to do anything and to just hire someone?
Vivian: Right. To just sit on it until I can afford to hire someone. Well, for me, I think the one thing that sums up this bad advice best is the, I don't know emoji with the hands up that they put at the end of it. You are right, sir. You do not know. Like don't just say very matter of fact, hire a professional or a freelancer. That's it, end of story. Great, not super helpful if I'm barely making it, but thank you.
Chelsea: Which, shameless pitch y'all. The SOB community is $50 a month and you get to talk with us for an hour long, once a week about whatever questions you might have. So if you feel like "I need help" instead of going to Reddit and these people responding with the I don't know emoji we'll help you in that way you don't have to maybe try to hire someone who gives you like a really bad logo. You know what? Insert the commercial here. Chelsea.
*S.O.B. Community Ad*
Chelsea: I once worked with an ad agency where I had to go through and revise all their work because it would be laden with misspellings and wrong information. We were spending thousands of dollars for me to do double the work.
Vivian: Sometimes, you donโt need an ad agency - you just need resources to figure it out on your own.
Chelsea: Thatโs why we created the S.O.B. Community - for the small business owners who want to keep their marketing in house but still need some support.
Vivian: Get templates, courses, downloads, expert advice, weekly live calls, and a supportive group of small business owners - for just $50/month!
So head over the skool.com/sob. That's s-k-o-o-l.com/sob, all lowercase. Join today and feel confident in your marketing.
*End of S.O.B. Community Ad*
Chelsea: Okay, Vivian, so my next piece of advice... this was just in a forum saying, give us your best marketing advice. Which, why would you put, I'm sorry, y'all, let me just read it. "If you can't win them, buy them." What?
Vivian: Okay, let me counter what you're thinking. First give me...
Chelsea: You know what? Explain it to me because I think I'm not understanding what this person is saying.
Vivian: I think what they're saying, if you can't win them with free promotion, buy them with advertising.
Chelsea: Okay, so in my head, I went, if you can't convince them to make a purchase, just send them free stuff or maybe like...
I don't even know what they're trying to say. You know what? I didn't think of it from that perspective, what you just said. I was thinking from a, I'm already not being able to convince them to buy. So just, I don't know, pay them - like it doesn't make sense to me.
Vivian: No, and it may have been, I mean, here's the thing. It is off of Reddit. We said it's unhinged. So it could be a variety of different things. When I hear that, if you can't win them, buy them.
I think if you can't win them over with free promotion, content marketing, stuff like that, buy them, meaning run ads. But the more that I say it out loud, that doesn't sound right. It sounds kind of like what you're saying is maybe some type of, I don't want to say coercion, but it's like, if you can't convince them to buy your product, then... not bamboozle them, but entice them with...than buy them, right? Like, entice them with something.
Chelsea: Maybe this was a brilliant idea. Maybe this guy is right. Or this girl, I'm sorry. Maybe this person is right. I don't know, because all you said was if you can't win them, buy them. Like, there was no explanation or anything. Not helpful. Bad advice.
Vivian: If you guys are listening and you think you know what they mean. Then go ahead and drop in the comments. Tell us, inform us, enlighten us of what that person possibly could have been thinking by writing that when it to marketing.
Chelsea: Yes, when it comes to marketing. Yes.
Vivian: All right. The next one, "email marketing doesn't produce any more".
Chelsea: Oh my God.
Vivian: I feel like someone put that in there just to punk us. They're like, you know who's really going to have beef with this? The Seasoned Marketers.
Chelsea: OK, but you know what's crazy? I didn't bring this one, but in the same forum, in the same discussion someone put "now for email marketing, you should be sending emails out three times a week".
Vivian: Three times a week?
Chelsea: Three times a week.
Vivian: In one of the ones that I read, they were saying two times a day.
Chelsea: Oh my God. OK, so it went from email marketing doesn't work to it only works if you're emailing them three times a week, to you got to email them three times a day. Oh my God.
Vivian: Not three, two times a day.
Chelsea: Okay, I was being dramatic. I'm sorry.
Vivian: But here's the funny part of it though is, to your point, how does that not mind fuck somebody? Like if you're a small business owner and you're getting all three of these different tips like, hey, email marketing is dead. Don't do email marketing. No, do email marketing three times a week. Actually, even better, do email marketing two times a day. Okay.
I think it's just all very confusing. if you do use an online resource like Reddit to get some information, we're not saying that there isn't valuable information there. Just take it with a grain of salt and be sure that whatever tips you do implement are aligned with your business and that you feel confident about. Don't just, just do a little research. Don't just take the first thing that you hear and that's it.
Chelsea: If you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you've probably heard Vivian and I say, this may work for you, this may not. We're not being wishy washy. It's just your, small businesses are so unique. What works for your business may not work for someone else. So we're giving advice of good marketing strategies. That doesn't mean every single marketing strategy is going to work for your small business. We love, love, love, love email marketing.
That does not mean it's going to work for your small business, but do not just write it off and say email marketing doesn't work anymore. That, no.
Vivian: Well, I think it's a, we've talked about, I do believe in the power of email marketing. So I do personally think all small businesses could benefit from email marketing in some way, shape, or form. The thing there is what, it depends on what your priorities are as a small business owner, given where you're at in your small business and what your budget is. Let me just make the pitch for email marketing. It's inexpensive. You are staying top of mind, regardless of whether you send an email once a month, once a week, or two times a day. You're staying top of mind. You're also able to open and keep a connection with potential customers outside of social media forums. We've always talked about what are you going to do if TikTok goes away? What are you going to do if Instagram, you know, I don't know.
Chelsea: Deletes your profile.
Vivian: Deletes your profile. You have to have an avenue to be able to continue to promote, sell, and just communicate with potential customers. Email marketing is a good, I think, fit for a lot of small businesses. If you guys are thinking, I'm in an industry where really I can't make email marketing work, send us an email and tell us. We'll help you come up with a couple ideas on how you can turn it into something that could help promote your small business.
Chelsea: Absolutely. Okay, what's my next one? Oh, this, I got this one from a discussion where it was saying, you know, marketing, what was it? It was marketing tips that you stand by, but are like hot takes. Okay. This is definitely a hot take. "Spam works. It's why it exists." Y'all.
Vivian: It exists to annoy people. Yeah, that's why it exists.
Chelsea: I mean, sure. Maybe it works like one out of 300 times. That's not a good conversion rate. Probably is not worth your time. All you're doing is pissing off 299 people.
Vivian: Yeah, and to your point, there is a, I went down this rabbit hole not too long ago where it was like-
Chelsea: Was it on Reddit?
Vivian: No, it was, I think it was on YouTube, but it was someone who was, it was about email marketing and somebody was talking about how you can buy email lists and basically blast out email communication. To your point, the game there is, it's a numbers game. So the more emails you buy, essentially, you know, that increases your probability of getting at least one or two sales. But things to keep in mind. Sure, spam works. I don't know what you're using for an email platform that allows you to spam because like, you're going to get blacklisted and that's not a good thing. So, you know, highly do not recommend.
Chelsea: Vivian, can you explain for a second blacklisted for email marketing?
Vivian: Yeah. So basically whenever like - Chelsea and I have over 1200 people on our email list. Anytime I send an email out, we send out weekly emails every Sunday. Every time I send it out it tells me what the bounce rate is, right? It tells me how many people actually opened it, how many people unsubscribed and how many people listed it as spam. You do not want to get listed as spam, which is why we tell you that whenever you, whether it's through a lead magnet and a freebie, like a downloadable PDF, whether it's from working markets and you're asking people if they want to sign up for your email list so that you can continue to communicate with them. However, you're acquiring that person's email list. You have to ask for permission and you want to be sure that you are...
Chelsea: That you have consent.
Vivian: Yes, so consent is a big deal because that is going to lower the amount of people that are going to quote unquote, mark you a spam. Because anytime you do get marked a spam or whatever, you're going to get dinged. With enough dings, you get blacklisted to the point where the email carrier slash platform is just not going to send your stuff out anymore. So that's why that particular, when I went down that rabbit hole, I was like, this is not good. This is some shady stuff, right? So sure, spam works. Do it at your own...
Chelsea: Risk.
Vivian: Risk because you're going to get dinged and it's not good. Also, can we talk about the fact that? If you're a small business owner and you are working so hard to create good interactions and good environments for potential customers. If you want that potential customer to convert to a customer where they're breaking out their wallet and giving you money to then convert to a repeat customer, right? You can't be doing stuff like this. You can't be spamming. You can't be doing that because it's almost like you're-
Chelsea: It's hurting your brand. It's bad for your branding.
Vivian: You're leading two different lives. Okay. Yeah. And you can't do that. You need to be consistent and you need to be a good small business and you need to not do spammy sh**. Can we just agree? Like all of us, 2025, no spammy shit.
Chelsea: Perfect. Put that on a, put it on a flag. On a t-shirt.
Vivian: The next one is "social media is free and provides guaranteed leads". Okay, I see the eye roll, Chels. What's up with that?
Chelsea: All of it. All of it is wrong. First off, I hate the word guaranteed. Nothing is guaranteed.
Vivian: For sure. I know. Yeah, I know.
I agree with you. What a bold statement to make when it comes to marketing of any channel, okay? Because like Chelsea and I said, there are so many different factors that go into making a marketing channel a success for any particular business that that's just a very generic thing to say and it's misleading, okay? Also, "social media is free and provides guaranteed leads".
How many times have we told you guys social media is not free? It's not. Okay, great. You're not paying for ads on social media. You're using it as a organic way to grow your small business. It still requires time and resource. I want you to tell me how long you took to create the last reel that you posted and tell me that social media is free. I get the concept. I get that you're not dishing out money, you are taking 15 minutes of your time to edit a video, to record a video, to post it. You're taking another 10 minutes to think of a caption that's going to generate engagement on there. Your time is valuable. Don't do that. Don't say, it's just requiring my time. Yes, that is the most valuable thing you guys have, okay? So please treat it that way.
Chelsea: Exactly, social media is not free and nothing is guaranteed. Yes.
Vivian: Also, I want to say when it says guaranteed leads, this is the problem I have with the term. I think this is, I think we should state this when Chelsea and I say we have a problem with the word guaranteed. It's for this simple fact. Great. What if I say that to you as a small business owner and you literally do the bare minimum on social media, which means you create a profile and then you post like a picture once every two weeks. You're telling me that I'm guaranteeing that she's going to get leads off of that. That's not getting leads off of anything. So that's the problem we have is you can't say I guarantee you're going to do this unless you also tell them if you follow my three step process, if you follow, you know what I mean? I can't assume. I don't know what business owner A business owner B and business owner C are going to do. Therefore I cannot tell all three of them that they're going to be successful at anything.
Chelsea: Yeah. Thank you. Okay. I love that. Well, I hated that and that was the point.
Oh my God. Okay. This was, this one's also from the hot takes one, right? That this person stands by this statement. They're like, this is good marketing advice.
Vivian: Which by the way, is this the last one? So are you going out with a banger?
Chelsea: I have one more that's like, but no, I have one more. I'll explain it later. Okay. So this, this one is a banger though. "Differentiation often does more harm than good". What?
Vivian: First of all, I thought the whole purpose of marketing was to be different. And stand out.
Chelsea: Uh-huh. So I'm like, what are you talking about? Maybe if you explained yourself and explained what you meant, maybe you have a really good point and it makes sense. But just saying differentiation often does more harm than good. That can mean 20 million things and of the 20 million that I can think of, you're wrong.
Vivian: Chelsea's like, you're O for O.
Chelsea: Yeah. I'm like, no, this makes no sense. The point one, as a small business, you're trying to tell people, hey, my business is different. My product is worthwhile, and here's why. Your marketing is about showing people, hey, my business is different, and his is why. This is why you should make a purchase. It's literally about differentiation. Yeah.
Vivian: Yeah. Agree. Bad marketing advice on that one. She just took out her stamp you guys.
Chelsea: I did. I stamped it as wrong. Wrong.
Vivian: Wrong. F.
Chelsea: So my last one, this is our last one guys, is specifically from a forum of bad marketing advice. They asked, hey, what's the worst marketing advice you've ever heard? Cause I was like, now I'm kind of interested cause a lot of these are bad. So I got, this guy worked at a company and he has two examples. First one was from a sales person in the company. They said, "we just need to send emails every day, maybe twice a day".
Vivian: I mean, what did we say? No spammy shit in 2025.
Chelsea: Then the other thing was from a sales manager. "Once a consumer applies for this financial product, we should automatically text them every hour until they talk to our financial specialist."
Vivian: Noooooo.
Chelsea: OK, like Vivian just said, stop the spammy shit in 2025. Do not do this.
Vivian: Well, you guys. OK, you have to tell us in the comments, what would you do if somebody, let's say you filled something out...The best thing I can think of is when you're looking for car insurance or if you're looking for home insurance and you just bought a house or you're looking to get your house like financed. So you go online and you put information in there. They share that information with multiple companies. Right. I have had it, we switched car insurance companies, I want to say maybe last year. I did not do this, my husband did because he was going to do the research, handle it, look at the rates, okay? The second he started looking for stuff, y'all, I was getting pinged because somehow our cell phone numbers are both attached to the obviously like, you know, whatever the address or something, however they figure that stuff out. So I started getting texts saying like, hey, we see you're looking for car insurance, blah, blah, blah.
I was like what? So I walked into the other room and I asked him, I was like hey Ddd you just...? He said oh yeah, I put our information in to get like quotes for x y and z.
So my thing is what would you do if a company started texting you twice? What did it say, twice a day?
Chelsea: "Text them every hour."
Vivian: If a company started texting you every single hour What would you guys do?
Chelsea: I have...okay, so Vivian and I, we want to provide resources for small businesses, right? So a lot of times I will look into resources to see if they're worth a business owner's time. I don't remember what company this was. I wouldn't tell you either way because I'm not getting sued. I don't even remember what the resource was for, but they wanted my information.
They started calling me. I don't want to say every hour, but they called me twice in a day and I finally picked up and I was like, "what, what do you want?" The person was like, "oh, well we have a pro version of this". I'm like, you called me for this multiple times in a day? I was like, no, I don't want it.
Vivian: Maybe that's that should be what we all do. When people call us or text us like that. We should just take Chelsea's approach and be like, what? What do you want?
Chelsea: What do you want? And then the person was like, well, let me explain why it's a good idea. I said, you know what? Is it free? No, then I don't want it. Because I mean, in my defense, I was looking for a resource for small business owners.
Vivian: It wasn't something you were going to be using.
Chelsea: Well, one, not something I would be using. And two, I don't remember what it was, but it wasn't something that I would tell a small business owner is worth the money.
Vivian: Gotcha.
Chelsea: It's something that you could do for free. You didn't need a business to help you with this. You didn't need to pay a business. Yeah. Don't do this.
Vivian: Well, and going back to what we were saying earlier, I don't know. Do you think annoying people is a good approach and a good way to get them to dish out their dollars and buy your product? I mean, the answer to that is probably no. Even if I do buy it, I'm probably going to be a little salty about it. Like about the way you went about the whole thing, right? So, I don't know. Very interesting.
The other thing is, I think whenever people have a computer in front of them, they feel like because it's not in person, there's this wall between it. Like you separate yourself from the action. If it's not something you would do when you're in person with someone, you probably should not do it. So we are just talking to Gretchen in our last podcast episode. She does a lot of vendor markets and she was telling us how, when people come up to her booth or her table, she lets them...like she'll say hello, she greets them, and then maybe she'll introduce a topic conversation, I really love your earrings or like, you know, military, whatever it is. But she said she's not on this bandwagon of like hounding people to buy her stuff, right? She wants it to be a good experience where they feel like they can look as long as they want without her watching and like basically saying, hey, you have to buy my stuff if you're standing right here.
I think, think of it in terms like that. If you guys are texting people on the hour, every hour until they buy your financial product, kind of like that annoying person at a market that's like in your face about buying their product. Right.
Chelsea: Well. That was my last one. So that was bad marketing advice from Reddit.
Vivian: If you guys have found any that top what we brought today, please share it with us. We would love to be able to talk about it in a future episode or just put it in our back pocket, right? So that we can laugh about it. We're joking. So don't forget you guys, if you haven't already subscribed to our YouTube channel, please do that. S.O.B. Marketing Podcast. Or if you have it favorited or followed our podcast on whatever podcast platform you're listening on, please go do that today.
Chelsea: And go be the best SOB you can be.
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