Howdy fellow marketer,

Hope you had a good Easter break.

As alluded to in the last email, we just moved to NYC for a couple of months, so this newsletter will hit your inboxes on Saturday morning instead of Friday afternoons for the coming months.

So without further ado, let me present to you...

...Today's topics

📈 Marketing Strategy:
Avoid Premature Scaling: Effective marketing requires a great product

🧰 Tools of the Trade:
Articles, Tools and Inspiration for Marketers

⛑️ Reflections from the Trenches:
How to deal with conflict in the workplace

📈 Marketing Strategy

Avoid Premature Scaling: Effective marketing requires a great product

Marketing a bad product sucks. It’s an uphill battle.

If people don’t love your product once they buy, there will be no word of mouth or referrals.

Which becomes very expensive and hinders growth tremendously.

The reason a product with no surrounding excitement is so painfully devastating for marketers in particular, is because all of the marketing systems out there right now are algorithmically driven towards engagement.

The Algorithm Demands Engagement

Every ad platform out there from LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, YouTube and Outbrain to Google display network and Twitter. Every single one of them is driven by engagement.

They measure: How is your click-through rate? How high is your engagement rate compared to all the other people who are bidding on those terms or trying to rank for those keywords or trying to appear in those social feeds.

And so if you don't have very high engagement, because your product doesn’t resonate with your audience and customers, guess what? You are going to suck in those algorithms.

Those algorithms are designed to push you down if you can't deliver. They are designed to make your cost of click, your cost of acquisition very high and your visibility very low. Don't play that game. That game sucks. That game is so, so painful. As a marketer, you come back and your numbers look like shit, and in a way it's not your fault. Right?

Don’t push for growth if the product is not ready

Maybe it is your fault because you didn't have that hard conversation with the chief product officer, with the CEO, with the board of directors. You did not have that hard conversation where you told them:

"Hey friends, this is how these algorithms and systems work, I cannot smear lipstick on this pig and expect to take it to market and have it perform well. Everyone is going to see through it, or if they don't see through it, initially, they will see through it as soon as they try it. Look at these metrics. Look at our numbers.

This product is not resonating and therefore will not receive amplification. And therefore every impression that I get is driving down our algorithmic ability to reach more people at a lower cost. Don't force me to do that. Don't throw bad money after good. Keep investing in the product. And when it reaches the metrics that we need, then, then let's go push for growth."

To sum up: As a marketer it’s important to speak up when you see that your company is pumping money into promoting a product that is not ready for the growth stage yet.

You are still in traction stage and learning what your clients need from you. Don’t try to scale prematurely if you are this stage, because you will waste a lot of money on customers who are not happy enough with your product to refer you (or worse: don’t stick around for very long).

🧰 Tools of the Trade:

Articles, Tools and Inspiration for Marketers

💬 On Greatness

“If greatness is your goal, it can only be achieved today.” - Dan Sullivan

👨‍🎓 Marketing & Leadership Education

• 5 Ways To Boost Your Career Progression In 2022 - Great list of tips from seasoned product and marketing leaders on how to grow your career in tech.

• How to Use Podcasts for Link Building - A fantastic guide on leveraging your podcast to build links. It’s what we do with our podcast as well.

🤩 Brands and (digital) Products that caught my eye

• Shift - This app is like a workstation that combines all your existing online-services like Slack, Google Docs etc. into one organized interface (as opposed to having 100 tabs open).

• Podcastle - A software to recording, edit, mix and publish your podcast episode.

• Greg - This is an app that helps you take care of your home plants. I love their website for it’s simplicity and free functionality (check out the plant care database and community tab). Great SEO plays and branding execution!

📚 Interesting reads

• The Conscious Universe - “The radical idea that everything has elements of consciousness is reemerging and breathing new life into a cold and mechanical cosmos.” - A thought-provoking article that stayed with me.

• Be Intentional About How You Spend Your Time Off - A look at “pro-active recovery” and why it’s more relaxing than non-planned reactionary time off.

⛑️ Reflections From the Trenches

How to deal with conflict in the workplace

Following are some tips on solving conflicts in the workplace that Kevin Indig (VP of SEO at Shopify) and I discussed during our podcast episode.

Methodology: Issue Clearing

When it comes to conflict there is a very specific methodology taught by Conscious Leadership, called issue clearing, where we bring the two conflicting parties together so both can:

1. State the facts of the conflict from their perspectives

2. State how it made them feel in a nutshell and the stories that they tell themselves about it, the emotions that they felt.

Kevin says about the process:

It's absolutely magical. It's very uncomfortable at the beginning, but 99% of the time we come out much more connected and really in the clear with the person. And with this method we will start to form these really good relationships all-throughout the organization.

Conflict happens on a regular basis. It is unavoidable.

If we think about how often we get into conflict even with our romantic partners, right?

It's unavoidable. It's human. It's necessary even in order to evolve. We're all really good at avoiding conflict. But we should not shy away from it.

Because in conflict situations we learn a lot about ourselves. We learn a lot about other people and how they feel inside. Resolving conflicts can create fantastic teams through shared empathy.

Your Team Performance Depends on It.

It takes a lot of work to get through this and make active conflict resolution a habit.

The rewards are plentiful though. There's this true personal alignment with our peers that will not only make our relationships better, but also has a true impact on the performance of our team.

When we are aligned with people, when we are in the clear, when we are connected with them, we can create much, much better work than if we just come to the office, show up for work, just do your job and then leave.

That's it for this week.

Talk soon,

Sandro