The best marketing advice I wish I'd learned sooner? Don't start at the top of the funnel.
When I first started out, I spent all my time on awareness content—blog posts, SEO, and social media. I figured if I could just get people in the door, the rest would sort itself out.
But it didn't. I brought in traffic, sure, but not enough of it turned into leads or sales. That's when I realized I was building the funnel backwards.
These days, I start with bottom-of-funnel content. I write the sales pages, offer breakdowns, comparison guides, and anything else that helps someone close to buying make their decision. These pages don't pull massive traffic, but they convert. And that gives me momentum—and budget—to build out the rest.
Once those core pages are in place, I start layering in top- and middle-funnel content to support them. But I don't make that the priority until the foundation's working. This simple shift made my content way more effective and saved me a ton of time chasing vanity metrics.
Kurt Norris, Content Marketing Specialist & Founder, Kurt'sCopy
Early in my career, I used to focus on creating flashy ads and clever taglines, convinced that was the secret to winning customers. However, one project with a small local shop changed everything. Instead of pushing ideas, I spent hours talking with their customers, really listening to their needs and frustrations.
That simple shift helped me understand what people actually cared about. The marketing suddenly became meaningful.
I remember how we reworked the message to speak directly to those concerns. It wasn't perfect, but it was honest, and the response improved dramatically. That moment taught me that marketing isn't about being the loudest voice; it's about tuning in to the people you're trying to reach.
Looking back, I wish I had realized sooner that the best marketing starts with understanding your audience's true story. When you listen closely, your message feels real, and people respond because you're genuinely addressing what matters to them.
Erin Siemek, CEO, Forge Digital Marketing, LLC
The most important piece of marketing advice I wish I had truly grasped earlier in my career is the immense value of building genuine, long-term relationships with your audience rather than solely focusing on immediate transactions.
What's more, in the early days, it's easy to get caught up in the pressure of hitting targets and driving sales, sometimes leading to a more transactional approach. However, I've learned that when you prioritize understanding your audience's needs, providing consistent value, and fostering a sense of community, the sales naturally follow and the customer loyalty you build is far more robust and rewarding.
Here's what you need to know: this approach involves actively listening to feedback, engaging in meaningful conversations, and creating content that truly resonates and helps your audience solve their problems. It's about building trust over time, so that when they do have a need that aligns with your offerings, you're not just another option, but a trusted partner.
This relationship-centric approach not only leads to more sustainable growth but also makes the entire marketing journey more fulfilling and impactful.
Michael Lazar, CEO, Content Author
Focus on customer problems, not product features. Early in my career, I spent too much time describing what a product or service did. I should have been talking about what it solved. Features are easy to list. Problems take work to understand. That's where trust begins, when your customer hears their pain described clearly, they believe you know how to solve it.
At a previous company, we built a tool for early childhood educators. It offered scheduling, payments, messaging, and everything a provider might need. But it didn't gain traction until we spoke directly to the real struggle: parents not showing up, tuition lost, time wasted chasing down invoices. When we adjusted our messaging to speak to those frustrations, conversion rates tripled. Same product. Different positioning.
I learned to stop leading with benefits and start listening. I trained teams to map customer journeys, run interviews, and pull insights from support calls. We ran copy tests weekly. We prioritized pain points over taglines. This shift grounded every channel in clarity and empathy. It made campaigns faster to build and easier to scale. Most importantly, it built alignment across product, sales, and service.
Your job in marketing is to say what your customer feels before they say it themselves. Everything else flows from that.
Lisa Walthers, CMO, Upkid
Build your email list early and never stop nurturing it.
In the early years, I focused too much on paid traffic—search ads, social ads, and anything that drove clicks fast. It felt productive, but I ignored owned channels. That was a mistake. Your email list is the one asset you control fully. It doesn't rely on algorithms or ad budgets. It's a direct line to people who've shown interest and are more likely to buy again.
When we shifted our focus to building and segmenting our list, our retention improved. We stopped pushing one-size-fits-all messages and started delivering offers based on product interest, timing, and location. That's where repeat revenue came from. Not from louder ads, but from smarter follow-up. One customer who buys twice is worth more than five who never return.
Email is also where you build trust. It's not about blasting promotions. It's about showing value week after week. Highlighting product tips, real customer installations, reviews, and pricing changes before anyone else sees them. That's how you stay top of mind. Most marketers chase cold leads and ignore the warm ones sitting in their inboxes. I made that mistake for too long. Now it's the first channel we plan around.
Patrick Dinehart, CMO, ReallyCheapFloors.com
The most important piece of marketing advice I wish I had known earlier? Not all traffic is worth chasing. In the beginning, I was obsessed with growing numbers—more keywords, more visits, more impressions. But what I've learned is that the real game is knowing which pages, queries, and audiences actually drive sales—and then doubling down on those.
At Loopex, we now start every campaign by identifying what I call the "money pages"—usually high-intent product or service pages. We optimize those first, build supporting content around them, and link strategically. It sounds simple, but too many marketers skip this step, chasing top-of-funnel clicks. Once we made this our standard process, we saw not just more traffic but better traffic—and real growth in revenue and leads.
If I could give one piece of advice to anyone starting out: Don't try to win the internet. Use 80% of your time for 20% of the work that gives you 80% of the results. Start with what sells. Everything else is there to support that.
Maria Harutyunyan, Co-Founder, Loopex Digital
If I could time travel, I would tell myself, "Marketing isn't about vanity metrics. It's about revenue. Every campaign should be tied to ROI, not just Google positions."
I'm not trying to blame anyone, but when I transitioned from tech to marketing, everyone told me SEO was about traffic, rankings, and Domain Authority. So I chased all of it. I got the numbers. But none of it mattered if clients couldn't see real results.
It sounds obvious now, but it took me some time (and a few reports) to realize I was solving the wrong problem. Clients don't care how many backlinks you built. They care how many leads came in, how many booked calls, and how many closed.
If I had learned early on to track ROI through GA4, call tracking, and CRM integrations, I would've built more trust, earned better testimonials, and grown faster. It's not just about performance. It's about proving performance.
Now, my company only focuses on what moves the needle—conversions and cost per result. I spend less time explaining what DA is and more time showing them how many new customers they gained.
Prerak Mehta, Founder, NetMafia
"Understand the customer journey" was the advice I heard from one of my early mentors, and I wish I had taken it seriously from the start. At the time, I was chasing quick wins. I was looking at clicks, conversions, and surface-level metrics without thinking about how people actually moved through our content or services. It took a while to learn that timing, context, and message placement make the difference between interest and action.
When I started mapping out the touchpoints, everything changed. I stopped sending broad campaigns and started shaping content around what someone was doing or looking for at each stage. Someone browsing our site for translation pricing needs a different message than someone downloading a guide about certified translations. That shift improves results. It makes your entire strategy more efficient. You stop guessing. You start communicating with people in the way they want, when they're ready for it.
Danilo Coviello, Digital Marketing Specialist & Founding Partner, Espresso Translations
Your personal brand is a living, breathing asset—and it only works if you keep it alive.
Early on, my personal brand helped me stand out in a crowded market and land an agency job straight out of college. Back in 2011, I was showing up, creating content, and putting myself out there—and it worked. But once I got the job, I got comfortable. I stopped nurturing my personal brand and stopped evolving it with me. By the time 2020 rolled around, I had to reignite it almost from zero.
That experience taught me that your personal brand isn't just a launchpad—it's what keeps you relevant, visible, and aligned with the opportunities you want. I had to rebuild, but doing so gave me clarity, confidence, and the momentum to build something even better. Still, I often think about where things could've gone if I had kept it alive all along.
Jennifer Sargeant, Founder, Digital Sargeant
The best marketing advice I've learned is this: if your brand tries to speak to everyone, it connects with no one.
In the early days of growing our agency, I thought being broad made us look more capable. Our website said all the usual things—custom solutions, tailored strategy, high-quality service. It sounded nice, but it didn't resonate. We'd get inquiries from all sorts of businesses, but most weren't a good fit. Worse, the right ones weren't reaching out at all.
Things changed when we got specific. We rewrote everything to speak directly to marketers who were tired of unreliable development teams. We called out the real issues—missed deadlines, no clear process, lack of support. Within weeks, the quality of leads improved and conversations became easier.
Now, every bit of copy we write is focused. One audience, one message. It feels more honest, and it works. That clarity has done more for our growth than any tactic ever did.
Nirmal Gyanwali, Founder & CMO, WP Creative
Looking back, I'd tell my younger self to track customer acquisition cost (CAC) from day one. Early on, we poured resources into broad marketing campaigns without measuring their true ROI. Once we started analyzing data, we discovered our electrician and builder clients were 3x more profitable over a 24-month period compared to one-off event planners. This shifted our strategy: we reallocated 60% of our ad spend to trade-specific platforms and saw a 40% boost in repeat business within a year.
The numbers also revealed something unexpected—customers who interacted with our installation tutorials spent 22% more on accessories like commercial-grade connectors and weatherproof controllers. Now, we bake educational content into every sales touchpoint, which has reduced product returns by 15% while increasing average order value. Profit margins don't lie—adapting to what the data shows beats assumptions every time.
Matt Little, Owner & Managing Director, Festoon House
One of the most important things I've learned throughout my career is the value of keeping an eye on establishing trust rather than riding every fad. When I first started, I was easily swayed by the newest craze or the next hot thing in digital marketing. But I learned pretty quickly that real success is built on consistency and credibility, not riding every new bandwagon.
Take the example of brands such as Nike and Dove. Nike has continued to lead the way by being true to its values of performance and inspiration, even when trends change and new ones emerge. Dove, with its "Real Beauty" campaign, created an emotional bond with its consumers by being real, not merely selling goods. These companies know that trust is gained with a clear message and a sincere attempt to reach out to people.
For today's businesses, authenticity is where it's at. It's about saying what you're going to do and then doing it, and communicating openly and honestly with your audience. The short-term fix of hopping on a trend may be alluring, but the long-term benefit of building trust far exceeds anything in short-term gratification. Trust is not something gained overnight, but when you build it correctly, it's the stepping stone to long-term growth. Creating an activated, loyal audience is a lasting success.
Darcy Cudmore, Founder, RepuLinks
Looking back, I wish we had embraced small, fast experiments instead of trying to perfect every campaign before launch. Earlier in my career, we'd spend weeks fine-tuning messaging, visuals, and timing, only to find out the campaign didn't connect with anyone.
Now, we take a different approach. We test rough versions first—not sloppy, just simple. We share them with a small audience and watch how people respond. Do they click? Reply? Share? That data tells us what's worth improving and scaling. It's like getting a live focus group without the guesswork.
Switching from "get it perfect" to "get it out, then get it better" changed how we work. It saves time and gives us real feedback early, which is way more valuable than opinions in a meeting room.
Vikrant Bhalodia, Head of Marketing & People Ops, WeblineIndia
One piece of advice I wish I had known earlier in my career is that your internal team is your first audience. Most marketers are obsessed with external campaigns, chasing leads, clicks, and impressions. However, no one tells you how powerful internal marketing can be. Your sales team, customer support, translators, and designers—if they don't deeply understand your brand story, offers, or positioning, your external campaigns will always underperform.
At our company, we started treating our internal knowledge-sharing like a campaign with branded playbooks, bite-sized content updates, and internal newsletters about client wins, content strategy shifts, and SEO trends. The result was better-aligned teams, faster execution, and even employees turning into brand advocates organically on LinkedIn and industry forums.
Naima Ch, Marketing Head and SEO Specialist, Morse Code Translator
What I really think is the most important marketing advice anyone should learn early is that clarity comes before creativity. People do not respond to how clever your campaign looks unless they immediately understand what you do, who it is for, and why it matters to them. That message needs to land in seconds.
Great marketing begins with strong positioning. When the offer is clear and the audience is well defined, everything else works better. I have seen campaigns with basic messaging outperform polished ones by a wide margin simply because they removed confusion.
If you are starting out, focus on crafting one clear sentence that explains your value. Make your audience say, "This speaks to me." Once you do that, you are not just running campaigns; you are building trust. And that is what gets remembered and shared.
Sahil Gandhi, Brand Strategist, Brand Professor
One piece of advice I wish I'd learned earlier is to always ask: "So what?" It sounds basic, but for years, I'd get excited about a campaign idea, a new format, or a shiny tool—only to realize later we weren't clear on what outcome we actually expected. Now, before we run anything, I ask: "So what? What's the purpose? What should this change—awareness, leads, engagement?" If there's no clear answer, we either sharpen the message or don't run it at all.
Over time, this question has become a filter that saves us from wasting energy on things that look good on paper but don't move the business forward. It's helped us focus on what really matters, not just what fills the content calendar or ticks a box. In marketing—especially in a service business like ours—clarity beats creativity if you want consistent results.
Ann Kuss, CEO, Outstaff Your Team
The most important marketing advice I wish I had known earlier in my career? That being around first-class, innovative marketing is far more valuable than any formal qualification.
Marketing is constantly evolving, and the most successful strategies often come from those willing to experiment, adapt, and stay curious about what's next—whether that's emerging platforms, shifting consumer behavior, or new creative trends.
In hindsight, I spent too long thinking I needed another course or textbook when what I really needed was to immerse myself in real-time, high-quality marketing. The kind that challenges the norms, breaks the rules (intelligently!), and connects with audiences in fresh, exciting ways. Surrounding yourself with people who are doing brilliant work—watching what they test, how they think, and how they pivot—teaches you faster and with far more impact than any traditional training ever could.
So now, I stay curious, stay connected, and always look ahead. That's where the magic really happens.
Nina Mace, Photographer, Trainer & Mentor, Nina Mace Photography
The most important piece of marketing advice I wish I had known earlier in my career as a content writer is that writing for people always takes precedence over writing for algorithms.
I used to focus excessively on keywords, SEO tricks, and meeting word counts, believing that was the key to ranking and success. However, real impact comes when you deeply understand your audience—what they care about, how they communicate, and what problems they need solved—and then create content that feels like it's speaking directly to them, not at them.
When you combine that approach with solid SEO fundamentals, that's when content really starts to perform.
Diana Royanto, Content Writer, Milkwhale
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