The Only Marketing Advice You'll Ever Need
dailyblog.scottdclary.com
Hi All,
Here’s my daily newsletter navigating the crossroads of business, growth, and life.
If you love this content (please share it), but also…
Start here > https://stan.store/scottdclary
Check out my Podcast, connect with me on YouTube / Twitter, and read my Weekly newsletter.
Sponsor: FreshBooks
The numbers speak for themselves - over 30 million people have chosen FreshBooks, processing more than $60 billion in invoices and saving an incredible 192 hours annually on accounting tasks. As an all-in-one accounting solution, FreshBooks helps entrepreneurs and freelancers create professional estimates, track time, automatically bill clients, and capture expenses on the go - all while integrating seamlessly with over 100 business tools and providing award-winning customer service.
Ready to stop drowning in receipts and chasing payments? Start your 30-day free trial at freshbooks.com - no credit card required.
Plus, if you act before January 7th, get an exclusive Success Story listener offer of 75% off your first three months at freshbooks.com/pricing-offer.
Transform Your Business with FreshBooks
The Only Marketing Advice You'll Ever Need
Marketing advice is everywhere.
And that's the problem.
Everyone's suddenly a marketer. Your neighbor who started dropshipping last week. The LinkedIn guru with a bought following. The agency selling you the "secrets" to 7-figure launches.
But strip away the noise and you'll notice something interesting. The marketers actually making serious money – the ones driving $200M+ in revenue – aren't sharing "growth hacks" or "viral secrets."
They've realized what most miss. Marketing isn't about tactics. It's about understanding reality.
The reality that humans are both simple and complex.
The reality that most marketing tries to trick people rather than help them.
The reality that in trying to appeal to everyone, most marketing appeals to no one.
This isn't about best practices or frameworks. Those change every week anyway.
It's about the timeless principles that drove commerce when we traded in town squares and still drive it in digital spaces.
Think about what actually makes you buy something. Not what you tell yourself, but what really moves you to action.
You buy when you trust. When you feel understood. When the choice feels obvious.
Yet modern marketing does the opposite. It tries to manipulate. To overwhelm with options. To appeal to everyone.
The gap between how marketing works and how marketers market is massive.
Let's fix that.
The Marketing Trap
Most marketing advice makes you worse at marketing.
Think about that for a minute.
The more tips and tricks you learn, the further you get from what actually drives human behavior. Every tactic puts another layer between you and your customer.
Modern marketers have become obsessed with the map while forgetting about the territory. They study best practices and psychological triggers, thinking if they just pull the right levers, they'll get the results they want.
But humans aren't machines. You can't just input the right sequence and expect predictable output.
The real trap is focusing on marketing tactics instead of customer truth.
When you spend all your time studying what other marketers do, you miss what actually works. You see their success and copy the surface level – their tweet style, their sales approach, their funnel design.
But tactics without understanding are worthless. A morning routine thread that works for one person flops for another. A pitch that converts in one person's DMs fails in yours. A landing page that drove millions for one product does nothing for yours.
But success doesn't come from copying tactics. It comes from understanding why those tactics worked for that person, with their audience, at that time.
This brings us to what might be the most uncomfortable truth in marketing:
Authenticity isn't about being yourself. It's about being useful.
All those posts telling you to "just be authentic" miss the point. Your authentic self isn't automatically valuable to others. You have to shape your natural strengths into something that genuinely helps people.
This is where most marketers get stuck. They either try to be completely authentic but provide no real value, or they try to provide value but come across as fake.
The real skill is learning to bridge that gap.
The Customer Paradox
Everyone says to put the customer first.
And that's exactly why most marketing fails.
When you try too hard to be "customer-centric," you end up second-guessing every move. You water down your message trying to please everyone. You overthink every word until your marketing feels robotic and safe.
The truth is, caring about your customers often works against you.
Not because caring is wrong, but because most people care in the wrong way.
Think about your best relationships. They work because both people bring their full selves to the table. Neither person is desperately trying to please the other. They connect because they're genuinely aligned.
Marketing works the same way.
The strongest brands aren't the ones that bend over backward trying to please everyone. They're the ones that stand for something specific and attract people who resonate with that vision.
Your customers don't want you to be perfect. They want you to be real.
This means having strong opinions. Taking stands. Sometimes being wrong and admitting it. These things feel risky, but they build deeper trust than any "customer-centric strategy" ever could.
Look at the most successful creators and companies. Apple doesn't ask customers what they want – they show customers what's possible. The best writers don't poll their audience for topics – they write what they believe needs to be said.
True customer care isn't about pleasing everyone. It's about serving the right people deeply.
This is why generic advice about "understanding your customer's needs" falls flat. You don't need to understand everyone's needs. You need to understand the specific problems you're uniquely positioned to solve.
And this is where data comes in – but not in the way most people use it.
Data: The Double-Edged Sword
Everyone loves to talk about data-driven marketing.
They pull up their dashboards, check their metrics, and think they're making smart decisions.
But data has become a crutch.
Numbers don't tell stories. They confirm them. And if you're looking at the wrong numbers, you'll confirm the wrong stories.
Think about Netflix. They have more user data than almost any company on earth. They know exactly what you watch, when you watch it, and how long you watch it for. Yet they still make shows that flop.
Why?
Because data shows you what happened, not why it happened.
This is where most marketers go wrong. They see a post get high engagement and try to replicate its format. They watch a video go viral and copy its style. But they miss the underlying dynamics that made those things work.
Real insights don't come from staring at numbers. They come from understanding patterns.
When you notice that your worst-performing content actually brings in your best customers, that's an insight. When you realize your highest engagement comes from the posts you were scared to publish, that's an insight.
The best marketers use data to validate intuition, not replace it.
They start with strong opinions formed through direct experience and deep thinking. Then they use data to refine those opinions, not to form them.
This approach unlocks a different way of looking at choices. Instead of overwhelming people with options because the data says "more choice is better," you learn to simplify.
The Simplicity Secret
Most marketing fails because it tries too hard.
Look at any website, sales page, or marketing campaign. You'll see people cramming in every feature, benefit, and bonus they can think of. They believe more is better.
But more isn't better. Better is better.
The mind craves clarity. When you give people too many options, they freeze. When you give them too many messages, they tune out. When you try to be everything to everyone, you become nothing to anyone.
Simple isn't easy though.
Making things simple requires you to deeply understand what matters. You have to know exactly who you're talking to and what they actually need – not what they say they need.
Take Apple again. They don't list every technical spec on their product pages. They focus on the few things that matter to their audience. The rest falls away.
The best marketing feels obvious after you see it.
Like it couldn't have been done any other way. But getting there means killing your darlings. Cutting features you spent months building. Removing clever lines you thought were brilliant.
That's why most people can't do it. Their ego gets in the way. They want to show how smart they are, how much value they provide, how many problems they can solve.
But effective marketing isn't about you. It's about creating clarity for a specific group of people.
And that's where targeting comes in.
The Real Game
Everyone talks about finding their niche.
But they do it backwards.
They start with a broad market and try to narrow it down. They use ideal customer avatars and demographic data. They build elaborate personas that look good in pitch decks but mean nothing in reality.
Your audience isn't a demographic. It's a mindset.
Think about who actually buys from you. Not who you want to buy from you, or who should buy from you, but who actually pulls out their credit card and pays.
Those people share something deeper than age or income.
They share a worldview. A way of thinking. A set of beliefs about what matters and what doesn't.
When you understand this, marketing becomes simpler. You stop trying to convince people to care. You start attracting people who already care.
This is why most targeting advice misses the mark. It focuses on surface-level traits instead of deeper patterns. It tells you to find people with money to spend instead of finding people who believe what you believe.
The best audiences build themselves.
When you have a clear point of view and express it consistently, you naturally attract people who resonate with that view. You don't need complicated targeting strategies. You just need to be clear about what you stand for.
The magic happens when you realize this approach scales. Being specific doesn't limit your growth – it enables it. Because when you deeply serve a specific group, they tell others like them.
And that's the real game.
Not manipulation or persuasion or psychological tricks. Just clarity, consistency, and genuine connection with people who see the world the way you do.
The Path Forward
This might all sound obvious.
Good.
The best principles always sound obvious after you hear them. But most people will read this, nod their heads, and go right back to what they were doing before.
Why? Because changing how you market means changing how you think. It means letting go of the safety of best practices and blueprints. It means trusting yourself enough to be clear instead of clever.
Marketing isn't about tactics anymore. The internet is already drowning in tactics.
It's about having the courage to:
Say less when everyone else is saying more
Stand for something when others try to stand for everything
Trust your intuition while everyone else chases data
Focus on depth when the world pushes for breadth
The tools don't matter much. You could delete every social platform tomorrow and these principles would still work. They worked in town squares centuries ago and they'll work in whatever comes after Twitter.
Real marketing is just clear communication with people who care.
The hard part isn't learning what to do. It's unlearning all the things you think you need to do.
Start by looking at your current marketing. What could you remove? What would happen if you cut your message in half? What would you say if you could only make one point?
Then look at your audience. Not through analytics, but through conversation. What patterns do you notice? What beliefs do your best customers share? What worldview are they buying into?
The answers will show you the way forward.
Because in the end, great marketing isn't about being better than your competition. It's about being different. Not through gimmicks or tricks, but through clarity and conviction.
That's the only marketing advice you'll ever need.
– Scott