Three Mistakes That Make Clients Roll Their Eyes at Marketers
Low barriers attract accidental marketers who keep stepping on the same three rakes. Real strategy starts with 10 conversations, not a thought experiment.
Why People Think Marketers Are Stupid
Three mistakes. Three reasons clients roll their eyes the moment they hear "I'm a marketer." And three things that separate professionals who solve business problems from professionals who make pretty slide decks.
The barrier to entry in marketing is almost zero. You need two skills: think clearly and communicate coherently. Sometimes just the second one is enough. That low bar attracts a lot of people who stumble into the field by accident. Accidental people make dumb mistakes. And mistakes stick in memory longer than wins. That's how a reputation gets built.
It's not that every marketer is stupid. It's that the same rake sits in the same spot on the ground — and people keep stepping on it. Here are the big three.
Mistake #1: Guessing disguised as strategy
Say you're a freelance copywriter and you want to launch a course on writing commercial copy. What should you do? Talk to potential students. Run 10–15 discovery calls. Find out what they actually struggle with. Then validate your hypotheses — send a survey to 100–200 people in your audience.
Literally: open Zoom, ask a question, hear an answer. Not a thought experiment. Not Reddit threads. Not asking ChatGPT to "generate a target audience persona." Talk to real humans.
Here's what an incompetent marketer does instead. They write copy themselves, so they figure they already know the problem. They build the course landing page based on their own experience. Swap "I" for "most copywriters" — and voilà, it looks like research. Except there's zero actual work underneath that "insight."
This is guesswork marketing. You might get lucky. But seven times out of ten, you miss. Then real money gets stacked on top of that crooked hypothesis: ad budget, hours of content production, months of work. It all goes down the drain because the foundation was made of fantasy.
The irony? Those fantasies take more time than 15 calls at 20 minutes each. While you were squeezing "insights" out of your own head, you could've talked to real people and learned things you never would have invented on your own.
What to do: before any marketing decision — have 10 conversations with real people from your audience. Not surveys. Not AI analysis. Conversations. Then validate with numbers.
