The Marketing Advice I'd Give My 25-Year-Old Self

I started in marketing at 24. Fresh out of figuring out what I wanted to do, armed with a communications degree and a lot of confidence I hadn’t earned yet. Eighteen years later, here’s what I’d go back and tell that version of me.

Nobody reads the strategy doc

I spent years writing beautiful, comprehensive marketing strategies. Sixty-page decks with competitive analysis, persona matrices, and channel plans. They’d get presented in a meeting, everyone would nod, and then they’d sit in a Google Drive folder forever.

The stuff that actually moved the needle was always shorter. A one-page plan. A three-bullet email. A conversation where someone said “let’s just try it.” Strategy matters, but the document doesn’t. Ship the strategy, not the deck.

SEO is the only channel that compounds

I wish I’d understood this earlier. Paid ads stop working the second you stop paying. Social posts have a shelf life of hours. Email is great but requires constant feeding.

SEO compounds. A blog post you write today can bring traffic for years. A well-structured site with good content gets stronger over time, not weaker. Every other channel is a treadmill. SEO is an investment. I wasted years chasing channels that reset to zero every month.

Your gut is data too

Marketing culture worships data. A/B tests, attribution models, conversion funnels, dashboards with seventeen metrics. And yeah, you should measure things. But I’ve watched smart marketers ignore their instincts because the data was “inconclusive” and the sample size wasn’t big enough.

After 18 years, here’s what I know: if something feels off about a campaign, it probably is. If a piece of copy makes you cringe, it’ll make your audience cringe. Your gut has been collecting data your whole career. Trust it more than a dashboard with a 72-hour window.

Be specific or be ignored

“We help businesses grow” is not a value proposition. It’s a thing everyone says that means nothing. “We build websites for therapists that rank on Google in 90 days” is a value proposition. One of those gets ignored. The other gets bookmarked.

I spent years being vague because I was afraid of being too niche. Turns out niche is where the money is. The more specific you are about who you help and what you do, the more the right people find you. Being for everyone is being for no one. I wish I’d learned that at 25 instead of 35.

The best marketing is being interesting

All the tactics, all the frameworks, all the tools — they’re just amplifiers. If what you’re amplifying is boring, it doesn’t matter how good your funnel is.

The people who win at marketing long-term are the ones who are genuinely interesting. They have opinions. They build things. They share what they’re learning. They’re not performing “thought leadership” — they’re just thinking out loud and letting people watch.

That’s the real advice. Be interesting. Have opinions. Build things. Talk about it. Everything else is just plumbing.

---

---