Stop Believing These 3 LIES About Marketing

It’s written by people who want to sell you a course or a service, so they wrap it in a layer of mystique and complexity. They make it sound like you need a Ph.D. in data science and a shaman to read the tea leaves of your Google Analytics.

It's nonsense. Marketing is actually pretty simple. But to get to the simple, you have to cut through the lies. Here are three of the biggest ones that are probably wasting your time and money right now.

Lie #1: “A Great Product Sells Itself”

This is the laziest, most dangerous lie in business. It’s the entrepreneur’s lullaby. The comfortable belief that if you just build something amazing, customers will beat a path to your door.

Tell that to the engineers at Xerox PARC. In the 70s, they invented basically everything we use today: the graphical user interface, the mouse, the modern computer. They had the world-changing product. But did they sell it? No. A guy named Steve Jobs took a tour, saw what they built, and then went out and marketed it to the world.

A great product in a vacuum is just a hobby. It's a cool invention gathering dust in a garage. Marketing is the work of finding the person with a specific problem and connecting them to your solution. Without that bridge, your product is an island. A beautiful, brilliant island nobody can get to.

Lie #2: “You Have to Be on Every Social Media Platform”

The 'be everywhere' mantra is the fastest path to burnout and creating a firehose of absolute garbage.

You see it all the time. The B2B consultant trying to point at text bubbles on a TikTok video. The craft knitting store trying to write thought leadership articles on LinkedIn. They’re spreading themselves so thin that their message is weak and watered-down everywhere. They’re showing up, but they aren't making an impact.

Stop. Just stop.

Where do your customers actually live? Not just their demographics, but their mindset. Where do they go to solve problems or to be entertained? Go there. And only there. Be a legend on one platform instead of a ghost on seven. Master your pond. You don't need to boil the ocean.

Lie #3: “More Followers = More Success”

Ah, the big one. The dopamine hit of a high follower count. It feels good, doesn’t it? It's also completely useless.

This is the ultimate vanity metric. It’s like judging a restaurant by the number of people who walk by the window instead of the number of people who come inside and eat. A follower count doesn't pay your mortgage. It doesn’t fund your next project.

Think about it. Would you rather have 50,000 followers you bought or tricked into clicking a button, who scroll past your content without a second thought? Or would you rather have 500 die-hard fans who read every email, comment on every post, and eagerly await your next launch?

One is an audience. The other is a community. An audience watches. A community buys.

The bank doesn't accept likes as a deposit. Focus on building real connections with a smaller group of the right people. That's where the sanity, and the money, is.

So Forget the gurus. Build something useful, tell the right people about it where they already are, and treat them like humans. That's it. That's the whole game.