Marketing has become bloated

I’ve been selling SaaS for 29 years — since 1995 when I was only 11 years old.

As you can imagine, a lot of things have changed since those early days, particularly in marketing, which has become bloated and overdone, especially in the past few years.

The standard wisdom from “Marketing Experts” is “test this, test that, spin up this project, spin up that” — it’s the “spray and pray” approach hoping that something lands. But inevitably, most of that crap doesn’t go anywhere and fails to convert visitors into paying customers.

It’s a pretty ingenious approach because if the advice fails to work, all they have to say is “you just haven’t tried enough things.”

My view is that when you’re doing a million things, especially as a small marketing team, you’re spreading yourselves way too thin – and you end up not putting in the love, care and attention into anything at all.

One example of this is adding endless pages to your website. I mean, webpages are free, so why not?

But all this does is create the “meganav” which is truly the grossest thing to come out of the “spray and pray” mentality of today’s marketers.

A few years ago our team at Podia fell for this, too, but we’re currently redesigning our website (coming soon) and I decided to gut the meganav in favor of simple navigational links that focus on user experience.

We’ll have one basic dropdown menu when you click on “online store” which will guide you to our online courses, digital download, webinars, and coaching pages.

I’ve also cut down the number of pages we’ll have on our website from around ~75 to under 30. I’d like to go even further, but SEO still drives a good number of leads for us.

At the end of the day visitors want to know what you’re offering, how it helps them, and how much it costs. That’s it.

Limiting their choices on your website is the best constraint because it focuses their attention on what matters and forces the marketer to be focused, concise, and to only work on what matters. 

“Less is more” has never been more true in marketing than it is today.

People are overwhelmed, there are way too many choices out there, and if you spread yourself too thin, taking on too many projects, you’re going to overwhelm yourself, too.

Do less. But do it well.