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Why I Stopped Listening To Neil Patel, Or Any Other Marketing Guru

Updated on January 26, 2017

7 Min Read

This is a guest post. It does not necessarily reflect the views of Cloudways or any of its employees.

Let me first make it clear – No, this is not an article that puts down Neil Patel, or any other marketing guru. It is an article dealing with a very important subject – why you should not fall into the trap of becoming a blind follower of a marketing expert, and why you should make your marketing decisions without relying on their expert advice.

According to Forbes, in 2015, 32% of the total marketing budgets were directed towards content, compared to 25% in 2014. In the past five years, and especially in the past year, there has been a huge industry focus on creating content as the best marketing strategy.

Why You Should Not Follow Them Blindly Banner

In the past, other fields were in focus: Web 2.0, SEO, social, mobile. Every period has its focus. The latest focus has generated a ton of content information overload, especially in the online marketing world. Now, more than ever, people are writing about how to do marketing.

The overflow of marketing content has made it very hard to learn and stay updated with online marketing, and especially to implement what you read, in your marketing strategy and daily operation.

My Experience: Getting Confused About Marketing

To make this problem clearer, I would like to share my experience in recent times as an example. I have been working as an online marketing professional for the past ten years.

A few months ago, I was immersed in a huge international project that took up most of my time. This meant that I neglected keeping up to date with the latest news by industry leaders.

After taking up as the new CMO at Pojo, I wanted to get updated and started catching up with various posts by marketing gurus like Neil Patel, Rand Fishkin, and Brian Clark.

As I began reading, what I noticed was that instead of making it easier for me to make my next marketing move, I became more confused about choosing what to do next.

4,000-word articles on how to build a title, an article on 25 must have plugins, in-depth interviews with top CEOs – How was I supposed to keep up, let alone implement this in my work? The flow of newly formed marketing knowledge kept pouring in. Each new content piece made me feel like a novice again as if I needed to devote more and more time for learning new skills.

Contemplating this difficulty, I now realize that my mistake was becoming too much of a fan of marketing experts. I began to ponder whether my target audience was dealing with such issues of marketing information overload. A lot of Pojo’s customers are web designers and agencies, which have a strong need to market their business online and also, need to stay informed with marketing material.

My Solution: Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan

Luckily for me, these challenges came at the exact time I was reading Nassim Taleb’s “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.” The book discusses the phenomenon of unpredictable events and how people relate to them. I have found the book to give a huge insight on the exact challenge I was dealing with: How to make marketing content useful in your daily routine.

I am not going to try to summarize this book here though I do urge you to read it. What I am going to do is depict at least some of the problems with becoming a marketing fan, as well as offer some tips at the end.

Problem #1: Following Experts Is the Wrong Strategy for This Kind of Profession

According to Taleb, there are two types of professions: ones that are based on what is called “techne” (crafts and know how), and others that are based on what is called “episteme” (book knowledge, know what).

“Techne” professionals, like doctors, carpenters, accountants, and engineers, rely on exact crafts that can be followed step by step and by the book. This is why there can be a large percentage of successful accountants.

Episteme professionals, on the other hand, like investors, artists, writers, actors, politicians and online marketers, rely on an elusive “knowledge”. This is why only a selected few “episteme” professionals reach success, and why there are so many actors that work and make a living as waiters.

This is also why you cannot reproduce Episteme geniuses. There are many graduates that finish their MD and become great doctors. Graduates of music schools, however, spend years learning Mozart’s pieces. How come there aren’t as many new Mozarts as there are great doctors? Because this is a different type of profession.

Techne professions work in what Taleb calls “Mediocristan,” where each profession has a mediocre effect on the whole professional community. Think of how one accountant can affect the accounting world. Episteme professions work in what Taleb refers to as “Extremistan”. Think about the amount of readers of Neil Patel in comparison to a random unknown online marketer that writes for a small company blog.

The problem is that we think Episteme professions work in the same way as Techne professions, and by following the successful online marketing experts, we will too become successful. In much the same way as 85 of the richest people in the world have assets equivalent to the sum possessed by  3.5 billion of the poorest people, so will be the ratio of Neil Patel’s successful blog post and a random online marketer’s successful post.

Problem #2: Can’t Predict Success

There are many examples of articles that detail the strategy and practice that brought the author or company from X to Y. “A SaaS Startup’s Journey to $100,000 a Month” by Groove is an example.

The problem with these kinds of articles about success is that they are based on looking back and describing the past using a certain narrative. It is vulnerable to the Hindsight Bias, where things look as if success arose from a predictable and thought out plan and not from luck or random chance.

There is nothing wrong with having a marketing strategy, and also in reading about someone else’s marketing strategy. The problem is in choosing to follow this strategy in the expectancy to recreate the same results.

Problem #3: Success Stories Are Not Brought in Comparison

There is another problem with following success stories. It is not empirical. Let’s say the latest success story describes how the business grew by focusing on long form articles. Your logic might reason that because they focused on long-form articles, and they succeeded, this means that if you focus on long-form articles, you will succeed.

This is not empirical and is not even logic reasoning because you do not take into account information that contradicts the reverse assumption, that short form did not produce success.

Most of these articles do not give you an example of how a business that chose the opposite or different approach failed to succeed. You also did not take into account information about other businesses that failed to grow with long form articles. These examples are ignored and are not even considered by the reader.

This phenomenon is what Taleb calls silent evidence:

Consider the thousands of writers now completely vanished from consciousness: their record did not enter analyzes. We do not see the tons of rejected manuscripts because these have never been published, or the profile of actors, who never won an audition— therefore, cannot analyze their attributes. To understand successes, the study of traits in failure needs to be present. For instance, some traits that seem to explain millionaires, like appetite for risk, only appear because one does not study bankruptcies. If one includes bankrupt people in the sample, then risk-taking would not appear to be a valid factor explaining success.

To take this analogy to marketing, the person that failed miserably is not likely to write a post about it, because it will damage their brand. You are only left with success stories that are not helpful.

Action Items – How to Filter Expert Marketing Advice

When I realized what was going on, it completely changed my perspective on choosing the right strategy. I still keep updated with the experts, only that I am very critical of what I write, and look for more “techne” content.

There is still more to write about choosing a marketing strategy and learning from other people’s experience, and I hope I’ll cover more about it in the future, but for now I’d like to leave you with a few tips to help you make this article actionable and not just philosophical.

You might see a contradiction in writing action items after telling you not to listen to expert marketing advice, but the fact is I am not going to tell you what to do (maybe to your disappointment), but tell you what to be aware of when reading experts.

  1. Know which type content you are reading: Extremistan or Mediocristan. If a blog post gets thousands of shares or implies of a get-rich-fast/get-growth-fast technique, know that you are in Extremistan. Results for this article will be harder to reproduce than say, an article explaining how to publish a post in WordPress.
  2. Don’t become a blind fan of an expert: These kind of fans will follow the advice of an expert because they’ll feel they do not have the means to test what the expert is saying. Prefer smaller scale tests that you can perform and verify yourself.
  3. Stop looking for “the right” marketing action: In many cases, you just cannot know. Eliminate alternatives that you know are wrong rather than trying to find out what’s right.
  4. Be skeptical of success stories and stories in general: They do not include the failed silent evidence and are often written in hindsight.
  5. Consider the effect and consequences of a failure: You cannot make a marketing move without taking a chance, but sometime the wrong move can be devastating and costly and other times it can go unnoticed and have a minor effect.
  6. Seek to refute what you are reading, rather than accepting the confirming evidence.
  7. Don’t seek out a structured methodology for extremist markets.
  8. Stick to what you need to know: Avoid getting overwhelmed by reducing the things you try to implement. Keep your marketing systems simple, without over-complicating it with every new piece of advice that the experts give.
  9. Avoid abstract and theory knowledge and focus on explicit knowledge: Instead of focusing on articles like “how to increase traffic to your site” focus on articles like “how to build a remarketing list on google analytics”.
  10. Experiment and tinker rather than theorize. Try to find content that you can test and tinker with, rather than content that involve complex theories. A great example of a marketing tutorial book that utilizes such experiment methods is the book Traction by Gabriel Weinberg.

Conclusion

Not automatically following the experts’ advice and not getting confused with the mass of online marketing information can be hard and counterintuitive. This is why I want to give you one other takeaway from the list above.

The decision-making process for people dealing with marketing is difficult at every level, both strategy-wise and action-wise. Should your strategy be focused on branding, email marketing or SEO, and with what exact mix? Should the next content action be a blog post, newsletter or contact page copy?

By examining the different faults of marketing experts, as seen through the Black Swan theory, we see that these experts are not better equipped or better informed to make such a decision than you. Reading them can be helpful, as long as you read skeptically and as long as you are not afraid to make the final decision yourself.

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Ben Pines

Ben Pines is Pojo's CMO. He has been in the online marketing industry for over 10 years, specializing in content marketing. WordPress has been Ben's platform of choice since the time when it was only used to blog.

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