What's Neil and Eric's Biggest Marketing Regret?

All right.

So today we are going to talk about the biggest regret that Neil and I have had in terms of marketing.

So I'll go first. My biggest regret is a simple one. One day when Dharmesh Shah was creating HubSpot, this was years and years ago. At the time it actually was already created, but it was an early stage company, just raised some venture capital, was raising a bit more. And we also had a startup at the time. And Dharmesh said one of the keys to content marketing was you just need to create a lot of content and tons of it. That's more important than quality. And at the time, my co-founder and I disagreed with him and we went with the quality route. And I'm not saying HubSpot doesn't have high quality content. They focus on quality, but The real core focus was actually quantity. And if you fast forward today, who gets more traffic, HubSpot or us? And I didn't listen to him. I'm just like, I don't think this guy knows what he's talking about. He's technical. What does he know? But I was totally wrong on that. And if I did the quantity route, we would have way more traffic because you can always go back and update and fix the quality and just make it better and better over time. Now keep in mind, back then it was less competitive. So if you just did crank out quantity, you could win. And HubSpot, even with algorithm changes and things like that, they still rank. They still get a lot of traffic, but that is probably the biggest marketing regret that I have. And if I did that and I focused on that a long time ago, I think I would have tripled the amount of traffic. In essence, my business would probably triple the size.

You know, we just mentioned the word quantity and we mentioned, or we mentioned quality and we talked about focus, or you just said that. And when I think about my biggest marketing regret, it's trying to do too many channels at once. Starting out, had I just focused on SEO, it would've compounded a lot faster because my resources would've gone into that instead of splitting my resources and saying, hey, let's do this podcast. Let's do this other podcast. Let's do a YouTube channel. Let's do, let's try these social channels as well. Let's try email. Let's try everything. The problem with marketing is that there's always new stuff coming out. And if I keep hitting For me, don't make my mistake. I was like, oh, what's the new shiny object? What's the new tactic? What's the new strategy over here? What's new? But then when you start doing that, especially if you have a team, you start dragging them in all these different directions and they start getting confused. They start wondering, what is the goal? Where are we trying to go? And you start to lose them as well. And so my key thing would be, hey, understanding that channels typically take 2 to 3 years to get really rolling and then to focus on that. And occasionally you might hit lightning in a bottle, but most people don't get that. So just understanding that it's anything good takes time to compound over the years, what it's Relationships, whether it's building a channel, whether it's building a business, just takes a long time. Again, if you split your focus, you might get there, but you're just going to get there a lot slower because again, we— it doesn't matter how good you are as a person, you're just one person or you're just one organization.

I really have nothing else from my end, but we'll all make mistakes. And I don't think this will be my last mistake or Eric's last mistake, or even your last mistake, whatever it may be, but just learn from it. And I think if you learn from it, that's how you improve as a marketer or entrepreneur, anything that you're trying to do in life.

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