Eric Siu and Neil Patel argue that talking directly to customers beats reading industry articles or copying competitors. They use SEO tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs as an example: these target agencies and large companies, so their strategies don't work for small businesses. The Mom Test offers a framework for asking customers the right questions to uncover real problems.
Today we are going to talk about why you need to go talk to potential customers instead of reading. You're muted.
When you go out there and you read about how to do marketing, you read about trends in your industry, you read about what your competition's doing, just because you have a similar type of product doesn't mean what works for them will work for you. Here's a great example of this. There's a marketing tool called SEMrush that all you guys know about. It's great. There's one called Ahrefs. It's great. There's one called Moz. It's great. And I own one called Ubersuggest that I believe is great. And even though a lot of us have similar features and we get our data from similar places, some may have more features than me. And I could be like, all right, here's what SEMrush is doing to grow. There's a lot of articles that break down what Moz is doing to grow. A lot of articles that break down what Ahrefs is doing to grow, but essentially they don't work well for me if I use those and I implement them. Why is that? If you had to guess, Eric, why would you think?
Sorry, I wasn't paying attention.
I'll answer for you. So the reason he would say that it won't necessarily work is because those guys target a lot of agencies and bigger companies. My target audience is a lot of SMBs. So for that reason, I can't just take what they're doing and apply it to my business, even if our products are similar and expect it to work. That's why you got to talk to your customers.
Yeah. Now I get it. Sorry guys. I'm just coming back into the thick of things, but look, at the end of the day, it's everything's unique to your business. Not every business is the same. Right. So my opinion is a little different than Neil's. I think it's, you can read and learn from other people's experiences, but this is why I find experience sharing helpful in the sense that you're not getting direct advice and you can figure out how to take that experience and make it into your own. That's why with groups like YPO or EO, they have this thing called Gestalt protocol where you don't— you're not allowed to give direct advice because if you give— your advice is really based on your experiences, right? And your business is different. Your experiences are different. Your life experiences are different. So if you give direct advice and it doesn't work out, what ends up happening is the person that took your advice is going to resent you. Or if you give the advice and someone else doesn't take it, you're gonna not resent them that much, but maybe there's a little bit of resentment. So you're better off just sharing experiences, which is why I personally love reading books. So if I read like 100 books and I pay $10 for each one, but if I get 6— let's say $60,000 worth of value, I, I argue I'd probably get a lot more value from, for books, then it's cool. But there's a limit to that, to, to, to the point of this topic. I think you should read a little bit, but largely if you're talking to customers, you're doing customer development. We've talked about Using the book, The Mom Test, you're gonna learn a lot more and you're gonna learn about the problems and then you can tie it in with whatever product or service that you're putting together. And you can, it's largely gonna be based off of other people's experiences and then you making the solution that you think is correct. And that's gonna be a lot more helpful than getting a bunch of random advice from everywhere.
Yeah. So in general, as Eric mentioned, there's nothing wrong with reading, but if you really do talk to your customers and your ideal customers, you'll end up learning a lot. And in marketing, the last thing you want to do is go out there, make some changes, run some campaigns, spend all this time doing what you think is right versus what your ideal customer really wants. All right.
So that's it for today. Go to marketingschool.io/live, that's L-I-V-E, to learn about our virtual and our live events. We'd love to see you there. Next one's happening September 13th to the 15th, and we'll catch you later.
