Nicolas ColeCo-Founder Ship 30 for 30, Premium Ghostwriting Academy

Stop Trying To Sell "Marketing Strategies" #shorts #business

10 Jun 2026 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

1:24

In this short business advice video, Nicolas Cole argues that selling a vague "marketing strategy" is ineffective. He explains that the term creates a black‑box for clients, allowing undefined expectations, and that such strategies often become unrealistic lists of tactics that ignore a business's real constraints—like budget, platform capacity, or staffing. Cole illustrates this with an example of a strategy demanding presence on ten platforms, daily posts, and a $100k ad spend, which looks impressive on paper but is unfeasible for most clients. To solve this, he recommends unbundling the concept: focus on a specific area of expertise (e.g., LinkedIn) and sell a clear, executable package that includes a concrete checklist of actions the client will implement. This approach provides clarity, scalability, and efficiency, avoiding the black‑box problem and ensuring the work aligns with the client’s actual capabilities.

Chapters

Why do I think charging for marketing strategy is such a bad idea? For a couple reasons. First, the words marketing strategy create a big black box for the client to put whatever they want in it. So it's incredibly undefined, which I don't like. And second, something that I've really learned about marketing strategy is it ends up becoming a game of let's list out all the things that we could do but are not anchored to the reality of what are the constraints of the business. So let's say my marketing strategy for you requires you to be on 10 different platforms posting 7 times a day and spending $100,000 a month on ads. That's great. We could look at all that on paper and go, wow, what a robust marketing strategy. But nobody here is going to do it because it doesn't fit within the constraints of your business. And so I just find that marketing strategy ends up not being that helpful of a thing for other people. What is much more helpful is unbundling the term marketing strategy and going, what is the piece of the marketing strategy that I know really well? Let's say LinkedIn. And then sure, you could charge for— here's this LinkedIn package, and part of it is I'm going to give the strategy that you should execute on, that I'm ultimately going to execute on, which is really just a checklist. Here are the things that we're going to do on LinkedIn. If you don't have that level of clarity, then I think all that's happening is you're just creating a black box. They're paying you some amount of money and then you kind of do whatever they say for that amount of money. That's not efficient. That's not scalable. That's not, you know what I mean?