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- First It Works, Then It Doesn't
First It Works, Then It Doesn't
The Laws of Shitty Clickthroughs states that over time, all marketing strategies result in shitty results. So once you start scaling a successful marketing strategy, it gets less effective. This is caused by a few factors, mainly:
Customers respond to novelty, which inevitably fades
First-to-market never lasts
More scale means less qualified customers
The short term solution? Always keep developing new creative, testing new publishers, and improving the strategy incrementally. But that just delays the inevitable.
The real solution? Be on the lookout for the next untapped marketing channel.
Actionable tip: Keep testing your campaigns and scale incrementally. This is also why marketing never stops, and you really just have to dive in because even the experts and industry veterans are playing catch-up all the time.
Read Andrew Chen's breakthrough article below. It's an oldie but a goodie.
After months of iterating on different marketing strategies, you finally find something that works. However, the moment you start to scale it, the effectiveness of your marketing grinds to a halt. Sound familiar?
Is performance advertising a scam?
What happens when big brands marketing down to zero? In 2020, AirBnB cut $542 million of performance advertising spend and saw no measurable falloff in attributable sales. Could it be that all those ads did nothing?
“What the pandemic showed is we can take marketing down to zero and still have 95% of the same traffic as the year before."
Because everyone is just winging it.
There's no institution, or walk of life, in which everybody isn't just winging it.
"I don't think people generally seek out such quick fixes or back-door solutions out of laziness or entitlement. It's not because they think they shouldn't have to put in the same effort as everyone else. Rather, most of the time, it's the opposite: it's that they feel so inadequate and unqualified for the task ahead of them (of writing, of marriage, parenting – whatever) that they believe they absolutely need a miracle technique, some sort of edge over other people, some secret from a book, if they're to have half a chance of not screwing everything up. They don't realise that everyone else is just winging it, too."
The bad news is that there isn't One Genius Technique you haven't yet discovered and that someone else might yet be able to impart, the good news is that you don't need one.