Why good marketing is hard

Good marketing is hard, because copying everyone else is very easy and doesn't work. Faced with the growing complexity of the digital landscape, individuals and marketing departments find themselves trapped in a vicious circle of low budgets, few campaigns, costly productions, endless revisions, and missed advertising opportunities. To overcome these difficulties, it's essential to develop a solid marketing plan and a content strategy that improves communication and engagement with your target audience. Marketing requires solid market research and an understanding of your brand to be effective. Successful marketing requires creativity and a well-defined brand identity that reflects the company's values and improves your digital presence. Marketing should be measured with appropriate KPIs to evaluate ROI and optimize results. Marketing is part of your social media plan and website to maximize impact.

Why are communication and marketing so hard?

For us, it's a combination of outdated methodologies for producing content and budgets out of sync with reality.

Today, brands need more content than ever. Content is the currency of the internet, and its quality is directly tied to its effectiveness. Quality doesn't just mean aesthetics or the ability to grab attention, but a set of intrinsic characteristics planned out in the strategy. Content should be integrated into your content strategy and social media plan to improve engagement and communication with your target audience.

Content without personality

The vast majority of brands "copy" (through influence, osmosis, or research) a generic communication style from their peers. This turns the digital landscape into one where the content is fundamentally the same.

If "emojis work in a post," every brand adds them. Now they're seen so much that they're routine and don't work the same way.

Any marketing team can picture this situation perfectly. A place where, through influence or by looking at others, we all gravitate toward a generic, personality-free type of content.

According to Marketo, 70% of respondents are very annoyed by the way brands keep relying on the outdated strategy of broadcasting mass messages over and over.

Creativity is, therefore, the variable of success. That's why we see small creative agencies handling few clients and generating a lot of impact. It's something increasingly important and valued. Creativity should be integrated into your marketing plan and can be improved through techniques like brainstorming and Design Thinking to generate innovative ideas that strengthen your brand identity.

Out-of-sync budgets

When budgets aren't tied to reality, it's a big problem. Budgets that are far above and far below reality. That is, situations where projects cost a lot for what they return, and others where too little is invested, attracting lower-tier talent that in turn performs below its potential.

This is often due to a lack of real knowledge. Experience and understanding. There's a huge amount of information on the internet, but also noise.

This phenomenon can be considered a kind of "content gap." Brands need to communicate their message to consumers, along with the resources required to produce and scale it, and that need grows every day.

Solutions for difficult marketing

Low content production

Teams must be equipped with infrastructure and technologies that scale as they need more capacity. This increase in "bandwidth" is achieved in several ways.

One is with what we call pillar content or trigger content. Run broad audiovisual productions so that each sub-part of that large production has its own slot in a distribution plan.

Scale to fight difficult marketing

Another way is with technologies that facilitate the natural creation of new content.

Business stock for greater content creation

Content is very easy to create, and each new piece you document can be combined and merged with the previous one to create something new.

Reusing assets through the standardization of creative work saves between 75 and 80% of production time. By introducing automation and separating content from design, teams can design a strong asset and then scale it across numerous variations.

Little creativity / Generalities

The average person receives more than 2,000 digital ads per month. And this number is growing by leaps and bounds. When there's little time or experience to get campaigns out, creative quality is almost inevitably affected, and so is performance.

When campaigns and content are scaled, maintaining true consistency and high-quality creativity can be extremely complicated. What can help is having more complete budgets and automation in workflows or technologies.

Lack of agility or speed

Another problem for companies and their internal departments is the fact that, in many cases, they tend to be swallowed up by the organization itself. General objectives, the assignment of other tasks, and other distractions are common in companies, and this affects agility. Our experience dealing with in-house marketing departments is that they tend to get stuck in old techniques and live day to day meeting deadlines and goals set by the company, without worrying about innovation and change.

Ideally, high-performing marketing teams would adopt an agile approach in which they could test, learn, and iterate on creative work continuously. In practice, however, most are busy trying to deliver the basics for their teams and media agencies.

This is where the good work of an agency, in conjunction with internal departments and freelancers, tends to create an ideal situation.

Steps to make your marketing "less hard"

If all of this resonates with you, you can start improving your marketing by following these steps:

1. Audit your current content

   • Check whether you're falling into generic, undifferentiated messages that are too similar to your competition.
   • Use articles like types of digital marketing or marketing plan to frame your strategy better.

2. Redefine your creative proposition

   • Clarify what makes you different and how that translates into tone, messages, and formats.
   • It's not just about "doing creative things," but about building your own editorial line.

3. Scale production with systems, not overtime

   • Create "pillar content" that you can then chop up and reuse across different channels.
   • Document processes and templates so your team or your suppliers can produce more with less friction.

4. Introduce automation where it makes sense

   • Tools for content distribution, personalization, reporting, etc.
   • Keep the human focus on the strategic and creative parts, not on repetitive tasks.

5. Combine in-house talent, agency, and freelancers

   • Evaluate which tasks are key to keep in-house and which you can outsource.
   • Design a clear collaboration to make the most of each model.

6. Adopt an experimental approach

   • Small, constant tests instead of big one-off bets.
   • Define hypotheses, measure results, and learn quickly to improve continuously.

That way, "good marketing" stops being something nearly impossible and becomes the result of a well-thought-out system, supported by creativity, processes, and the right collaboration between roles.