Everyone Hates Marketers | No-BS Marketing & Brand Strategy Podcast

Louis: All right. Bonjour, bonjour and welcome to another episode of Everyone Hates Marketers.com, the marketing podcast for marketers, founders, and tech people who are just sick of shady, aggressive marketing. I'm your host, Louis Grenier. In this episode, we're going to talk about why marketers are so bad at marketing themselves, why do we feel guilty if we don't work 80 hours a week or even 100 hours a week, why some people think marketing is evil, and how to answer all of those questions with a way to really being comfortable with--as marketers and even as people who want to market their products--being comfortable with things that don't work, that might not work and still being happy with that.

There's a bit of a funny story with my guest today. She reached out to me via email to compliment me on the podcast. That's a true story, and then I went on her site, and I was like, "Whoa, okay I need to talk to this gal."

Her website--we'll mention it later on--it's really well written. I loved the style of it, the writing style and the copywriting is truly excellent. This is why I really wanted to get to know my guest better.

My guest began her career in academia as a psychological researcher, and she discovered how difficult it was to get people to act in their own best interest. Then she went to grad school after doing a master's in psychology and accidentally ended up in marketing like a lot of people I think listening to this podcast. She worked as a market researcher, strategy planner for some fancy Fortune 500 companies before starting her own consulting firm in 2014.

Today, she's the founder of the world's first virtual coworking space for solo founders with their own business and virtual companies called The Arena. The Arena and arena is a word that we're going to keep using I think during this interview.

She's also a columnist for Inc and writes regularly about entrepreneurship, psychology, and marketing on her website that I mentioned previously, ThatSeemsImportant.com. You should definitely check it out. It's really nicely written. She's been featured in HubSpot, The Observer, Entrepreneur, and Business Insider. Margo Aaron, welcome aboard.

Margo: Thanks for having me.

Louis: Right, why marketers are so bad at marketing themselves?

Margo: Because it's really easy to point out what other people should be doing. The second we have to start doing it for ourselves it's a completely different skill.

Louis: Why?

Margo: When you're working on a client's project, you can see the entirety. You can see the objectivity. You can take a step back and you can implement best practices. You have the brain space for it. You also have the distance from the actual product that you're promoting and all the internal politics and all the things that are going on.

When it's your own project, and I actually just wrote about this today, oftentimes, you are so stuck in the logistics. I'll give you an example. I know what perfect email marketing looks like. But for me, I have to first get ConvertKit to talk to Stripe and WooCommerce. That's already going to take up two weeks of my time because God knows what tiny things I'm doing wrong. Then I have to call my developer and see why it's not working. Then I have to figure out why the segmentation isn't doing what I told it to do because the tagging has it set up doing this or that duh-duh-da.

There are all these very, very concrete, tactical, logistical things that get in the way of doing what you know you're supposed to be doing. It's a lot harder to do it for yourself than for someone else.

Louis: I suffer from the exact same problem. I know how good email marketing looks like because I've interviewed this wonderful guest in the past. I'm going to forget his name now. No, I have it, André Chaperon, who's one of the best.

Margo: The master.

Louis: He's the best, right? We know the method, but my emails are still very much shit. I just know how to change it, but I don't have the time to do it and don't have the distance to do it either.

Okay, so that's the problem you wanted to start with that we wanted to talk about. We're going to talk about a solution for that as well as two other problems, we're going to mention right now.

The second thing that I also very much agree with is there is this hustle guilt going on wi

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