Last year I got a project from a founder who had tried 3 different marketing agencies and was unhappy with all of them. Her words: “They just throw tools at the problem.”
What she meant: they’d come in, set up some marketing software, run some campaigns, make the dashboard look impressive. Activity.
But none of them had asked the basic questions. Who are your actual customers? What problem do you solve that competitors don’t? Why did your early customers buy from you instead of someone else? What’s working now, and why?
They jumped straight to the tools because that’s what they knew how to sell.
The homework that precedes everything
Before strategy. Before tools. Before campaigns. There’s work.
Market research. Customer interviews. Competitive analysis.
Understanding where the business is actually making money (and where it’s losing money). Figuring out what actually differentiates you.
This work is boring. Unglamorous. Doesn’t look impressive in a proposal.
Takes time. Requires real thinking instead of template application.
So people skip it. They have tools so powerful they think they can shortcut past the homework.
They can’t.
What skipping homework looks like
Company comes to me and says, “We want to do more content marketing.”
I ask: “What kind of customers are you trying to reach, and what content would actually matter to them?”
They say: “Well, we were thinking blog posts, social media, maybe a podcast.”
They picked the channel before they understood the customer. They’re doing content marketing because it’s popular (not because it connects to their business).
That’s skipping homework.
Real homework looks like:
- Who is your ideal customer?
- Where do they look for information when they have your problem?
- What question or problem are they actually trying to solve?
- What would convince them you’re the right solution?
- Can we reach them with content, or should we be doing something else entirely?
If you don’t know the answers, more content won’t help. You’ll just have more unread blog posts and empty social feeds.
Why AI makes this worse
AI is so good at generating content that you can start a blog, launch social, launch a podcast without ever knowing if it matters.
AI can write a blog post in 30 minutes. Create 20 social posts in an hour. Video scripts in minutes.
So people do. They start creating. Output, output, output.
And they never ask: Is anyone reading this? Does it matter? Does it move the business?
AI has made the homework easier to skip. Producing content is trivial now. Knowing which content to produce is still the hard part.
The homework that actually matters
Before you create anything:
- Know your customer. A real person, not an aggregate. What keeps them up at night? What are they actually trying to accomplish? Why would they choose you?
- Know your competitive position. What can you say that competitors can’t? What do you understand that they don’t?
- Know your money. Where is your business actually profitable? Which customers bring the most revenue? What’s your path to growth?
- Know your hypothesis. What do you believe about your market that, if true, would change everything? Test that. Something like: “if we teach our customer this one thing, they’ll understand why we’re different.”
How this changes execution
Once you have the homework done, content becomes strategic. You create content that addresses a specific belief or misconception you’re trying to change.
Channel choice becomes clear. You know where your customer is. Focus there.
And AI becomes a multiplier. It helps you create more of the right thing, faster. (It still can’t figure out what the right thing is. That was the homework.)
The permission you need
You might feel pressure to launch campaigns fast, get content up, show activity.
Pause. Do the homework first.
It’ll take a few weeks instead of launching tomorrow. But everything you build after that will actually move the business. You’ll cover more ground in the right direction than you ever would have by rushing in the wrong one.