Stop Confusing Social Media Tips With Real Marketing

This week on Marketing Sucks, Amanda and Phil tackle a mistake too many business owners are making right now: confusing social media advice with actual marketing strategy. They break down why content tips, posting hacks, and follower growth tactics are only one tiny part of the bigger picture and why relying on them alone can leave your business stuck. Using the classic four Ps of marketing, they unpack the real difference between social media marketing and marketing as a whole, from product and pricing to placement and promotion. This episode is a back-to-basics reality check for brands that are taking advice from people who know how to grow an account but not necessarily how to build a business. If you have ever been told to just post more, raise your prices, or chase the next platform without a real strategy behind it, this one will call you out in the best way.

What You’ll Learn

 ✔ Why social media advice and marketing advice are not the same thing
 ✔ How the four Ps of marketing still shape smart business strategy
 ✔ Why product-market fit matters more than content tips
 ✔ How pricing affects positioning and perception
 ✔ Why promotion is bigger than posting consistently on social media
 ✔ How to tell whether advice is helping your business or just feeding the algorithm

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Today's an important episode brought to you by Amanda's frustration with the internet.

SPEAKER_01 0:07

Fair enough.

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Should start doing like fake ads.

SPEAKER_01 0:13

I love fake ads.

SPEAKER_00 0:14

I think it'd be really funny. Alright, guys, let's get into it. Welcome back to Marketing Sucks. I'm your host, Amanda Casina.

SPEAKER_01 0:34

And I'm your co-host, Phil Ginther.

SPEAKER_00 0:36

And what sucks today? Philip.

SPEAKER_01 0:39

Oh, you know, you're stealing my question, but what sucks? Don't read your card. I'm not looking at it. Okay. I'm trying so hard. You know, I'm just gonna put it down.

SPEAKER_00 0:49

Okay, great.

SPEAKER_01 0:51

Social media advice is not marketing advice. And it's being just polluted out on the internet as the same thing.

SPEAKER_00 1:01

Yeah, you almost you almost got it.

SPEAKER_01 1:03

Almost?

SPEAKER_00 1:03

Almost. So yes, I agree. It's a little bit deeper than that. So there is something called social media marketing. There's also email marketing. There's also network marketing. There's also interest marketing. There's a lot of different kinds of marketing. And social media marketing has become this thing that like anybody can do. And it kills me. Because yes, we can have really great content creators. We can have really good advice out there. There's a lot of people that can edit really well. Does that mean you understand marketing like in general, though? Like the actual, like true definition of marketing and what that means. Because I think everybody thinks marketing equals social media.

SPEAKER_01 1:52

Yeah, it's easy to equate that now. Because that's just you're you're constantly bombarded by it, right? Yeah. So it's like buy my course, do my thing, learn the tricks of the trade. And there are very knowledgeable and capable people out there. And then there's a pile of shit too.

SPEAKER_00 2:10

I like when you swear a little. It's kind of you're like joining me. Yeah. So the the thing that I don't like, because I think there's 100% obviously a place for social media marketing. I I've built a business off of it, I but I have the experience behind me to back it up. So the but here's the thing that bothers me. It's not social media marketing, it's when somebody says they're going to give you marketing advice and then it's just rooted in social media. So there's no other like actual marketing advice. It's just social media marketing advice. So today we just want to go over how social media marketing advice is not necessarily the same as marketing advice. So we thought we would get super nerdy and sexy.

SPEAKER_01 2:54

If you the little disclaimer, if you went to school for marketing in any postgraduate capacity. You're gonna love this. You're gonna be like, oh, take me back to the basics.

SPEAKER_00 3:04

Yeah, or you're gonna shudder and shut this fucking shit off. So if you didn't go to school for marketing, we are going to take you through the basics. Because I think that a lot of people, there's like there's probably like three types, but I'm gonna break it down to two types of people, like entrepreneurs specifically. The ones that like did marketing, have an MBA, did business, did like, I don't know, commerce, like did something in that world from like a schooling professional manner, and then started a business or started to help run a business or became like a C-suite or something, right? And they have a very different way of looking at things. And then you have another type of subset, which is the person that like started doing something because they were very passionate, had a great idea, and were able to monetize off of it and created a business. And both are entrepreneurs, both come from two very different backgrounds. Yep. And the the people that come from, and again, I'm generalizing here, so don't come for me. The people that come from the very academic side approach business very differently than the people that come from like scrappity-doo side. And then there's people that have both.

SPEAKER_01 4:16

Can we just back up to scrappity-doo for a second?

SPEAKER_00 4:19

I'm really tired. We've been recording all the time.

SPEAKER_01 4:21

I thought we were about to like, you know, anyway.

SPEAKER_00 4:24

Well, what would have been a better what what would you have liked me to say?

SPEAKER_01 4:28

Oh, I'm I'm actually quite happy with scrappity-doo.

SPEAKER_00 4:30

I think we need to call Natasha.

SPEAKER_01 4:31

We're gonna come back to that.

SPEAKER_00 4:32

Okay, great. So basically, you made me lose my train of thought now with the scrappity-doo thing. Okay, so it's reverse. So basically we have like the the two types of people, maybe three with this the two together. And so what ends up happening though is that when you have the scrappy, I'm gonna say it, scrappity-doo types of entrepreneurship, we don't don't really have like real like baseline marketing schooling. You're you're basically test and learning and fucking like spray and praying to the gods.

SPEAKER_01 5:03

Yeah, so it's structured and on the fly.

SPEAKER_00 5:05

Yeah. And that's good, but it only like lasts for so long. And then what ends up happening is then people start to, you know, go into networking and like seeing other people and and and meeting new entrepreneur friends and da-da-da-da-da. And then they start like start following the same accounts online when it comes to social media. And some of that stuff is very useful. And again, like Phil said, there's a lot of really valuable, smart, intelligent marketers out there, and then there are people there to just like take your fucking money and run with it. So we want to just kind of do a really unsexy episode on the four Ps, just their basics of marketing, just to like bring you back down to earth and from a really, really simple standpoint, and and these go across all different channels of marketing, not just yeah, no matter no matter where you play it.

SPEAKER_01 5:53

I'm glad you said that.

SPEAKER_00 5:54

So we're gonna go from the four Ps and what social media marketing advice would look like and what actual marketing advice would look like. Yes?

SPEAKER_01 6:06

I love it.

SPEAKER_00 6:07

Okay, so number one, product. So social media advice is gonna tell you to talk about the benefits and educate your audience. Okay, go ahead. What's the marketing advice, Phil?

SPEAKER_01 6:20

I really wasn't expecting you to lob that over. I thought you were about to go into another uh tangent. Okay, let's see. So social media advice would be, you know, for your product. Talk about the benefits.

SPEAKER_00 6:31

I just said that. Are you even here? Can you really? Yes, and then I just said, what's the actual marketing advice?

SPEAKER_01 6:36

Oh, the actual I'm sorry, I totally misheard you. That's hilarious. All right, well, here, actual marketing advice when it comes to product is does your product solve a real world problem?

SPEAKER_00 6:47

Yeah, that's a huge one. Because I feel like there's people out there who be like, oh, that's a great idea. You should just sell it on social media. And it's like, does it it is this actually something people want?

SPEAKER_01 6:56

Can someone like make a hearing aid for me or a product that allows me to actually be present for that question? Oh my gosh, that's funny.

SPEAKER_00 7:05

Oh, is it? It's real funny. You're gonna you're gonna we're gonna talk about that later. So so the real questions are like, do people want this? Do people want the product? And honestly, when we say product, this also means service. Like, what's the thing you're selling is the product. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 7:19

So the thing that solves the problem.

SPEAKER_00 7:20

Some people get really caught up when I say product versus service. So I'm just going to make it known when when we're talking about product here, we're talking about the thing that we are selling. Correct. Clear. Great. So do people want this? Is it clear and differentiated from your competitors or anything in the in the that's in your uh niche at that point? And is the result obvious? So what happens when we have the social media advice of talk about the benefits and educate your audience is it actually does not cover all of the gaps in which we need for marketing. Because we need to actually talk about everything, not just the value.

SPEAKER_01 8:04

Yep. Correct? That sounds like some solid marketing advice, Amanda.

SPEAKER_00 8:08

Great. Next, price. So social media will tell you.

SPEAKER_01 8:12

No, no, this is an interesting one. Go ahead.

SPEAKER_00 8:14

Add urgency, scarcity, like you know, the like, oh, we only have one spot left, you're gonna miss out, blah blah, and add value, which I still hate that fucking word, but it's fine. The marketing advice is going to be a little different. So it's your pricing is part of your positioning. So this isn't I'm just you know what I'm so mad about still is that the last recording didn't take of this because it was such a good fucking episode, and I'm having like flashbacks as to what I said. So I'm gonna try and inject that in here. Let's go. This is something that we go over a lot with clients, especially when we're pricing new things. So the pricing is a part of your positioning. So what that means is that it's not just$497 or$9.99 or$49.99. It's telling people what bucket you're in. And that bucket is like like low entry, like we're, you know, we're not the high-end, like high ticket, but we're somewhere with still, you know, in the middle. And then there's just like the high ticket bucket. Premium, premium. Yeah, premium service, premium product, whatever that's. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 9:22

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 9:23

So what ends up happening that I find is that on social media, you're gonna get the advice of just charge your worth, sweetheart. Just charge whatever you think. But what ends up happening, and the and then what ends up happening after that actually is okay, so you charged your worth and you're not getting it. So add scarcity, add urgency, and add more value content. And then you still aren't making sales. The problem is not in any of that. The problem is that your pricing and your positioning are fighting because you didn't actually solidify the first P, which was the product, and you didn't identify the gaps and you didn't identify if this was a need in the market or not. And so if we take Apple, like as in Mac, Mac, iPhone, whatever, Apple, the the brand, we we you're not nobody's walking into fucking Apple and being like, Hi, I'd like a 20% discount on your latest iPhone, make it 35. Yeah, like you're not, nobody's fucking doing that. Why? Premium product, premium ecosystem, premium margin, premium expectation. Premium. Nobody's fucking questioning it. The customer serves from the time you buy it to the time something there's an issue, it's premium.

SPEAKER_01 10:47

And they, and I mean, for a lot of consumers now, that might seem like just obvious. Yeah, it's Apple, but like they started out doing that, they were always more expensive. And so now that's just been established.

SPEAKER_00 10:58

Yep. But even when they come up with a cheaper option, like that new Mac book, the one that's like for students. Have you seen it? It's like$5.95 or whatever. So it's it's cheaper, I guess. Like it's on par with like PC now, like on the PC computer. It's still premium, it still exists in the premium ecosystem with the premium product, with the premium expectation. And those people will probably just continue to be Apple users because now they're in the system, they're in the cloud. So that's the price thing. So if you are not selling at your premium pricing, is your pricing competing or fighting with your positioning? That's a conversation the social media marketers are not having with you.

SPEAKER_01 11:44

They're just telling you to charge, charge what you're worth, huh?

SPEAKER_00 11:48

To make it urgent. And and oh, in in tomorrow, this is going up to 222 and then 333 and 400. It's fucking predatory. Anyways, I digress.

SPEAKER_01 12:00

Not that you have any experience with that situation. No, it's a fucking dumb.

SPEAKER_00 12:05

Okay, so the third topic is place. Placement. So social media is the advice would be like, go where your audience is. Why don't you try TikTok? There is a hair attached to my mouth, and it is grossing me out. Okay, so it's like, where's your audience? Go to TikTok. Oh, we should go try YouTube next.

SPEAKER_01 12:28

Yeah, and I think this is this is interesting because you want even like even when going through school when talking about placement, it was always like where your product lives. But no one ever said it's where your product lives and also where your consumer is comfortable purchasing.

SPEAKER_00 12:44

Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 12:45

And that was just that I found that very interesting because it's it was not a conversation. It's like, oh well, if it's on that shelf, then it'll be bought on that shelf, which is not always the case.

SPEAKER_00 12:53

Yeah, I think it's just like one really simple thing that everybody can do right now. Go check your stats. Where are people purchasing from? Their desktop or their phone? How many fucking unmobile friendly sites there still are in 2026 is insane to me. So just go check that. Just go check those stats. If 98% of the people are buying from their phone, go focus more on what your mobile site looks like and the user like interface there than what it looks like on a desktop. I mean, they should match, but like really go check your phone from the cell phone side. So if we look at the placement, we want to look at a few things. Is the access convenient for the person, right? What's the buyer environment look like? What's the customer journey look like? So many times I see this. So it's like, okay, so you want to charge what you're worth, but you don't want to invest in the customer journey afterwards or what that onboarding looks like, or the or the nicer emails. And so I get it's a big conflict of this product placement, pricing. We haven't even got into the last P yet, but like it really looks like it's very difficult to have a conversation with someone that doesn't understand these basics of marketing because unfortunately the social media marketing advice that they keep getting is oh, well, just just go dance on TikTok, or like, oh, just like go post on Pinterest now. That's where the people are. Oh, start a podcast because the podcast is going to do really well for you. And so it's what where that all stems from is a lack of actual marketing experience. Under the guise of I have, you know, X amount of followers and I'm pretending to be really successful.

SPEAKER_01 14:34

Yeah, it's and I mean it's not like that portion isn't true. It's just one small slice of a much larger pie. So that's that.

SPEAKER_00 14:46

Number four, promotion. So the social media advice is just like post consistently, use stronger hooks, try the viral stuff. We're gonna post, post for 30 days in a row. Like, honestly, there are some strategies behind that, but it's a lot more questioning, and there it's a lot more than just saying, try this. It's impossible for somebody to give you advice on a strategy for your marketing without knowing your business inside and out. So I deeply, deeply, deeply say this with all of my heart. Stop fucking trying what everybody else on the internet is telling you to try. And just if you have the budget, hire somebody to truly like be a partner with you and and and work from the inside out on making it the best fucking strategy for you and stop just listening to like just anybody because there's no way in hell that somebody posting social media marketing advice can like just change your entire business, unless you're working with them, then that's different. And if their advice is giving you that, you know, oh, I think I could work with this person. This person gets what I'm about, this person gets my industry, great. Then go and engage at that level. But I'm I'm I what happened, what ends up happening in the social media marketing and marketing world is that you get a lot of, yeah, I tried that and that just like failed. And then again, it's asking a lot of questions of okay, well, what did you try? And who did you try it with and for how long? And what were the actual metrics and what were the data and did it, and then when we finally start to get into it, you realize, oh, that probably was the wrong person.

SPEAKER_01 16:32

Yeah, so to work with. To to go back to your example of the advice of, you know, post consistently to very tactical. So we zoom out, right? And we look at that advice just exists within the larger world of what promotion actually is holistically. So if you're only at if someone's giving you advice just on that one thing, you're blind to everything else that's outside of that.

SPEAKER_00 16:55

Yeah. So when we think about promotion, it's not just social media. It's not like, oh, just go post. It's content, email, SEO, PR, sometimes media buy or ads, referral systems, events, like it's everything goes into one. And it's also looking at the ecosystem again of like where your people live and how they make buying decisions. So in in the social media world, it's just promote on social. Now, listen, in my case, a lot of my business comes from social because that's where my people are and that's where my people buy. So that is where my promotion lives. Like I'm not doing that anywhere else. So now for other people though, that's not where people buy from them. So do they need to be in there every single day? Do they need to be showing up? Do they need to no?

SPEAKER_01 17:45

Not necessary. It's not necessary.

SPEAKER_00 17:47

So when we think about marketing and social media marketing, social media is a channel, the marketing is the system. It's just one small component of the wheel.

SPEAKER_01 17:59

That's a nice way to summarize that.

SPEAKER_00 18:02

Do you want to add anything else?

SPEAKER_01 18:04

I think you did a fantastic job on kind of a very boring topic.

SPEAKER_00 18:08

It's a very boring topic.

SPEAKER_01 18:09

A necessary topic, but a boring one.

SPEAKER_00 18:11

Let us know if you want more boring content like this. Thanks for listening, guys. If you like that episode, seriously let us know. You can follow us on social at grind social media, share, like, review, do all of the things, and uh, I guess that's it. We'll see you next week.

SPEAKER_01 18:25

Sounds good.