Is Marketing Hard? Yes—Here's Why & What To Do About It.

Yes, marketing is genuinely hard. But it’s not because the tactics are hard to learn.

Marketing is hard because you’re trying to solve three totally different problems at the same time. Testing what works, deciding how to spend time and budget, and measuring performance.

These are totally different problems with different rules, timelines, and measures of success.

Running ads isn’t that hard, and neither is writing a sales email or posting to social media. Interns can do it, DIY business owners can do it, and—if I’m being totally forthright—so can ChatGPT.

But knowing your offer is something people want? Figuring out how to allocate limited resources? Proving that your marketing is really working?

That’s a lot harder.

Most marketing advice glosses over these questions because they are HARD and the answers are not clean. There is no “just do X and watch leads roll in” strategy that works for every business. Anyone who has tried to market a business knows this.

So in this post, I’m going to walk you through three systems you can use to address the truly hard parts of marketing: the Testing System, the Decision System, and the Measurement System.

Master each of these, and you’ll quickly find that marketing will stop feeling impossibly chaotic and start feeling manageable.

Before I get too far in the weeds, here’s a quick overview of my three systems framework:

These are the real challenges that marketing seeks to address, and they aren’t the ones that show up in beginner tutorials. Because, quite frankly, they’re so straightforward that they’re boring to describe. Answering these questions doesn’t make you feel like you’ve discovered a way to “10x your business.”

But answering these hard questions is exactly what separates profitable marketing from expensive noise.

Here’s a common situation: a business decides they need marketing. So they build a website, maybe run some ads, send some emails, and hope for the best.

If nothing works, the tactics usually bear the blame. This could take the form of statements like "LinkedIn ads don't work for us." "SEO is dead." "Email is too crowded."

But a lot of the time, the real issue, the deeper issue, is that they never tested if anyone actually wanted what they were selling in the first place.

And that’s because testing is hard. Not the mechanics of it—you basically write down what you expect to happen, come up with some test parameters, run the test, and review the results (more on that later). But the vulnerability of it is killer because people can tell you that your ideas don’t excite them, and that hurts.

I cannot tell you how many times I've seen businesses spend thousands on optimizing their landing page copy when the fundamental offer was something nobody wanted. No amount of A/B testing your headline will fix an offer that doesn't solve a real problem for real people.

The difficulty here is that you have to test your offer before you optimize tactics. And testing your offer requires real discipline—small scale pilots, real conversations with prospects, and a willingness to hear "no."

Before you spend a dollar on marketing, you need a system. I think of it as a pre-flight checklist—the kind pilots use before takeoff because skipping steps has serious consequences.

Ask yourself:

If you can't answer yes to all three, you're not ready to scale.

Once you're running campaigns, you need to apply the scientific method. And I mean this literally, as in the exact the same process you learned in middle school:

You form specific, testable hypotheses. "If I change the headline to mention price, CTR will increase by 15%." You take any vague hunches you may have and come up with falsifiable predictions based on them.

Then you isolate the variables. You change one thing at a time so you actually know what moved the needle.

Along the way, you document everything. Write down what you expected to happen and what actually happened.

This is the single easiest way to get clarity, even though it feels like extra work.

It’s important to let tests run without constant tinkering. If you change things every two days, your data becomes worthless.

In short, you have to spend a lot of time answering the most fundamental question a marketer can ask.

Do people want this product or service?

You know what's hard? Saying no.

Every marketing channel looks promising. Your competitors are on TikTok, LinkedIn, running Google Ads, doing SEO, sending newsletters, hosting webinars, and posting daily blog content. And sure enough, if you go on Google, you’re going to find a bunch of industry advice tells you to be everywhere. Saying "no" to any of it feels like you're missing opportunities.

But here's the thing: 90% of marketing is scope control in disguise.

Small teams can't do everything well. You will always have limited time, limited budget, and limited attention. Doing five things poorly will almost always underperform its opposite: doing one thing excellently.

But how do you know which one thing to focus on?

This is where it helps to really understand, in your bones, the explore-exploit tradeoff.

Early on in marketing, you explore. You test wide to find what has potential. You run small experiments across different channels. Try Google Ads for few months and try out cold email. You spend 6-12 months posting content to see what gets traction. You're not betting the family farm yet, you're gathering information.

And then once you find something that works, you exploit. You go deep. You optimize it. You double down and squeeze every bit of value out of it before moving on.

It’s entirely too tempting for businesses get this backwards. They either commit too early to the first thing they try, or they explore forever and never commit to anything. Both are expensive mistakes.

You also need to know when to triage versus when to optimize. If your campaigns are actively losing money and nothing's working, you're in triage mode. It’s here that your focus should be to stop the bleeding, cut what's not working, and focus on survival.

But if things are working okay and you just want them to work better, or if you’re running tests and they need time to gather results, you're in optimize mode. That's when you refine, test variations, and improve incrementally.

Don't confuse the two. They require completely different approaches, and treating triage situations (broken tracking, ads going to 404 pages, etc.) like optimization problems will burn through your budget fast.

If you feel like your marketing department is just generally in disarray and you need quick wins, here’s what you can do:

This is very hard because killing campaigns feels like failure. Committing to fewer things creates anxiety about missed opportunities. And you have to resist the temptation to add new tactics every time your current ones plateau.

But this discipline—this willingness to focus—is what separates profitable marketing from make-work marketing.

Of all the hard parts of marketing, this is the one that really gets to me sometimes.

Conversion attribution these days is an absolute mess. Third-party cookies are dying. iOS privacy changes broke most forms of ad tracking years ago, and marketers have yet to find a truly suitable replacement. And even they did, nowadays, customer journeys don't follow neat linear paths—someone sees your ad on their phone, Googles you on their laptop three days later, and buys after asking Gemini for recommendations. Good luck tracking that!

But your CFO still wants proof of ROI. And you still need to make budget decisions. Marketing is expensive, but it’s necessary, so you really have to find out what works and what doesn’t. Even if the tech just won’t cooperate any more.

So what do you do?

First, accept the hard fact: perfect marketing attribution is dead, and arguably, never really existed. It’s up to you to build a better system with what you have.

Here’s what I would recommend you do if you’re having trouble measuring marketing success:

It’s going to take a lot of trial and error to get the technical and mathematical parts of measuring marketing down pat. There’s no getting around this.

But if you prioritize clean data, useful metrics that correlate with revenue, and the ability to prove marketing lift, that’s going to go a really long way. That’s the mindset that will prepare you to have a meaningful, data-driven conversation with your CFO or your accountant about your marketing efforts and what you expect to come out of them.

You might be thinking to yourself: "this sounds like a lot of work."

And if that is what you’re thinking, well—you're right. It is.

Building these systems isn't the kind of work that makes headlines. But it produces the kind of results that do.

Even so, it requires discipline over time, not one-time effort. It forces you to confront uncomfortable truths about what's not working. But in return, you don’t waste budget on tactics that sound good but don't work. You gain the ability to prove marketing's value when leadership asks for ROI. You’re freed up to ignore vanity metrics that don’t tie back to revenue. And you won’t be at risk of burning out trying to do everything while proving nothing.

Marketing is harder than it was in 2016. Privacy regulations, algorithm changes, and platform limitations mean fewer shortcuts. We’re not in a big gold rush anymore. And that makes good system-building more important than ever.

Yes, marketing is hard. It really is.

But it's hard in specific, solvable ways. The difficulty isn't in the tactics, but rather in system-building and good mental habits. Good marketing comes down to testing, decision-making, and measurement.

You don't need to build all three systems at once. So if you’re struggling with marketing, use this framework to zero in on which system is causing the most pain right now.

If you're launching something new or your campaigns keep flopping, start with the Testing System. If you're overwhelmed and scattered across too many channels, start with the Decision System. If you can't prove what's working and leadership is questioning your budget, start with the Measurement System.

The beautiful thing is that each system makes the others easier. Good testing gives you clearer decisions about what to focus on. Clear decisions make measurement simpler because you're tracking fewer things. And better measurement improves your testing because you have the data needed to know what worked.

Marketing is hard. But if you understand these three systems, it’s a lot easier to manage.