In May 2024 the marketing technology landscape that Scott Brinker and Frans Riemersma publish every year on chiefmartec.com counted 14,106 marketing technology products. That was 3,068 more than the year before, the thirteenth year in a row the count had grown, and 9,304% growth since their first landscape in 2011. Every one of those products has somebody selling it, and every one of those people has a reason why a business like yours needs it.
Reels, ads, SEO, newsletters, LinkedIn carousels, a podcast, webinars, email sequences, a content calendar, brand guidelines and funnel optimisation all arrive on a small business owner's list the same way, as somebody's product or somebody's service, and the people selling them are paid in proportion to how complicated marketing looks, so very few of them have a reason to tell you it is simpler than that.
Who gets paid for the list
Marketing is overwhelming, and the hard part is not doing the work. It is prioritising, and saying no, and most practitioners in the industry have something to sell you while they give advice, so the advice leans toward whatever they sell. I have something to sell as well, a book, and the same caution applies to everything on this page.
The software side runs on the same incentive with more products in it. A vendor in a category with thousands of similar tools in it has to convince you the whole category is essential before it can convince you its version is the best one.
None of that needs a villain. It is incentives, and for the person running a business the result is the same either way: a list that gets longer every year, written by people who are paid when it gets longer, handed to somebody who already has a business to run. The main problem in marketing is overwhelm, and the decision paralysis that comes with it, and a longer list makes both of them worse.
Two levers underneath
A business has two levers it can pull, traffic and offer, and every item on the list either moves one of them or it doesn't. Traffic is attention from real people who might actually care what you do, in the right frame of mind, and not impressions or followers. The offer is the reason to act, made of what you sell, what it costs and the promise you make about it, and it is the answer to the question every customer is quietly asking, which is why they should care. Traffic + Offer = Results, and the equation works through both.
The equation is a diagnosis, not a prescription. If the offer is solid and nobody is seeing it, you have a traffic problem, and traffic is where the work is. If people are seeing the offer and nobody is buying, you have an offer problem, and more traffic only means more people walking past it, so the work is on the offer. If you can't tell which one is broken, the diagnostic asks the two questions in order.
Once the broken lever has a name, most of the list stops being urgent, because most of it moves neither lever. That is what a framework this small is for. It isn't a plan of things to do, it is the nerve to say no, out loud, to the next thing somebody insists a business has to be doing.
The hard part is the business
The equation gets oversold, though, and marketing can't create a business from nothing. The equation puts marketing underneath the business rather than on top of it: most of what a new business needs is business, and the marketing is the smaller part.
The economics of a product can rule a channel out before any marketing starts. The whole digital marketing ecosystem, the online thing, doesn't really work with a low-value single product, because one cheap sale doesn't leave enough to pay for the attention that made it. When I set up my own experiment I worked with that constraint rather than against it: no manufacturing, no stock, no warehouse fees and no range of products to look after. No campaign fixes arithmetic like that. You change the product, the price or the plan.
Some of it no lever reaches at all. BookPrint started trading in 2012 and I sold it in 2020, and I was proud of what I had built, and exhausted, and the exit was neither a financial success nor a launching pad for anything else. In the year before we moved to Wānaka I took on a big side job for a lawyer, worked hard on it, and was never paid. Neither of those was a traffic problem or an offer problem. They were business, and business is hard, and anybody who tells you the hard part is a tool you haven't bought yet is selling you the tool.
A shorter list
In 2026 I work 20 hours a week for each of two companies, on completely separate days, in long blocks of deep work with very few meetings. I used to check the ad accounts every night before bed, and these days it is every weekend at least. That isn't a productivity system. It is the list cut down to the few things that move a lever, done as well as I can do them, with the rest left to whoever is selling it.
The same cut is what I try to help other people make. Overwhelm is the problem, so the useful thing is finding the one action a business should be taking, at the strategic level, and then handing the how-to over to the people and the guides that teach it properly. Pick a small number of things, do them well, and keep going, instead of starting another channel because somebody sold you on the idea.
Test the exchange first
If neither lever has been tested yet, a marketing strategy is the wrong thing to buy. The only answer that counts is whether a stranger will pay for what you offer, and finding out costs less than nearly anything on the list. The 3-checkpoint validation plan does it with a small amount of real traffic, interest from strangers first, then a sale, then the maths on what a customer is worth, before a dollar goes into a website or a box of business cards.
A business only happens when something is exchanged for money. Test that exchange, find the lever that is actually broken, and let the rest of the 14,106 sell to somebody else.