Effort scales exponentially - establish quality at scale with the 5-step depth framework

In an ideal world, compromising with quality should be non-negotiable.

Everything has to be perfect:

• Flawless software that never goes down or breaks

• Cars that never break or require maintenance mid-way (let alone Boeing planes)

• Food that’s always healthy, delicious, never rots

• Employees who never make mistakes

• Clients who never delay payments or incur scope creep

No crime, no wars, high-quality clothing, no lines at stores - an effortless experience in living one’s life.

However, achieving perfection is exponentially more difficult than not.

Mediocre vs. a piece of art

Mona Lisa took Leonardo da Vinci almost 17 years to complete.

Imagine the average time to complete artwork today in an agency (for a client).

Let alone using DALL-E to create a robotic version of this. Here’s a random prompt passing to AI to generate a Mona Lisa:

Granted, this is based on the original portrait, but having a concept in mind makes it possible to achieve this in seconds.

Why global quality degrades continuously (economical explanation)

The reason quality degrades over time is competition in two forms:

1. Alternative, lower-quality solutions take less time to complete and are significantly cheaper. Settling down for 80% of the quality for 20% of the price and 5% of the time (or less) is a bargain. This is called the “race to the bottom”.

2. Top quality is often not required, not demanded, not applicable. A $20,000 cigar chair may be an artisan product that’s a monumental achievement, but do you need this for your living room? A flawlessly engineered product that scales 300M views sounds great, but most blogs barely cross 5,000 monthly views, let alone 300M.

Incentivizing high-quality work isn’t there. Consumer demand is missing, or is narrow enough to prevent perfectionists to pour their hearts into something of low value.

Businesses and creators cannot affort to invest 100X the time that won’t get paid for a product that will settle on a fraction of the effort and definitely won’t pay a fortune.

Different forms of quality

However, quality and perfection has different forms:

• Quality product

• Outstanding of customer service

• A top-notch team

• The perfect manager

• Incredible market opportunity (timing/need/PMF)

• Effortless educational resources (videos/tutorials easy for everyone to DIY their problem)

Different forms and realms of effort required for every individual segment. And in the real world, with limited time, we jump between hoops and get to whatever we can, whenever we can.

Establishing the right amount of quality is a principle of supply and demand. Businesses sell a certain quality threshold until the market gets oversaturated, stop buying, or moves to a cheaper or better competitor. This is how global quality gets settled.

If people suddenly find McDonalds truly intolerable for health reasons or a Burger King comes up with a better recipe with larger burgers for the best price, McDonalds is bound to innovate, cut costs, double down on a healthy line, or cut 80% of its frozen imports to increase the quality.

Consumers are happy and satisfied with the combined value proposition of McDonalds - and as they keep buying and grow revenue, the fast-food chain would never move dramatically and quickly as long as the machine works.

Quality and effort exist outside of traditional business and product management

If you feel that quality and effort are undermined, you’re missing the non-negotiable aspects of life and competitive environments that thrive on perfection.

• Doctors - you don’t want to risk a surgery, ever. Or any form of threatening procedure.

• Lawyers - misrepresented and sued is unacceptable at best.

• Athletes - competing often means that 80% of all rewards go to the first one, and possibly some uptick for #2 and #3. Not enough room for mediocrity.

In business, this is less contrast in most cases.

• Products can be mediocre and still sell.

• Great products can be sold by unskilled sales people (they just work).

• Unique products can tolerate poor customer experience most of the time (or commodities like banks or telecoms - they often provide poor CX but limited competition and good terms)

One specific area that stands out where quality makes a real difference is marketing.

Quality assessment in marketing products and services

Two reasons why marketing is so integrally crucial and could make or break a business (often the latter):

1. Wrong messaging can deposition a product and prospects will bounce immediately. Failing to relate to their needs with the right messaging 100% immediately ruins transactions.

2. Algorithms are so brutal that the tiniest mistake has a massive impact on performance. Poor copy, creatives, landing page experience, social copy, subject lines lead to a massive drop in open rates, clickthrough rates, likes, comments. A single comma can turn the ship around.

Marketing efficiency follows the famous Bell Curve - I’ll illustrate the similarities with IQ distribution across the globe:

Beginners clearly don’t contribute to the bottom line at all.

The vast majority of people—nearly 70%—contribute to some level of performance near the 50th percentile. They get some work done, but it’s far from perfect.

And then there’s 1% of all marketers just crushing it. And the sub-segments of this 1% are so significant that their “IQ efficiency” can vary between 130 and 160. Absolutely wild.

It’s all about effort and depth

The two core elements of success in marketing are:

• Effort - time spent on iterating on creatives/copy/campaigns and looking into data for decision-making purposes, moving fast, running A/B tests, launching 100 small campaigns instead of 3-5 large ones

• Depth - the level of detail spent on copy, subject lines, or content complexity

The level of effort is about time, determination, diving as deep into the details as possible. This is the key differentiating factor. Caring about squeezing the last 1% should matter so much that it could double your MRR over one or two months of hardcore experiments and analyzing every single KPI out of the data source.

As for depth? What separates a GREAT copywriter or brand marketer from a 50 percentile one is the sheer level of insights and knowledge, a value bomb dropped so deeply that the reader remains in awe hours after consuming the content.

And this content could be:

• An educational piece of content

• A course outline that’s packed with advice and strategies

• A breakdown structured as a powerful, reusable framework

• A bulletproof worksheet that’s easy to fill out and directly put in action

• A complete checklist that covers every single detail to the T

The five levels of depth

I teach my team that depth is the differentiating factor between okay and successful.

Whenever we produce blog content, a lecture, video outlines, a social media post, or an infographic, we rate it in a 5-star model - 1 being basic, 101, and shallow, and 5 being the ultimate guide.

Let’s use “go to market” as an example - a pitch designed for marketing directors in a B2B company launching a new product and seeking advice on structuring their positioning in the best possible manner, start to end.

They stumble upon a social post or an article of ours - great! Now, what lets them stick around and call in for help? The level of depth.

1. Fundamental Awareness

“Go to market is integral for bringing your product to life.

1. Define your audience

2. Launch your product

3. Run campaigns

4. Iterate

5. Reach profitability”

My answer to that?

duh.

It’s 101. Common knowledge.

You don’t have to be a proficient marketer to leverage that. In fact, every 19-year-old who took a 5-minute YouTube video can enumerate the same steps.

1 out of 5 complexity and depth - providing no value to the audience.

2. Novice

Let’s bump it up a bit.

“Go to market strategies define the path to launching your product from start to end.

Marketers need to bring the leadership together, establish the right roles, secure the budget, and allocate it to the right initiatives accordingly.

The fastest way to launch is through experimentation - and you need traffic and data for this.

Therefore, outbound sales or PPC are the path to least resistance and getting more eyeballs on your offer.

1. Launch your Meta and Google Ads campaigns

2. Secure 500 visitors on your landing page

3. Branch out

4. Iterate on the best variation

5. Repeat until profitability and high ROI”

This variant is slightly better than the fundamental one, but still doesn’t touch the right level of depth.

✅ We mention our audience by name

✅ We establish the right GTM motion that makes sense

✅ We stress on the importance of experimentation

✅ Certain channels are brought up as more relevant (even though sales and Facebook are the go-to choices for everyone)

✅ We set a target of 500 viewers before we make any conclusions

So, slightly better, but nowhere near.

3. Intermediate

Let’s bring a little depth to the equation this time. Follow what the 50 percentile does in our bell curve.

“Marketers - agility is key in 2024 and iterating fast on offer development and execution is more important than ever.

With the latest layoff rounds, marketing directors are stripped out of staff and resources, running blind with limited tooling on the market.

And launching new products (or pivoting new services) is harder than ever. Let alone the speed of execution.

GTM campaigns go through different motions like inbound and outbound, or tap into events or partner marketing. Picking the right strategy for your journey can go a long way. The right industry and market research can reveal the motions that bring strong results with limited risk to the portfolio.

• Run a blended inbound and marketing set of campaigns - this would combine the performance-first approach with brand building and educational exercises

• Readjust your forecast based on industry metrics and expectations - longer buyer cycles and sales journeys

• Position yourself for your ICP needs: they have evolved over the past 6 months”

We’re getting close here. What have we added?

✅ A strong callout to marketers and the ever-changing environment

✅ A practical explanation of what happened and the necessity for a change.

✅ A brief mention of different GTM motions: educational!

✅ A more diverse outlook on different strategies and how to execute them

✅ An essential reminder that ICPs have evolved and changed and keeping the pulse on makes a difference

So - slightly more helpful, but not a fully baked one. Moving past the 50th percentile.

4. Advanced

“50,841 employees have been laid off in big tech this year alone. And this is merely covering the surface of known startups and popular tech companies!

Marketing leaders are left high and dry with limited teams and inefficient data sources that suck. KPIs and attribution are a myth - website form submissions are still attributed to marketing efforts despite founder and sales initiatives pointing to contact forms.

Time for a foundational reset. Interview your ICPs and isolate two problems worth repackaging in separate offers. Build a OnePage or Instapage landing page testing the value proposition, packed with testimonials and reviews, and testing out a very specific problem and a fixed price rate.

Then, resort to the core GTM functions:

• Inbound

• Outbound

• Event

• Partner

• Community

• Product

Rank these from 1 to 6 to the level of importance and relevance to your target market.

Study the competitive landscape and isolate the #1 most successful channel and one area that’s barely covered in the market. You want a proven winner and a blue ocean market to penetrate.

Put these to good use with your new landing pages - and test the offers out. Get your sales team and account managers to supplement and validate the idea fast.

6sense reports that 84% of buyers reach out directly AND close a deal with a brand they’ve researched and trust. And the research process takes 8 months on average. Brand affinity is key - be the brand they want to close with.”

Now, this one speaks to the audience.

✅ Core market problems. Layoffs. Limited resources. Playbooks no longer work.

✅ Iterating on the key GTM functions one at a time. A suggestive approach of picking efficient channels and a blue market strategy.

✅ Recommending tools. Some industry stats.

More strategic, more tactical, more actionable.

“5. Expert

Let’s try a final take on this.

“You’re about to get the March GTM playbook that’ll make you feel like Jeff Bezos on day 1 of Amazon's launch.

Current playbooks expire in 2 to 3 months - don’t bet on the old horses to win a new race.

Ready?

First, a brief refresher for marketing directors whose teams got slashed and remain overwhelmed with hundreds of ongoing campaigns, little help from AI, and abusive targets from executive teams.

Go back to the GTM basics and review the six core GTM motions: outbound, inbound, partner, product, community, event.

Gartner reports that 62% of respondents focus on product-led initiatives and 38% are sales-led. This instills the importance of product-market fit, building powerful and actionable offers that consumers buy, and using sales as a supplement to a great product.

Here are 5 data-backed go-to-market tactics to accommodate in each motion starting today:

1. 80 / 20 rule - focus 80% of your efforts on 20% of your audience for faster traction. Integrate at least 4 of the motions effectively applying the 80-20. Run ads on 2 key channels where your ICP hangs out and automate. Monitor once a week and calibrate - or use a tool like MadgicX to run the magic for you.

2. Go niche - "there's riches in the niches" - target a specific audience with a unique proposition. Account-based marketing is a strong contender in 2024, limiting the “shotgun” approach and doubling down on personalization. Pick 50 ICP accounts and build comprehensive value propositions solving their unique problem. Nurture them and increase your close rate along with SDRs.

3. Paid ads - 72% of marketers agree PPC ads are effective for their business. Based on numerous 6sense and zoominfo reports, and influencers like Chris Walker, CAC payback rates are terrible across all PPC channels in 2024. Businesses have been pumping PPC budgets and staying oblivious to low conversion rates. Revert to 2 and ABM.

4. Leverage social proof - 88% of people read online reviews before making a purchase decision. Branding has been neglected for years since performance marketing became king. Go back to foundational knowledge, build educational resources, tap into the partner-led motion and build shared data sets and webinars with your strategic 3 partners.

5. Content marketing - sharing articles on social media influences 66% of buyer's purchasing decisions. Thought leaders are mandatory - get your executive team to post strategic, in-depth content, engage with your ICPs, bring the human element out. Feed them data points, statistics, and surveys. Use YVisuals and Canva templates to visualize them by preparing a common brand template with reusable typography and color scheme. Prepare a content calendar for them and amplify internal efforts.

The tactics above are proven to drive results for businesses of all sizes.

Which of these tactics will you implement in your next go-to-market plan?”

Now, this copy can be reworked a hundred times and tap into different emotional and logical triggers.

✅ But it’s viral and captivating. Involves FOMO. Contradicts the old ways.

✅ Touches on all GTM motions. And challenges all of them.

✅ Packed with data, tools, stats, influencer mentions, actionable tips to follow.

It empowers and educates every marketing director with new skills, strategic business insights, and specific steps to execute their motion.

Many readers will question their own strategy and return to the drawing board - revisiting their TAM and competitive landscape to uncover new gems.

And an extra call to action at the end to spark more engagement and reach more eyeballs - and even sales form submissions if you add a form.

Depth matters

This illustrative example merely exemplifies the difference between low quality/effort/depth and deeply educational, empowering content that strikes a chord.

If you double down on #4 and #5 level of content consistently, your audience will remember you and you’ll build the brand affinity in no time.

With an 8-month research cycle in B2B, starting today will lead to a couple months of ramp up and a solid community building exercises on the way. This is the proven way to authority building - just like skyscraper content was king in ultimate guides for SEO for years.

You can’t go wrong by 10X-ing the value of content provided to your audience. It doesn’t have to take 50x, 10x, or even 5x of the time. You can pull data and stats, bookmark them in a folder, download every industry study and inject it into corresponding data.

This is why I read 20 different newsletters every single day. I load up on stats, case studies, quotes, data points, KPIs, strategies that no longer work, new tools.

This is the different between mediocre content and what the top 1% does.