A few years ago, my brothers and I piled into my brother’s old Prius and drove into ranch land outside of Tyler, Texas, for our first hunt, led by none other than the man, the priest, the legend Fr. Mitch Paqwa.
I remember feeling out of place carrying my bag from the car to the rugged hunting cabin.
I was a computer job millennial who’d grown up in the burbs. I was wearing a faux leather jacket that creaked every time I moved. It was perfectly suited for an evangelical pastor’s relevant Sunday morning message but was very far from perfect for the stealth required for a late-season hunt.
But not being properly equipped wasn’t that big of a deal, right? We’d probably head out tomorrow, shoot a deer in our first hour, and eat the backstrap for lunch.
Instead, Fr Mitch and his ranch owner friend Mark met us like WWII vets looking over a fresh batch of recruits: “This is the best they could send us? We’re scraping the bottom of the barrel here.”
They wouldn’t let us even take our guns with us the first day. We wouldn’t be allowed to carry them until we could
Tell a buck's age from its points
Discern the difference between a doe and a young buck from 30 yards
Tell the difference between mule, Axios, and white-tail bucks
Tell the impact of the wind’s velocity and direction on blind choice,
Tell differences in deer behavior during rut.
For three days, we woke up in the pitch black, froze our asses off for hours while being grilled on the above concepts.
On day 3 of the hunt, after we’d adequately proven to our mentors that we had digested the lessons and taken them seriously, we were allowed to take our guns with us and allowed us to choose our blinds (with feedback, of course).
And then, despite all of the lessons, I went ahead and shot a young buck I thought was a doe. Whoops. But hey, they were proud of their city-slicker pupil anyway.
They then proceeded to convince me every hunter always wraps their gear stick with the bucks ballsack skin.
Hilarious. I could never get it off.
But that’s the price of masculine mentorship, right?
And now to business
I often think about this experience because it’s so opposed to how the internet has trained me to think. Everything is supposed to be easy! There are shortcuts to every outcome we desire, and we can look this all up on YouTube or pay a few hundred dollars for a class.
But despite all the ads that get served, promising the perfect content formula and quick returns on investment, and despite the proliferation of tools, frameworks, and AI, marketing is STILL more like hunting than printing money.
SENT Ventures: A case study in marketing hard knocks
When I took a role at SENT Ventures, a membership community for entrepreneurs, I was just as cocksure as I was on that first hunt.
I had grown and sold my own community; I’d worked with hundreds of NGOs on brand, marketing, and strategy at that point. I knew what I was doing. I was going to get in there, and the next day, we’d be pulling in more leads than we could handle.
We built a weekly newsletter and daily LinkedIn posting strategy, an in-person event strategy, a digital event strategy, and a paid ad strategy. We made big splashes on a minimal budget and then sat back and waited for leads to convert.
Spoiler alert. They didn’t.
So we worked on our product. We worked on our offer. We worked on our onboarding process.
We got some new leads, but they were trickling in.
Every quarter, when we discussed the marketing budget, I could never prove positive ROI against the spend for each individual initiative.
Despite this, SENT doubled in size by the end of the year and we hit most of our growth goals. Sent has continued to grow since. WTF.
Not only that, but the growth picked up speed over time despite being upside down on the individual tactics. I felt like I was observing a law of nature at work but couldn’t make sense of on my own. I didn’t even really know what questions to ask!
Why I’m not getting positive ROI? 20 pages of clickbait
How to measure organic growth? Some helpful stuff, but mostly clickbait
How to create and justify a marketing budget? Infinite clickbait
When the Pupil is Ready…
After I departed from SENT last June, I had coffee with one of the most experienced marketers I’ve ever met. He worked with big brands well before the dawn of the internet and had the grey hair to prove it. I told him about my challenges, showing return on investment and winning a marketing budget.
This is what he said:
“Yeah, that doesn’t surprise me at all. You guys probably were doing all of the right things. Marketing is cumulative. It takes time to really get into people’s consideration set, especially when you’re creating a new category. I bet no one is searching ‘the membership community for Catholic startups.” You were creating demand, which takes a long time to do. Eventually, SENT will be able to capture it.
He explained in seconds that felt completely opaque and that hours of googling and youtubing couldn’t answer.
Then, he pointed me to studies and articles that helped me put the pieces together.
Here are two images from those studies that show what was happening at SENT:
1. We were measuring the wrong things, and
2. We had unrealistic expectations of the marketing timeline.
Measuring the Mix
This shows that one individual tactic done once will never show great ROI returns on its own.1. It’s the mix of tactics that leads to positive ROI. We weren’t demonstrating positive returns because we were trying to measure TOO MUCH. Don’t measure individual tactics because individual tactics don’t lead to positive ROI. You should measure the cumulative impact of ALL of your marketing efforts together.
*Analytic Partners ROI Genome Report.
*Please don’t think I’m saying go and do all the marketing tactics simultaneously. That’s not what I’m saying.
Patience is Key
At SENT, we carried out several initiatives to build our brand and anticipated that these efforts would result in sales within two or three weeks. Our initial expectations were unrealistic, considering that it takes an average of 12 to 18 months to see a return on investment for brand investing.2
The end result: We achieved our goals by the end of the year, but the process caused us a lot of frustration and anxiety that could have been avoided simply by having realistic expectations of the timeline.
And now, back to the hunting analogy
The ranch where I shot my first doe buck (lol) had been dropping the same feed at the same time for months before this dumb-ass city slicker showed up and bagged his deer. The blinds had been placed by expert hunters who knew the land like the back of their hands.
I probably could have shot a deer on my first day if Fr. Paqwa had let me. But he didn’t let me. He knew “instant results” would have kept my head big and kept me from learning what I needed to learn if I wanted to ride without the training wheels.
Marketing is the same way.
Expecting instant results, shortcuts, and obvious feedback is the mark of the noob in every arena, from hunting to marketing.
The problem is that modern technology trains us to think like noobs, but modern technology is not the real world.
In the real world, you learn what you were shown.
In the real world, things take time.
In the real world, you start with the foundations and build on them with practice.
In the real world, hands-on learning and mentorship are beet clickbait articles and influencers every time.
The world is amazingly complex. Audiences change, technology changes, and the economy changes. What stays the same is human nature and the value of hands-on learning and mentorship.
Both marketers and business owners need to approach the blind with much more humility than they often do.
Instead of asking: “How do I bag a buck in 15 minutes despite never doing this before?”
We should ask instead: “What do I need to learn today to be able to bag my buck tomorrow.
Then ask: who can teach me this lesson? I’ll give you a hint: It’s probably not Google.
Happy hunting.
Ps. Find the results of my work with SENT here.