r/marketing

I want to share this because I think a lot of small founders are experiencing something similar. I have been trolling youtube comments and the sentiment is the same - The platform is genuinely broken in ways that aren't obvious until you're already trapped inside it. I am hoping I am able to collect enough information from peoples experiences to inform myself and potentially share a list of problems and solutions with Meta themselves (I know this is wishful thinking but I am willing to try)

 

Here's everything I've run into, roughly in the order it happened.

 

There is no starting point: Search "how do I run an Instagram ad" and you get fifty blog posts, none of them from Meta. There is no page on Meta's site that says: here is what you need, here is the order to do it in, here is how Instagram, Facebook, Pages, and Business accounts actually fit together. If there ever was a need for an AI agent - this is what it is for not for the dogshit they use it for today.

 

Your starting point decides where you end up: I made a business instagram first. Doing that automatically spun up a business portfolio attached to it except you can't escape that portfolio. To actually run ads through ads manager, you need a FB page. To have a page, you need a personal Facebook profile to manage it. So now you're creating a FB profile you never wanted. And that profile cannot be in your brand's name because FB's terms require real personal identities on profiles. Nobody tells you any of this up front. You find out one error at a time. I'm not even sure I am correct but this is my understanding at this point in time.

 

There are no guardrails anywhere: I used Meta's own scheduler to queue ten organic posts. No warning, no nudge, no "hey, this looks like bot behavior to our system, want to space these out?" Just hit publish, get flagged, account restricted. If the platform knows the pattern is risky enough to ban you for, the scheduler should know enough to warn you before you commit.

 

Troubleshooting is impossible: Business Suite, Ads Manager, Account Quality, Accounts Centre, Business Help, Meta for Business. Different domains, different layouts, different login states. Each one sends you to a different place. None of them give you a real answer. Everything funnels into a chat with Meta AI, which is just guessing at the reason your account was flagged. It doesn't have context from the system that actually flagged you. So it's one AI trying to reverse engineer the decision of another AI, while I sit there watching.

 

There is no human: I am not exaggerating. The AI recommends a contact form. The contact form 404s. The "request review" button appears and disappears depending on the day. There is no email address. There is no phone number. There is no escalation path. Tweeting at Meta is, somehow, the most legitimate support channel they offer. Meta doesn't even have a active twitter page you have to message them on thread lol

 

The object model is unhinged: Portfolios own assets. Assets are Pages and Instagram accounts and ad accounts and pixels. Pages have admins. Portfolios have admins too, but different ones. Personal profiles have roles on Pages. Sometimes things sit at the profile level and not in a portfolio at all. You can have a Page in one portfolio and an Instagram in another and the ad account in a third, and Ads Manager will simply refuse to acknowledge that any of it exists. There is no diagram. There is no glossary. You learn the model by breaking it.

 

Where I am now: my portfolio is restricted. The flag was that it was being run by a bot, which it was not. I can't add another admin because the portfolio is locked. I can't appeal to a human because there isn't one. I can't move on because the assets are trapped in the restricted portfolio.

If you've been through this and come out the other side, I'd genuinely love to hear how. And if you're at the start of this and reading this thinking "that won't happen to me," I really hope you're right.

So even though its summer, some Northern Hemisphere ski resorts are still attracting tourists for stuff like mountain biking, hiking, and even summer skiing. But getting those bookings in the off season has been a challenge.

Ive been trying to figure out the best strategies to bring in tourists when the slopes arent packed with snow.

Maybe promoting the other activities these resorts offer or running special deals for summer travelers? Any tips would be awesome 🙌

I own the marketing department team and budget and plan to leave the company for a new role in a few months (they don’t know this yet). I realized today that I’m under spent in our budget. We’re still hitting all our KPIs and doing well despite spending less than planned to date but I’m not being recognized for my awesome work which is why I’m leaving. So here’s my question: where could I spend ~$200k in the next few months in a way that benefits me or my resume the most? Like, what are some ways I could kick off a cool campaign or do something experimental or wild? I’ve got nothing to lose so I may as well spend it on something that helps my career or is super fun. And if it flops, oh well.

Hi folks, I work in an APAC manufacturing/industrial business that has a very niche target market - with only around 500-5000 other manufacturing companies in the country that would buy our different product lines. They also would only buy our product or shop around every 5 years or so.

What's the best way of measuring whether your marketing efforts are working during the very long sales cycle? Enquiries as leads is one way, but I'd like to get more insights on whether our ads, sale enablement or content is working whilst an opportunity is open or in a nurture stage

I’m not sure if I’m alone on this, but working with content is as painful as before. I don’t understand how.

What used to take much longer to write, now takes drastically less time. The time used to publish still feels long, though now I have to edit, fix redundancy, check facts, and do many more things that I didn’t have to do as frequently before.

I feel like I’m doing more work now than I did with traditional publishing methods, even though it’s more convenient.

Is it just me or is SEO content still as brain rotting?

This isn't political, but every year I dread memorial day because nothing is sacred is it? I rack my brain trying to figure out a new way to push sales offers, emails, web banners and CTAs to consumers while balancing on the knifes edge of tone and respect. Does anyone else relate? "Like happy memorial day come get your discount tires." "In honor of those who made the ultimate sacrifice get up to $500 off any new vehicle this weekend only." "Did your father die in an IED explosion in Kuwait? Well come get some discounts on your routine maintenance and service!" It's sick. It's one of the more tastless part about marketing. Chase the dollar, push a sale. Make your employer even more money and discuss the campaign's success metrics next week.

It's the one and only "holiday" that should be left alone.

- Happy Memorial Day from your Greedy n' Greasy Automotive Group -

I joined a company as part of their in-house marketing team as a performance marketeer. My manager is quite good at people management, negotiating with other departments, delegating the work, ensuring we are not being overloaded or overwhelmed with requests, prioritizing tasks…he even increased our marketing ad spend budget…however he seems not to be very technically aware. He knows what data he requires from META or GA4 but doesn’t know how to navigate the platforms himself or even how to properly set up an ad campaign across any of the platforms. Content, story telling and communication seems to be his strong suit but I’m not sure if it’s normal for them to not be technically skilled.

So we were kind of suckered into 6sense…spent $1M+ on all of the bells and whistles. We had only 2 employees in our whole enterprise who used and set up 6sense and refused to let anyone else touch it. They promised everything was set up correctly and working and would bring it up in every board meeting, etc. They ended up being let go, and then finally us in marketing and the SDR’s, sales enablement teams could get our hands on it.

We found that actually nothing, in a whole year a whole million dollars, nothing had actually been done. The keywords that were uploaded were atrocious, no ICP’s, the segments were all wrong, no campaigns had been launched (thank God). Its taking a huge group efforts of digital marketing, sales enablement and sales to put it all together to work for our business and GTM strategy and campaigns.

I honestly feel like its so overhyped. It doesnt connect to Salesforce Marketing Cloud, so we cant connect our email campaigns to the platform. Connecting ads just seems like an extra step. We pull high-intent lists for our google ads so that would help. The audiences and segments it pulls isnt really that great or as well fit as it was advertised.

I can see the worth if it was significantly cheaper. I see the value for our SDR’s, and I see the value of targeted lists for our ABM strategy. I just…..am more frustrated than impressed.

What have you noticed?

I work for a large university and we have a large marketing budget. Every agency we talk to promises the world but its the same crap over and over where they put a few ads online, turn on every option, and let them ride. We're paying our current agency $50,000 monthly in fees and I can tell their doing nothing. Last week our ads were offline the entire week and they didn't even notice which makes me think no one is managing our account. Mind you this is an agency with loads of awards.

Before this we used an agency who reduced the number of leads we were getting. When we complained we started getting lots of leads but they were all spam. This was also an agency with lots of awards.

What do agencies do? I'm trying to put together an argument we would be better of hiring someone and making it their job. It would be cheaper and we would have someone focussed on our account.

I dread talking to agencies now as they seem to only tell us what we want to hear. Its like they will say anything to win our account and then they don't care. I looked at our CRM and its mostly spam leads.

Advice?

Honest question- does anyone else feel like no matter how much you invest in digital, referrals still close faster than anything? We spent months trying to figure out why our paid campaigns weren't converting the way word of mouth leads did, and after working with ditans group to clean up our online presence and reputation, we finally realized the issue was trust signals, not traffic. Anyone else find that once your reviews and visibility actually matched your real reputation, the paid stuff started working way better too?

looking to sell one of my tiktok pages since i realistically don’t have enough time to keep scaling it properly anymore
i’m still active on it and post occasionally, but ever since taking on a marketing lead role, i haven’t been nearly as consistent as before
the page is in the beauty/skincare space. mostly simple slideshow content around skincare, body care, haircare, etc. so it’s pretty low maintenance content-wise
it’s currently around 128k followers and even with inconsistent uploads it still pulls decent traction whenever something gets posted (usually around 4–5 digit views)
feels like someone more focused on content scaling, affiliate marketing, tiktok shop, or product testing could probably do a lot more with it than i currently can
not trying to oversell it or make it sound like some automated money printer, just figured i’d post it here in case someone was already looking for an account in this niche
happy to send analytics/stats through dm if needed

Dear

I am approached with this free fantastic offer of a 2p editorial article, but then my suppliers will be approached to make paid advertising in the same edition. Looks non-compliant to our ethics standards. And the impact/readership of the magazine is unclear.

Do you confirm this is scam ?

Thanks!

Personally, I like the smell of fresh baked food and might even be encouraged to buy some. But what are some good arguments against stores introducing such scents into the air for this reason? And maybe the alternative view?

Anyone else feel this way?

I love marketing. The psychology behind it, the theory, thinking through how to get to a target audience. Love talking shop!

But being an in-house marketer….it’s eating away at me. All of the pressure of growth is on my shoulders. Yet when my team delivers the glory isn’t pointed to us.

I’m just losing the love of it which makes me sad because when I’m around marketing peers, I feel so energized.

When your company is growing fast, you've had a lot of traction. People are talking about you on the Internet. What is that one very important decision that you need to make? It can be:

• scaling
• identifying the cohort
• identifying which is the best next marketing campaign to run
• which is the best next people to target etc

Which is the most important question that you answer, or the most important insight you need to make the right decision?

I’ve been looking at Reddit from a marketing angle and something feels overlooked.

A post can be average in one subreddit but still spread into multiple communities and gain traction over time.

This makes me think Reddit behaves more like a network than a single platform.

The interesting part is how the same content performs differently depending on where it appears.

Has anyone here built strategies around cross-subreddit distribution instead of single posts?

I freelance for a startup doing social media + some community work.

The issue is that they keep reducing the amount of hours I’m “allowed” to work per month, while still expecting the same level of output.

For context, they expect:

• 2–3 social posts per week
• reels/trend research
• weekly calls/admin work
• comment/community management
• occasional event attendance/content capture
• extra coordination tasks

I recently tried properly calculating how long things realistically take. Even conservatively, it realistically comes out far beyond the allocated hours.

But after going over hours last month, they told me I now need to stay around 25 hours this month to “average it out.”

The problem is that I’ve realised I’ve started delaying logging hours, underreporting work, trying to squeeze unpaid work in just to stay within limits; otherwise the workload literally doesn’t fit the allocated hours.

I understand startups have budget limitations, and I genuinely like the work/team, but at what point does this become unrealistic or unethical?

do you think i should upfront to them about how i feel, or anything else? is this normal for western startups? any advice would be appreciated.

I have lost count of the number of times I see a head of marketing or lead marketing role advertised where the JD literally reads out what’s expected from a CMO! Yet unashamedly they mention role reports into a CMO!

wtf is wrong with people these days! HR and CEO’s ? Can you not clearly distinguish what the F is expected from a head of marketing and what’s expected from a CMO?

Stuff like positioning/ vision setting/ marketing strategy. Then why the F do you guys have CMO’s and Please don’t give me the “it’s strategic role” BS

I read reports perhaps 10 years ago stating that the CMO role would have to evolve and no more severe to be strategic but execution. It disgusts me how CMO’s now need to hire junior people to Rip Off their strategy and then represent it as their own .

Anyone else seeing these JD’s?