Why Marketing Advice Is Not One-Size-Fits-All
Written by Rocio Sanchez, SEO-First Brand Strategist
Marketing by Rocio is a multicultural and multilingual brand strategy and digital marketing agency, helping LGBTQ-focused brands stand out in their industries.
Scroll through LinkedIn, Instagram, or YouTube for long enough and you'll find someone promising the answer to your marketing problems. Start a podcast. Post every day on Instagram. Launch a newsletter. Create short-form video. Build a personal brand.
I'll tell you this much as someone with more than a decade of experience in marketing, most of these are solid ideas. I've seen all of them work.
Where things go wrong is when they're presented as universal solutions instead of strategic choices. What works brilliantly for one business can be a waste of time, money, and energy for another.
The longer I've worked in marketing, the less interested I've become in finding the "best" strategy and the more interested I've become in understanding context. Budget, capacity, goals, industry, personality, and even energy levels can all influence whether a marketing channel succeeds or fails.
In this article, I'll explore why context matters more than trends, why copying successful businesses can backfire, and how to choose a marketing strategy that's aligned with your business instead of someone else's.
The marketing advice trap
Early in my business journey, I became convinced that Instagram needed to be a major part of my marketing strategy. The advice seemed to be everywhere. Post consistently. Show up on Stories. Create Reels. Build a personal brand. Engage with your audience every day.
None of it was necessarily bad advice. In fact, for many businesses, it works extremely well. The problem was that I accepted the advice without stopping to ask whether it was actually right for me.
For years, I tried to make Instagram fit into my marketing strategy because I believed that's what successful business owners were supposed to do. Every time I opened the app, I felt pressure to create more content, follow more trends, and spend more time on a platform that often left me feeling drained rather than energized.
Around the same time, The Wall Street Journal published a series of reports based on internal Meta documents that examined Instagram's impact on mental health, particularly among teenage girls. I remember reading those reports and recognizing parts of my own experience in them.
Although the reporting focused on Gen Z, I had grown up alongside the rise of social media and spent years navigating many of the same pressures around visibility, comparison, and self-presentation. By the time I started using Instagram professionally, those dynamics hadn't disappeared. If anything, they had simply taken on a new form.
Reading those reports forced me to ask a different question. Instead of asking how I could become better at Instagram, I started asking whether Instagram was the right marketing channel for me in the first place.
At first, I assumed the problem was my consistency. Then I assumed the problem was my content. Then I assumed I simply needed a better strategy. Eventually, I realized the issue wasn't Instagram. The issue was that I was trying to force a marketing channel into my business when it simply wouldn’t work with my capacity, energy levels, and personality.
At the same time, I was ignoring the channels that felt more sustainable and more aligned with my strengths. I enjoy writing. I enjoy long-form content. I enjoy search engine optimization. I enjoy creating resources that continue working long after they're published.
The more I leaned into those strengths, the more my marketing started to feel sustainable. That experience taught me one of the most important lessons I've learned as a marketer. A strategy can be effective and still be the wrong strategy for your business.
Why marketing advice sounds more certain than it really is
One of the quickest ways to get confused as a business owner is to consume too much marketing content. One person says you need to post on Instagram every day. Another insists that email marketing is the only channel worth investing in. Someone else claims that SEO is dead, while another person credits SEO for their entire business.
It's easy to walk away thinking that somebody must be right and somebody must be wrong. In reality, marketing is rarely that simple.
People want simple answers to complex problems
Running a business involves making hundreds of decisions. Naturally, most people want shortcuts. If someone can tell us the best marketing strategy, the best platform, or the best way to generate leads, it saves us from having to navigate uncertainty on our own.
The problem is that marketing decisions are rarely made in a vacuum. Every business has different goals, resources, audiences, budgets, and constraints. A strategy that works brilliantly for one business may be completely impractical for another.
Absolute advice gets more clicks
There's another reason marketing advice often sounds so certain, certainty is compelling. A headline that says "Everyone should start a newsletter" will usually attract more attention than "A newsletter might be worth considering depending on your goals, audience, capacity, and existing marketing channels."
One makes a bold promise. The other acknowledges reality. As marketers, we're not immune to this either. Strong opinions attract attention. Nuance often doesn't.
Context gets lost online
One of the biggest challenges with online marketing advice is that we usually see the outcome without seeing everything that happened behind the scenes. We see the business that grew through Instagram. We don't see the years they spent building an audience. We see the company generating leads through YouTube. We don't see the production budget, team size, or systems supporting that content. We see someone recommending a specific tactic and assume it was the reason for their success. What we often miss is the context that made the tactic effective in the first place.
That's why I'm cautious whenever I hear that every business should be using a particular platform or following a particular strategy.
In many cases, "everyone should do X" is a content strategy designed to attract attention. It's not necessarily a marketing strategy designed to help your specific business grow. The best marketing decisions are rarely made by copying someone else's playbook. They're made by understanding your own situation and choosing tactics that align with your goals, resources, and capacity.
What works for one business might fail for another
One of the reasons I'm skeptical of universal marketing advice is that I've rarely encountered two businesses with exactly the same needs. Even when businesses operate in the same industry, their goals, budgets, strengths, and constraints can be completely different. That's why effective marketing strategy starts with understanding the business in front of you rather than applying a generic playbook.
Different problems require different recommendations
I've worked with clients who had a clear message, a cohesive visual identity, and a strong understanding of their audience. Their biggest challenge wasn't branding or positioning. It was that their website wasn't supporting the business they had already built. In those situations, the recommendation was clear, fix the website first.
I've also worked with businesses facing the opposite problem. Their website was functional, but they struggled to explain what they did, who they served, or what made them different. Before discussing SEO, social media, or advertising, we needed to establish a clearer message and stronger positioning.
I've even worked with clients who had both. A decent website, a decent brand, and a decent offer. What they lacked was the time, energy, or team capacity to execute another marketing channel consistently.
The recommendation was different in every case because the problem was different in every case.
Why different industries need different approaches
Even if two businesses share the same goal, that doesn't mean they should use the same marketing strategy.
A therapist, a lawyer, a pet sitter, and a fashion brand all need customers. Yet the way people discover, evaluate, and choose those businesses can be completely different. A therapist may benefit from educational content and local SEO because trust and expertise play a significant role in the decision making process. A lawyer may rely heavily on referrals while also investing in search visibility for high intent keywords. A fashion brand might prioritize visual content and community building because customers often want to see products before making a purchase. The goal, really, is to identify the channels most likely to connect a specific business with its audience.
The danger of copying successful businesses
One of the easiest mistakes to make is looking at a successful business and assuming their tactics are responsible for their success. Maybe they built their audience through Instagram. Maybe they grew through YouTube. Maybe they swear by newsletters, podcasts, SEO, or networking.
What we don't see are the resources behind those results. We don't see the years of experimentation, the failed attempts, the team supporting the work, or the systems that make consistency possible.
It's similar to downloading someone else's budget spreadsheet or workout plan and expecting the same results. The tool itself isn't necessarily the secret. What matters is how well it fits your situation.
There's nothing wrong with learning from successful businesses. The problem starts when we copy the tactic and ignore the context.
Read more from Rocio Sanchez
Rocio Sanchez, SEO-First Brand Strategist
Rocio Sanchez is a brand strategist and digital marketer who specializes in helping LGBT-affirming businesses take up space. With a marketing degree from the Fashion Institute of Technology, they started Marketing by Rocio to help small business owners who often feel left behind and under-resourced. Rocio grew up between New York City and the Dominican Republic, and is now based in Europe, where they've lived for almost ten years between Amsterdam and Paris. They speak three languages (English, Spanish, and French) and deeply understand the lived experience of queer folks in these cultures, giving Rocio a unique outlook on running a queer-led business.
