Toast my f-ing bagel.

I will die on this hill

I used to go get bagels and coffees on Saturday mornings with my wife. I would always order a toasted sesame bagel with cream cheese. The bagel always came out barely toasted from this shop. This went on for weeks until I finally said something.

“Excuse me, This bagel isn’t really toasted.”

“Well I ran it through the toasting oven.”

What I wanted to say was - I didn’t ask you to run it through a machine. I asked you to toast my f-ing bagel.

But I’m not some crazy Karen so instead I simply said “Ok.” smiled and walked away. Ate my un-toasted bagel and found a new spot the next week.

“Toast my bagel” has now become a saying in our house meaning do the actual job not just go through the motion of it.

So let me tell you, too many marketers today aren’t really toasting the bagel.

Most of the marketing I see today is completely uninspired.

> Boring subject lines that took 10 seconds to write and 1/2 a second to delete.
> Stock images and illustrations that people scroll right past
> Generic keyword stuffed AI content no one actually reads
> Bland podcasts without a real point of view no one listens to.
> Generic direct mail campaigns that end up in the trash.

The problem is these same marketers are tasked with hitting extraordinary growth numbers. Markets are crowded. Everyone is doing paid, creating content, posting on social, podcasting, sending emails etc. Simply doing marketing isn’t good enough.

If you sell a marketing automation solution you aren’t competing with the other 300 companies selling the same thing, you are actually competing with all 10,000 martech solutions going after the same buyers.

To truly scale you need to approach it differently then those other companies. That could mean your creative, your offer, combining it with direct mail - really anything. And that’s the fun part - figuring out what can set you apart. 

Look across your channels and strategies - how many of them truly stand out?

One of the things I love most about running Growth Union is we get to push the envelope across a lot of companies. Right now alone, we are working on:

> A direct mail campaign involving a potato
> A contest give-away for best side hustles
> Influencer campaigns on Tik-tok
> Automating outreach to all high intent website visitors
> Competitor steal campaign - involving crazy landing page personalization.
> Outbound subject line testing - currently getting 60% + opens

And guess what? All of those companies are growing and scaling.

Point is - maybe the reason growth is so hard to get going is because your marketing is boring. Try having some fun with what you do instead and you might be surprised at the results.

Marketing isn’t the act of sending emails or running ads. Marketing is getting people’s attention and getting them to take actions. That is marketing.

Toast the f-ing bagel.