A lot of what gets passed off as best practice is conventional wisdom recycled by people who’ve never had to defend their results. Following their advice is basically repeating their mistakes. And it’ll cost you time, money, and momentum.

Most bad marketing advice has one thing in common: It skips the hard part. Before following a hot tip that promises to short cut to magical results, make sure you’ve worked through the hard part. Here are the BAD tips we see founders follow most often…

At Unicorn Creative, we do things differently. We believe you should be able to get an instant, accurate answer from anyone on our team. How do we do it?

Most marketing agencies want you dependent, locking down your assets and campaign results in proprietary systems to make you reliant on them for years on end. Why? Because they want you on retainer, which is agency-speak for a subscription.

You’ve seen it before: the standard packages, the turnkey solutions, and the design templates. It sounds great to get started immediately, right? That might be helpful for onboarding your new CRM, but it can be disastrous when it comes to marketing your business.

The truth is that you don’t need a sophisticated business intelligence tool or to stare at spreadsheets until your eyes cross to figure out why something is or isn’t working. You just need to know the right questions to ask.