I Took a Marketing Class—Now I Know Everything

Welcome to the "Did You Try Geofencing?" Era In the world of digital marketing, there’s a sacred moment that happens in every agency office. It starts when a business owner calls and says the words: “So I just got back from this conference…” That sentence is the marketing equivalent of someone watching one YouTube video about open-heart surgery and then walking into the ER with a scalpel like, “I got this.” And look—good on them. Learning is great. Self-education is noble. But taking a four-hour workshop on "How to Use Instagram Reels to Dominate the Market" doesn’t make you Gary Vee. It just makes you someone who now thinks “meta descriptions” go on images. Which… they don’t. Please don’t do that. In this episode of the Search Hustle Podcast, we tackle one of the most common (and accidentally hilarious) marketing problems agencies face: business owners who want to be involved in marketing—but don’t really know what that means. “What’s Our Strategy on... Meta Descriptions for JPGs?” There’s a real conversation that happened where a business owner asked us: “Have you ever done a meta tag in a meta description on an image?” That sentence is like asking a chef if they’ve ever cooked a microwave. It’s just... not how any of this works. Meta descriptions describe pages—not images. But to the freshly-minted Marketing Class Alumni, it all sounds the same. And we get it. You heard some buzzwords. You got excited. You came back from the seminar with a hotel pen, a three-ring binder, and a burning desire to say, “Are we using geofencing?” at least twice a day. But here’s the thing: digital marketing is not a set of magic words you say to make money. It's not Beetlejuice. It’s a craft. It’s layered. It’s slow sometimes. It’s not one thing—it’s a system of many things, each one dependent on others being set up correctly. You can’t start with the cherry on top and then ask where the cake is. SEO Isn’t a Checkbox—It’s a Strategy Let’s talk about SEO for a second. A lot of these conversations start like: “Are we doing SEO?” That’s like asking your contractor, “Are we using nails?” Like, yes. Yes, we are. We’ve been doing that since Day One. But SEO isn’t a single button we press. It’s technical, local, content-driven, link-building—all of it. But what most business owners really mean is: “I heard a new word. Are we doing that word?” And listen, if we had a dollar for every time we’ve heard “schema,” “geofencing,” “Core Web Vitals,” or “EAT,” we’d be out here geofencing a yacht. The Post-Conference Glow-Up There’s something about conferences that fills people with a temporary glow of confidence and a small packet of absolute chaos. The owner comes back from a hotel ballroom in Des Moines with 50 pages of notes and a dream. They burst into the office like: “Have we ever done content repurposing for maximum funnel conversion via omnichannel AI automation?” No. Because that’s not a real sentence. That’s a podcast Mad Lib. But we’ll still answer kindly, professionally, and only scream internally. Let’s Be Clear: We LOVE That You Care All jokes aside, let’s clear something up. We love that business owners want to be involved. We love that they’re learning. We love that they want to know what we’re doing with their budget. That’s fantastic. But there’s a line between asking good questions and accidentally becoming the guy at the BBQ who argues with a doctor about how “WebMD said it could be gout.” When a business owner learns one term—like “geofencing”—and suddenly wants it all over their Google Ads account without providing an ad budget, it makes things… interesting. When You Know Just Enough to Be Dangerous A big theme of this episode was what happens when clients come in with just enough marketing knowledge to feel confident—but not enough to know when they're off base. Think of it like trying to land a plane because you watched Top Gun twice. You understand the vibe—but you’re about to crash that SEO into the ocean. Common Off-Base Requests We Hear Here are a few favorites from the podcast team: “Can we SEO the PDF?” “Can you make our Facebook post go viral?” “Are you targeting keywords in the header of our YouTube thumbnail?” “What’s our funnel doing on TikTok?” Each of these questions reveals good intentions but shaky understanding. And that’s okay! But it means the marketing team has to spend time explaining instead of executing. That costs momentum. That costs efficiency. That can slow down results. Trusting the Process (Even When It’s Boring) Marketing isn't always sexy. Sometimes it's doing the same thing 40 times—like creating title tags, resizing images, rewriting meta data—because that's what gets results. Imagine going to a personal trainer and saying: “Why aren’t we doing backflips yet? I saw it on TikTok.” Because you still can’t do a push-up, Kevin. Great marketing comes from boring consistency, not flashy trends. And your marketing team needs room to focus on the work that actually moves the needle—not just the work that sounds fancy. When to Ask Questions (and How to Ask Better Ones) Here’s what we recommend to all our business owners: 1. Ask for Strategy, Not Buzzwords Instead of asking if we’re “doing schema,” ask what our content strategy looks like. That invites a real conversation. 2. Focus on Goals, Not Tools Rather than saying “Should we be on Threads?” ask, “How can we improve brand engagement this quarter?” 3. Share Your Ideas—Then Let Us Translate Have an idea? Awesome. Tell us. Then give us space to translate it into something that works within your funnel, brand, and tech stack. 4. Let the Experts Drive You wouldn’t grab the wheel from your Uber driver because you saw a shortcut on Apple Maps. Same thing applies here. Collaboration Over Control If you own a business, it’s awesome that you want to be involved in your marketing. But being involved doesn’t mean taking the reins when you don’t know the terrain. It’s okay to not understand everything. That’s what we’re here for. Your job is to grow your business. Ours is to help people find your business. Let’s each stay in our lane (but use the same map).