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13. The platform you don’t control can kill your business overnight. Many years ago, I was banned from both Meta and Google Ads for another business I was running. No warning. No appeal that mattered. Just gone. Within six months, that ban killed an entire info business I had in the dry-cleaning niche. Years of work, gone, because I didn’t control the platform. Here’s the hard truth: Email deliverability keeps dropping. Meta and Google can and will ban you from their platforms. Facebook’s organic reach averaged just 1.4% in 2024. Instagram sits at 3.5%–4%. Even email typically only reaches 20%–30% of your list, depending on your industry. If email or social is your only connection to customers, you’ve already lost access to 70%–98% of your ability to reach them. That’s why I push clients to collect real, multichannel contact information: name, email, mailing address, and phone at a minimum. Print, email, social, and text together give you resilience. If one channel gets shut down or stops working, the others keep you connected. The lesson: Build your contact list across multiple channels. The platform you bet everything on today might ban you tomorrow.
ad. They spent seven weeks using artificial intelligence (AI) to create a “clever” commercial showing people slipping on ice, burning cookies, getting tangled in lights — then suggesting they hide from their families at McDonald’s until January. Technically proficient. Strategically terrible. They pulled it after massive backlash. One viewer nailed it: “No artistry. No wit. No charm. No warmth. No humanity. You can tell it’s AI from a million miles away.” Coca-Cola made the same mistake twice with AI Christmas ads that consumers called “creepy” and “soulless.” Be real. Share genuine stories. Let your values show. Don’t share your darkest secrets, political views, or every controversial opinion to be authentic, unless that is part of your brand. Our best-performing content at Newsletter Pro, for both clients and ourselves, has always been when we told real, personal stories. Not polished. Not written by AI. Just human. The lesson: Authenticity can’t be faked, but it also isn’t permission to be unfiltered. Be genuine. Be thoughtful. Be human. 15. Story compresses years of learning into minutes. Every business is sitting on a gold mine of content — it’s just waiting to be tapped. The biggest resource for a company to market, in many cases, is the owner. Yet most business owners are stuck in the grind instead of working on what matters. Time and again, I’ve seen the same pattern: Facts and features bounce off people while stories stick. You can tell someone, “Retention matters,” and they’ll nod and forget. Or you can tell them about the client who almost left, how a relationship
Progress compounds a lot faster when you don't have to keep rebuilding what you rushed the first time.
14. Authenticity is your competitive advantage, but it has guardrails. Being authentic doesn’t mean sharing every dark thought or controversial opinion with your customers. There’s a line between genuine and reckless. Abercrombie & Fitch CEO Michael Jeffries crossed it when he said, “Only cool, good-looking people should shop here.” That authentic but offensive comment tanked the company, resulting in a $60 million sales drop. However, there’s a flip side: You can’t fake authenticity either. McDonald’s learned this the hard way with their 2025 Christmas
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