Educated hedging

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Hey folks, it's your content friend Eric here.

I’ve always struggled with the certainty and decisiveness people expect from marketers.

Back when I was a less seasoned SEO/content freelancer, I’d often lose potential clients to other freelancers or agencies who guaranteed results. I’d give the old line, “We’ll probably see results in about 6 months….maybe.”

Or I’d fail to dazzle co-workers when I’d present a marketing plan and then opine about all the reasons it might fail.

Of course, I didn’t want to lie, but I struggled to sell the truth.

Coming from a brief stint as a psycholinguist, I was trained to be a skeptic. In science, you have to think about all the potential reasons an experiment might fail. Talking through and designing around all of those possible failure modes is exactly what leads to great experimental design. If you don’t, the results are bogus.

Of course, that’s not as true of marketing. Yes, it helps to have a great plan and think through the failure modes, but you can really just try stuff and fail forward.

The hard part for me has always been communicating the uncertainty of what may or may not happen.

The more experience I got under my belt, the more frustrated I got with successful “thought leaders” (we didn’t call them that at the time) who made bold, unwavering statements about what did/didn’t work, when I had plenty of personal experience to the contrary. Were they lying or just brazenly overconfident?

My bosses would see such proclamations, forward them to me, and say, “We should try this.” I would openly hem and haw over why their advice may or may not work, which would normally lose to the convincing absoluteness of the thought leaders.

I’m feeling the same thing now with all the AEO experts and agencies popping up. (Yes, some folks are running well-designed experiments and sharing data the scientific way. And some folks are saying “we don’t know yet, but let’s try.”) But many folks are making bank by making absolute statements about what must be true, when it’s clear to me that this world is still absolutely unknowable because it changes every day.

I really don’t think you need to be one of these people to succeed. I’m sure most of the freelancers I competed against churned and burned clients by guaranteeing results. I’m sure the same will happen with many of these AEO agencies.

What I do think you need to succeed is the ability to communicate confidently in the face of uncertainty—especially if you want to move up the corporate ladder or earn bigger freelance contracts. You’ve gotta give “trusted partner” vibes.

I’ve gotten much better at this over the years. Working directly with senior leadership at a few startups was a great forcing function for this.

Now when I present a marketing plan, I present it more like:

Framing it that way builds a heck of a lot more trust that you know what you’re doing. And it doesn’t even have to be a super formal presentation. It might just come up casually in your 1-on-1s with your boss or client.

But it’s good to internalize some form of “educated hedging” framework for when these conversations come up.

I’m still learning to be a great corporate communicator (unfortunately, it’s not the same skill as being a good writer). But at this stage in my career, and probably yours too, how you communicate uncertainty to your boss/clients matters a lot more than how good a writer you are or how many Claude skills you’ve made. Definitely a (real) skill worth working on!

Cheers,

- Eric

PS. I have to look up the spelling of “hem and haw” every time

PPS. We have a really exciting AMA coming up next week in the community with Sabreen Haziq from Buffer. Don’t miss out👇

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🎙 New episode of Content, Briefly: CEO Tyler Denk wants beehiiv to be Shopify, not Amazon

Tyler Denk was the second employee at Morning Brew, where his innovations helped turn one business newsletter into a media juggernaut.

That experience led him to start beehiiv, with a vision to build the newsletter (and multi-channel media) platform he wished he had back then.

In this conversation, Tyler and Alex talk about how beehiiv is deliberately building itself as invisible infrastructure for creators rather than a destination that owns the audience—the Shopify model, not the Amazon one—which is exactly why he's skeptical of Substack's push into becoming a social app and its take-rate business model.

They also talked about:

Listen here.

🎙 Another new episode of Content, Briefly: So the career you built doesn't exist anymore...

(Wow, what value. Two for one! The truth is I’ve somehow been behind by one podcast episode in the last bunch of newsletters and finally decided to rectify it.)

On last week’s episode, Alex and Chloe talk to Bonfire cofounders Kevan Lee and Shannon Deep.

Kevan and Shannon left in-house marketing after years of watching good jobs turn sour. They now run Bonfire together, hosting brand marketing retreats for marketers wondering if there's still a place for them in an AI-flooded, flatter, harder-to-break-into job market.

Their big question is what would you do, in work and life, if you made time to choose?

Their advice for marketers at a crossroads right now: don't chase certifications or "must-have" skills to stay marketable. Hiring managers care more about proof of work than credentials. Burning yourself out upskilling for a job you don't even like isn't worth it.

They also talked about:

Listen here.

💬 Great Slack Threads This Week

Here were some great discussions in the Superpath Slack community this week:

📙 The Reading List

Here are some links that got the Superpath Slack community talking this week:

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