How To Revive Your Marketing Strategy in 2026 (No More Guessing!)

**Justin Simon** (0:02)
Hey, friend, welcome to this week's episode of Distribution First. If you're like most marketers or creators or business owners that I talk to, you are most likely running some sort of content-led business. You're producing content, you're publishing, and you're also doing everything else that you have to do in your business.
And for some reason, you might not be growing the way you want to. And in reality, this is usually because of a few things that are really easy to miss, but they're quietly stalling a lot of your progress. And so today, I brought on Daniel Kosmala. He's an expert in building and scaling content-driven businesses. And we are going to talk about five things that are quietly killing your growth and more importantly, what you can do about them. So Daniel, welcome to the show.

**Daniel Kosmala** (0:50)
Thanks so much for having me, Justin.

**Justin Simon** (0:52)
Absolutely. I'm super excited about this. So maybe as we set up this conversation and talk about these five things, maybe give us a little bit of the background on kind of either A, what you're seeing, or you can give a little bit of your background as well, but kind of how you came to these conclusions.

**Daniel Kosmala** (1:07)
Yeah, of course, happy to do that. Thanks again for having me. So yeah, I currently work at a company called Uscreen. I've been there for nearly six years. I've been working in marketing roles for almost 15 years, I guess. It's been a long time. But I've worked at Uscreen for six years, and we have a video monetization platform for creators and entrepreneurs. Before that, I actually worked at a digital membership business that was doing just under a million a year in revenue with me, the founder, and a couple other people. So it was like, I think, five people total to start. It was like me, the founder, and then just a couple of contractors. So cut my teeth there in terms of the subscription world, and then came to Uscreen six years ago.
And we serve thousands of creators all over the world who are selling digital video in some shape or form, whether that's courses, mostly memberships and subscription businesses. And I have talked to hundreds and hundreds of those customers. And really over the last year have dug deep in with a number of those customers, or a number of those people like figuring out, okay, what's wrong with your business? Why isn't it growing the way you wanted to? What's wrong? And honestly, within a month of starting that work, I started to see patterns emerging. And a lot of the times, people think that their business is unique, that their business is different than everybody else's, but I'm here to tell you, they're all pretty much the same.
Now, that's obviously a generalization. Every business is different. They operate differently, but there are some common themes that really tie people together. And I started to notice very quickly these common threads. If you're struggling with this, you're not alone. If you're struggling with this, you're not alone. And there are clear ways to fix those things, which is the good news. So that's kind of how I've arrived where I'm at these days.

**Justin Simon** (3:02)
Yeah, so let's dive right into those. Then what's maybe one of the main ones that you've sort of seen that sort of sticks out, like as you've talked to these hundreds of business owners and creators as far as a sticking point to why they're not seeing the success that they want to see.

**Daniel Kosmala** (3:21)
So when I kind of like go through the five, there are two that stand out to people as being like the sexy things to like go fix, because they seem like the fun ones to work on. And that is like broken marketing funnel and email marketing, which honestly you could even lump in as being one piece of a marketing funnel. But honestly, people's funnels are usually broken, and so is their email marketing. So those are the two biggest ones, but honestly, the one that I come back to more consistently and either like maybe not more consistently, but I think is a precursor to having a really good marketing funnel and to having really good email marketing is the first one that I try to work with people on, which is like they don't know their audience as well as they think they do, which is a huge like nothing else really matters if you're getting that part wrong. And if you don't know your audience well enough, like if you're making too many assumptions about who they are, what they want, what they're willing to pay for, you're setting your business up for failure from the get go.