Remove Your Marketing Darlings
🔥 It’s Time To Let Go
🧠 Painful? Absolutely.
🌋 How To Start
🏷️ Marketing Tips
Contents
Introduction
The phrase “kill your darlings” comes from the world of writing. It means letting go of the lines, scenes, or ideas you love (You know, the ones you poured your heart into) if they don’t serve the bigger story.
Painful? Absolutely.
Necessary? Always.
In marketing, the idea is exactly the same.
Your “darlings” are the things you’re emotionally attached to even when the data tells you they’re not working.
Here’s what they might look like:
- That campaign you spent two months building — strategy decks, custom assets, cross-channel rollout — but it landed with a thud. No clicks. No lift. Just crickets.
- The slogan your CEO is obsessed with — it’s been on every pitch deck and banner ad for a year, but no one outside your company knows what it actually means.
- The email template that’s been running since last summer — beautifully designed, brand-approved, and totally ignored by your audience (0.7% click-through rate and dropping).
- The visual aesthetic you’ve clung to since 2021 — sleek, polished, and completely invisible in today’s scroll-first attention economy.
These are your darlings.
They feel essential, but they’re actually dead weight.
They take up budget, energy, and oxygen that should be spent on what works.
And if you’re serious about results?
You’ve got to be willing to let them go.
Let the metrics lead the way.
You Are Not Your Audience
It’s easy to forget.
You live inside your brand. You know the product inside out. You’ve read the strategy doc.
You’ve sat in the brainstorms. You’ve reviewed the copy 17 times.
But none of that makes you a proxy for the people you’re trying to reach.
And when teams start treating themselves like the customer, things become blurry, boundaries become crossed and we end up in the realm of assumptions and wishes.
We’ve seen it happen over and over again:
- A campaign gets built to impress leadership, not engage real humans. It looks amazing in the pitch deck… and gets ignored in the wild.
- A content piece keeps getting pushed out “because it took a lot of time to make,” not because it’s driving traffic or conversions.
- Design or copy gets approved because someone “likes the feel of it” even though the data says otherwise.
That’s not a strategy. That’s internal bias.
And it’s one of the fastest ways to waste budget, stall growth, and miss the mark entirely.
Your audience isn’t sitting in your meetings. They aren’t in the room where it happens…
They’re not thinking about your brand.
They’re not here to interpret vague metaphors or admire your typography choices.
They’re busy. Distracted. Skeptical. And one bad experience away from bouncing and ignoring your brand forever.
So let’s be crystal clear:
You don’t need to impress your team.
You need to move the people who don’t care about your brand (yet).
You need to win attention in seconds.
Be clear when others are vague.
Be useful when others are loud.
Be relevant, or be ignored.
Plan #1 Run an Audience Alignment Check
Take one live piece of content – an ad, a landing page, a video, a sales email – and run it through this filter:
- Would a complete stranger understand what this is within 5 seconds?
- Does it lead with value, or with what we think sounds cool?
- If we weren’t inside this company, would we care?
If the answer to any of those is “no” — it’s not ready.
Strip it back. Clarify the message. Bring it back to the user’s world, not yours.
Because clarity beats cleverness.
Results beat opinions.
And the only people who matter are the ones you haven’t won yet.
Kill the ego. Serve the audience.
Then watch what happens.
What Does Ruthless Marketing Actually Look Like?
Ruthless marketing isn’t about being cold. It’s about being clear.
It’s not about tearing down for sport it’s about refusing to waste energy on what doesn’t deliver.
It means auditing everything without emotion.
It means choosing performance over polish.
It means asking the question every marketer avoids:
“If we weren’t already doing this… would we start now?”
Ruthless means honest.
It means cutting your losses fast.
It means optimizing for attention, action, and ROI — not legacy or internal comfort.
Plan #2 Get Ruthless (here are some places to start)
❌ The Brand Film You’re Proud Of
You hired a great director. You wrote a heartfelt script. The voiceover makes your team tear up. You dropped it on the homepage like a mic.
But the data tells a different story:
- Only 11% of visitors click play.
- The average watch time is 14 seconds.
- Zero impact on conversions, demo signups, or scroll depth.
The problem? It’s built for emotion, not for speed. It’s designed to be appreciated, not acted on.
And worst of all — it’s optimised for desktop… when 80% of your traffic is on mobile.
✅ Kill it.
Cut it down to 3-5 second hooks that actually stop a scroll.
Test motion against static. Prioritise value over vibe.
Your audience is skimming. Match that behavior — or lose them entirely.
Hard truth: If the only people watching your content are internal, it’s not content it’s nostalgia.
❌ The “Award-Winning” Tagline
You spent weeks on it. You ran workshops. You brought in brand consultants. It feels clever. Poetic. Maybe even emotional.
But when you put it in front of real users?
Crickets. Confusion. The most common response:
“Wait… what do you actually do?”
You have 3 seconds to land your value. That’s it.
Clever buys you a slow clap in a brainstorm.
Clarity gets the click.
✅ Kill it.
Replace it with a statement so clear, you could shout it on a noisy subway and still be understood.
Lead with function. Anchor in outcome. Write for the impatient.
If it needs explaining, it’s already failed.
❌ The Weekly Newsletter That Won’t Die
It’s been going out every Thursday for 18 months.
Internal teams like it. Leadership occasionally forwards it. It’s “on brand.”
But the metrics?
- Open rates haven’t budged above 15%.
- Clicks are flat.
- There’s no measurable conversion lift.
Still, it lives on — because “we’ve always done it.”
✅ Kill it.
Replace it with behavior-based automation.
Segmented flows. Triggered emails tied to actual customer actions.
Make relevance the standard, not routine.
If your email isn’t helpful, timely, or actionable — it’s noise.
❌ The Social Channel No One’s Watching
You post daily to a platform that brings in less than 2% of your traffic.
Why? Because once upon a time, it drove results.
Or because someone on the team has a personal affinity for it.
You’re burning time, budget, and energy to keep something alive that hasn’t delivered in quarters.
✅ Kill it.
Run a 90-day channel performance audit. Reallocate that time to where you have real traction — even if it’s unsexy.
Instagram stories, UGC, paid retargeting — wherever your audience actually is.
Presence means nothing without performance.
❌ The Landing Page That Looks Great But Doesn’t Convert
You A/B tested the colors. You sourced custom illustrations. The UX feels “premium.”
But…
- Bounce rate is 78%
- Time on page: under 20 seconds
- Conversions? Barely above baseline
✅ Kill it.
Strip it back. Lead with urgency. Make the CTA impossible to miss. Inject social proof above the fold. Use real language, not brand speak.
Pretty is not the same as persuasive.
Ruthless Means: Everything Fights to Stay Alive
At Everburn, we have a simple rule:
Everything in your funnel should fight for its place.
Nothing is safe. Not even the “good” stuff. Especially not the old stuff.
Ruthless marketing means removing friction wherever it hides:
- In processes
- In language
- In content that doesn’t convert
- In design that looks good but doesn’t work
- In “best practices” that are actually just bad habits
Plan #3 – Build a “Remove List”
Here’s how to apply ruthless thinking today:
- Inventory everything you’re doing: Campaigns, emails, landing pages, videos, content series, ad sets, channels.
- Ask the kill question: If we weren’t already doing this, would we start now?
- Cut 20% of it immediately.
- Replace it with tests: Scrappy, low-lift, high-feedback experiments. Push live. Watch the numbers. Double down on what works.
Marketing isn’t about doing more.
It’s about doing less — but better.
Burn what doesn’t serve.
Light up what does.
That’s how you create real ignition.
This isn’t about being harsh. It’s about being honest.
Killing your darlings doesn’t mean creativity is dead.
It means creativity is finally accountable.
It means ideas are judged by results, not emotion.
Great marketing is lean. Fast. Relentless.
And if you want ignition — you need fuel, not friction.
Final word
“Kill your darlings” is not a cute phrase. It’s a discipline. A mindset shift. A permission slip to stop clinging to work that isn’t working.
Marketing isn’t therapy. It’s ignition.
It’s not about what feels good — it’s about what performs.
So look at your work. Your content. Your pipeline.
And start cutting.
Burn the safe stuff.
Burn the fluff.
Burn your darlings.
And watch what happens when the only thing left is what works.
