Ditching the gurus: how to actually start in SMM

datanerd

I've been in B2B demand gen for years, and i still see this question pop up constantly. The short answer: skip the courses and gurus. I finished one of those Rene Lacad classes too - turns out the guy's reputation is f*cked. Don't waste your money.

Here's what I learned the hard way. Start by running tiny ads for yourself or a friend. Not for a client. You need to understand the mechanics before you sell anything. Build a sandbox project: pick a niche, throw up a basic landing page, try to get just 10 people to sign up for something. Don't worry about scale. Worry about how you find the audience, what you say, and why they click. One week of that taught me more than six months of how-to videos.

To answer your specific questions:

Followers mean nothing. I've run campaigns for zero-follower pages that outperformed accounts with 10k. Meta's algorithm cares about ad relevance and landing page experience, not vanity metrics.
SMMDealFinder? tried it. Leads were garbage. Better to build your own outreach with a clear ICP.
Location: depends on the offer. For local businesses, same city works best. for digital products or agencies, go national or even global. But start local to test targeting.
Running ads with AI? Yes, but only for creative and copy variation. Don't let AI handle bidding or audience selection until you know what good looks like.
Cost to start? Minimal. I spent £50 on a domain and landing page builder. Ads budget can be £5/day for testing.

Biggest tip: don't chase the shiny tools. learn the fundamentals - targeting, messaging, funnel structure. The rest is noise.

chatbox

Honestly, the "skip gurus" advice is the single best thing you can do. Everyone wants to sell you a £2k course that's basically a repackaged Google help article. I've been doing this for years and here's what actually works when you're starting from zero.

Build your own sandbox. Set up a Google Tag Manager container on a personal site or a friend's small business site. Doesn't matter what it is - a blog, a local café, whatever. Go into GSC and Ahrefs (their free Webmaster Tools is plenty to start). Run a Screaming Frog crawl on that site. You'll learn more from fixing a real (but low-stakes) site than from any course.
Run tiny ads for a friend. I mean tiny - £5/day on Meta or Google, targeting a very specific local audience. You're not trying to make money, you're learning the interface: conversion tracking, UTM parameters, event tagging. Mess around with the GTM preview mode until you can see every click, form submission, and page view fire correctly into GA4.
Use free analytics tools to your advantage. Set up Google Search Console and see which queries actually drive traffic. Compare that with what your ad data says. The gap between what people search and what they click is where the real insight lives. I still use this method when auditing client accounts.
Skip the gurus. Seriously. The most valuable stuff I learned came from breaking my own container, fixing it, and reading the official Tag Manager documentation. That and asking specific questions in communities like this one - not "how do I start?" but "why is my GA4 event not firing on button click?" - will teach you 10x faster.

Start small, break things, fix them, and repeat. The rest is noise.

emailwiz

oh, this hits home. back when I was trying to break into marketing, I spent months reading every "ultimate guide" and watching endless webinars. felt productive, but i couldn't actually do anything with it. the real breakthrough came when i just picked a tiny niche-think something absurdly specific like "vegan snacks for gamers"-threw together a stupidly simple landing page on Carrd, and ran a tiny Facebook ad with £20. my goal? get five email sign-ups. not even customers, just people willing to hand over their email.

that one week taught me more about copy, targeting, and why people actually click than every course I'd binged before. You start to see the gap between theory and reality real fast. so yes: build your sandbox project. don't worry about scale. worry about the mechanics-how do you even find the audience, what do you say that makes them pause, what makes them hit that button. You'll learn more in seven days of chasing ten sign-ups than in six months of watching "how-to" videos. it's messy, frustrating, and brilliant.

ranktracker

Get a degree, get a job. Seriously, stop listening to snake oil salesmen online. focus on fundamentals like log file analysis.

gmbpro

You're asking the right questions. Most newbies skip the fundamentals and jump straight into tools they don't need.

You don't need thousands of followers or expensive software. Clients want one thing: can you drive customers?
Start with content creation, basic Meta ads, copywriting - and analytics. Don't sleep on GA4 setup, that's where trust in your results lives.
Then get hands-on. a friend's business, a local shop, a school club. one small case study beats another course every time.

even a 3-month tracking test with real conversion data is worth more than a certification

emailwiz

Good on you for asking first - that already puts you ahead of half the people who dive in and blow their budget on garbage.

I've been in this game a few years now, and I can tell you straight up: Rene Lacad is absolutely a scammer. Anyone selling you a dream with no track record of actual client results? Run.

You don't need followers. Zero. Zilch. Businesses couldn't care less about your personal Instagram. They care if you can move the needle for them.

And yeah, those lead gen platforms like smmdealfinder? Total waste of time. You'll spend hours sifting through tyre kickers who want everything for free. Better to pick three local businesses you genuinely like - walk in or DM them. Offer to run one tiny campaign for free or cheap just to get a case study. That's your ticket.

Leads can come from anywhere, but starting local is smart. Face-to-face builds trust way faster than cold DMs.

On AI - yes, you can use it to write copy and create creative. But you still need to know how to target and read data. AI won't save you if you don't understand the basics. Learn the fundamentals first.

Cost to start? Basically nothing. A laptop, maybe £15 for a domain and landing page. I'd actually suggest starting with organic social help before touching paid ads. Get one win under your belt, then scale.

My biggest piece of advice: pick one platform and learn it inside out. Facebook and Instagram are where most small businesses still hang out. Master the ads manager, learn how to write copy that actually sells. Everything else is just reps.

Start small, fail fast, learn, and try again. You've got this.

datanerd

Why start with a free landing page builder like HubSpot? For B2B ABM you'll need more control - have you tried a static site on AWS S3 or GitHub Pages?

digitalnomad

I remember feeling exactly the same when I started out. A structured digital marketing course - one of the big online platforms - laid out a clear path for me and made everything click. Definitely worth exploring if you're after a solid foundation.