You’re Solving The Wrong Marketing Problem

The most visible part of your marketing is rarely where the real problem begins.

If your marketing isn’t producing the results you want, it’s tempting to start by quickly changing things. Your Instagram bio. Your website. The number of emails in your launch.

That isn’t necessarily a mistake. Changing those things won’t do any harm. After all, it could be something on your website. It could be that you’re sending too many emails, or not enough. Those things can be part of the problem.

They’re just very unlikely to be the reason you’re not getting clients.

A founder who isn’t seeing enquiries will often start with the most visible parts of their marketing. A specialist will most likely suggest their area of expertise as the solution to the problem presented to them.

And so, the homepage gets rewritten. The call to action changes. More content gets published. A launch grows from three emails to seven.

Those are all marketing decisions, but the question is whether they’re the right decisions for your business.

Most founders, and honestly a lot of marketers, don’t see marketing as a continuum.

The truth is that marketing begins much earlier than most people think. It starts right up at the strategic end of the business and continues all the way to the point where it hands over to Sales, through decisions around sales pages, calls to action, conversion content, and other activities close to the point of conversion.

Most marketing advice focuses on this final, highly visible end of the continuum.

However, if you’re not getting the right clients, or not getting enough clients, you could be dealing with a much more structural problem.

A mismatch between your offer and your target audience (meaning the people you are speaking to are not the people interested in what you’re offering).

A mismatch between the value you provide and the price you charge.

A mismatch between the type of business you run and the way you position and portray it online.

So, if you’re not getting results, rather than assuming the bright new shiny thing is the solution, the real answer any marketing professional should be providing you is: it depends. I’d need to take a look underneath the hood to see what could be going on.

Only then does it make sense to decide whether the answer is your positioning, your offer, your website, your content, your emails, a combination of all, or something else entirely.