Seven reasons why your marketing plan is failing — and what you can do about it
Many businesses make it look easy. But is there really a secret marketing hack? Definitely not. Here’s what businesses should be doing instead.
No matter how many years your business has been selling to customers, you’re probably no closer to unlocking a secret marketing formula than the biggest Fortune 500 companies. Consumer behaviours, communication platforms, and a million other external factors mean locking in a ‘marketing formula’ that stands the test of time is virtually impossible.
Trust me, the ones that lead the way are not in possession of a secret formula; they just have enough cash flow to have top marketers experimenting 24 hours a day, seven days a week to find what works for their business. Most entrepreneurs are lucky to find two hours a month.
If you’re familiar with the popular marketing saying, ‘50% of marketing works; if only we knew which 50%’, then you’ll know exactly what I am talking about. Trying something new is a risk. It’ll cost you a lot of money, it’s not guaranteed to work and there are a million avenues to choose from.
Of course, many businesses make it look easy.
And many experts claim to have the ‘seven-figure-guaranteed marketing secret’ or the ‘20k per day sales hack’ that they use to generate $1 million worth of income with next to no work.
Are these guys for real? Maybe.
Is there really a secret marketing hack? Definitely not.
The promised land
Several years ago, I fell into a bit of a marketing trap that I am almost too embarrassed to admit. It was early 2021 and I was two months away from giving birth to my son. Before this, I was absolutely in denial about going on any kind of maternity leave, but as the date crept closer it was really beginning to sink in that my business development hat was about to disappear from our company for a while and I needed a quick solution for sustaining our lead flow.
Out of desperation, or possibly just exhaustion, I started a search for a marketing agency dissimilar from our own that could bring in high-value leads for my company while I was on maternity leave. A brand new, cold marketing strategy.
I found an agency in the UK that served me a series of Facebook ads about their secret, proven marketing formula, and I believed they were telling the truth (I should have known better). The first time I met them over a video call late in the evening (because of the time difference), I remember feeling sceptical. They were vague about their special marketing sauce, but fantastic at convincing me it was going to work. I assumed the lack of detail in their proposed strategy was due to the fact we had not signed any contracts yet and I was somewhat of a competitor.
In the weeks to come I was sent a contract and some brief info about a potential campaign, which looked okay. It was the equivalent of $10,000 for the campaign set-up and a further $2500 per month for management, plus any advertising spend, which they recommended be between $2000 and $4000.
I signed it.
The first month of the project was labelled as a ‘set-up month’, which I could only assume involved setting up the campaign copy, and creative and technical elements. They insisted on using a third-party website builder instead of our own website and produced two landing pages using Click Funnels (a funnel-building website). It looked okay. I couldn’t find the secret formula in it though — it looked straightforward to me. Possibly the secret recipe was in the advertising setup.
So after four to six weeks of setting up the landing pages, the ad campaign began. I quickly scoured the ads manager to see what was so special about their set-up/creative/wording/imagery.
And much to my absolute disappointment, there was nothing. There was nothing special, nothing out of the ordinary, nothing my team could not have set up themselves. It was Facebook advertising 101.
So, naturally, I panicked. We had just invested $12,500 in a strategy that was not even close to what we would recommend to our clients. It was a disaster. I was embarrassed, and I was out of pocket a lot of money. And to top it off, at this point I was in hospital on strict bed rest orders so there wasn’t anything I could do even if I wanted to.
I had to let it run its course. Give the campaign some time to deliver some leads. Long story short, I pulled the plug when we hit $20,000 of expenses and no leads. Not one.
The agency was less than cooperative. They wouldn’t entertain new ideas on the campaign without us paying more, they didn’t seem to have a further strategy beyond what they initially came up with, and they kept claiming that we just needed more time for the campaign to run before we saw results. I felt tricked and taken advantage of and utterly embarrassed.
I have thought a great deal about what transpired in those months over the last few years. It was absolutely one of those pivotal learning experiences that entrepreneurs always reference in their ‘journey-to 2success’ speeches — and not because it sent us broke and brought disaster upon the business, but because it taught us the very lessons that we were trying to teach others. There is no quick marketing hack, no marketing secret, no sudden-millionaire weapon.
If we had stayed on the path with that agency, things may have been different. We would have pivoted the strategy, learnt from the pitfalls, and tried and tested different strategies to bring that campaign to life alongside the other tactics in our business. It would have been a successful long game for us. Not the quick, temporary win I was betting on in my pregnancy-induced, drowsy desperation.
I was drawn in by the money guarantee that never existed. And at some point along your journey, you will be too. Drawn in by the sweet promise of instant success that is so very tempting to an entrepreneur like yourself who carries the weight of everything on their shoulders.
But just like anything in nature, good things take time to grow. Good marketing requires commitment, consistency, and, above all else, it requires a considered plan.
At one point, you may have had that plan.
Your business was generating leads and sales and you were hitting the revenue targets you had set out to achieve. The energy you once threw into driving leads to your business lapsed so you could focus on other things: staff things, processing things, product things.
Suddenly, it’s six months later, your lead pipeline is hollow, sales are slumping, and you haven’t even thought about marketing for months and months. You panic and see the overnight marketing-hack-secret income-generating sauce on the internet.
Tempted?
No!
Not you. You’re better than this.
There are reasons your marketing plan is failing, and it isn’t going to be solved by a quick hack (I am proof of that).
Reason #1: You don’t spend time on marketing
Level with me here: how much time do you spend on marketing every week? Every month? Is it something you spend time on consistently or is it sporadic? I bet you don’t even have time, am I right?
You have no time! Out of all the resources you do have, time is not one of them, and it’s very rarely spent working on the business. I would go as far as to say that this is the biggest reason I see growth stop for small businesses. Small-business owners:
- don’t have any time
- don’t prioritise it to marketing, and
- don’t know what to do with it when they do have it.
There’s a classic saying in business: ‘You need to be thinking about marketing when you don’t need it. Because if you wait until you do, it’s already too late’.
When you think about this paradox carefully, it likely rings true for your own business. Product-buying cycles for customers are such that if you wait until you have the time, until your business is quiet, until you have a dire need to market to them, there just won’t be enough time to generate the momentum you need to survive. So, depending on what industry you’re in, your lack of time could be catastrophic.
I work with a lot of clients that are in the B2B (business to business) space. To be more specific, this next example is in the B2BB (business to big-business service) — something I just made up to emphasise the exceptionally long buying cycles that come with selling products to big businesses, with their big budgets but also their big bureaucracy and multiple approvals that need to take place before a quote is approved.
One client of ours delivers leadership development services to big businesses. Her business services are demanded at different times of the year but usually line up with things like National Safe Work Month or the end of the financial year when budgets need to be spent.
Throughout the rest of the year, she is fairly quiet.
So, for her, April to July is packed with work and so is September to November (with October being National Safe Work Month).
Her average buying cycle is six months, which means that for her business to run effectively, she needs to be undertaking marketing and doing all her product delivery in the same months.
It’s chaos.
When she reflects on this, she laughs. She says, ‘It’s the unluckiest of flukes, that when I have the least amount of time all year, I must make the time for marketing and sales. These are the times we are supposed to be focusing on our service delivery and, instead, we are working on getting the next job.’
The kicker is if she didn’t, she wouldn’t survive.
Making time for marketing and sales is the biggest, most important thing you can do if you want to reach your goals. One of our biggest fears, though, is giving up that time for marketing and not using it on something that seems more important or urgent.
Those emails from those customers?
That interview?
Sorting out that quality problem?
All very important. But what is prioritising them costing you?
‘You don’t need more time. You just need to use the time you have better.’
I carry this quote with me everywhere. We are all given 24 hours in a day. Whether you want to grow your business, spend time with loved ones, pick up a new hobby, or work on your fitness — whatever is important to you deserves time. And you can’t make time, you must trade for time.
Don’t lose sight of what is important versus what is urgent in your business. You need to make time for things like marketing. (Forget about what to do with that time. I’ll tell you what to do later.)
I guarantee you that the more time you, the founder, dedicate to the marketing of your business, the more leads, customers, and fans you will generate. Almost exponentially.
But, for now, let’s just start small.
Go get your calendar out and block out some non-negotiable time each week to work on the business, not in the business. For my company it’s Tuesdays. We call it ‘hours of power’. We all get three hours from 8.30am to 11.30am to work together on marketing our business and using our technical expertise to overcome any of our marketing bottlenecks.
Allocating and dedicating time is the very first step. Just like any investment, time is a precious resource that can repay tenfold. Allocating this time is going to be the number one thing you can do to ensure your future is different from your present.
Reason #2: You aren’t focused
So it’s 8.30am Tuesday morning and you’re ready for your ‘hours of power’. You’ve got your coffee ready, your inbox is closed, your ‘do not disturb’ has been set on your phone, and you’re ready to ‘do marketing’.
So what do you do?
Lack of focus is a really big problem that small business owners face. Not just in marketing, but in every business discipline. When there’s a thousand competing priorities, it can seem impossible to give just one thing all of your attention. The result is that nothing gets completed — or worse, completed to terrible standards.
In the words of Gary Keller, author of The One Thing, ‘In your effort to attend to all things, everything gets short-changed and nothing is done’.
Marketing is the same. There are not only hundreds of options available to you and your business, but hundreds of ways to execute each marketing method — and no limits around them.
Source: Supplied
What I mean by that is that any other business task is finite. If you have to complete a Business Activity Statement (BAS), the task is complete when you submit the BAS. The actions involved to complete it are always the same, the outcome is always the same. There is one path.
When it comes to marketing, tasks are never straightforward. Marketing is variable, it is ongoing, and the frequency and nature of tasks are so different every time that it makes creating a static marketing plan and checklist very hard. It also makes sitting down and ‘doing marketing’ quite an unsettling task if you aren’t sure what to focus on.
I was in a meeting with my team the other day, and we were talking about all the actions we were working on for a client project leading up to a new product launch. I could feel the overwhelm in the room. There was a lot that needed to be done.
At the end of the meeting, I asked the team what they thought was the number one thing on the list right now. What was the most important thing?
One by one, everyone said something different.
We lacked focus because there were so many things that seemed equally important and could each lead to the best outcome. And our disparity was not going to lead to the best outcome for the client.
What I’ve found, time and time again, is that when it comes to marketing, businesses spread themselves thin. Really thin, across everything.
Ask a business owner what they are doing exceptionally well, and it’s not a lot of things.
Ask them what’s in progress, and there’s a lot.
When you spread yourself thin, it takes a very long time for anything to reach its maturity. And that’s why a lot of small businesses fail. Nothing quite gets finished, or nothing quite gets to 100% of what it could.
So, we have a bit of a saying to remedy this: Do it 105% or not at all.
This idea is going to come up again later in the book because it is very important. It is going to help you decide what marketing methods to choose for your business and commit to them.
Focus on one thing, give it 105% and it will do so much more for your business than 50 things you’re giving 2% of effort to a day.
In marketing, we see a lot of 2 percenters.
- It’s the social media page that hasn’t been used for eight months.
- It’s the Google Business listing that is out of date.
- It’s the About Us page on the website with team members who no longer work there.
- It’s a customer service email that gets responded to six days late.
- It’s ‘I’ll get to it eventually’, rather than, ‘this is my number one priority’.
Perhaps it’s inattention to where the focus needs to be directed. Or it’s the perceived risk of focusing on one thing to the exclusion of all others. But no matter what the reason, a lack of focus is one of the top reasons your marketing is failing.
Reason #3: You don’t have a system
Michael E Gerber is one of the world’s best business authors. He’s nearly 90 now, and his book The E-Myth Revisited: Why most small businesses don’t work and what to do about it is possibly one of the most cited books for SMEs to date.
Now, there are plenty of books out there written for SMEs, but none have stuck like the fable in Gerber’s book. He is responsible for transforming thousands of businesses over the last few decades just through the simple idea of systemising your business.
‘Let systems run the business, and people run the systems’, he says.
So many SMEs don’t have any systems within their business. Even systems as simple as the process to manufacture your products or the process in answering the phone.
Raising a quote.
Invoicing a client.
When you can systemise your business, you can do things like franchise it or double it in size or sell it. And it is separate from you as the business owner.
The way you generate business for your business needs to be its own system and it is an important one.
‘How are we expected to write down how we do sales? It’s different every time,’ said Ron, sales agent for an international battery technology company.
Ron is based in Turkey and is the sales agent for the western Asian region. He is very good at his job and doesn’t particularly like being questioned about how he does it.
‘I agree with Ron’, Dan chimed in on the videoconference. Dan was in Amsterdam, as the sales agent for northern Europe. He didn’t really see how Ron’s process had anything to do with his process in Europe — they were completely different.
In fact, amongst all eight international sales agents in the meeting, none of them were that keen on taking the time to document exactly how they did their job. It made it easier for the company to replace them, surely. Or worse — tell them how to do their job.
‘Our sales numbers aren’t where we want them to be’, said the general manager back at Australian headquarters. ‘Our CRM indicates the volume of leads is steady, but sales numbers just aren’t improving like we want.’
This had been the trend for the last twelve months for this technology company. When I met with them back in 2020 to discuss their marketing, and they couldn’t produce a codified sales or marketing system, their first task was to find out what was being done out in the field.
Except nobody could tell them.
How was the company supposed to improve something that didn’t exist? (How are you?)
Systems were a big part of how this company manufactured its product, so the idea of a process wasn’t new to them. It was just a bit of a challenge to convince their team that marketing and sales should be captured as a system as well.
‘Every time, it depends on the product, the customer, the stage of their project, the budget’, Ron rambled on. ‘It’s not possible’, he concluded.
Finally, when it was my turn to talk, I explained the task: ‘If something isn’t working, you need to know what it is as soon as possible. The only way you can do that is by knowing what is being done, and if something different is being done every time, it’s virtually impossible to make conclusions and remedy it.’
It took some time, but eventually the team developed a high-level sales process that included when/how to introduce brochures, unique selling points, case studies and discounts. The entire process enabled the different agents to share stories and learnings, and work with the marketing team to create things that would further enhance their process.
Notwithstanding the benefits of a formal system, the act of sharing knowledge capital amongst individuals around the world was one of the single most impactful things this company did to shift its conversion rate. And the habit of reviewing the system and collaborating ensured new agents were able to hit the ground running with success as they grew.
Reason #4: You don’t do data
If your marketing plan is failing, it is likely because you aren’t using the right marketing and sales numbers to make decisions. This one is two-fold because when I say the ‘right’ marketing and sales numbers, I am alluding to the reality that data nowadays seems to be either in overabundance or not present at all.
Many businesses are flush with data. It is coming out of their ears, and a lot of it just doesn’t make sense — especially digital data that comes from website management or ad campaigns.
On the other side of that is the complete absence of data. No sales data, no conversion rates, and no knowledge about lifetime customers and fans. Just an empty guess.
The result of both realities is that data often gets neglected altogether because finding the right data is just too damn hard.
You’ve likely heard of the famous quote by Peter Drucker: ‘What gets measured gets managed.’ The basic tenet is that if you’re measuring something like marketing or sales, then the probability of you using that information for decision-making (and, therefore, success) is a lot higher.
So, if data is something you aren’t collecting or using, it could be the reason that your marketing is failing you. If you can’t see where you are succeeding or failing with cold, hard numbers, then you are wasting precious marketing money.
Reason #5: Your relationship with marketing experts is bad
As a small-business owner or leader, it is likely you will not have all the resources available to execute all of your own marketing tasks from scratch. Whether that is graphic design work, advertising, website development, photography, social media etc., there will have been a point in your journey when an agency, freelancer or consultant was engaged.
If you are relying on a marketing expert now to implement your marketing activities for you, chances are that relationship could be better. And it needs to be if you are going to get the most out of their professional experience.
I can relay hundreds of conversations I have had about unhealthy relationships between agencies and small-business owners. So many stories of misunderstood briefs or financial abuse — I even witnessed one instance where an SME owner had to conduct their own investigation to discover that the forwarding number for their Google Ads account was incorrect.
These issues come up time and time again (heck, I was even victim to a bit of agency misalignment), so it is important to understand why it keeps happening and how you can make the most of your marketing expert-to-business relationship.
Importantly, not all marketing-expert-to-business relationships are poor. The best ones are built on a mutual understanding of the business strengths, realistic outcomes, and communication — for both parties.
We used to work with a client whose view of her business strengths, desired outcomes and communication expectations differed vastly from ours. Where most clients would fit into a once- or twice-monthly communication rhythm, this client would call me every week — multiple times. Text, WhatsApp, everything. The communication expectation was not clear, and it did not lead to the best outcome for either of us. To make matters worse, every call she made to us used up her marketing budget as our team would be clocking time to her business. This left very little time for actual ‘marketing work’, which didn’t produce the outcomes she wanted and made the relationship very tense.
As she was the owner of a beauty salon, the way I contextualised it for her was to compare the behaviour to me coming into her salon sporadically over a couple of weeks to have a few eyebrow hairs plucked and then expecting to pay the same appointment fee when I arrive for my full shaping appointment.
Whilst not all marketing agencies have rules around communication (and not all salons have rules about sporadic eyebrow-hair pop-ins), it was essential that we got on the same page about things like communication to get the best results.
So start by locking in how often you going to communicate. Who will you be communicating with? What is your expectation for communication and what is theirs? Getting on top of these things is important for success. Remember that communication takes time, and when it comes to a service like marketing, time is the commodity. So, the more time you spend communicating, the more this is going to cost your business. Ensure you are on the same page with your marketing company about how much this time costs, what is included, and how much you receive in your quote.
Similar to how you communicate is the language you are communicating with. Marketing lingo (which can manifest in abbreviations, technical terms and insider phrases) can often leave business owners feeling a little lost. Follow up on lingo you don’t understand so that you increase your knowledge and can have better conversations about strategy, rather than feeling overwhelmed. This is essential to combining their skills with your intimate understanding of your business for the best outcome.
Ensure you have ample time together to communicate your business strengths to each other. They need to understand yours, but also take the time to understand theirs, so you feel comfortable with their marketing strategy.
Sometimes working with a marketing company is a bit like a gossip chain where the message you relay to one person has to trickle down and down until the creative that assembles it only has a loose understanding of what your business does and what you are looking to achieve. How can you rectify this? Can it be relayed in a document, video or notes so the whole team is across it?
Goal setting every year, or every quarter, is absolutely essential to ensure you and your marketing provider are both on the same trajectory. They will be able to give you realistic feedback on what is possible for your budget/business/resources, and you can hold them accountable to those results.
This process is essential not just for improving your agency-business relationship, but as an integral part of shaping your entire marketing strategy. As we work through the chapters in this book, it is important to quantify your goals and your budget and resources so you can bridge that gap between your present state and your future goals effectively.
Reason #6: Your marketing foundations aren’t strong
So, remember our friend David whose YouTube video went viral?
David had the start of an amazing business. He had an awesome product and he had customers who were dying to buy it. What he didn’t have was the rest of his marketing and sales foundations in place to sustain a sudden influx of strangers wanting his product.
And this is where I see so many businesses slip up.
A lot of businesses have a marketing strategy in some form, whether that is part of their business plan or based on a theoretical model. (Luckily, David had a great website ) But for a lot of other businesses, all their good work attracting strangers, doing networking and getting good word of mouth might be wasted because their website isn’t converting visitors into proper leads.
And to that end, many businesses don’t have a mechanism for converting leads into customers effectively, or else they lose those customers before they have a chance to become real fans. Every interaction a customer has with your business must be carefully considered. It doesn’t even have to be perfect; it just needs to be something.
An accounting company we began work with recently invited me to come out and meet with their two founders, Ben and Sarah. The pair were young and enthusiastic, and clearly passionate about the SMEs they helped.
They openly told me they didn’t need marketing. All their business came from word of mouth, so they didn’t need a website or a social media profile.
The pair had built quite a thriving business over the last few years through strong word of mouth and (clearly) amazing customer service. They grew their team from seven people to 30 in just over three years and without any ‘marketing’ help whatsoever.
They told me their philosophy to growth was ‘good work for their current customers’, and that alone was the key to bringing in new business.
Except for lately. Lately they weren’t generating any new customers at all, not for three to six months. Ergo, my attendance.
‘So, you don’t have a website at all?’ I asked over coffee.
‘Nope.’
‘So, when one of your customers refers you to a friend, where do they go to learn more about you?’
‘They call us’, Ben said.
‘Of course’, I agreed. ‘But maybe we should look at setting up an online presence. A website, a Google Business listing? You could be getting 100 referrals a month, but they can’t find you online, so they think you’re not legit.’
Both founders looked a bit taken aback by that.
‘If someone recommended a lawyer to you, for example, would you go see them if they didn’t have any kind of online presence? Or a home builder? We’re talking about people’s money. It’s a big deal and a decision they won’t take lightly. They’re going to do due diligence.’
After a while, they both agreed. They needed some foundations in place so they could continue compounding their word of mouth over time as their major marketing tool.
Reason #7: You’ve got a leaky bucket
So, imagine you have some foundations in place, and you feel okay about your marketing so far, but you still aren’t reaching your goals. What isn’t working?
The seventh and final reason marketing fails for SMEs is the leaky bucket. And what I mean by that is the water (or the customers) escaping through holes in the bucket (your marketing strategy) you didn’t even realise were there.
When you’re investing in marketing to strangers, you are pouring water in the top of this bucket you assume is completely sturdy. You have a website, you have a sales team, you have a great product.
But over time, you realise that bucket isn’t sturdy at all. Your sales team is inundated; they take days to reply to enquiries. Your website doesn’t have a call-to-action button.
Your competitors have products that have overtaken yours.
Without realising it, all the water you have paid good money acquiring has escaped when it shouldn’t have.
This is an extract from The Very Good Marketing Guide by Amy Miocevich. The book is available from June 28.
