Why Your Marketing Isn't Working, and What I'd Fix First

On a Facebook and Instagram campaign we ran for a client, the ads were live and people were clicking on them. What we just weren't seeing was conversions, meaning the inquiries and sales the ads were there to bring in. Since those are the reason a business runs ads at all, the money was going out with nothing coming back that we could see.

Marketing that isn't working tends to look a lot like that, whoever is running it. Nothing is visibly broken, because the ads run and people click and a report still shows up, and the only thing missing is the one number the whole effort was for. If you've been there, you'll know how maddening it is to be sure something's off with nothing to point at.

Why your marketing isn't working usually comes down to what's underneath it: what was or wasn't set up before anything ran.

Why am I getting clicks but no sales?

You can see the clicks and what they cost, right there in the report. What you can't find are the inquiries and sales that were supposed to follow.

Not seeing sales can mean two very different things. Either the sales really aren't happening because something between the click and the sale is losing people, or they're happening and nobody is counting them. Both look the same. Yet they call for opposite moves, because in the first case something has to change, and in the second the ads may be working while you're one frustrated afternoon away from switching them off.

The instinct is to change the ad, because the ad is the only part you can see. Sometimes it's the ad. But you can't know that until the inquiries and sales are being counted. The counting is what shows you where people stop, whether that's on the page the ad sends them to, at the form, or with a phone nobody picks up.

That campaign taught me how thorough we need to be with all of that setup for every client. Now, before any money goes into ads, I check the tracking, so that every inquiry, call, and sale gets counted somewhere you can see it.

When you're getting clicks and no sales, that counting is what tells you whether something after the click is losing people or the sales are happening without anyone recording them.

How do I know if my marketing is working?

Before any campaign we run goes live, someone plays the customer. They fill in the form or go through the checkout exactly the way a real customer would, and then they check that it turned up everywhere it's supposed to be counted. It's the least glamorous part of the job, and it's the part I'd never skip, because every decision about the ads after launch depends on those numbers being right.

That's all tracking is, once you take the software out of it. Every inquiry, every call, and every sale gets counted next to what you were aiming for and what you spent to get there, in a place you can see for yourself. If your cash register only rang up some of the sales, you'd notice by closing time. Marketing is different. It can run that way for months without anyone noticing, because the ads keep running and the report keeps arriving whether the counting works or not.

With the counting right and a goal like booked calls, you can see how many came in and roughly what each one cost you. Your marketing is working when you can put what you set out to get, what actually came in, and what it cost side by side, and see that it was worth it. If your numbers can't show you that, they're telling you about activity, not results.

When the numbers go up and the business doesn't

A post takes off, or a promotion pulls in more clicks than you've ever had, and for a week or so the follower count won't stop climbing. It feels like it's working. Then the month closes and you count the new customers, and the number looks almost exactly like the month before. Somewhere in there, the question stops being whether the marketing is working and becomes why the business isn't growing when the marketing so clearly is.

What happened is that the marketing grew exactly what it was pointed at, and it was pointed at the wrong numbers. Likes, followers, views, and clicks on their own are vanity metrics: numbers that look good and pay nothing. Because nobody has to buy anything for those numbers to go up, they're easy to grow, and easy to mistake for progress when you're the one watching them climb. When I look at marketing like that, it's just chasing vanity metrics for a short bump. That's not sustainable.

If the business isn't growing despite the marketing, stop chasing clicks for their own sake, however good they look in the report. Pick the one number that actually pays you and judge everything else by whether it moves that number.

What are the common reasons marketing fails?

"We tried marketing and it didn't work" can sound like an excuse, but it rarely is one. Whoever says it has spent the money and posted the posts, and may well have paid someone to run the whole thing. When that much effort comes back with nothing to show for it, deciding that marketing doesn't work for a business like theirs is a reasonable conclusion from what they could see.

What's missing sits underneath the effort, and it tends to start with a goal nobody can name, which leaves the money with nothing to aim at. Without a goal there can't be a strategy either, since a strategy is only the plan for reaching one. So the spending becomes guesswork. And because nothing's being counted along the way, nobody can tell which guesses are paying off, and the good ones get cut along with the bad. Then a month disappoints and the goal itself changes, and everything built toward the old one gets written off.

That's a different problem from marketing where every piece is running and none of them connect, because here there was never a foundation for the pieces to connect to. Dig under "we tried marketing and it didn't work," and often it's that they didn't establish a goal and a strategy, something that would be long-term and sustainable.

Keep the goal, change the path

A month in, the inquiries are slow, so the goal starts to drift. Maybe it becomes a new platform somebody swears by, or a different product that might move faster, or followers, because at least those are going up. Each switch feels like progress. Each one also starts the clock over, because whatever the first goal was beginning to teach you goes with it. When you start asking how to fix marketing that isn't working, the answers you get are mostly new things to try.

Marketing that isn't working is usually missing its foundation: a goal that stays fixed, a plan to reach it, and every inquiry and sale counted. Until that's in place, more clicks only buy a short bump.

Fixing it starts with the goal, and the goal has to be something you can count, a number of inquiries or sales in a month rather than "grow the brand." Then fill in your own form, call your own number, and see whether each one gets counted where it should. Only then spend on ads. And when a month disappoints, change the tactic before you touch the goal. None of it needs you to buy a strategy from anyone, which I realize is an odd thing for a marketing consultant to tell you.

The rule I run on is to stick to the original goal and chase that, while staying fluid enough to shift and be nimble about how you get there. Go every day looking to achieve the goal.

The part owners were priced out of

For a long time, the people who could build that foundation properly were senior, and senior people mostly sat inside big firms whose fees assumed big budgets. So owners bought what they could afford, which was the clicks. The foundation underneath stayed a big-company luxury.

Small and mid-size businesses can now get the senior-level marketing they would once have been priced out of, because a small senior team can do the work that used to take a big firm. The modern tools that bring the cost down still need a person with taste deciding what's good enough to go out under your name.

If your picture of marketing help is still a big firm you can't afford or someone cheaper selling you clicks, that picture needs to change. And if you tried marketing and it didn't work, try it again from the ground up. Goal first, then the counting, then the clicks.