Start with the problem, not the solution
One of the easiest mistakes to make is deciding what the solution is before you've properly understood the problem.
If organic traffic is down, you need SEO.
If enquiries are down, you need more leads.
If sales are slow, you need more advertising.
It sounds logical, but businesses are rarely that simple.
You might already have plenty of traffic. The problem could be that the wrong people are arriving.
You might have good-quality visitors, but your website isn't giving them enough confidence to make an enquiry.
Your marketing might be generating leads perfectly well, but something later in the sales process is losing them.
Or you might simply be spreading your budget across too many things without really knowing which ones are contributing to growth.
If you don't understand where the constraint is, adding more marketing can just mean spending more money pushing people into a system that isn't working properly.
More traffic isn't automatically more growth
Traffic is probably one of the easiest examples.
It's nice seeing the number go up. I've spent a large part of my career working in organic search, so I'm certainly not going to tell you traffic doesn't matter.
But traffic on its own doesn't pay the bills.
You could double the number of people visiting your website and still see very little commercial difference if those visitors aren't the right people or the website isn't converting them.
I'd much rather understand what happens after somebody arrives.
What are they looking for?
Does the page answer the question that brought them there?
Can they quickly understand what you do?
Is there a clear reason to choose you?
Is the next step obvious?
And, most importantly, are the visitors you're attracting actually capable of becoming customers?
Those questions aren't as exciting as reporting a big percentage increase in traffic, but they're usually much closer to the questions that matter to the business.
Your website may be the bottleneck
Sometimes the marketing is doing its job and the website is where things start to fall apart.
That doesn't necessarily mean the website looks bad.
I've seen plenty of attractive websites that make it surprisingly difficult to understand what the company actually does.
There can be unclear messaging, confusing navigation, slow pages, poor mobile experiences, weak calls to action or a structure that has grown organically over several years without anybody stopping to think about how everything fits together.
That's why I'd be reluctant to recommend spending more money sending visitors to a website before understanding whether the website is ready to do something useful with them.
Fixing that bottleneck could be considerably more valuable than increasing the marketing budget.
Sometimes you've simply accumulated too much activity
There's another problem I see quite often.
Businesses rarely start with a complicated marketing operation. It builds gradually.
Someone starts doing SEO.
Then paid advertising gets added.
Then social media.
Then email.
Then content.
Then another tool.
Then another agency.
A few years later, there can be a remarkable amount of activity taking place without anybody having a particularly clear view of how it all fits together.
Everyone is busy.
Reports are being produced.
Content is being published.
Campaigns are running.
Money is being spent.
But ask a simple question like “Which of these things is genuinely helping us grow?” and the answer can become surprisingly difficult.
At that point, doing more isn't necessarily the answer.
You may actually need to do less, but do it with much more clarity.
Look at the whole journey
This is why I prefer to look at growth as a connected system rather than a collection of individual marketing channels.
Your positioning affects who pays attention.
Your marketing determines who arrives.
Your website influences whether they trust you.
Your user experience affects whether they take the next step.
Your sales process influences whether that opportunity becomes revenue.
Your measurement tells you whether any of this is actually working.
A weakness anywhere in that journey can restrict growth.
And if you're only looking at one part of it, it's very easy to optimise the wrong thing.
Marketing might still be the answer
None of this means businesses shouldn't invest in marketing.
Sometimes the diagnosis really is straightforward.
You have a strong proposition, a good website, healthy conversion rates and a proven sales process. You simply aren't reaching enough of the right people.
Great.
That's a marketing problem.
Now we can decide whether the best opportunity is organic search, paid acquisition, content, partnerships or something else.
The difference is that we're making that decision because we've understood the problem, rather than because somebody happens to sell the solution.
Clarity before activity
If growth isn't where you want it to be, your first question probably shouldn't be:
“What marketing should we do next?”
A better question is:
“What's actually stopping us from growing?”
Sometimes the answer will be marketing.
Sometimes it will be the website, the proposition, the customer journey, the technical foundations or the way different parts of the business connect.
And sometimes you'll discover that you're already doing enough. You just need to focus your effort in the right place.
That's why I believe in clarity before activity.
Understand the problem first.
Then decide what deserves your time and money.