What marketing cannot fix

This is an odd thing for a marketing company to publish, so here is the reasoning. We would rather tell you not to spend money this quarter than take it, fail, and have you conclude that marketing does not work.

Marketing is an amplifier. Point it at something that works and you get more of it. Point it at something broken and you get more people finding out.

The five things

• A capacity problem. If you are already booked three weeks out and turning work away, more enquiries will not help. They will sit unanswered and become bad reviews. Fix scheduling, pricing or staffing first.
• A pricing problem. If every quote you send loses on price, advertising buys you more quotes that lose on price. Either the price is wrong or the way you justify it is, and neither is solved by reach.
• A reputation problem. If you are sitting on a 3.2 average, every pound of ad spend drives people to a page that talks them out of it. Reviews first, always.
• A product problem. If people buy once and never return, you do not have an acquisition problem. You have a retention problem wearing an acquisition costume, and acquisition is the expensive way to solve it.
• A follow-up problem. If enquiries already arrive and nobody answers them within the hour, you are not short of leads. You are short of a process.

How to tell which one you have

Count three numbers for the last ninety days. Enquiries received. Quotes sent. Jobs won.

If enquiries are low, marketing is probably your constraint and spending makes sense.

If enquiries are fine but quotes are low, the problem is response and qualification. If quotes are fine but wins are low, the problem is price, proof or timing. In both cases advertising is the most expensive available fix, and it will not work.

The uncomfortable version

Most businesses that call an agency are in the second or third bucket. They have enough interest and are losing it somewhere between the enquiry and the invoice.

An agency that sells you a campaign in that situation will deliver exactly what it promised. More traffic, more leads, a nice report. And your revenue will not move, because the leak was never at the top.

When to call anyone

When you have fixed the leak, or at least found it. When you can answer within the hour. When your reviews would survive someone actually reading them. When you have capacity for the work you are asking for.

Then amplification is worth paying for. Before that, it is just a louder version of a problem you already had.