When More Marketing Creates More Activity but Not More Growth

A client came to us spending gobs of money on Google Ads. Once we dug into the account, we found that roughly 80% of that spend was being wasted.

That is not a small optimization problem. That is a lot of money being thrown at activity that was doing very little to help the business grow.

The easy answer could have been to increase the budget, test more campaigns, or keep pushing more marketing because they wanted more leads. Instead, we needed to understand what was actually happening first. We looked at how the account was structured, where the money was going, which searches were triggering ads, what was converting, and whether those conversions were meaningful to the business.

Once we understood that, we had very different options. They could spend less and potentially maintain the same results. They could keep the same budget and make it work much harder. Or they could redirect some of those dollars into another part of the customer journey where the investment might actually move the business forward.

That is smart marketing.

Simply spending more because growth is not happening is throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks… and that gets expensive fast.

Activity Is Not a Strategy

When businesses get uncomfortable with growth, there is a natural tendency to start adding things. Another campaign. Another channel. More content. More advertising. More outreach.

I understand that reaction because I have felt it in my own business. When I want growth to move faster, my instinct can be to push harder and put more out into the world.

The problem is that activity can make you feel productive without giving you any clarity about whether the activity is actually useful.

If you do not have a clear understanding of your audience, what they are struggling with, what matters to them, and where they are actually spending their time, more marketing can be a significant waste of dollars and resources. You can spend plenty of money on an initiative and see very little impact on the bottom line because the message is wrong, the positioning is off, or you are putting it in front of people who were never likely to care in the first place.

The Customer Journey Has to Be the Starting Point

This is why I continue to bring almost every marketing conversation back to the customer journey.

Businesses manage marketing in pieces because that is how teams, budgets, and platforms are organized. Paid media lives in one place. SEO lives somewhere else. Sales has the CRM. Email has its own system. Operations takes over once someone becomes a customer.

But customers do not move through your business thinking about departments or software.

Customers are trying to solve a problem. They are deciding whether you understand that problem, whether they trust you, whether your solution makes sense, and whether it feels worth taking the next step.

If you lose sight of that, it becomes really easy to celebrate activity that does not mean very much.

A campaign can generate clicks and still attract the wrong audience. A website can get traffic while confusing the people who land on it. Leads can come in and sit untouched. Sales can have conversations with people who were never a strong fit to begin with.

• Where are people engaging?
• Where are they dropping off?
• What are they confused by?
• What does sales keep hearing?
• What does the pipeline tell you about where opportunities are moving and where they are stalling?

That is the work I want to do before recommending more of anything.

Let the Data Challenge Your Assumptions

I am a big believer in research because it forces us to stop guessing.

The Google Ads example is a perfect case of that. The amount of money being spent could have easily created the impression that the business simply needed more volume. Once we looked at the data, the story was completely different.

That happens all the time.

A company may think it has a traffic problem when the issue is conversion. Leadership may assume marketing is underperforming while sales is not consistently following up. A team may be producing a tremendous amount of content without ever asking whether the message reflects what customers actually care about.

The data does not always hand you a clean answer, but it should tell you where to look harder.

I want to understand CRM data, what sales is hearing, which traffic sources are producing meaningful opportunities, and where there is friction in the customer journey. Then we can make an informed decision about what deserves more investment.

Without that, you are still guessing. Maybe it is an educated guess. Maybe everyone in the room agrees with it. Maybe it is based on what worked two years ago. Unfortunately, it is still a guess.

I Have Had to Catch Myself Doing This Too

There have absolutely been times at Keystone Click when growth was not moving at the pace I wanted, and I started thinking about all the things we could add.

I could do more networking. We could push more content. I could increase my speaking activity. We could create another offer or another campaign. At some point, though, doing everything starts to look a lot like having no focus at all.

That is usually when I have to force myself to step back and look at the bigger picture.

• Where is the actual constraint?
• What does the pipeline look like?
• Are we talking to the right people?
• Is our positioning as clear as I think it is?
• Are we following up consistently?
• Which efforts are creating real opportunities and which ones are simply keeping us busy?

I do not always like the answers. However, I would rather have an uncomfortable answer than waste time and money putting a bandage over a problem we have not properly diagnosed.

Do the Research. Build the Strategy. Then Push.

I am not arguing against doing more marketing. Sometimes more is exactly what is needed.

There are absolutely businesses that need more visibility, traffic, content, etc. But that decision should come after you understand the customer and the journey, not because the business is nervous and wants to feel like something is happening.

Do the research first.

Know who you are trying to reach. Understand what is painful enough for them to act. Know where they are looking for information and what they need to hear from you. Look at what is happening once they engage with the business. Use the data to find the places where momentum is being lost.

If you are not sure where your customer journey is working and where it is falling apart, that is exactly why we created our Customer Journey Assessment. The link is not quite ready yet, but if you want to take the free assessment, reach out to me, and I will make sure you get access.