One of the biggest marketing mistakes we see? Solving the wrong problem

Biggest Marketing Mistakes - Part 1

"We need more leads." - "Our ads aren't working." - "We need more followers."

If you work in marketing, it's almost guaranteed that you’ll have heard any or all of these refrains on repeat. For us, they're often the opening lines we hear when onboarding a new client or on a discovery call. This comes from business founders who care deeply about growth, or marketing directors under pressure to justify spend. Generally it's coming from people who are doing their best to make things work, but are seeing less and less return.

We do think that these concerns are valid, but while they sound like problems, they usually aren't. More often than not, they’re symptoms pointing to deeper issues, and if you misread a symptom as the disease, you’ll end up applying the wrong remedy (expensively and repeatedly).

The illusion of obvious problems

In medicine, being misdiagnosed usually means receiving the wrong treatment, wasting time on said treatment, then the unnecessary costs associated with that, and last but not least the very real likelihood of your health deteriorating. In marketing, the same applies. When businesses misidentify the actual source of their underperformance, they waste time and money applying solutions that don’t work while the root problem festers.

Surface-level problems feel true because they are visible. Leads are down. Website traffic is flatlining. Your latest email campaign underperformed. But what’s underneath those visible outcomes? Why are the leads down? Why is the ad spend climbing and your conversions dropping? Why does it feel like everything worked so well, once, but now nothing does?

Most businesses stop looking and zoom in on what’s not working, rather than stepping back to ask, "what’s missing?" The issue isn’t that they’re doing nothing, it’s that they’re doing the wrong things.

1: The lead generation trap

Let’s start with the classic:

“We need more leads.”

This is what most marketers hear a lot, it's the most common diagnosis clients make and, in some cases, it’s true. But in many, many cases, it’s only part of the issue. Because when we dig into the data, we often discover that the business is generating leads, just not the right kind.

They’re unqualified, they bounce after one call or say, “too expensive” too fast. What happens next is that more money is thrown at ads. Broader targeting. Bigger funnels. New agencies. New creatives. New platforms. However, without refining the offer, the positioning and the customer profile, businesses are essentially just pouring water into a leaking bucket.

HubSpot found that 61% of marketers say generating traffic and leads is their top challenge, and few take the time to audit whether their targeting aligns with their actual best-fit customer. That gap is where budgets go to die.

We've worked with clients who were convinced they had a traffic problem, and once we unpacked their funnel, the problem often was not quantity but quality. The wrong people were arriving and leaving quickly. Once we honed in on who the message was really for, cost per lead dropped and sales conversations became more productive.

In other words, "more leads" might only be part of the solution. A better strategy is almost always the answer.

2: The ads that "don’t work"

This one is another classic. You’ve run ads on Meta or Google, the click-through rate seems decent, and people are visiting the site… but they’re not converting. The assumption quickly follows that the ads must be broken and it's time to rework them.

“Our ads aren’t working.”

They might not be. But then again, if you were able to convince someone to click on your ad in the first place, something’s clearly working. They might be doing their job perfectly, driving people to a landing page that quietly kills interest.

According to Unbounce, the average landing page conversion rate across all industries is just 4.02%. Yet some high-performing pages convert at over 11%. That’s a huge variance that has almost nothing to do with ad creative.

Your ad is a promise. Your landing page is the proof. If there’s a mismatch, people leave.

Ask yourself:

• Is our landing page aligned with the ad promise?

• Is our message clear and compelling?

• Is our call to action visible and friction-free?

The most successful campaigns we’ve run didn’t start with rewriting ads, but with rewriting expectations and rebuilding the lead journey. Recently we worked with a client who had beautifully designed ads, but their landing page buried the enquiry form under three scrolls and six different font sizes. Users were getting lost. A simple redesign with clearer structure, more direct copy and an above-the-fold CTA doubled their conversions within two weeks.

So if your ad performance is faltering, don’t just look at the ad account. Look at what you’re asking users to do after they click.

Your ad should say, "Here's something that could help you." Your landing page should say, "Yes, and here's exactly how."

3: The follower fixation

Ah yes, the follower obsession. A business sees a competitor with 10,000 followers on Instagram and panics. "We need to grow our following!" - cue the boosted posts and giveaways.

“We used to get so much engagement and now it’s crickets. We need more followers.”

More followers might make a nice graph in your next report but they don’t build a business and aren't called a vanity metric for nothing. Conversions rarely come from the person who liked your reel, they come from the person who saw themselves in your message and remembered it.

According to Hootsuite, brands with smaller but highly engaged audiences consistently outperform those with large but indifferent ones. It’s not the size that matters, it’s resonance.

Ironically, the best-performing brands usually don’t tend to chase followers. They chase clarity, and clarity attracts the right audience organically. I've seen clients double their sales with a few hundred LinkedIn followers because they nurtured the right audience, shared valuable insights and built real credibility in their field. On the other hand, there are accounts with thousands of followers and near-zero conversions.

Strategy first, tactics second

In each of these cases, the real problem isn’t leads or ads or followers. The real problem is this:

Businesses are solving the most visible problem, not the most important one.

In a challenging economic climate, marketing budgets are under pressure. Every pound spent needs to justify its return. Businesses can’t afford to burn budget chasing vanity metrics or fixing the wrong part of the funnel.

Yet that’s exactly what happens when we respond reactively instead of strategically. The most common root causes for this that we've found?

• Unclear positioning

• Confused messaging

• Misaligned targeting

• Poor customer journey flow

• A weak or outdated offer

None of these show up in your ad account. They don’t appear on the analytics dashboard and you will only reveal them when you zoom out and ask, “What are we really trying to achieve here and what’s getting in the way?” Great marketing strategy starts with asking the right questions:

1. Who are we trying to reach? Are we reaching them?

2. What do they need to see or feel to act?

3. Where are the drop-off points in our journey?

4. Is our positioning clear and distinct?

From the front lines

Managing client accounts and building marketing strategies for close to 200 businesses, we’ve had a front-row seat to how good businesses struggle, and what’s most interesting isn’t so much what separates the high performers but what unites the ones that struggle.

The patterns we see repeatedly are:

• Clients expect performance from campaigns before their offer is properly validated.

• They want traffic before their website is ready to convert.

• They seek visibility before they’ve clarified their message.

• They're missing a coherent strategy that tells them why they’re doing any of it.

In each case, our job is to zoom out, reframe the problem, and re-align strategy with reality. We have learned that the most valuable thing we can give our clients isn’t a new tactic, it’s a reframing, - a new lens through which to see their situation more clearly. It's always clarity, not complexity, what moves businesses forward.

So what should you do instead?

If you’re reading this and thinking, “This sounds uncomfortably familiar,” here’s where to begin:

Diagnose before you deploy. Before launching another campaign, ask yourself: do we have a clear, compelling, distinctive message? Are we delivering it to the right people? Don’t assume you know what’s wrong. Audit your marketing funnel, look at the data, interview your sales team and study the user journey.

Map the real customer journey. Not just the funnel on the whiteboard, the actual experience. Where do people fall off? What questions are they left with?

Define success at each stage. What does a qualified lead look like? What should happen after the click? What’s the next best action? Is it obvious to the user?

Think like a strategist, not just a marketer. Tactics are important, but they must be rooted in a bigger plan. Align every marketing action to a clear business goal.

Focus on outcomes, not outputs. Forget vanity metrics like followers or impressions. Track metrics that lead to growth: qualified leads, conversion rates, customer lifetime value.

Audit the foundation regularly. Your message, your offer, your differentiation. What was clear last year might be muddy now. Markets shift. Buyers evolve. You should too.

Test, iterate, improve. Even the best marketers don’t get everything right the first time. But they measure, learn, and refine constantly.

Final thought: Strategy isn’t a luxury

We sometimes hear from smaller businesses that strategy feels like a “nice to have”, something you get to after the marketing is running. But that’s backwards. Remember that the scariest part about solving the wrong marketing problem is the time spent running in the wrong direction. Time spent tweaking things that don’t matter. Time spent wondering why it’s not working.

Strategy isn’t the garnish, it's the plate everything else sits on. Without it, you’re just stacking tactics on top of each other, hoping that one of them sticks. When reviewing your marketing efforts, your starting point should always be the same:

What’s actually broken?

Because when you ask and answer that question honestly, everything else starts to click into place. The campaigns improve. The right customers engage. The numbers start moving in the right direction.

Sometimes the most powerful move is just asking a better question.