Look — most marketing problems I see aren't about big strategy. They're about small habits people quietly default to and then wonder why their numbers are flat. Here are the five I run into most, and how to actually fix each one.
1. You're optimising before you have data
You launched the campaign yesterday. Today you're already moving budget around, tweaking subject lines, second-guessing the headline. I get it — it feels productive. But you don't have enough data yet to know what's working. You're just adding noise.
The fix: pick a minimum data threshold before you start optimising. For email, that's at least a few hundred sends. For paid, at least 50 conversions per ad set. Before that, your "optimisations" are basically guessing.
2. You're talking to "everyone"
If your landing page sounds like it could be for any business in your industry, it is. And that means it lands with no one. The fastest way to improve almost any marketing asset is to write it as if it's for one specific person — name them, picture them, write to them.
You'll feel like you're losing audience by being specific. You're not. You're earning the audience that actually matters.
3. You're confusing activity with progress
Sending more emails. Posting more often. Running more ads. None of these are progress on their own — they're activity. Progress is "we figured out what message moves this audience." Activity is "we did a lot of stuff this week."
Quick test: if you stopped doing 30% of your marketing tomorrow, would you know which 30% to cut? If not, you're probably doing too much.
4. You haven't talked to a customer in 3 months
This is the one I see most in growing businesses. The early days, you talk to customers all the time. Then you scale, and somehow that stops. And your marketing slowly drifts away from what they actually care about.
The fix is embarrassing how simple: book one customer call per week. Just one. Ask them what almost made them not buy. That single question will reshape your messaging more than a $20K consulting engagement.
5. You're not measuring the things that matter
Most teams I work with track surface metrics — opens, clicks, impressions — and miss the ones that actually predict revenue. The metrics that matter are usually the boring ones: customer acquisition cost, payback period, repeat purchase rate, qualified-lead conversion rate.
If you don't know yours by heart, that's where to start this week.
What to actually do
Pick one of these. Just one. Spend a week on it. Then come back to this post in a month and see how you're doing on the others. Marketing improvement isn't about doing all of it — it's about fixing the obvious leaks one at a time.
