Why Your Marketing Feels Broken (And What to Do About It)

You’re doing everything you’ve been told to do, and it’s just not working.

You’ve posted on social media.

You’ve built a new website.

Maybe you’ve run an ad or two.

You’ve been to a few networking events, handed out business cards, asked for referrals.

You might have even hired someone to help.

Some of it worked for a bit but most of it didn’t.

And now you’re back to square one, wondering what you’re doing wrong.

Here’s the thing, you’re not bad at marketing.

You’re just doing things in the wrong order.

The real problem

Most business owners I work with are really good at what they do.

Plumbers, accountants, coaches, consultants, trainers, therapists, builders, designers, they’re all (ok, most) great at what they do.

But when it comes to marketing, they’re stuck.

Not because they’re lazy or stupid but because nobody ever showed them how it all fits together.

So they do what anyone else would do, they grab whatever tactic seems to be working for someone else and they give it a go.

“You need to be on Instagram.” So they start posting.

“Email marketing is where the money is.” So they set up a list.

“Have you tried running Facebook ads?” So they throw some money at it.

Each one of those isn’t bad advice, but without anything connecting them, they’re just random acts of marketing.

A bit of this, a bit of that, hoping something sticks.

That’s not a strategy, it’s a lucky dip.

Tactics without strategy

This is the thing I bang on about the most, and I’ll keep banging on about it because it’s the single biggest thing holding most businesses back.

Strategy ALWAYS comes before tactics.

A tactic is a thing you do.

Post on LinkedIn, send an email, run an ad, build a new website.

A strategy is the plan that connects all those things together.

It’s the reason you’re doing them, the order you’re doing them in, and how each one leads to the next.

Without a strategy, you’re just collecting tactics and a collection of disconnected tactics is like a pile of jigsaw pieces without the picture on the lid.

You’ve got all the bits, but you can’t see how they fit together. So you try random combinations and get frustrated when nothing works.

Most businesses don’t have a marketing problem, they have a strategy problem.

Fix the strategy, and the tactics start making sense.

Why it feels so overwhelming

There’s another reason marketing feels broken…

…there’s just too much of it.

Every day, someone’s telling you about a new platform, a new tool, a new approach.

TikTok. AI. Reels. Threads. SEO. Funnels. Webinars. Chatbots.

The list never ends!

And every one of them comes with someone telling you it’s the thing you need to be doing right now or you’ll get left behind.

No wonder it feels overwhelming. You’re drowning in options with no way to decide which ones actually matter for your business.

Here’s what I’ve learned after years of working with businesses like yours…

Most of it doesn’t matter. Not for you. Not right now.

What matters is having a clear strategy, knowing the order things need to happen in, and doing the basics properly. Not the fancy stuff. The basics.

The basics done well will always beat the fancy stuff done badly.

Half-built bridges

There’s one more thing that keeps coming up, and it might be the most important idea I can share with you.

Most businesses aren’t failing because they’re doing nothing, they’re failing because they’re doing too many things and finishing none of them.

They start posting on social media… then stop after three weeks.

They set up an email list… but never send anything.

They get a website built… then forget about it for two years.

I call these half-built bridges.

You start building a bridge to your customers, you get halfway across, then you spot another bridge that looks more promising, so you abandon this one and start that one instead.

Then another.

And another.

You end up with five half-built bridges and zero ways to actually reach people.

One bridge, built properly, all the way to the other side - that’s what works.

So what actually works?

Your marketing has six stages.

I call it the Perfect Customer Journey, and most businesses are only doing two or three of them.

That’s why it feels broken, not because the tactics don’t work - because the system is incomplete.

The six stages are:

1. Stage 1 - Get Noticed - being visible to the right people
2. Stage 2 - Connect - capturing their details so you can follow up
3. Stage 3 - Engage - building trust and showing you can help
4. Stage 4 - Convert - making the sale
5. Stage 5 - Deliver & Wow - exceeding expectations
6. Stage 6 - Create Fans - turning happy customers into people who recommend you

Six stages and each one has a job.

Each one earns you the right to move to the next, if you skip one the whole thing breaks down.

When you can see all six stages, you stop guessing.

You stop chasing the next shiny tactic.

You look at your marketing and say “right, Stage 2 - Connect is where I’m losing people” and you fix that.

That’s strategy over tactics, that’s how you make marketing feel manageable instead of impossible.

It’s not going to be easy. But it can be easier.

I’m not going to tell you marketing is easy. It’s not. Anyone who tells you different is probably selling something.

It takes work, it takes consistency, it takes showing up when you don’t feel like it and doing the boring stuff that nobody sees.

But it can be a hell of a lot easier than it feels right now.

And the difference between “impossible” and “manageable” usually comes down to one thing…

…knowing the order.

One action you can take today: Grab a pen and write down what you’re currently doing for each of the six stages. Don’t overthink it. Just write what you’ve got. If a stage is blank, that’s fine - now you know where the gap is. That’s your starting point.

If you want more help with this, I write about it every day in The Marketing Memo