Why does it feel like every dollar you spend on marketing vanishes into thin air?
For business owners and executives like you, the common story is investing time, money, and resources into marketing that doesn't deliver. Here's the truth you need to hear today—marketing isn’t a cost center. It’s your growth center. If it's not acting like one, the problem lies not with "marketing" itself, but in how it is being executed.
And most marketing issues come from an incomplete or non-existent strategy.
At The Business of Marketing (BOM), we help businesses diagnose failing marketing strategies and rebuild them to produce measurable, transparent, and sustainable results. This guide will equip you with the tools to identify where your strategy is breaking down and how to fix it efficiently.
Table of Contents
Part 1: Diagnose the Problem—Pinpoint Why Your Marketing isn't Working
Successful marketing stems from clarity and alignment. Start by identifying where disconnects exist in your strategy. These steps will guide you toward actionable insights.
Step 1. Review Your Overall Marketing Strategy
Are your marketing efforts tied to clear, measurable business goals? If you have no defined strategy—or worse, if your strategy focuses on irrelevant tactics or metrics—your marketing is set up to fail.
Action Item:
Define business goals and directly define how your marketing will support them (e.g., increase sales by 20%, boost lead generation by 30%, grow awareness by 50%).
Audit your existing marketing plan and actions to determine whether they're supporting these goals.
HINT: If you have a plan but no clearly defined strategy, you have done it backwards and need to reset. All Marketing has 3 phases, Strategy, Tactics, and Implementation. Strategy must always come first, and it must be airtight. How's your strategy?
Step 2. Analyze Marketing Investments & Performance Metrics
Are you spending money without seeing returns? It’s vital to treat marketing as an investment, not a line-item expense. Every dollar needs a transparent ROI pathway. This does not mean every marketing dollar converts to a sales dollar. But do you know what Key Performance Indicators you're using to assess whether your marketing is working? Are you tracking the right numbers? Simply being “busy” doesn’t create impact.
Action Items:
Identify the key metrics that will help you accomplish your goals. Focus on meaningful data points like conversion rates, customer retention, or sales attributed to marketing. Use tools like Google Analytics to measure your full funnel from intent to conversion.
What are your current benchmarks for those metrics?
Track what percentage of budget goes to ineffective channels.
Calculate ROI by campaign, prioritizing metrics like customer acquisition cost (CAC) and lifetime value (LTV).
Step 3. Assess Your Target Audience
You can't market effectively if you’re targeting the wrong people. Misaligned targeting leads to wasted spend and decreased engagement. For this reason, the start of all strategy is the target customer.
Action Items:
Revisit data—who are your actual customers, and are they represented in your messaging?
Does your target customer match your existing? (They do not have to if you are looking to grow, but they should have similarities).
Interview recent clients or partners to confirm motivations, pain points, and preferences.
What are you solving for your target, and how are you solving it better than everyone else?
HINT: These answers feed how we build content that delivers the right message, at the right time, and in the right place.
Step 4. Evaluate Competitive Landscape
If competitors drown you out in your market, chances are they’ve already optimized where you’re falling behind. It is important to maintain an open mind and look outside your industry too. If we create the same content as others in our industry, we just add to the noise for our target. The way we stand out is by creating something they have not yet seen.
Action Items:
Conduct a competitive analysis to identify gaps in your offering, differentiators in their campaigns, and opportunities for you to stand out.
Part 2: Immediate Action Steps to Fix Your Marketing
Once you’ve diagnosed the issue, it’s time to re-engineer success. Fixing your marketing doesn’t need to become an overwhelming process—it just needs the right steps, executed efficiently.
1. Develop a Results-Driven Strategy
The foundation of effective marketing is a strong, tailored strategy. A cookie-cutter plan doesn’t work when every business has unique goals.
Action Items:
Identify your key business objectives.
Create a roadmap where every element—channels, messaging, budget—aligns directly to those objectives.
Pro Tip:
Working with expert strategists like BOM ensures you save time and resources while designing a strategy proven to work.
2. Identify Efficient and Sustainable Tactics
Not every tactic is created equal. Going viral on TikTok is not a strategy. Rather than using shiny tools, focus on what’s effective for your business. A strong strategy will make this clear.
Action Items:
Reassess marketing tactics against ROI data—what has historically worked or failed for your business?
Prioritize sustainable approaches like email marketing, paid media, and SEO to generate consistent returns.
3. Optimize Across Channels and Platforms
Integration is the name of the game. Siloed campaigns underutilize your resources—a connected ecosystem can turn small fixes into compound results.
Action Items:
Use the strategy to adjust your content across all channels and platforms.
Re-train algorithms with optimized ad targeting based on refreshed customer profiles.
Test campaigns across platforms and iterate based on real-time performance.
4. Implement Expert Guidance
“If you think hiring a professional is expensive, try hiring an amateur.” Partnering with skilled professionals—who lead with data, not guesswork—will amplify impact at a fraction of the cost of building an in-house team.
The BOM difference? Our custom strategies take 2-3 months and have a 100% success rate when implemented. From there, we can execute the plan directly or find you the experts you need to build lasting internal capabilities. But the true value of what we do lies in its turnkey nature. Our strategies live well past any 1 person in any 1 role. So, your investment pays dividends.
Own Your Marketing Narrative with BOM
Here’s the reality: Continuing to market with incomplete strategy, outdated tactics, or generic playbooks won’t transform your business. Business owners like you deserve better—and BOM delivers better.
The solutions start with clarity backed by decades of expertise. Here's the equation we swear by:
Strategy + Tactics + Expert Implementation = Results
If you’re ready for your marketing to stop bleeding money and start producing results, now is the time to take that first step.
Discover how BOM can transform your marketing. Apply to work with us today.
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