When Marketing Should Stop Spending
CAC payback is climbing and marketing wants more budget. Change what the marketing owner is paid on, set the ceiling yourself, and be the one who says no.
Angle
Marketing
20 posts
Most Lead Magnets Are Liability Magnets
3,000 downloads, 200 calls, 4 deals: the guide that anyone will download builds a list of the wrong buyers. Add friction, gain intent.
Referrals Are Not a Channel
Forty-two percent of new customers came from referrals. The growth team called it their best channel. It wasn't a channel. It was a product that worked.
Doubling the Channel Halved It
Spend up 40%, pipeline up 60% -- the team celebrated. Six months later conversion collapsed. The 'doubling' was buying the wrong customers.
The ranking with no buyers
Number one on G2, featured on Capterra, two reviews a week. And zero deals attributable to either site for three straight quarters.
Four articles in, the press stopped working
The first article moved a deal. The second, a hiring spike. The third, nothing. By the fourth, you were planning the company around press cycles.
804 registrants, zero net customers
Eight hundred registrants. Three hundred attendees. One signup. The webinar was content marketing wearing a sales costume.
Stop optimizing for the keyword nobody buys on
First page on Google. Eighteen thousand monthly visitors. Conversion to paid: 0.1%. The keyword had volume and no commercial intent.
Don't Build a Waitlist You Can't Nurture
18,000 signups. One launch email nine months later. 4% converted. The waitlist had been a marketing trophy, not a sales pipeline.
Category creation is usually vanity
They named the category, ranked first for the term, and the term drew eighty searches a month. The category existed in the deck and nowhere else.
The marketing spend with no attribution
Six hundred thousand a quarter, four channels, clean CAC on the dashboard. The dashboard was wrong — it took a Series B investor and a holdout test to prove it.
The persona you invented to explain a slow quarter
Pipeline was light, so marketing introduced a new ICP. The new ICP didn't exist. The deck had a name for it anyway.
Two thousand scans, one deal
A $40,000 booth scanned 2,000 badges and closed one deal. The revenue at a conference shows up at the dinner, not the ten-by-ten carpet.
The vanity metric on the homepage
'Trusted by 12,000 teams.' Half of those teams were free users who logged in once. The number was technically accurate and strategically useless.
Don't trust the logo on your own homepage
Their logo was on the homepage. Their quote was in the deck. They had canceled six weeks before the marketing team noticed.
40,000 Signups, No Change in Retention
40,000 signups in a weekend. Six weeks later retention hadn't moved. The spike taught the team the wrong lesson about what actually worked.
Stop buying the marketing trend of the year
Every year the trade press crowns a new must-have channel and the budget follows it out the door. The real question is which lever fits your buyer.
9 Easy Hacks to Boost your Website Traffic
A blog without traffic starts no conversations, and no business. Nine mechanical changes that move the numbers.
What You Need To Know About Internet Defamation (Infographic)
A bad review can gut a small business. You see the comment online, maybe a customer posts it, and suddenly your phone stops ringing.
Stop Broadcasting to Women on Social Media
Women are the majority on the platforms where buying intent forms, and they treat them as conversation, not billboards. Broadcast, and you burn the budget.