Why your marketing stopped working

0:00Why growth stalls

Most businesses hit a point where their growth stops falling in line with the spend and effort they’re putting into their marketing. Most businesses hit this point and react the same way, more ads, more content, more features, more discount, more, more, more. Or they go into the new year or a new quarter and they reset goals and reset KPIs based on doing the exact same things and using the exact same tactics over and over again. But if the revenue that they’re generating now is starting to slow down, that’s only gonna compound the more you throw at the same system that’s not currently working. Instead, you can solve your growth problems by stepping back from your marketing and reverse engineering what needs to happen to hit the growth goals that you have and get things back on track, and this marketing evaluation is exactly how you do it. As a brand and growth strategist, this is the exact system and evaluation that I take clients through to reverse engineer their growth and focus their marketing on the right place, speaking to the right customer, using the right channels. So by the end of this video, you’ll have identified all the factors that are contributing to your growth plateau and everything that’s holding you back within your marketing using the four quadrant method, and you’ll have a prioritized list of actions to get out of that plateau so you know which factors to tackle first to get out of the slump as quickly as possible without just throwing more ads at the problem or guessing at what you need to do.

1:18The chasm

But first, it’s important to understand why so many businesses go through this exact problem. It happens at any stage, but especially when a business is going from start-up to scale-up, this is so common. They’ve had that early growth and then for some reason it starts stagnating, and this can be explained really well with the adoption life cycle, which is the bell curve that explains how customers adopt products. So what happens within the bell curve? The first small portion are the innovators. These are the customers that love new things for the sake of having new things, and they like to be ahead of the curve, and these are the customers in your launch phase that get in there really early. Then are the early adopters. They see a chance to leap ahead and start buying into the vision. Okay? This is still in your start-up phase. You’re gaining traction, and these are still quite early customers, and these guys are a slightly bigger portion than those first innovators. Then we get to the next bigger portion again, which is the early majority. Now, these customers want a safe, proven improvement in their daily life or their work, whatever you’re selling into. Now, you’re tapping into these customers when you’re in your scale-up phase, when you have that proof about how beneficial your product is and you start getting a real foothold within the market. Then we start coming down the other side of the curve, where we have the late majority. These people buy once your product becomes the standard. Okay? This is when you’ve me- reached maturity, when you start becoming the norm and just the go-to product within your market. And then finally are the skeptics. These people will avoid adoption wherever they can, and they only start adopting when they don’t really have any other choice. This is once your product has become dispensable to the process it’s involved in, so the customers can’t avoid upgrading to it, and you hit this stage when you are a super mature company. Now, what this nice clean bell curve doesn’t show is that there are gaps in between reaching each group of customers because each group needs something else to get them to buy. So like the early adopters want to buy into the vision and they like exciting new things, that early majority needs to see proof. So therefore, when you’re trying to reach each stage and group of customer, you need to show them something different than the group before. Geoffrey Moore wrote all about this in his book Crossing the Chasm, and he points out that that biggest gap sits between the early adopters and the early majority, although there is a gap at every single stage. But why does that matter so much to you? And that’s because all of us need to understand that if our business growth stagnates and nothing has changed about our pro- product that was working well and selling well previously, nothing has changed about our marketing tactics which were working well previously, maybe we’ve hit the end of that group and we actually haven’t jumped the chasm to be able to attract the next group. Nothing about your product or solution has changed, but the context in which you’re operating has.

4:12The four quadrants

So to reverse engineer your growth, we need to figure out what has changed and therefore what you need to change in your marketing, and that is where we analyze four quadrants of your business, and that’s your audience, your offer, your message, and your channels, in that order. And for each one, we need to look at what are the symptoms of this quadrant potentially being the problem, what actual points you need to examine within that quadrant, and the scoring system that’s going to allow us to then see where we need to focus our efforts and in what priority order. So by spending even 10, 15 minutes working through the quadrant exercise, you’re gonna have a prioritized list of tasks that you need to go away and do, actions you need to take in your marketing in the right order to move your growth forward and get out of that plateau.

4:581. Audience

So let’s start with quadrant one, which is the audience. Some symptoms that core challenges here are causing that plateau in your growth are things like getting lots of leads still, but they’re actually a bad fit for you. You’re attracting people who can’t afford or don’t actually need you, or are your leads actually dropping off while competitors still appear to be doing well? So in order to figure this out, there’s five key things that we need to look at within this quadrant. So the first is who your best customers are right now. So pull a list of even your top 10, 20, and not just by one metric, but you wanna look at revenue margin, ease, referrals, what makes them an overall great customer, and look at if that is the person that you’re currently marketing to or is that actually different from the person you’ve been targeting in the past. So that’s number two, is to look at your actual ideal customer personas and see if that matches up with what you’ve found. And if you’re working directly with customers or clients within your business and you’re tracking metrics about them, then you can see this pretty easily. So think about what-Assumptions about your customers you’re working with, about what they value, about what they’re going through the moment before they buy, and what they intrinsically believe about themselves. Then the third thing is to look at the breadth of the customer base that you are targeting. Is that still viable, or is it too broad or too narrow? ’Cause if you’ve targeted a very specific ICP, then you might have hit the ceiling within that very narrow niche, and you need to broaden. Likewise, you might be speaking too broadly so that many of your ideal customers don’t actually understand that you are built specifically for them. Point four is really important, and that is has the environment in which you’re operating changed? Okay, is the market context different? So have new competitors emerged? Are there new alternatives that aren’t direct competitors? Have consumer preferences and con- conditions shifted overall? Okay, that might be economic changes, that might be buying power. Things like how AI has affected your industry and your customers’ ability to choose between products, ability to go and build their own tool versus using yours are really important here. And then finally, what stage of awareness are your ideal customers? And you should be thinking about this within every individual piece of marketing that you do in terms of where you’re meeting your customers and what type of message you need to use for them in that particular ad or in that particular piece of content. However, it’s also important to think about the stage of awareness your customers are in overall because if you were the first to market in your category, your customers were very unsophisticated because you were first to market. There wasn’t existing competitors already doing what you do. If it’s now two years on, and there is many different competitors doing the same thing as you, and customers are more aware that the solutions exist, and you have a lot more customers already moving through the stages of awareness, then you need to understand where they are now because you might be speaking to someone that doesn’t exist anymore. So against each of the five points within this quadrant, score yourself green, amber, red. Green, obviously, if you nailed it and you’re really confident that you are very aligned and really confident in your answers and that you understand the answer to that question, amber if it could use some work, and red if it’s a glaring problem or something you hadn’t even considered thinking about. And that’s all you need to do there for now. You don’t need to go off and do more ’cause this is just your first assessment.

8:122. Offer

Okay, and now we need to move on to the second quadrant, which is your offer. Some symptoms relevant to this quadrant are things like people showing interest but not buying, price objections is a huge one here, and low repeat purchases or high churn. That means you’ve got a problem with what you’re actually offering. So we’ll do the same thing again with the traffic light system for each of the points that come into this quadrant, and there’s four things to think about. Product market fit test. So is your offer as it currently stands solving the core problem of your audience as it is today? Do you have offer bloat? Have you added lots of features and bonuses and things like that over time to keep getting sales over the line? ’Cause this could lead to a lack of clarity in terms of the benefits that you actually deliver by just adding loads and loads of things that can actually confuse your customers. Pricing and packaging, so is your price anchored in the value that your solution creates, or is it anchored in the cost of what it takes you to deliver that solution, so the cost of creating it? Because if, if it’s anchored in that floor of this is what it takes for us to create it, so this is the lowest we can go, you are more than likely competing on price, and you’re in a race to the bottom with your competitors, versus it being anchored in value because then you’re in a race to the top to be the most premium solution. So if you are in that price race to the bottom, the fourth point is probably relevant to you as well, which is differentiation erosion. The key things that you differentiate yourself on, have those become table stakes within your market? So for example, five years ago, if you had AI embedded in your solution, you might have been ahead of your competitors. You might have been differentiated by that. Now, if you’re still leaning on that, it’s table stakes because everyone has it, and everyone can do it, and that’s an example of how your differentiation can be eroded over time. So think there, are the things that I’m differentiating myself on genuine differentiators today? And again, score those things green, amber, red.

10:093. Message

And then jump into quadrant three, which is your message. This is how you’re communicating the offer from quadrant two to the people from quadrant one. So you’ll see how this starts to stack on top of each other. So the symptoms that we’re looking at within this quadrant are things like falling conversion rates, whether that’s on your website, emails, whatever, uh, content getting engagement and views but not necessarily, again, converting or leading to inquiries or any valuable metrics, realizing that people are confused about what you actually do, and also feeling like you’re sounding like everyone else in your space which, again, with AI right now, is getting really common. Okay, and there’s six things that we look at within this. So one is a quick clarity test. Could someone who doesn’t already know your brand look at your website, look at your content, and immediately understand what it is that you do and who you do it for? The second is differentiation, but not in the context we talked about in the offer quadrant. This is differentiation in the context of how you communicate. And the way to easily think about this is if you open your website right now and cover your logo, could the copy and content that follows only belong to you, or could one of your competitors say it as well? ’Cause if they could also say it, then you’re not communicating in a differentiated way, okay? So that’s potentially a positioning problem within your messaging. The third point is has your market gotten more sophisticated, and therefore your marketing has followed? Okay, so this is in the context of the claims that you’re making about your solution. Are you making the same claims and trying to shout them louder, or are you coming up with a new mechanism, a new angle, because your market has heard all of those claims before? And then the four is are you backing up those claims with specific, relevant, recent evidence every time? Number five is the balance between sales and brand. So look at the split across your content. Is everything that you’re posting, sending, advertising all about making a sale, or are you including really important brand-building and value creation that isn’t just directly asking for money? Look at that split and see if it feels balanced ’cause it’s okay to have a sales push short term, but when you actually look at all of your content across all of your, all of your channels, if you’re just continually pushing for a sale, that’s how you lose trust and can stunt your growth in the long term. And finally, is your content suffering from creative fatigue? Have you been using the same hooks, formats, and offers for a really long time? If you have, this can be an indicator that, again, it’s a messaging problem ’cause you’re just saying the same thing over and over without coming up with new ideas. So again- Score each of those points red, amber, green.

12:524. Channels

Then this brings us to your fourth quadrant, which is channels. And this isn’t just about social media, although, of course, your social media channels are important, but it’s about every channel from which you bring in sales. So it might be email marketing, it might be cold outreach, it might be direct sales. Whatever that is for you. So symptoms that you have a problem here are things like when you do get leads, they are good leads, they convert well, but you just don’t get enough of them, so this also means your cost per lead can be pretty high, or it’s actually rising over time. So let’s look at what we’re working with within this quadrant. So there’s five points to think about. The first one is channel concentration. What percentage of your customers are coming from a single source? Is this percentage high, and is it therefore putting you at risk and capping you if you max out or lose this channel? I, for example, know that I rely heavily on referrals from some key partners. So if anything ever happened to those partners, that could actually heavily impact my business, so that’s a channel problem. Then there’s channel decay. So is one particular channel contributing to your stagnated growth more than others? So from the same effort or spend or time that you’re putting in, are you slowly declining in how much you’re actually getting back out of it? For example, we work with a lot of clients who’ve relied a lot on cold email, and over the last couple years, it’s become increasingly difficult to actually bring in clients that way, which means that channel has been decaying for them, and we’ve had to focus on other channels to make sure that they aren’t concentrated on that decaying channel. You could also look at if you’re relying a lot on Meta Ads or Google Ads, for example. Is your cost per acquisition going up? Because there’s a lot of talk right now of the cost of Meta Ads going up for everyone, so really look at whether that is happening for you. The third point is what type of growth are you actually going after? Specifically, is it founder-led? Now, if your founder, their network, their personal brand, and the channels they communicate that brand on are the lion’s share of where your growth and new customers come from, that means that they personally are the main sales engine. So actually look at and assess, is that capping your growth? Where it might have skyrocketed and really pushed it forward initially, is it now holding you back, or is it still a viable main growth engine? That’s up to you to decide. Then look at, do you actually have product channel fit? So do the channels that you’re pushing towards suit the sales cycle and price point and audience of your market? So for example, if you’re posting tons on TikTok, but you’re selling to an enterprise client a high-ticket product with a two-year sales cycle, is TikTok really the platform that you should be focusing on? Off the top of my head, without knowing a business, probably not. And finally, ask yourself when the last time was that you actually tested a new channel, okay? And then again, green, amber, red all of the points within that quadrant. So if you’ve just done this and you’re seeing a lot of red and it feels a bit overwhelming, then this is the exact process that we do go through with our clients to build out their strategy and then execute it for and with you. And we do take on a limited number of clients every quarter, so if you would like to apply to work with us, make sure you check out the top link in the description.

16:12Prioritise the fixes

Okay, so once we’ve done this with our clients and we’ve done this initial triage, and we can do this sometimes, depending on the size of the business, within 15 minutes with a founder of a smaller business. It takes a little bit more with a CEO of a larger business. Then it’s time to prioritize how we actually tackle all of the problems that have come up. So we went through those four quadrants in their natural dependency order, and it’s really important to do it in that way because each one depends on the one before. We have to look at it audience, offer, message, channels because you can’t write the correct message until you know what you’re selling and who you’re selling it to. There’s no point picking channels until you know who you’re trying to reach and what you need to say to them, okay? So we need to work top-down in terms of building out this plan. So the next step is to find the highest level constraint to start tackling so that we can find, fix, and then step down to the next one. So pick the most upstream quadrant that has the most reds against it, and we’re gonna focus first on that quadrant. So against each of the questions that we’ve asked ourselves, we need to create the fix to match with that challenge. So for example, if we had a red against the audience quadrant where we looked at whether our best customers now align with the ideal customer personas that we’ve been using, if we said that was a red because they don’t align, then obviously the fix for that is that we need to create a new ideal customer persona based on the best fit clients or customers that we want to attract. So list the fixes for that first quadrant and then score them one to 10 on impact, confidence, and ease, so the amount of impact they’re gonna have on your business, the confidence that you have in being able to execute that fix, and then the ease of being able to do it. So you should have three scores against each fix. When you total up that score, the highest score is the first fix that you go for, because it’s a combination of the highest value and the easiest to execute, because we want quick, valuable wins to start moving through this list. So you’ve got them ordered by score, and for that first action, that first fix that you’re gonna work on, can you fill out the statement in this framework? So we believe change will move metric from X to Y within timeframe. So for example, we believe adding a 30-day structured onboarding plan for new members will move 90-day retention from 53% to 70% within one quarter. Or we believe that partnering with three wedding planners for our key-Catering services will move new inquiries from referral partners from one to eight per month within three months. And we create these statements for every action that we’re gonna take, every fix we’re gonna implement with our client so that we are tying it back to a hypothesis and an actual movement in key metrics. And then we push that fix forward until it turns green, and then we move on to the next one. And obviously, depending on capacity and depending on what that action actually is, you can probably run many of these simultaneously, but don’t take on too many. Don’t try and fix multiple quadrants at the same time. That’s really important. So there might be four fixes that I need to make within my audience quadrant. I can work on all of those at the same time because they’re probably intrinsically very interlinked, but I’m not gonna go and work on fixes in a different quadrant as well because they need to be worked on in sequence, otherwise you’re just gonna end up backtracking. And as the context changes, you can of course rescore things as you go if you need to reorder those priorities because something that wasn’t easy to work on before might be easy now because of a new tool, or something you weren’t confident on before you may be confident on now because you’ve just fixed something that came before it.

20:07It comes back to your brand

So you have scored all four quadrants. You know what it is that is holding you back, and you’ve got your first action statement that you are gonna go away and test. And the thing is that when I take clients through this, the fixes that we need to make and the challenges that come up usually lie within the first three quadrants. It’s in their audience, their offer, or their message, and all three really come down to the same foundational thing, and it’s being clear on who you are for, what you stand for, and why you are different. So you really need to understand all of these things, especially when there’s multiple fixes that need to be made within multiple quadrants because what you want those fixes to be doing is working cohesively to be sustainable and compound your brand over the long term. Okay? Knowing those things means you have the guardrails to work within when you’re implementing strategy, when you’re deciding what fixes need to be made ’cause you know the sandbox you’re playing in, and that is your brand. So if that sounds like a problem for you, if that sounds like something you don’t even know where to start trying to define, then make sure you go and watch this video here, which is the nine essential questions all of the best brands have answered, which is the foundation for their growth. And if you like this video, please don’t forget to like and subscribe.