I had a call last week with a business owner who’d spent the morning updating her Instagram bio, the afternoon reading about SEO, and was now messaging me at 9pm asking whether she should “just do more email marketing.”
She was doing what most small business owners end up doing at some point – trying to be good at everything, all at once, because nobody’s told her which one thing would actually move the needle.
That’s the question I hear most often, in one form or another:
“What should I actually be focusing on with my marketing?”
“Should I be posting more on Instagram?”
“Do I need to finally sort out my SEO?”
“Should I start an email list?”
“Is my website the problem?”
“Would Google Ads help?”
“Should I be on LinkedIn?”
And before long, marketing has become an enormous list of things you feel you should be doing.
Here’s the thing though – there are so many things you could be doing that working out what actually deserves your time becomes the hard part.
After more than 17 years working in marketing, one of the biggest things I’ve learnt is that doing more isn’t necessarily the answer.
Sometimes you need to do less. You just need to make sure you’re doing the right thing.
Before You Choose a Channel, Work Out What the Problem Actually Is
Let’s say you’ve decided you need to improve your SEO.
Why?
If the answer is because someone told you SEO is important, or because you keep seeing other businesses talking about it, that’s not really a good enough reason to make it your priority this month.
The same goes for Instagram, email marketing, paid ads, LinkedIn or redesigning your website. They’re all useful. But they solve different problems, for different businesses, at different times.
So when I’m looking at a business, I’m far more interested in a different question first:
Where are people getting stuck?
Think about the journey someone takes before they become your customer. First, they need to find you. Then they need to understand you. They need enough confidence and interest to enquire or buy. And finally, they need a reason to choose you over anyone else.
Where that journey breaks down tells you almost everything about what your marketing needs next.
1. People Aren’t Finding You (a Visibility Problem)
You could have the most beautiful website in your industry, brilliant testimonials and a genuinely brilliant offer. But if hardly anyone sees any of it, none of that matters yet.
This is when I’d start looking at things like your search visibility, local SEO, Google Business Profile, social media, partnerships, PR or networking.
Look at your numbers too. How many people are actually visiting your website each month? Where are they coming from? Are the right people discovering you, or just anyone?
If very few potential customers are finding your business, spending the next month tweaking the wording on your contact page isn’t going to transform your results.
Your priority is getting in front of more of the right people – first.
2. People Are Finding You, but They Don’t Quite Get What You Do
This one is incredibly common, and it’s rarely obvious from the inside.
You’re getting profile views. People are visiting the website. Maybe you’re networking regularly and meeting plenty of people. But you’re still not getting the response you’d expect.
Try looking at your business as though you’d never seen it before. Within a few seconds of landing on your website or social profile, could a total stranger tell:
- Who you help?
- What you help them with?
- Why they might choose you?
- What they should do next?
We spend so much time inside our own businesses that it’s genuinely difficult to notice when our messaging has drifted into vague. Phrases that make perfect sense to us can mean almost nothing to someone discovering us for the first time.
If people are finding you but aren’t quite getting it, creating more content might just mean more people seeing a message that isn’t clear enough yet.
Your priority here is your messaging and positioning, not your volume of posting.
If this section sounds a bit too familiar, it might be a messaging problem rather than a marketing one.
The Magnetic Messaging Workbook is designed to help you get out of your own head and work out exactly how to say what you do, who it’s for, and why it matters – in words that actually land with someone who’s never heard of you before.
Get the Magnetic Messaging Workbook →
3. People Are Visiting Your Website, but They’re Not Getting in Touch
I’d be careful about automatically chasing more traffic when this is the pattern.
If 500 people visit your website and hardly anyone enquires, sending another 500 people there won’t necessarily fix anything. It’ll just mean 1,000 people not enquiring instead of 500.
A client I worked with a while back was in exactly this position. Decent traffic, almost no enquiries. We didn’t touch her marketing at all for the first few weeks – we went through her website line by line instead.
We worked out her services page answered every question except the one people actually had: what it would be like to work with her.
Once we fixed that, the same traffic she already had started converting. No extra ad spend, no new content plan. Just a website that finally did its job.
So before assuming you need more visitors, ask:
- Does the website immediately reassure people they’re in the right place?
- Is it easy to understand your services?
- Do you answer the questions someone’s likely to have before they contact you?
- Is there enough proof that you know what you’re doing?
- Is the next step obvious?
Sometimes the opportunity isn’t at the top of the funnel at all – you’ve already got people’s attention.
Your priority is making better use of the attention you’ve already earned.
4. People Are Enquiring, but They’re Choosing Someone Else
This is a different problem again, and one of the harder ones to spot without stepping back.
You’re visible. Your message is doing enough to generate interest. Your website gets people to take action. But somewhere between the enquiry and the sale, they’re slipping away – to a competitor, to “we’ll think about it,” or just to silence.
I’d start looking at the whole decision-making experience.
Are you clearly communicating the value of what you offer, not just the features of it? Are there testimonials, case studies or examples that make the decision feel safer? Does your follow-up actually happen, and happen well? Are people comparing you purely on price because they genuinely can’t see any difference between you and somebody else?
You might not need more leads at all. You may need to build more trust with the ones you’ve already got.
Your priority is understanding what’s actually stopping those people from saying yes – and it’s rarely price, even when that’s what they say.
And Sometimes, Marketing Isn’t the Problem at All
Not every quiet period can be fixed by changing your marketing.
Sometimes there’s an issue with the offer itself. Perhaps the demand isn’t there. Perhaps the pricing and audience aren’t quite aligned. Perhaps the service has become difficult to explain, even to yourself.
Maybe it’s just a seasonal dip. Or perhaps enquiries are actually healthy, but your sales process isn’t converting them once they arrive.
Good marketing strategy isn’t about prescribing marketing as the answer to everything.
It’s about looking honestly at what’s actually happening and making a sensible decision from there.
So, Where Should You Focus Your Marketing?
If you’ve currently got SEO, Instagram, email marketing, your website, LinkedIn and three other things all fighting for your attention, don’t start by asking which one you should be doing more of.
Start here instead:
- Are enough of the right people finding you?
- When they do, do they understand what you offer?
- Are they taking the next step?
- And when they do, are they choosing you?
You don’t need perfect data to answer these questions. Google Analytics, Search Console, enquiry numbers, conversion rates and customer feedback can all help – but often you’ll already have a pretty good idea once you stop looking at individual marketing tasks and look at the journey as a whole.
Then choose the one area most likely to make a meaningful difference, and give it your proper attention.
You can come back to the rest later.
Not Sure Where Your Marketing Is Getting Stuck?
This is exactly the kind of thing we work through in a Marketing Power Hour.
Before we meet, I’ll ask you to complete a short questionnaire so I understand your business and where you are right now. Then we’ll spend the session properly focused on the one area that’s holding you back, rather than trying to fix ten different things in sixty minutes.
You’ll leave knowing what deserves your attention next – and what can wait.
