Are you Happy With Your Marketing?

An 8 Minute read

Most of Them Aren't Mistakes.

They're the Easier Option.

Here's the thing about the mistakes below.

Nobody makes them out of ignorance.

Every single one is the comfortable version of something harder. And the harder version always involves deciding something: who you're for, what you believe, whose name goes on it.

Deciding is uncomfortable. Posting is not.

So firms do the easy thing, call it marketing, and wonder why it doesn't work.

Nine of them. You'll recognise at least four.

1. You lead with your credentials.

Twenty years' experience. Award-winning team. Trusted by clients since 1998.

All about you. None of it about them.

Your background is the thing you're most confident discussing, which is exactly why it's the first thing out of your mouth. It's also the least interesting thing in the room.

The buyer has one question running: does this firm understand my situation?

Nothing in your history answers that.

2. You hide behind "we".

"We are a leading provider of..."

Nobody follows a "we". Nobody quotes a "we". Nobody looks up a "we" before a meeting.

They look up a person.

The firm voice feels safer because it doesn't expose any individual. That's precisely what makes it useless; there's nothing there to trust.

3. You won't say who you're not for.

Because ruling anyone out feels reckless when the pipeline looks thin.

So the website tries to include everybody, and the result is that nobody reads themselves into it.

You didn't widen your market. You blurred it.

4. You market when it's quiet.

The cycle everyone knows, and nobody breaks:

Busy → stop marketing → quiet quarter → panic → burst of activity → win work → busy → stop.

Round and round.

The problem is the lag. What you do this month affects the pipeline in two or three quarters' time. So you're always feeding the pipeline you already have and starving the one you'll need.

5. You treat referrals as a strategy.

They're not a strategy. They're a result.

Referrals are wonderful right up until the year a big client restructures, two referrers retire, and the phone doesn't ring.

Then you discover you have no way to create demand — only to receive it.

Firms that run on referrals aren't wrong to value them. They're wrong to have nothing else.

6. You rebuild instead of continuing.

New website. New brand. New tagline. Every two or three years.

It feels like progress because there's something to look at when it's finished.

But you've reset the compounding each time. Three years of familiarity, search authority and accumulated proof, traded for a nicer font.

The firms winning the work you want didn't start again. They kept going.

7. You hand it to whoever's least billable.

Marketing goes to the most junior person, or the office manager, or a partner's spare Friday afternoons.

Not because anyone thinks it's unimportant. Because everyone else is chargeable.

But the person with the least experience of your buyers is now deciding what your firm says to them. And the person with the most is too expensive to spend an hour a week on it.

That's backwards, and it's almost universal.

8. You judge it on the wrong clock.

Six weeks in, nothing's closed, so it gets cut.

But you're selling something with a 9- to 18-month decision cycle. Six weeks tells you literally nothing.

Half the marketing that gets killed in professional services was working. It just hadn't arrived yet.

9. You count what's easy to count.

Impressions. Followers. Open rates.

None of them tells you whether the right people are paying attention.

Three views from your target account matter more than three hundred from your competitors. But one of those numbers is on a dashboard, and the other requires you to actually look at who's showing up.

The bit most people skip

Here's what makes all of this genuinely dangerous.

You will not notice any of it while it's happening.

Marketing failure doesn't announce itself. There's no bad quarter, no obvious drop, no moment where something visibly breaks. The pipeline just quietly stops refilling while you're busy delivering the work you already won.

And because there's a lag of two or three quarters between cause and effect, by the time it's visible in the numbers, the mistake is six to nine months old.

You'll find out you had a marketing problem in Q3.

You had it in Q1.

Which is why "we'll sort marketing out when things slow down" is such an expensive sentence. When things slow down, you're not fixing this quarter — you're starting a process that pays out next year, at the exact moment you can least afford to wait.

The firms that don't get caught by this aren't smarter. They just kept doing the boring thing during the busy months, when it felt completely unnecessary.

The takeaway

Stop talking about your credentials. Put a person's name on it. Say who you're not for.

Keep going when you're busy. Build something that creates demand rather than just receiving it. Stop rebuilding what was finally starting to work.

And give it long enough to be worth judging.

None of that is complicated.

It's just harder than posting something and hoping.