What to do when your marketing isn't working

Have you ever wondered why your marketing strategy didn't go as planned? 

It can be hard to know what went wrong. Was it the channel? Was it the message? Was it the timing?

And if you don't know what went wrong, it's really hard to make it better. 

In today's episode, I'm gonna share a technique I've used for years on growth projects when customers weren't buying as expected.

We'll run through some different angles you can use and we'll talk about how you can bring data in so you can make your decisions about your next move based on evidence. I'm Lex Roman and this is the Low Energy Leads Show.

My favorite thing to do when my marketing isn't working is to break it down into smaller pieces. So today we're gonna talk about something. I call discovery boards, which is a tool that I've used many times inside companies to get to the heart of what is going wrong. Let's look at first, the factors at play when it comes to marketing. 

I break marketing into four main factors, channels, audiences, messages, and offers. 

Channels are where you are delivering this marketing. So it can be something like a Google search. It can be your website. It can be email, it can be through a partner's newsletter. It can be through a podcast. Where is this message being delivered? Where is this marketing strategy being deployed? 

And you can have multiple channels at play in any marketing strategy. You wanna think about what channels are at play when you're saying what went Wrong here.

Audiences is who you are trying to reach. And a lot of times people are way too vague and broad about your audience. But I really encourage you to think about who were you intending to reach? And who did you reach? What delineates them and separates them from people that you didn't reach and would never have reached. 

I encourage you to think about behaviors, situations, pain points, motivations, what unifies this group of people. And makes them the target for this marketing strategy. Messages are what you are saying. About why they need you and what you're offering. So this can include the pain points you might be messaging around, or the benefits that you might be sharing, or it might include more educational content or conversion focus content. 

What messages are you delivering in your marketing strategy? 

And lastly, we have offers. I sometimes combine messaging and offers because they go hand in hand, but the offer can stand alone in terms of what it is that you're actually trying to sell. 

There are some preferences that can come into play there in terms of the kind of solution someone wants, for example, do they want a done for them service or would they like to learn in a course or in a membership and price point would also fall into the offers factor. So these can be broken down further. 

I use it as a framework when I'm looking at my marketing strategy to say, okay, what was the issue here? Was it channel? Was it target audience? Was it my message or was it my offer? 

When I'm not sure what exactly happened. I like to break it down with something called a discovery board. Discovery boards are a technique I've been using throughout most of my growth career to make huge problems much more manageable. And to make it more clear what path we should take, where our opportunity is. 

I'll share two examples of discovery boards I've used inside growth teams. To troubleshoot what might be going wrong and to fix conversion issues inside companies.

If you're watching this on YouTube, you can see two giant poster boards. These are four by eight. Gator foam poster boards. And what I've done here is I've laid out everything that's happening in a certain experience. Now, these boards are actually mapping in product experiences for the black tux and for burner. So these are apps and websites. And so people are not just interacting with marketing here. They're interacting with the whole product and leading to a purchase. 

But you can do the same thing with marketing. To walk you through what's happening here in the center. We have images that show what the customer or prospect is going through as they're approaching the sale. So what are all the things they're seeing? What are all the messages there? What are all the images there? How many steps are involved from a to B? 

This can be really easy to misconstrue when you are heads down in the work all the time, and you can forget just how many things are in someone's way. When they learn about you and then all the way to a purchase like that path can be actually very long and there can be many things going on in there. And as you can see if you're watching this on video, 

There are so many places where people could get distracted or lost along the way. And you always wanna reduce that. If you can, you wanna reduce the amount of steps people are going through. You wanna reduce the amount of factors that are at play, reduce confusion points. So we've got our basic flow, what someone is doing from a to B. And then on top of that, there's a bunch of sticky notes and graphs. So what's overlaid here is the information we have about what might be going on.

Data of how many people made it to each step of this flow. 

Information from customers and perspective customers in the form of quotes, feedback, support tickets, things like that. In the case of the company that we're looking at here, this was a bigger team. So they had support systems, but in your case, you might have DMS, you might have email replies, you're still getting feedback from people. 

Overlaying that on top of the area that they're referencing. can help you understand what might be the issue there, right? It's just a little bit of a hint. As to what might be going wrong now, you don't wanna over-index on one person's feedback, but if you're really lost someone else's feedback, that's not yours is better than just your assumption of what's going on. 

Looking at the other board here. This is for um, a mobile app that I used to work on called burner. You can see here that I've gone quite overboard with the post-it notes and not only have I captured data and customer feedback, but I've also captured my own questions. What do I think is going wrong? What are my assumptions about what might be causing an issue or friction at any step of this process? Right? Someone starts. They have the best of intentions to get through. Where are they getting lost? What do I think is going wrong? 

For me, it's been really helpful to map this out. I've done this on pretty much every growth project I've worked on since 2014. And it always helps me see visually where the gap is. It is a great way to focus your attention on what's actually going wrong. Versus things you wish were better or areas where someone gave you feedback, but it's like actually not rooted at any data. So it really helps you get clear on where do you have information? Where do you not have information and where should you be focusing your time and energy? 

Discovery boards are incredibly helpful for mapping out. What are all the parts going on here? A lot of times, again, in marketing, we think, oh, it's just a couple things. It's just an image. It's just a piece of text, but there's actually a lot more moving parts to it. And when you break it down, you can see what those moving parts are and you can analyze them separately. 

That helps you ask how well is each part functioning? Is it the title? Is it the image? Is it the homepage load time? What are the issues getting in the way? you overlay information here. Click through rate response rate. Sales page views. Any information that you have that aligns with the marketing strategy that you are trying out. You can see very clearly. 

What's your biggest gap. Now sometimes you'll illuminate that you have a gap of information and you might need to go back and try to figure out what's going on. So that leads us to the next question. What information do I have 

when you visualize a marketing flow, you can see what information you have about how that thing is performing. And very clearly what information you do not have. Which leads you to ask, what questions do I have about what's going wrong here? Is there more information that I can gather either from my tools or from my customers? 

it just really makes it clear. What's going well, what's not going well. And where should you focus your time and energy? You don't wanna fix. What's not broken a lot of times in marketing, especially since there's so many visual elements, people will spend a lot of time on things that actually don't have that much impact. 

And it's actually a piece that's working great. And even though maybe you're sick of that landing page, or you wish your email template was prettier, it's not actually the piece of the puzzle that's broken. So it's helpful to see it laid out and to know here is where I should. Actually focus my time. 

I will walk you through an example of how this might look for you. If you are mapping out your marketing. In a discovery board to identify what went wrong with a test. You can do this in something like Canva, I'm using a tool called Figma right now on this video, you can use Miro. Any whiteboarding tool will work. If you are analog, you can do this in a notebook. I think it's really helpful to see screenshots of what you did so you can print those out. You can make a poster board, as I showed earlier in this episode, this is a real flow that I tried in the fall and it worked pretty successfully for me. 

These metrics are fake. So if I was laying this out to try to figure out how I could get more from this flow. The first thing I would do is lay out every step of the experience from the first touchpoint to the booking that I want people to make. 

Here is my conference talk summit attendees saw this landing page. So you can see here that the channel is a summit. And that has a specific target audience. So there's two factors there, channel and audience. And there's a third factor, which is the messaging that I decided to gear my talk around the solopreneurs guide to getting more referrals. So that message is a key message that either attracted people in or didn't. 

And there's metrics around all of those things. I'm gonna put a traffic metric on there. Um, again, this metric is fake, but as an example, This is how many people might have looked at that landing page. You could do something like video views as well. 

You can see here on the right that I have a download button on my summit talk and the download goes to this landing page. So here we have, the channel is my website. We have the message, which is free resource referral program toolkit. and then people can get the toolkit. The metric there is downloads. How many people downloaded that? 

So we'll overlay that here. And then once they download that they get an email sequence, so they get their free download and then they get several emails about how to use the referral toolkit. And that sequence is also designed to warm people up so that they might be interested in working with me. Referrals are fantastic. The referral toolkit is a fantastic resource if I might say so myself, but referrals are not usually enough to keep someone booked. 

Folks are interested in exploring other channels and other opportunities. So this email sequence is. Designed to get people thinking about that and to encourage them to explore support for that. So we might have click through rate now. Email sequences are gonna have several metrics involved. They'll have open rate, they'll have click through rate. You'll have click through on specific links. Um, you'll have timing metrics and things like that. I would encourage you to not look at everything and to really just look at the metrics that matter to you. 

I'm simplifying this for the purpose of my example, I just really care about the click through rate on the last couple emails versus the first email, which is just, did they get the toolkit or not?

Then I want that to go to a booking in this case, I'm skipping over what the booking flow looks like just for simplicity, but you can also lay out your booking flow here because those are steps that could get in people's way. And there is messaging there and there is speed there. How quickly does that load? 

How easy is that to navigate? There's a lot of factors that could be at play in the booking flow that might slow someone down. So you can see here. I have a pretty simple discovery board for this test. I've got how many people saw my talk. How many people downloaded it, clicks and bookings. So I can see really clearly here where I might have a gap. 

I like to start all the way at the end. So if one person made it through, the reason I chose the metric of one here is because if one person made it through, then you have a fully successful flow that at least worked for one person. And there are probably more people that, that could work for. 

So there's a little bit of signal there. Focusing on the lightest weight signal is always great because it can give you an indication that something did work. I would recommend that you start closest to the money. As I like to say, if you had five people click through to look at the offer and only one person book, is there something that you could do to close this gap? So I would look at the steps here between. The click through on the offer and the booking. 

So you can drill down even further in here and say, was it the message? Was it the button? Was it the initial audience? Right? Was this not the right audience to get through this flow? So you can start asking those questions. And again, you can start mapping that data on here. 

Once you've solved that problem, or you've tried to address it as best you can. Then I would work back upwards. 

Through your funnel, the top of funnel traffic or the early awareness traffic is gonna be the least qualified traffic. And so that's why I recommend that you work closer to the money with people. Who've shown a lot of interest and intent in buying before worrying about people who we really don't know their intent. 

It's a lot harder to understand what like who they are and whether or not they're gonna buy anything anyway. So I wouldn't worry about them in the beginning. I would start close to the money and work your way back up the flow, because if you can increase conversion from step to step, starting at the bottom. 

You're gonna increase throughput. And then when you do higher level marketing activities, more visibility activities, you have a proven funnel that you can run over and over again. 

 Just like with the other discovery boards, I show you can also add. Feedback onto your board. So if people write you back in your email sequence, if they respond to the summit talk. You can include that information. You can include drill down metrics, like timing between activities. This is especially helpful if you're using. 

Like a sales process with a CRM and you have a discovery call and you wanna know how long from discovery call to booking did something take. And that might vary a lot based on the channel for example, a podcast might convert differently than a summit talk versus a partner referral. And so all of this information can just help you piece together the puzzle of what might have gone wrong, and it can help illuminate where you should focus your energy to get it right. 

once you have your discovery board, you can begin to create tests about what you want to try next, focus in on the area where you'll have the biggest impact. This is why I recommend you go close to the money because people that are closer to a sale, they have higher intent, they're easier to close, and there's usually less factors at play at that part of your marketing funnel.

If you're thinking, wow, Lex, I wish I had some help to come up with what I should test next. I've got great news for you.

I created a membership called Growthtrackers, which is a space for testing, tracking, and tuning your marketing and your sales. Inside that program, we find your “get booked and stay booked formula” by testing high value, low effort opportunities, and doubling down on what works and ditching what doesn't.

You can stay connected with the show at lowenergyleads.com. Subscribe there to keep up with the latest episodes and leave me a voicemail with your thoughts or questions about this episode.

Thanks for tuning in, and until next time, remember that high value doesn't have to mean high energy.