4 Lessons From a Year of Marketing Failure

In early July, I’ll have been at my current job — Director of Digital Marketing for a small software development company — for a year.

In that time, I launched a podcast; published ebooks; advertised on Google; posted a bunch to Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook; published articles on AllBusiness.com, YFS, and Clutch (to name a few); sent a hundred emails; built a half-dozen marketing automation workflows; sponsored company listings; and even sent copies of industry-related books to a curated list of ideal clients with a note asking them to schedule a 15-minute call.

All that, and marketing drove just one sale over the course of the year. Just one. Granted, it brought in more revenue than our annual marketing budget, so our ROI was positive (and I’m not in danger of losing my job), but it’s still hard to feel like a good marketer when you’re closing just one lead a year.

It isn’t a total and abject failure, of course. Our social media followings have grown — marginally. Our email list has grown — a little. Our SEO rankings have increased — barely.

But when it comes down to it, the purpose of marketing is to deliver qualified leads to the sales team and ultimately, to drive revenue.

So far, almost nothing I’ve done has worked.

There are some who might say that a year of marketing a startup simply isn’t enough time and I should go easy on myself. Sure, maybe that’s true. I sure hope it is.

But I’ve still learned some hard lessons this year. I figure that if I write them out here, I might save some people from learning those same lessons the hard way.

So let’s get started.

 Lesson #1 — One person can’t do everything

My company barely did any marketing before I started. They sent out a quarterly email newsletter to a poorly engaged email list they had bought, and sometimes they wrote a self-promotional blog post.

When I came in, I advocated for the building of a massive inbound marketing engine.

I wanted to blog far more regularly. I wanted to create ebooks to use as gated content. I wanted to engage with people on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook on a regular basis. I wanted to capture leads and nurture them with email workflows, which meant writing the emails and building the automation.

Basically, I wanted to do the work of an entire marketing team.

I was coming out of a job where I had been the Digital Marketing Manager in such a marketing team. We’d had an email manager, a content manager, a social manager, a dedicated graphic designer, and a dedicated web developer. I had seen how well that marketing engine could work, and I wanted to replicate it…myself.

And I sure tried, but even with the help of my CMO and freelance writers, this took an inordinate amount of time, and, ultimately, the results were poor and ineffectual.

You simply can’t do everything. Whatever your limitations — time, budget, resources — you have to acknowledge them and prioritize your efforts.

I don’t know for a fact that I would have been more successful if I had focused on just one or two things rather all of them at once, but I can definitively say that I what I chose to do didn’t work.

 Lesson #2 — You can’t market something without a story

I like to think I’m a pretty good storyteller.

I write here on Medium a lot, and I’m also an independently published fantasy author with six novels out.

Marketing is largely about finding out either a) what story your company has to tell or b) what story your customers need to hear, and then telling it to the best of your ability.

Coca-Cola’s story is one of nostalgia — it’s the drink you chose when you were a kid and your parents would take you to McDonald’s. And the McDonald’s story is one of popularity — it’s served billions and billions of hamburgers since its inception.

At least, those are the stories those companies’ marketing departments tell you through advertising.

Whatever your company does, it has to be unique. Finding that unique story and telling it is the purpose of a good marketer. As an avid writer and storyteller, I should be good at it, but I’ve struggled at this company to the point of barely telling any story at all.

We’re really good at the service we offer, but so are our competitors. OK, so we’re local to Denver — yeah, but there’s lots of competitors here too. We like to think we’re a great value, but what company doesn’t make that claim?

The truth is, what differentiates us are our founders, who are both brilliant and yet humble. When potential clients meet them, they fall in love with them.

Knowing that, it should be easy for marketing to succeed — all I have to do is get these guys in front of potential clients!

But I had no idea when I started, and I didn’t dig in to figure it out — the realization that our best marketing tools were our founders only came earlier this year when we brought it in a marketing consultant to look at our company from a different angle.

Don’t make my mistake — relentlessly pursue your story until you know it. And don’t bother doing any marketing until you’re sure that you’ve found a story worth telling.

 Lesson #3 — What you’re good at isn’t necessarily what you should do

I came into this company with 10+ years of digital marketing experience.

I had done it all — SEO, SEM, email, social, automation, web design…

So naturally, when it came time to develop a marketing strategy, I suggested we do … all those things.

It was misguided. The company didn’t need everything. We had no audience, so there was nobody reading our blog posts or liking our social posts. We had no leads, so who were these marketing automation funnels for? Barely anyone ever visited our website, so we could have saved thousands of dollars on updates and improvements we made in the first few months of my tenure.

I was blinded by my ambition and my hubris. I thought I was so damn good at this whole digital marketing thing that it would simply work, like I could flip a switch and suddenly the leads would start pouring in.

That wasn’t the case. It turns out we have to dig some trenches and establish a foundation first. It isn’t the stuff I’m best at, but it’s what this company needs right now and what I should have started doing my first day.

 Lesson #4 — Fail fast and pivot quickly

Here’s one that my company is actually good at.

We tried a million things. Most didn’t work. But we were gathering the right data to realize they weren’t working and able to move on to the next idea relatively quickly.

I do believe that some tactics need time to mature. Google Search Ads, for example, won’t necessarily work perfectly right out of the gate — you’ll probably have to adjust keywords and landing pages, and you’ll definitely have to wait for Google’s algorithms to determine what ad copy converts the best.

So don’t move too quickly, but when the data is telling you a story, don’t be afraid to listen. Even if the story it’s telling is one of failure.

 I doubt this is a holistic list — heck, I’m sure I’m still learning lessons, and I don’t even have any evidence that my year of marketing failure is over. But it’s what I’ve got right now.

Hopefully the sequel is “4 Lessons from a Year of Marketing Success” instead of “4 More Lessons from Another Year of Marketing Failure.”