Why More Marketing Won't Grow Your Business

If you are an experienced entrepreneur, chances are your business is working.

You are making money. You have leads coming in, and your audience is growing. You are likely starting to think about scaling your offers and growing your business.

But there’s a question in the back of your mind. What’s working? Where is my revenue coming from?

Your business looks successful from the outside, but inside, you’re burning out. You are doing a lot more than you want to do to market your business, and because you don’t know where the revenue is coming from, you’re afraid to stop doing anything.

When you don’t know where your leads and revenue come from, it’s hard to know what to focus on and what to cut. Sometimes, we start adding even more to a channel that might not be working because we want to scale and grow the business.

When You’re Marketing Everywhere, It’s Overwhelming

Most entrepreneurs at this stage are doing a lot to market their business.

Maybe you’re trying to do SEO on your website.
Maybe you’re running ads to your funnel.
Maybe you’re running a webinar.
You likely have email marketing set up.
You’ve probably created multiple opt-ins or freebies.
You may even have a podcast or YouTube channel.
You are likely posting on multiple social media channels.

It’s very likely that you are spending more time on marketing than you’d like each week.

You are busy. Your business is growing, but you can’t answer the questions:

Where are my leads coming from?
Is what I’m doing for X channel working?

When you can’t answer those two questions, you can’t safely drop the marketing efforts that aren’t working because you don’t know which ones they are. You often end up spending a lot more time than is truly necessary focused on marketing your business.

It’s Not that You’re Afraid of Data, It’s that You Don’t Know Where to Look

When I first start working with entrepreneurs 1:1, I help them find out what’s working by teaching them how to look at their data.

Sometimes they don’t know if they have data available, so that’s the first thing we check. Is there an analytics program available for their website? The good news is that most website platforms have something available, or they’ve installed Google Analytics, so there’s information we can review.

The Answers We Need are in Your Data

Then we look at what marketing channels they’re focusing on, and I teach them how to find out if those channels are sending traffic, leads, or sales to their website. I show them how to find their page-level data, which is something many entrepreneurs have never viewed.

From here, we figure out what’s working and what’s just wasting their time so they can start to double down on what’s working and get back those wasted hours.

Once You Understand What’s Working It’s Easier to Grow

Once you start to understand your data and know where your leads come from each month, it’s much easier to stay focused and grow your business. You’re less prone to following shiny objects or adding another marketing channel, thinking it might be the thing that helps you scale.

Even if they have support teams like VAs or ads managers, I still walk them through the performance reporting for their business so they can start to learn what the goal numbers are so that when their team is telling them how things are working, they understand if the performance is actually good or they’re just being told the people they’re paying are doing a good job.

You Need Strategy, Execution, and Performance Review to Grow

In order to really grow your business, you need to understand how it’s working. Once you understand the full marketing cycle from idea (strategy) to implementation (execution) to performance review (data / what’s working), it’s easier to start to grow your business with confidence.

I recommend committing to one primary marketing channel at a time, focusing on it, and then repurposing the content you create for that channel across others, if you want. For example, I start with my blog post, which is my core piece of content each week. From there, I create a podcast episode and record that so both can go out into the world to help my business be found. Then, I share the podcast episode and blog post with my email list to help nurture those who already follow me. You want to be doing the same thing with your business.

It's not necessary to be everywhere all the time. If you’re strategic and you understand what works for your business, you can free up your time and grow your business. You’ll notice my plan doesn’t include posting on social media. I’ve done it in the past, I have profiles on several platforms, and I’ve got information on them; however, I don’t personally find that social media drives much revenue for my business, so I don’t prioritize it. If I have extra time and want to post something, I may, but it’s not part of my standard weekly plan. I do have several thousand people who follow me on social, but I get more visibility from my website, blog, and podcast than I do on social every month. I also have over 10,000 people on my email list, so I definitely prioritize keeping up with them, staying consistent, and nurturing those who have raised their hands and said, I want to be in your world, Rachel.

The Benefit of Doing Less But Being More Strategic

This approach allows you to operate like a marketing director, not a scared entrepreneur. When you are more strategic in your approach to your marketing, you can spend fewer hours creating content and engaging with your audience, but generate more leads and make more money.

You want to run your marketing from a place of clarity and confidence. Once you know how to interpret the data in your accounts, it helps you so much.

It’s interesting to me because this was one of the first things I learned when I started working in corporate marketing. We test and report on everything. We try new strategies and marketing channels regularly, but we track the results, we let go of what doesn’t work, and we double down on what does fairly quickly. I was so surprised by the fact that almost no one talks about tracking metrics or understanding where your leads come from within the entrepreneurial world. It’s crazy to me.

If you’re interested in shifting your approach to marketing and becoming more strategic and confident, I’d love to help you. I work with a select group of entrepreneurs one-on-one. If you’re interested in exploring working together and understanding what’s working in your business better, you can learn more about my marketing consulting work here.

What My Clients Say About Working with Me

Michael shared:

Working with Rachel completely changed how I run my business. I was spending money on ads without really understanding my numbers or what was actually working. Rachel helped me slow down, get clear, and focus my efforts where they mattered. It was the highest ROI investment I have made in my business.

Deanna shared:

Before working with Rachel, I knew we were doing well, but I could not clearly see why. I felt stuck doing everything out of fear that stopping the wrong thing would hurt the business. Rachel helped me understand my numbers and showed me exactly where our leads were coming from. That clarity alone was a huge relief.

Both of them were already successful. What they were missing was clarity.

How to Get Started Today

If you are tired of guessing, the first step is to be curious.

You do not need to fix everything at once. You do not need to overhaul your marketing overnight. You just need to understand what is actually happening.

And if you want help walking through this step by step, this is the work I do with clients one-on-one. I help you understand what you are seeing, what matters, what does not, and how to build a strategy that supports sustainable growth instead of burnout. Learn more about my one-on-one program here. I’d love to help you with this too.