For business owners · Innovative Media Professionals
Before you fire your marketing company
The five things I check when an owner tells me their ads stopped working. In the order that costs you the most.
I hear the same sentence in almost every first conversation. "My ads just aren't working."
Sometimes that's true. More often something else is going on, and the marketing company is about to get blamed for it.
So before anything else, I ask one question.
Are you getting leads?
If the answer is no, that's a problem with the ads. Go talk to whoever runs them.
If the answer is yes — people are calling and filling out forms, they're just not ending up on your schedule — then the ads did their job. Something is going wrong after that, inside your office. Firing your ad company won't fix it.
That's an uncomfortable thing to hear. It's also usually the truth.
Here is what I look at, in order. The order matters. These don't cost the same.
01How fast does someone call back, and how many times?
Usually the biggest one · cheapest to fix
Someone fills out your form at 9:40 in the morning. By two in the afternoon, they're a different person.
They filled out three forms, not just yours. Somebody else called them back in four minutes. By the time your front desk gets to it between customers, that appointment already exists somewhere else.
Here's what I usually find. One phone call. Business hours only. No text. No second try. Nothing after the first two days. Leads that come in Saturday sit until Monday. And everyone counts a voicemail as "we called them," even though a voicemail almost never turns into a customer.
Before you look at anything else, get two numbers: how long your office takes to call a new lead, and how many times it tries. Most owners are surprised. If the answer is hours, that's your problem, and no amount of ad money will outrun it.
02What did those leads actually respond to?
This is where the owner is sometimes right
Here I'll defend you a little, because sometimes the complaint is fair.
A marketing company can get you cheap leads by showing an ad to everybody and offering something free. A free consultation. A free estimate. A $49 first visit. Those ads work. They bring in a lot of people, and the monthly report looks great.
But someone who raised their hand for something free often wasn't going to pay for anything either way. No follow-up in the world turns that person into a customer.
So the second thing I check is simple: what was the ad offering, and who was it shown to? If it promised something free to everyone within twenty-five miles, you're getting plenty of people. You're just not getting people who were ever going to pay.
That's worth bringing up. But bring it up as a question about the offer and who's seeing it — not as "your ads don't work." One of those gets you a better ad. The other gets you a defensive vendor.
03What do they find in the next forty seconds?
Nobody in your office can see this one
Nobody calls straight off an ad anymore. They look you up first.
They search your name. They read your reviews. They look at your photos. And more and more of them just ask an AI app whether you're any good.
That takes under a minute, and you are not there for it.
If what they find is fourteen reviews with the newest one from 2022, a Google listing with no hours and three photos, and a website that takes six seconds to load on a phone — then the ad already worked. It got their attention. The look-up is what lost them. And they will never tell you that's what happened. The lead just goes quiet.
The biggest piece of this, by far, is reviews. Not social media. Not YouTube. Reviews. A better business with twelve of them loses to a worse one with two hundred, and it isn't close.
04Are they not booking, or not showing up?
Two different problems · people treat them as one
These get talked about together, and they have almost nothing to do with each other.
Not booking is everything above. How fast you call. Whether they trust you. How hard you make it. If someone has to fill out a form and wait for a call back to get an appointment, you're losing the people who would have booked at eleven at night on their phone. They didn't want a conversation. They wanted a time.
Not showing up is a completely different list. How far out you're booking. Whether you send reminders, and how many. Whether anyone picks up the phone when someone misses. A business booking three weeks out will lose appointments no matter how good the marketing is. So will one that sends a single text and leaves it there.
This matters because the fixes have nothing in common. Spend more on marketing to fix a no-show problem and you'll just buy more people who don't turn up.
Show rate is usually the fastest money in the building, and it costs nothing but process.
05Then the last one: how many never became a lead at all?
This never shows up on any report
By now we've looked at every lead you paid for. Here's the part that appears nowhere.
The whole time this has been going on, people in your town — often a couple of miles from your front door — have been searching for exactly what you do. They aren't responding to an ad. They already have the problem and they're looking for someone to fix it. They're the best customers there are, and they cost you nothing.
If your business sits on page two, doesn't come up on the map at the top of Google, and doesn't get named when someone asks an AI app who to go to, then those people found somebody else.
No missed call. No lost lead. Nothing on any report. Nothing anywhere says the search even happened.
And it's the same root problem as everything above it. A business with few reviews, a slow website, a Google listing nobody has touched in two years, and nothing posted lately is invisible to the search and unconvincing to the lead who does come in.
That's not two problems. That's one problem seen from two sides. The customers you never see, and the leads you can't close.
What I actually tell them
If you're not getting leads, go talk to your marketing company. That one's theirs.
If you are getting leads and they aren't turning into customers, the fix is almost never a new ad company. It's how fast you call back. Then what your ad is offering. Then what people find when they look you up. Then your no-show process. Roughly in that order, because that's the order of what it's costing you.
And once that's working, there's a bigger question nobody has asked yet: how many people never called you at all?
That one is easy to answer. We'll check your business from spots all over your area and show you exactly where you come up and where you don't. Free. About three minutes.
Run my free checkup