Why Marketing Isn’t Working: Diagnosing the Root of Digital Underperformance

Marketing underperformance is one of the most common frustrations we hear from business leaders. The channels are in place. Budgets are allocated. The team is working hard. But the results aren’t there.

When that happens, the instinct is often to change tactics: pause a campaign, fire an agency, try a new platform, or rewrite the content.

But what if the real problem isn’t the tactic at all?

In work with clients at my agency, we’ve found that underperformance usually traces back to something deeper than the channel—it’s a strategy, alignment, or expectation problem. And until that’s addressed, no amount of tactical tweaking will move the needle in a meaningful way. It can just lead to more frustration, sunk costs, or lost time and faith in the effort.

What underperformance really looks like

It doesn’t always show up as failure. In fact, some of the most concerning marketing problems hide under the surface of “pretty good” performance.

You might see:

• Decent lead volume, but poor close rates
• Strong traffic, but low engagement or conversions
• A mix of vanity metrics with little connection to revenue
• Lots of activity, but no clear forward momentum

These are all signs that something is broken beneath the surface—and it’s usually not just one campaign.

In The Digital Marketing Success Plan, I unpack a story about a company who thought their Google Ads were profitable and wanted us to take them to another level of performance. When digging under the surface, we found that they actually were losing money on each ad dollar and needed to dig deeper before putting any more money into their ad budget.

Why tactics aren’t the root issue

When things aren’t working, the default assumption tends to be tactical. It must be the ad creative, the SEO agency, the email frequency, or the website.

Sometimes that’s true. But more often, those are symptoms—not causes.

Here are the real reasons we often uncover:

• No shared understanding of what success looks like
• Marketing efforts disconnected from business strategy
• Undefined or misaligned audience targeting
• Lack of differentiation in messaging or positioning
• Inconsistent execution due to role or resource gaps

In these cases, the tactic didn’t fail—it was set up to fail. Without a strong foundation, even good marketing can underperform.

How to find (and fix) the real problem

Before swapping tools or changing vendors, it’s worth stepping back and asking the bigger questions.

1. Are we clear on our goals—and are they aligned across teams? If marketing is optimizing for leads but sales is focused on profitability or retention, you have a mismatch that creates friction. Start with shared objectives that tie to revenue or customer value. And, make sure we’re tagging and tracking everything consistently in the CRM.

2. Do we have a strategy, or just a list of tactics? A real strategy includes defined goals, audiences, value propositions, and messaging—mapped to the right channels and funnel stages. If you’re launching campaigns without those, you’re relying on luck more than planning. Yes, tactics and best practices checklists are great, when they come out of a defined strategy and are part of a plan. However, the checklist is not the strategy.

3. Are we investing enough in the right phases of execution? In the START Planning Process, we often find gaps in the Application phase. Teams have a strategy, but the creative, content, or assets don’t bring it to life effectively. Or they skip the Review and Transformation phases, failing to measure, fully implement in the defined period, or have enough agility built into the implementation steps.

4. Are we being realistic about time, resources, and expectations? It’s common to expect fast ROI from longer-term channels like SEO, or to judge paid media by lead count alone. Digital marketing takes time, refinement, and clarity to deliver sustained results—not just spikes.

5. Do we know how we’ll measure success—and what to do when we see it? Having KPIs is a start. But knowing how those map to business outcomes is what gives you leverage. Metrics should inform decisions, not just sit in dashboards. Not spin or open to interpretation, but rooted results and meaningful metrics that move the needle for the business.

Moving from frustration to focus

When marketing isn’t working, it’s tempting to blame the tactic or the team. But the most impactful move is often zooming out—not down. If you feel like doing the test of turning it off to see if there’s a difference in impact, then you’re not in a good spot.

Underperformance is usually a signal. It means your strategy needs realignment, your team needs clarity, or your audience is telling you something. I want to encourage you to not give up and not do the “turn it off” test.

By digging into the underlying structure—through better planning, more focused messaging, and realistic tracking—you create space for your marketing to succeed.

That’s why we use the START Planning Process in Digital Marketing Success Plan®: to get to the root, not just the surface. Because once you fix what’s beneath the tactics, the tactics actually start to work and you have the power of not assuming or speculating, but knowing, if it is working or not and why.