You Can't Market Your Way Out of a Broken Promise

Before spending more money attracting new customers, perhaps find out what happened to the ones you already had.

I've spent more than 25 years in marketing, much of it in higher education, and I've been in more meetings than I care to remember where the answer to almost every problem was another campaign.

Enrollment is down? More advertising.

Customers aren't responding? Change the messaging.

People aren't coming back? Perhaps a rebrand.

Lovely. But has anyone checked whether we're actually delivering what we promised?

Because sometimes marketing isn't the problem. It's just the department everyone expects to fix it.

More leads weren't the answer

Years ago, when I was at Apollo College, which later became Carrington College, prospective student inquiries were going directly to individual campuses. Each campus handled its own follow-up, and nobody had a particularly good handle on what happened next.

Who was following up? How quickly? Were prospective students getting what they needed? And how many were simply disappearing?

As the organization expanded to 18 campuses and online programs, the need for a better process became even clearer. We centralized inquiry handling so we could actually see what was happening.

I even joked with the VP that our enrollment rate would probably go down once we started capturing every inquiry. More leads, bigger denominator. Basic math.

Except it didn't.

The enrollment rate went up by 15%.

Which was rather satisfying.

We hadn't discovered some wonderful new advertising channel or an audience nobody knew existed. We'd simply got better at handling people who were already interested.

It taught me something I've carried through the rest of my career: before spending more money getting people through the door, make sure you're not losing them in the hallway.

Marketing can't fix what operations gets wrong

Marketing is very good at making promises. It's rather the point.

A university promises an education that will help someone build a future. A business promises great service. A nonprofit promises its work will make a difference.

But what happens when someone takes you up on that promise?

If they fill out a form and nobody responds for three days, you've got a problem.

If they have to give you the same information four times, you've got a problem.

And if the experience bears little resemblance to what your advertising promised, you've got a much bigger problem.

You can change the headline, redesign the website, or commission a lovely new brochure. None of that fixes what happens when an actual person tries to do business with you.

There's not much point paying to attract people if the rest of the organization is busy giving them reasons to leave.

We're measuring the wrong things

Marketing departments love numbers. And we've certainly got plenty to choose from.

Impressions, clicks, leads, open rates, engagement, cost per lead. There's a metric for just about everything.

But it's surprisingly easy to end up measuring activity instead of results.

At Carrington, I managed and reforecasted a $30 million annual media budget. That meant deciding where the money went, what was working, and where it needed to stop.

Cheaper leads weren't the end goal. More students enrolled, at a sustainable cost, was.

In one year, we delivered more than 800 additional student starts while reducing cost per start by 9%.

Those were the numbers that mattered.

I've never been particularly impressed by a campaign that generates thousands of leads if nobody can tell me what happened to them.

A cheap lead that doesn't go anywhere isn't a bargain.

It's just a cheaper way to waste money.

And now we have AI

Which means we can do everything faster.

Create more content. Send more emails. Automate more follow-ups. Generate another 47 variations of a subject line nobody particularly wanted in the first place.

Marvellous.

I use AI and automation constantly. They've taken hours of repetitive work off people's plates and made plenty of processes considerably easier to run.

But there's a fairly obvious catch.

If the process is rubbish, automating it just makes the rubbish happen faster.

I've worked with organizations where people spend hours chasing information, forwarding emails, and reminding one another to do things a sensible workflow could handle in seconds.

The answer isn't always another piece of software. Sometimes it's figuring out why everyone is doing the same job three times.

AI is useful when it helps solve a problem.

It's considerably less useful when we're using it to avoid admitting there's a problem in the first place.

Someone needs to look at the whole thing

Marketing gets an unusually good view of how an organization actually works: how people find you, what persuades them to take the next step, and where it all starts going wrong.

Sometimes it's the advertising. Sometimes it's the website. Sometimes it's the follow-up, or a system nobody has questioned since 2007.

And sometimes everyone is doing their own job perfectly well, and the overall experience is still dreadful.

That's the tricky bit.

Marketing can't fix everything. But someone needs to connect the dots, and it's usually cheaper to ask why something isn't working than to spend another meeting deciding whose fault it is.

I've attended enough of those meetings.

One last thought

Before you ask marketing to bring in more people, find out what happened to the people you already convinced.

You might discover you don't need another campaign at all.

You just need to fix what happens next.

Not terribly glamorous, admittedly.

But neither is wasting money.