Zašto 'marketing ne radi' nikad nije pravi problem

When founders say marketing isn’t working, they usually mean: we’re spending money and not seeing results.

I hear this regularly. The frustration is real. The diagnosis is almost always wrong.

The Complaint

It sounds like this: “We’ve tried Facebook ads. We’ve tried content marketing. We hired an agency. Nothing’s working.”

The assumption is that marketing is a machine. You put money in, leads come out. When leads don’t come out, the machine is broken.

But marketing isn’t a machine. It’s part of a system. And when “marketing isn’t working,” the failure point is rarely where people think it is.

What’s Actually Breaking

In most cases, I find one of three things:

Attribution is broken. The marketing might be working, but you can’t see it. Someone finds you through a blog post, visits your site three times over two weeks, then calls because a friend mentioned you. In your data, that shows up as a referral. The blog post gets no credit.

This is especially common in B2B and high-consideration purchases. The buyer’s journey is long and messy. Last-click attribution — which is what most small businesses use by default — systematically undervalues everything except the final touchpoint.

So marketing “isn’t working” because you’re measuring the wrong thing.

Handoffs are broken. Leads are coming in, but they’re dying in the gap between marketing and sales. The form submission sits in an inbox for three days. The follow-up email is generic. The sales call happens a week after the inquiry, when the prospect has already talked to two competitors.

Marketing did its job. The system after marketing didn’t.

I’ve seen businesses double their close rate without changing their marketing at all — just by responding faster and following up more consistently. The leads were there. The handoff was broken.

Capacity is broken. Sometimes marketing works too well. Leads come in, but the team can’t handle them. Sales is overwhelmed. Fulfillment is stretched. Quality drops. Customers churn.

Then someone says: “Marketing isn’t working — we’re not growing.” But the problem isn’t lead generation. It’s that the business can’t absorb more leads without breaking something else.

The Diagnostic Question

Before blaming the channel, ask: where exactly is the system failing?

Map the full journey from first touch to closed deal to retained customer. Where do people drop off? Where do things slow down? Where is the data unclear?

Usually, the answer isn’t “marketing isn’t working.” It’s “we don’t actually know what’s working because we can’t see the full picture” or “marketing is fine but something downstream is broken.”

Why This Matters

The danger of “marketing isn’t working” is that it leads to the wrong interventions. You fire the agency. You switch channels. You hire a new marketing person. You increase the budget.

None of these help if the problem is attribution, handoffs, or capacity. You’ll just spend more money on a system that can’t convert it.

The right intervention depends on the actual failure point. Sometimes it’s marketing — the targeting is wrong, the message doesn’t resonate, the channel doesn’t reach your audience. But often it’s not.

What Actually Helps

When a business tells me marketing isn’t working, I start by asking questions:

What happens after someone fills out the form?
How long until they hear back?
Who’s responsible for follow-up?
How do you track where leads came from?
What’s your close rate on leads that do come in?

Usually, within fifteen minutes, we’ve found the bottleneck. And usually, it’s not the ad campaign.

The fix might be boring: a faster response time, a better CRM workflow, clearer handoff protocols. But boring fixes that address the actual problem beat exciting marketing initiatives that don’t.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Sometimes, marketing really isn’t working. The targeting is off. The offer doesn’t resonate. The channel doesn’t fit the audience.

But you can only know that after you’ve ruled out the system failures. Otherwise, you’re blaming the hammer for the crooked house when the problem is the foundation.

Diagnose the system before blaming the channel. That’s where the answer usually is.

Article: What I See in Businesses That Finally Stabilize — The patterns that emerge when companies stop firefighting and start building real infrastructure.