Before You Change Your Marketing Strategy, Watch This

Two years ago, my content was driving seven figures a year into my consulting business. All organically. I wasn't running paid ads, anything like that. And now it's driving basically close to nothing, and I'm not quitting it. And the reason why is a concept I want to hand to you, because it's a really expensive mistake that I see people make all the time. I call it ignorance debt.

But really what it boils down to is I had a solo consulting business. I was using content primarily on LinkedIn, a little bit on YouTube, and a newsletter. And it worked really well for the volume that I needed and what I needed it to do.

When we launched MSP Sales Partners about a year and a half ago, the business changed substantially, and the way that we needed content to work with it changed substantially. So we tried some new stuff, and for all intents and purposes, it hasn't driven any business. Now, we've grown much faster than almost any business that I've been in as a result of public speaking, as a result of word of mouth, as a result of referrals and relationships within the industry that we're working in. But content has basically done shit. It's producing basically nothing.

And what I could do is I could say, hey, content's not working. Content doesn't work. I'm going to stop writing my newsletter. I'm going to stop recording videos. I'm going to stop publishing on LinkedIn. And you know what? I'm just going to go with paid ads instead. This doesn't work. It just doesn't. All right, I'm not seeing results. I'm going to go find something new. I'm going to try something new. Fine.

But what I just did was I made a decision based on what I think that I know about paid ads today. What I do know about this channel, what I think I know about the next channel — and it's not a ton. Say I stop doing everything that I'm doing today. I pivot and I start the other thing, and I start finding problems that I didn't know existed.

It's like, oh yeah, you've got to pick the right platform. Oh yeah, you've got to figure out all the creative that goes into it. What style are you going to do? Oh yeah, you've got to figure out the right KPIs to use in paid ads. Oh yeah, you've got to find the right lead magnet. You've got to build the funnel behind it. You've got to build the sequence behind it. You've got to build all the emails. You've got to turn it into a real lead. Oh, now you've got to run your sales calls, which are different when you're running it from cold traffic than it is from web traffic. Right? Dot dot dot. There's all these other things.

None of that was on the list when I made the decision, because I didn't know about it. That's the debt. I'm paying for every problem that was sitting below the surface of a channel that I didn't know about.

And that's why I say pivoting is a really romantic idea. It feels like a fresh start, and it feels like it's fun to start new stuff, and it's usually just restarting the clock on the same set of problems, or at least volume.

So assume every channel comes with ten problems. If you've already solved eight of them in the channel that you're in, solving two more is going to be a hell of a lot easier than starting a brand new channel, hoping that it only comes with four. Because it doesn't come with four. It comes with ten, and you just can't see them yet.

Now, I want to be fair, because sometimes pivoting is absolutely the right call. If you're truly spinning your wheels and changing directions is right, absolutely consider it. But most of the time we use it as an escape hatch, and we use it too often.

So how do you tell the difference? Let me use my situation. A guy on my content team audited the YouTube channel. Took him 15 minutes. He came back with really clear observations, data going back a couple of years, and he told me we're going the wrong direction. We're actually further back than we were two years ago on YouTube.

Meanwhile, I've got people I trust, people who have no problem telling me that my ideas are bad. Friends of mine. They have no problem telling me I have a dumb idea, telling me my content is too good to not be seen. And I trust them, because they tell me the truth.

And I could look at all of that and I could go, all right, content doesn't work. Again, that's the conclusion that's available to me, but it's not the conclusion that I'm going to draw, because I've done this a million times.

So what I do now is I ask one question. Is there anybody else selling something similar to me that's winning with this thing right now? Content. And who are they? What are they doing? That is the first question, and it's enough on its own. If the answer is yes, then you know it's possible and we're just doing it wrong.

Every system is perfectly designed to get the results that it's getting. It's systems 101. You've got inputs. They go through a process. They create an output. And when the output isn't what you want, there are only two possible answers. Either you've got the wrong pieces in the system, or something's wrong with the way those pieces connect with each other. That's the diagnosis from my standpoint. Change the inputs or change the process, and you get a different output.

So no, we're not quitting content. I'm going to change the inputs, and we're talking that through, and probably change the process too, and talking that through. And we will get a different output. Maybe the output's better, maybe the output's worse. That remains to be seen. But the feedback loop is what drives the decision.

And the underlying thing that I'm trying to hit on here is a lot of times we think, we hope, that the new thing that we want to go do — the shiny ball, squirrel thing that we want to do — is going to come with four problems. Just assume it's going to come with ten. And if you're in a place where you've already solved six, seven, eight of these things and you've got a couple more to solve, the likelihood and the speed at which you actually get the results you want is usually going to be more favorable for you if you see it through. Look at the data objectively, use the feedback loop, and stay consistent to the extent that you are in the right strategy, and change the tactics — as opposed to, fuck it, throw it out and go start with a whole new strategy, because it's going to have ten problems.

I've done this a million times.