Why isn't my marketing bringing in leads?

Because you're not doing it right.

That's the honest answer. Sorry*. It’s not what you want to hear, but it's usually true. And "not doing it right" tends to come down to two things.

Reason One: You’re treating marketing as a list of activities

Successful lead generation isn't a task. It isn't a list of tasks either. You can tick every box of what good marketing is supposed to look like - the weekly blogs, the social posts in the best format, the podcast, the tidy website - and still generate nothing.

Because lead gen isn't the activity. It's everything underneath it. Making sure what you sell is something people actually want. Making sure it's articulated in a way they understand. Then getting it in front of them, repeatedly, from multiple angles, in a way that's deliberate rather than hopeful.

If they want it + they see it + they understand it = they will buy it.

If you just have nice blogposts + regular social rhythm + a podcast = anything can happen but it probably won’t be lots of leads.

Reason Two: You're not measuring your marketing on lead gen

If whoever's running your marketing can hit their KPIs without generating a single lead, that's your problem. For most businesses, web traffic will go up naturally over time. Followers will increase over time. Blogs will be produced. You’ll start seeing some AI visibility. And then you’ll see a little more.

If your team is measured on marketing metrics, they'll benefit from that natural uplift and also optimise for marketing metrics. That's not their failing, it's yours. They're doing exactly what you're paying them to do. It just isn't lead generation, because nobody set it up to be.

The leads are in the last mile

This is the phrase I keep coming back to: The leads are in the last mile.

You can read a HubSpot post that tells you to blog twice a week. Good advice. It might get you most of the way to your objective. But the leads aren't most of the way. They’re at the end. They're in the last mile - the things you do that most of your competitors don’t bother with. The strategy, the testing, the optimising, tweaking and honing that turns activity into results.

And the last mile is brutal. It means running a channel in the 98th percentile. Not doing it. Doing it exceptionally well. Then keeping it there, month after month, long before you see a single lead come back. Most people (more than 97% to be exact) never get to the 98th percentile. And of the ones that do, most give up too soon. They mistake the absence of early results for proof it doesn't work.

How I actually generate leads from marketing

My marketing brings in leads. Not because I publish twenty blogs, a Substack and ten YouTube videos a month. That's the visible part. It's not the part that works.

It works because:

1. I sell something that people want - access to leads
2. I package it in a way they understand - my website being Exhibit A
3. A try things that I hypothesise will move the needle.
4. And then I watch the data. When something doesn't move it, I learn from that and adapt. When something does, I learn from that and adapt.

You'll never catch me saying a channel doesn't work. When someone tells me "we tried LinkedIn and it didn't generate leads," I want to ask: how long did you do it for? What exactly did you do? What was the strategy? What were you measuring? What hypotheses did you test? What training did you have?

The channel didn't fail. The way it was run did. Sorry.*

That's the whole idea behind the AI Edit Method for lead gen. Do lead gen properly. Strategically. To a very high standard. Consistently. And the leads will flow. It’s much harder than paying an agency $700 for 10k leads a month (a lot of my clients come to me after doing this) and waiting for your spreadsheet of names. But it works long term.

So why isn't your marketing bringing in leads?

It's not that you're not doing marketing. You probably are, and plenty of it.

It's that marketing without the last mile doesn't bring in leads. It just keeps everyone busy.

*not sorry

 By Heather Baker. Founder of the AI Edit. Lead generator. Thorn in the side of AI lead generation agencies.