Case Study #1: When they couldn’t mess up an ads campaign more if they tried

“Lynn, we’d like you to help us with the HubSpot build for this funnel.”

In the wonderful world of pre-COVID, I was pulled into a marketing funnel for one of the $30M-year agencies I had as a client. My primary job was to help with HubSpot, but I often advised on strategy as well… at least, when they let me.

And friends, this time they should have pulled me in far, FAR earlier than they did. (And you’ll learn why this is important for YOU and your sales campaigns in a moment.)

So I was in the meeting and the project manager politely explained the project:

“This project involves creating a marketing funnel for [multi-million dollar xyz company] to generate more leads for their [xyz service]. We’re going to run ads to an article, which then pitches the service.”

And if you know me, you know I have a LOT of questions I ask. And I ask them not to be a dick, but to understand the full scope of what we’re doing.

Those questions included:

What’s the GOAL of this campaign?

To generate more net new clients for their [XYZ service].

Who is the AUDIENCE for this campaign?

I was told that it would be to cold traffic — so people who had never purchased from XYZ industry before. (Oh, and this was a regulated financial industry.)

Has the client ever run ads on Facebook before?

I was told that nope, they’d never run Facebook ads, didn’t have a business manager, and had never created lead generation campaigns like this before.

Okay, so who’s writing the article?

That would be our content writer, who’s never worked on a sales enablement campaign before but who was really good at branded SEO blog posts.

And what awareness level are we going for?

I was told — I shit you not — that this article would be written for the UNAWARE audience who didn’t even know they needed XYZ service at all.

How long would we run said cold traffic campaign?

For 30 days. Which was, as I advised them, not nearly enough time to warm up an ads account to a cold + unaware audience and do things right.

Can we switch the campaign goal now to go after warm traffic and upsell/cross-sell existing customers, to have a longer runway, or anything?

The answer was, unfortunately, no.

So I told my project manager and anyone who’d listen point blank:

This campaign WILL fail.

Now, I live in the land of I-told-you-so not because I want to be right, but because I am generally paying attention to enough data points (based on 21 years of experience) to have a good sense of what’s a good idea and what’s not. And this, my friend, was NOT a good idea for the brand.

And as time went on, my “guess” proved correct despite everyone’s best efforts to rock the campaign within the parameters we’d promised. They generated zero leads as a result of their work with the agency.

There was just no way to save a poorly-positioned campaign like that.

(As opposed to my $1M Account-Based Marketing Success Story, which far exceeded our expectations.)

Too often, brands bring me in AFTER the fact. Here’s another example:

Case Study #2: An Ads Campaign Which Failed (but was completely preventable!)

Another client of mine in 2024 did this after they’d churned through gobs of the clients’ ad budget and still hadn’t garnered a single sale for an upcoming event despite doing everything “correctly”: ads, sales page to a VSL, a book-a-call page, and so forth.

I took one look and immediately noticed that they were going after a Sophistication Spectrum Stage too early to get buyers.

This campaign would NEVER work as designed.

I advised that they they should shift the messaging up a level in sophistication and awareness, and gave them specific examples.

I also noticed that the Expert at the forefront of this Expert Brand wasn’t doing nearly enough organic social media marketing (in the form of videos especially) and overlooked key opportunities in their email list. I pointed those out too, with ideas.

Last I heard, they immediately booked the event up after they shifted the messaging as I suggested.

Friends, getting marketing to work isn’t rocket science, but it is a system, and if you don’t know it, you’ll be left guessing when you could be winning.

Want my help getting your campaigns back on track? Want to look like a rockstar marketing leader to the CEO/CMO?

Book your campaign review with me here and let me find out for you what’s holding your sales back.