Many entrepreneurs find themselves asking, “Is my marketing working?” It’s a question Michelle Warner addresses in this episode of Sequence Over Strategy.
Many entrepreneurs find themselves asking, “Is my marketing working?” It’s a question Michelle Warner addresses in this episode of Sequence Over Strategy. Rather than trying to figure out if a strategy is failing or not, Michelle emphasizes the importance of sequence—the order in which marketing steps are implemented.
Michelle explains how breaking marketing down into three steps—awareness, engagement, and sales—can provide a clear framework for diagnosing issues. Often, the problem lies not in your ability to sell, but in failing to target the right people in the awareness stage. If the wrong audience reaches your engagement stage, sales won’t follow, no matter how polished your approach is.
By focusing on the sequence of actions, you can diagnose problems and determine whether adjustments in one step might improve the entire process. Instead of blindly tweaking your sales tactics, step back and ask: Am I engaging the right audience from the start?
If you’re struggling to understand where your marketing falls short, start by breaking it down into these steps. The sequence will guide you to more productive solutions.
Check out the full episode at TheMichelleWarner.com
Hi, I'm Michelle Warner and I'm a business designer and strategist. In the 15 years that I've been doing this work, I have noticed the same trend everywhere. Business owners are falling into a trap of centering strategies first, when they need to be centering sequence.
Because the reality is, the steps you take in your business and the order in which you take them is more important than how well you implement any single strategy. So on this show, my goal is to fix that by helping you find and trust your own sequence of actions rather than blindly following someone else's strategy. Welcome to Sequence Over Strategy.
Real Questions from Real Entrepreneurs
And in every episode of this show, I answer a real question from a real entrepreneur who's struggling with a real challenge in their business. And in today's episode, I'm going to pick up on a great question that came up at this month's Tiny and Strong Roundtable. And listen, if you're not familiar with what that is, I host a free Zoom gathering on the first Wednesday of every month where I talk about some of the different concepts I share here and I answer your questions live.
It's a really great gathering where we can go a little deeper on the concepts and the sequences that we talk about in this show. So if you've not yet attended, I would love to welcome you to that and see you in the future at one. We'll put the link to register in the show notes.
How do I Know if My Marketing is Working?
It's completely free. But let's get back to the specific question. And the specific question that came up was, How do I know when to throw in the towel? How do I know whether or not my marketing is working? AKA, I'm not seeing a lot of results from my marketing, but how do I know, A, if that means anything? And B, when do I just stop? And I'm sure all of you can relate to this question in some way or another.
I cannot imagine that there hasn't been a point in your business where you were trying something new with your marketing and you weren't sure whether it was working or not. Or you had a sense that it wasn't working, but you were scared to pull in the towel too soon or you didn't even know what actions you might take to remediate that fact and get it working again. So stick around because we're going to talk this out because this might come as a shock to you.
eing able to answer that question has a lot more to do with understanding sequence than it does in being able to look at a single strategy and know whether or not it's working or know whether it's time to pull the plug or not. And that's what this comes down to, right? Because when you ask me, how do I know if my marketing is working? How do I know when it's time to stop? Or how do I know when it's time to hold on for a little bit longer? That, again, is an impossible question to answer. And we've tackled a few of these impossible questions to answer throughout this podcast series because that's not the right question.
So you can't come to me and say, hey, I'm not sure if my marketing is working, is it? I can't answer that question. But I can break it down into a sequence and I can teach you how to break it down into a sequence so that we can get to a question that we can answer and get you moving in a positive direction again. And that's what I want you to take from this and why I want all of you to stick around here while we walk through this.
Because when you are asking those questions that are impossible to answer, that means you're asking the wrong question. And we have to dig down into the sequence to figure out what questions are answerable. And from there, we can derive an answer to the unanswerable question.
OK, so that's what we're going to know. How do I figure this out? How do I approach this process when somebody asks me, I'm not sure if my marketing is working, should I keep going? Well, I go back to the basics. And again, none of this is going to shock you.
I go back to the sequence and there is a real specific reason why I think about marketing in the way that I do. And a big part of that reason is to be able to answer questions like this one. If you know me, if you have listened to the show before, you know that I think about marketing in three distinct steps.
The Three-step Marketing Sequence
There's awareness, there's engagement, there's sales. Awareness is step one. That just means people need to know you exist.
Engagement is step two. That's where people build their loyalty to you and make a decision that they're interested that you can help them with the challenge that they're having. And then sales, step three, pretty obvious, they need to buy something from you.
Or maybe more specifically, you need to offer them something to buy. And the reason that I break marketing down into these steps is, well, there's a number of reasons, but the most important reason is that it allows us to isolate different phases of your marketing so that if it's not working or if it is working, we can isolate down into those steps and figure something out and diagnose something. Because you have to work in the sequence if you're going to have any chance of being able to understand what is happening.
So let's take a stab at navigating this question given the idea that we're going to think about marketing in these three steps, awareness, engagement, and sales. People need to know we exist. People need to build loyalty to us and understand that we can solve their problem.
And then people need to buy something from us. So let's think about a situation that I hear over and over and over again. Your relationship marketing.
So you're going to apply your awareness, engagement, and sales. You're going to apply that to what I call a relationship marketing funnel, meaning you're going to be building relationships with folks in order to sell them something. And so you're reaching out to your network.
Your awareness strategy, how are people going to know that you exist, is that you are reaching out to your network and you are trying to connect, trying to ask for introductions, trying to get in front of people who may be interested in your services. Maybe you're asking for a phone call. That would be the engagement stage of the marketing.
But for your awareness, you're reaching out to your network. In this scenario, you are likely either a service provider, like a B to E type person, you know, selling business to entrepreneur, definitely a business to business case, even some B to C. If you're like a health coach or something, this is probably what you might be doing, right? In awareness, you're reaching out to folks in your networking. And from that networking, you are having some conversations.
So you are successfully moving some people from the awareness stage into an engagement stage by having them say yes to a conversation that you are inviting them to. And in that conversation, they're polite and they're interested and they're expressing that, oh, this is very interesting. But then at the end of the conversation or in your follow-up stages, it goes nowhere and you don't hear from them.
Maybe they ghost you, maybe they're polite and they keep kind of putting you off, but there's no urgency for a sale. And I hear this very, very often, this sequence, this pattern of what happens when people are trying to relationship market and then people start ghosting them and it goes nowhere. So when we look at that magic question of is my marketing working? Well, it's really an interesting question because if this is happening to you, if you are meeting people via your network and then you're having a conversation with them where they are expressing interest and they are being polite and they are saying your thing is interesting and then they ghost you during the follow-up process, if you are not thinking in terms of sequence, what are you going to naturally think is wrong? You're probably going to naturally think that you don't know how to follow up correctly or you're doing something wrong after that conversation happened, right? After you networked and got introduced to someone, after you had a conversation, then they drop off the face of the earth and you start saying, gosh, I don't know that my marketing is working.
Diagnosing When it’s Not Working
Should I pull the plug? Should I stop doing this? I don't know how to get people to the sales stage. Maybe even say, maybe I need to hire a sales consultant to teach me how to get these people to stop ghosting me. That's what you're going to think if you don't think sequence first.
You're going to immediately look at the place where the problem occurs and you are going to assume that that is the problem and you're going to assume that either it is a skills or a strategy issue. You need more skills to be able to move people or you need to understand a better strategy to move people into the sales process. And if you're assuming that, nine times out of ten, you're assuming wrong.
And this is why we break things down. Because, my friends, when I am confronted with one of those things, I first think not how do you keep moving people forward and how are people falling off. Instead, I ask myself, were the inputs into that step correct? And let me repeat that.
Were the inputs into the step that is falling apart, were they correct? And in this hypothetical situation, again, where we look at awareness, engagement, and sales, our awareness is a networking situation, our engagement is some type of phone call, and then we're not reaching the sales. And so the natural instinct is to say, I'm not doing that phone call correctly or I need a strategy to move people to the sale. What I'm telling you is that I'm wondering if the input into that engagement call is correct or not.
So instead of looking forward and instead of saying, people are dropping off at the end of the engagement call and they're ghosting me, how do I try to push them forward into the sales stage and do a better job at that? I'm going to say no. The correct sequence is to look backwards and say, did I not have the correct people attending that call in the first place? Is there something wrong with my awareness strategy? And nine times out of 10, that's where we find the problem. That's where we diagnose it.
The problem with your marketing in this type of situation when you're asking yourself this is not, hey, do I need to learn more skills to keep people moving? It is, do I need to go backwards and do a better job of getting the right people into the conversation? Because if I get the right people into the conversation, they're not going to ghost me. And a lot of times when we're networking, it's very easy to just limit yourself to your network that you know. And it's very easy to be connected with people who are going to be polite to you.
And even beyond polite, they're going to be interested in what you have to say. Every time I talk to a business owner, I am interested in the solutions that they're providing because you're good at your job, you're passionate about it. And so when you describe it to people, they can see the benefit.
And so if you're on one of these calls, it is likely that they are going to express some interest or express some intrigue. That is not the same thing as them having an immediate need. And in a market where, let's face it, financial decisions are a little tighter right now, people aren't buying a lot of nice twos.
Awareness First - Getting the Right People
So if you are networking and you are getting connected with people who don't have an immediate need for your product or service, but they're interested enough to take a phone call with you, I don't care how many strategies you learn to be a better salesperson, they're never going to buy from you. Or if you learn some high pressured sales technique, maybe they do buy from you and they immediately regret it. And then it's a really painful process for everybody involved, right? So what we want to do instead is correct the first stage.
So my response to somebody who is asking, is my marketing working? You know, should I stop doing this? Is not going to be a black and white, yes, it's working or not, it's working. It's going to be a, hey, let's break down the awareness, the engagement and the sales stages. And let's find the stage that is breaking down.
And then let's look at the stage prior to it. And let's see if we see any signs that that stage could be done better. Because again, let's live in our hypothetical here.
If you are selling B2B, selling in any way where you're having these individual conversations with people at the engagement stage, and they're being polite, they're expressing interest, and it is going nowhere, it is more than likely that you are getting connected in the awareness stage to people who view you and view your product or service as a nice to have and not a need. And so you need to correct that in the awareness stage. And you correct that by either getting in front of different people for whom that is a need, or you correct it by understanding that you're in front of the right people, but maybe you're not presenting your product in the correct way.
And you're not presenting it in a way that really speaks to everything that they need. And so you go back and before you decide whether my marketing is working or not, what you do is you diagnose which step isn't working and you attempt to fix that. And that's why it's so important to think about these things in terms of the sequence.
Because if you just look at this marketing hypothetical as a whole, you have no idea where to start to even fix this thing. And that's where we come up with these broad yes or no attempts to answer the question of whether or not your marketing is working. And that's why I can't answer that question for you.
But I can answer the question if we drill down, is my awareness working? Is the engagement working? Is the sales working? And then when I figure out which one of those isn't working, I can figure out how to fix it. If I figure out that things are falling apart during the engagement stage, I can go back and I can make sure the right people are reaching the engagement stage. And if they're not, I can fix that.
Or at least I can try to fix that. And then that's where I can get an answer of whether my marketing is worth continuing or not. Because if I try to fix that and I can't figure out how to fix it within a reasonable timeframe, then I can have a productive conversation about, hey, maybe the marketing isn't working.
Do I need to look at a different market? Do I need to look at a different product? Et cetera, et cetera. But until you can drill down to that level, you can't even have that conversation. Because if you can't drill down to that level, not only can you not have that conversation, again, you can't answer the question of whether it's working or not.
And so you don't get a fair play. You don't get a fair chance to fix the correct thing. And so that's why when we talk about marketing, we have to talk about it in those three stages, awareness, engagement, sales.
Because not only does that make it much easier to insert the correct strategies at the correct stage and at the correct sequence, it makes it much, much, much easier. In fact, it makes it possible to diagnose when things aren't working and to find a solution. And so my challenge, my encouragement to you is if you are looking at marketing that you're not sure whether it's working or not, break it down.
A Systematic Approach to Building your Marketing
Get out a piece of paper. Write down, what am I doing for awareness? What am I doing for engagement? What am I doing for sales? And then you're going to say, where did it stop working? Where are the people falling off? In what stage are the people falling off? And then usually you can look a stage prior and say, hey, are the inputs in the stage prior, are they correct or not? Or is there something I can do to try to get better inputs into this stage that's falling apart? And from there, can I correct my marketing? And if you can start doing that, now you have a really powerful way to not only answer the question again of, should I keep going or should I stop? But you also have productive options to go and test and to see if you can fix this thing and get it back on track. And that's what we're looking for is we're looking for productive ways to solve problems and to understand how can you move forward when you might be feeling stuck.
Let's sum this up. I do not teach marketing in the sequence and in the sequence over strategy way that I do for my health. I teach it so that we set it up as a system that can be tracked, diagnosed, and fixed.
Because when you build your marketing, you're going to build it one step at a time. First, you're going to build awareness and you're going to say, okay, that looks like it's working. Then you're going to build engagement and you're going to say, okay, now that I have awareness working, how can I start to get engagement up and running? And do the awareness people come over and engage with my engagement strategies? Does that work? And when those two pieces are working, then you can start offering them something to sell.
You can say, okay, now that I'm meeting the right people and they're engaging with my engagement stuff, can I sell them something? That's how you build it from the start. You don't try to build all three at once. You build it systematically so that you know what you're doing and you can watch those pieces build on each other.
And then if things stall out or if things aren't working, you go right back in the other direction and you break it back down into those sequences and you say, where did it stall out? Did it stall out in awareness, in engagement, or sales? And if I don't see something obvious that's wrong in whatever stage that it stalled out at, I'm going to look at the stage prior and say, am I sending the correct inputs into that stage that is falling apart? And if not, how can I fix that? How can I fix those inputs so that they have a better chance of moving forward? And that's what you do. That's how we find answerable questions and pathways forward. When you are confronted with these questions that feel unanswerable, like is my marketing working or not? How do I know when it's time to move forward? When you are confronted by that and it feels impossible to answer, that's when you need to start breaking it down into smaller questions that form a sequence that you can follow.
Build Marketing Step by Step
That's how we solve these marketing problems and that's how we solve a lot of problems in business. That's why we talk about sequence over strategy. Because not only is it important to do it in the right order, but when you do it in the right order and when you do it in an order that you can follow, you can break it down, you can diagnose, and you can find productive ways to move forward.
So my friends, when you are confronted with those impossible questions, I encourage you again, look for the ways to break them down into some sort of system. And if you're hanging out with me, I'm always going to have a system. We talked about the marketing system today, but there's a system for finding your clients, for building your network, for building your product mix, for understanding the inputs that you're putting into your business model.
And when you understand those inputs, when you understand that system, we can solve whatever is going on with your business. And we're going to continue doing that on this show week after week. We're going to continue doing that at the Tiny and Strong Roundtables that again happen once a month live on Zoom, where we can hang out and tackle some of this stuff live.
So if you want to get in on that, again, check out the show notes, check out my website at themichellewarner.com. You can register for the next one. That'll be coming up in October pretty quickly. And let's continue to understand the power of sequence over strategy and the power of understanding the inputs in your business so that they allow you to fix things as you need to.
And they allow you to just understand, again, those inputs in your business so that we can talk impossible questions down to size and find pathways forward. Thank you as always for being here. If you haven't done it yet, please subscribe and even rate the show wherever you're listening.
It makes a huge difference in others being able to find it. And I appreciate you doing that so much. You can always find me at themichellewarner.com where you're going to see information about the Tiny and Strong Roundtable and different boot camps that I have coming up or my course, Networking That Pays, that helps you build the correct network so that hopefully your awareness is firing in the right directions.
And in the meantime, I'm here every other week. You can always reach out to me and say hello. I'd love to hear from you.
If you have any burning questions that you want answered on this podcast, I would love to hear about that as well. And in the meantime, I will see you in another couple of weeks to break down another sequence over strategy question.