You have a marketing problem.

How many meetings have you sat in where people want to refresh the logo, redo the website, create a mobile app, build a Facebook page, get new brochures and more because they think that they’re having a problem getting their message through to their potential audience? The issue is systematic. Unfortunately, too many marketers think that they have a branding problem. That the message that they have is simply not connecting to an intended audience.

Maybe that is all wrong.

Before you go changing things, take a deep breath… a few steps back and ask yourself this:

• What is the path to purchase? Do you know how people find out about your product (or service), learn more about it, make a decision and then finally buy from you?
• Tracking. How much of that process are you both tracking and optimizing? Do you know your true conversion rates? Where these potential people are in your sales funnel? Are you constantly tweaking that tracking with a better understanding of what it costs to acquire a customer, keep them and their overall lifetime value?
• Fixing what you have. Before a redesign of your website, mobile app or whatever, what do you really know about what is going on? How well-versed are you in web analytics? What insights are you culling from the data and tweaking/testing to ensure that with every move, you are making it simpler for someone to transact with you?
• Telling your story. Have you truly leveraged social media and traditional communications to uncover the real stories of your business? The types of stories that people will actually want to find and share? Making the content that you are creating as shareable and as findable as possible? Or, is this still a world of frustration because the trades won’t pay any attention to your standard press releases and nobody watches those boring corporate videos on YouTube?
• Finding like. Are you busy chasing likes, friends, followers and plus ones and spending little-to-no time engaging with those who actually care about the industry that you serve? Are you expecting everyone to come to you, when you spend no time going to them and being active in their community?

Tough questions. True questions.

All too often people think they’re doing something wrong… or not doing anything at all. My experience (twenty years and going) says this: most people don’t know what they have and spend too much time doing the whole, "the grass is greener" thing. So, even if they keep adding and redoing, they’re still not doing the hard work of figuring out who is doing what and why. It’s better to point to something else, blame a logo, think the website is not performing or buy more advertising instead of truly understanding what there is, what is working (and what isn’t) and what has been done to rectify and optimize. Yes, marketing optimization has been on the brain lately. It’s mostly there because we (finally) have the technology, data and information to know. To know everything. To fix it. To do the right thing.

And so… let’s fix the logo? Or… let’s fix our marketing?