When to stop paying for marketing

Most businesses stop paying for marketing too late, after months of hoping it turns around, or too early, in month two before anything could have worked.

Here is how to tell the difference, written by people who would lose money if you applied it to us.

Decide the number before you start

The most useful thing you can do is write down, before the first pound is spent, what result would make you stop.

Something like: if cost per acquired customer is still above $400 at the end of month three, we stop.

Making that decision while you are calm is worth more than any amount of analysis later. The alternative is deciding while you are frustrated, which tends to happen in a bad fortnight that would have recovered, or not at all, because stopping feels like admitting the money was wasted.

The four signals that it is not coming back

The cost per acquired customer has been above your ceiling for three consecutive months.

Not cost per lead, cost per customer. Three months is enough to rule out a bad run. Above your own breakeven number, not an industry average.

Nothing has changed despite things being changed.

If the creative, the offer, the audience and the landing page have all been through a cycle and the result is flat, you have tested the main variables. Continuing is paying to repeat a conclusion.

The leads are arriving and not converting, and you have ruled out your own handling.

This is the important qualifier. If your contact rate is low because nobody answers the phone, the marketing is not the problem. If you are reaching them promptly and they still do not buy, the market is telling you something about the offer or the price.

It only ever worked when you were already busy.

If the good months correlate with your natural season and the quiet months produce nothing, the advertising may be taking credit for demand that was already there. Worth testing by pausing for a month in a normal period and seeing what actually changes.

The four signals that it is too early

It has been less than three months. Month one is setup and learning. Month two is the first readable one. Month three is where a pattern appears.

Only one thing has been tried. One offer, one creative set, one audience. That is a single data point.

Your contact rate is poor. If you are speaking to half the leads, the problem is downstream and changing agency will not fix it.

You are judging on lead count rather than customers. A month with fewer, better leads can be a better month.

The honest conversation to have first

Before cancelling, ask the agency directly: what would you do differently if this were your money, and at what point would you tell us to stop?

A good answer names something specific they have not tried and a point at which they would agree. A bad answer is reassurance and a request for more time without a plan attached.

If they cannot name a point at which they would advise stopping, that tells you what you need to know.

What to do instead of stopping entirely

Stopping is not the only option and often not the best one.

Drop to a baseline. Keep a small spend running to hold the account’s learning and your visibility, rather than going to zero and restarting cold later.

Change the channel rather than the agency. If Meta has not worked and people do search for what you sell, Google is a different proposition entirely.

Fix the thing the data pointed at. Low contact rate, weak reviews, a page that does not convert. Spend two months on that and come back.

Change the offer. This is the most under used option. Three months of poor results with the same offer is three months of testing creative against a proposition nobody wanted.

What we would say about us

If three months have passed, the leads are arriving, you are reaching them promptly, and they are not becoming customers at a price that works, we would tell you to stop.

Not out of nobility. A client who stays while losing money leaves angry and tells people. One who stops on good terms sometimes comes back when the timing is right, and in the meantime does not warn others off.

The thing we would ask for first is the close rate on the leads we sent, because without it neither of us can tell whether the problem is the advertising or something between the inquiry and the sale. That is not deflection, it is genuinely the number that settles it.

The one rule

Decide the stopping point in advance, in writing, and hold yourself to it in both directions. It stops you quitting in a bad fortnight and it stops you funding something for a year out of reluctance to admit it did not work.