Something isn’t going quite as you’d expect in your business.

You aren’t getting the amount of work you’d hoped for, you aren’t getting enough qualified leads, your proposals keep getting rejected, you aren’t getting enough web traffic, your phone hasn’t been ringing as much or you’re relying too much on past clients or referrals.

You know something isn’t going according to the plan but you can’t quite figure out where the issue is.

So, you do what most business owners do: you turn to research. You pull up your competitors' websites. Immediately, your stomach sinks. Their site looks sleek, polished, and modern. They have smooth scrolling animations, crisp photography, and an enviable colour palette. Your website looks outdated by comparison.

You think to yourself:

“Maybe my website is where I’m going wrong. Maybe if my site looked like theirs, people would take me more seriously. Maybe visitors would stay longer, more people would call, and I’d finally get the high-paying leads I need to stop relying on referrals. and then my business will take off and I won’t be so reliant on my past clients recommending me to their friends.”

STOP.

You have just fallen into the maybe trap.

Why maybe doesn’t build strategy

You cannot operate a business on "maybes." Hypotheticals, assumptions, and panic-driven guesses do not grow a company.

Maybe a new website is the right thing to do, but then again, maybe it isn’t. You have no idea because all you’ve done is found a better looking website than yours and concluded that this is the root of your issues.

You can do all these things, but not if your marketing strategy is formulated on a whim.

Smart business owners take a step back and perform an honest audit. Recognising there’s a problem puts you ahead of the business owners who stay in denial. However, solving that problem requires a clear, methodical process.

Because you don’t make a decision when you’re feeling emotional.

(Note: If you’re a brand-new business with low stakes and no existing audience, fast experimentation is fine. But if you have an established operation, a deeper investigation is required before you make major investments.)

The Audit: Finding the Real Problem

So what did we do in this situation, and the way this question is phrased is intentional, because we have been where you are, of course we’ve hit a roadblock and questioned whether our website was up to scratch. The first thing we did was to take an honest accounting of the business as it currently stands.

We started with our business as a whole, looking at what we sell, who we sell it to, how we reach those people, what those people need from us, what we need from them, margins, profits, losses, processes and strategies. Already this gives you a more objective view of how you’re currently operating.

When running a business, it’s very easy to get wrapped up in the day-to-day that you lose sight of the bigger picture. It’s very easy to focus on the negative and overlook all the positive - so what a prospect rejected your proposal, learn from what went wrong and move on - and don’t fail to notice the three proposals that were accepted last week.

Know what you need to know

This moves very well into the next thing you need to do - decide on your commercial objective. What are you actually trying to achieve? Where do you actually see your business going? What do you want to sell? Who do you want to sell to? Where do you want to go? Who do you want to be?

Then bring those questions closer to home to understand what your business is trying to do at this very moment in time. Are you trying to increase revenue from a properly defined audience? Are you trying to sell your flagship product in a different geographical market? Are you trying to streamline your sales process so your sales team can speak to more leads each month? Are you trying to get higher quality leads so your sales team stop complaining?

You can’t formulate answers to a question you haven’t asked

So second is to get clear on what you’re trying to achieve, it might turn out that your objective of improving margins isn’t even reliant on your website.

The next thing to do is analyse your offer. Are you advertising the thing you want to as coherently, as consistently and as succinctly as you could be? Question whether the offer itself fits what your customers need, value and will pay for.

Everything you do should come back to your offer, so make sure you know it inside-out, upside-down and back-to-front.

If you can’t articulate what your business does, how is a someone viewing your website supposed to understand. Your offer is the backbone of your marketing, it tells you who you are, what you do, what you sell and who you sell it to.

The next phase of your analysis it to understand your customers. Who they are, where they are, what they do, age, gender, occupation, where they hang-out online, their hopes, fears, dreams and desires, what keeps them up at night, what relaxes them, what brings them relief, how they buy, where they buy, what they buy.

But even deeper than this - buying circumstances are more useful: what triggers the search, who influences the decision, which alternatives do they consider, what creates hesitation and what evidence gives them confidence.

Cross-check how accurately your customer relates to your offer

If there’s a mismatch between who your offer appeals to and who you’re trying to sell to, perfect -you’ve just found a friction point.

Benchmark the market, not just the aesthetics

The next thing to do is look at the market you operate in, look at your competitors and how they are presenting themselves. Who they sell to, what they sell, how they position themselves, where they are online and offline, how they structure their pricing model.

Look at broader industry trends, supply and demand, innovations, topics of conversation, thought leaders and influencers, customer expectations. Anything that relates to your market should be a topic of scrutiny, because the more you familiarise yourself with the forces that contribute to the success of your business, the more effectively you can use those forces to your advantage.

Now is the time to check your marketing

Only after this initial investigation should you to look at your marketing.

Now is the time to look at your website and measure how accurately it conveys who you are, what you do, what you sell and who you sell it to. Look at your social channels, do the platforms you are represented on coincide with the platforms your customer base is using - because you could have the PERFECT Instagram strategy but it’s completely redundant if your ideal customer only scrolls on LinkedIn or only watches their reels on YouTube.

Take an accounting of what marketing you’re doing and how it’s performing.

You can use your metrics to tell a story - journey through what works, what doesn’t work, what can be improved, what should be stopped, where the opportunities lie and what can genuinely bring the growth you want - inline with the commercial objectives you have already established.

The critical moment

Making the decision - based on everything you have uncovered, discovered, recovered or rediscovered - you need to make the decision.

Your research might reveal that your website is indeed the core bottleneck - and that’s completely fine. But it could point somewhere else, and then you’ve saved yourself from a costly mistake.

You’ve saved money, you’ve saved time, you’ve saved effort - and that investment can be put somewhere else, somewhere it matters more.