The 5 Marketing Questions Every Business Owner Asks Us

Every first call with a new prospect covers some version of the same ground. The business is different. The market is different. But the questions? They rhyme.

Business owners running professional services firms (law practices, architecture studios, consulting businesses, wellness practices, sports agencies) tend to hit the same walls around the same time.

Growth becomes trickier and marketing needs a real push. But marketing can be elusive. It’s often confused for sales. And worse, these days everyone and their brother’s friend is trying their hand at the industry.

With that said, we wanted to take a minute to cover some foundational questions and dispel any less-than-correct industry knowledge that you may find out there.

1. “How Do We Know If Our Marketing Is Working?”

The honest answer: most businesses aren’t measuring the things that matter. They’re watching follower counts and post likes. Those are vanity metrics. Likes don’t (necessarily) lead to purchases.

Some go a level deeper and track the things that reflect business health: organic search traffic, email list growth, where your leads are coming from, how many of them are converting. Better. We’ll take it.

But what we really want to know (ahem, what keeps us up at night on your behalf) is your cost-per-lead and cost-per-client. What does it cost your business to acquire a lead and then a client, in real dollars and real time? And is that number going down over time?

Because that’s the whole game. Not more followers. When that number starts dropping, you’re not guessing anymore.

2. “Do We Really Need to Blog, or Is That Outdated?”

Not outdated. I repeat: nowhere near outdated. Blogging is still one of the highest-leverage things a professional services firm can do. The reason: your prospective clients are searching for answers to specific questions, and a well-written blog post that answers those questions can rank in Google search and in AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity for years. One post, written once, pulling in qualified traffic indefinitely.

The caveat: a blog that publishes generic, opinion-free content for no specific audience doesn’t do much. A blog written for a specific reader, answering a specific question that they’re asking, with a clear point of view behind it – that’s the jam to the search world’s jelly. If you catch my drift.

We’ve seen blog posts written seven years ago that are still generating leads. We’ve also seen clients publish weekly for a year and get almost nothing from it because the content wasn’t targeted. The question isn’t whether to blog. It’s whether to blog strategically. To which the answer is a resounding yes.

3. “We’ve Tried Paid Ads and They Didn’t Work. What Are We Doing Wrong?”

Shooting from the hip, these are the three problems we see the most commonly: the targeting was too broad, the landing page didn’t match the ad’s promise, or there wasn’t enough budget to let the algorithm learn. Paid ads are not a faucet you turn on and get immediate, predictable results from. They require testing – multiple creative approaches, specific audience segments, a clear conversion path on the back end.

The other thing we hear constantly: businesses ran ads before they had any organic presence and expected them to carry the full weight of lead generation. When you’re just starting out, you’re not only competing against businesses that have been buying ads for years and optimized their campaigns: you’re competing against an algorithm that manages the bidding process.
When you’re starting out, you have no history and no track record. In short: you’re not going to win any bids against the established businesses unless you pay a higher rate per impression than they are.

If paid ads haven’t worked for you, we’d want to know what you were selling, what you were sending people to, and what your budget was before assuming the channel is wrong for your business.

4. “Should We Be on Every Social Platform?”

That’s a hard no. Pick one or two where your actual clients and prospects spend time and do those well. A law firm serving business owners gets more return from LinkedIn than TikTok. An architecture firm with a design-savvy client base belongs on Instagram. A wellness practice might find more traction on a combination of Instagram and email than anywhere else.

Being on six platforms poorly will cost more than it returns. Being on two platforms consistently, with content that’s useful or interesting to your specific audience, compounds over time. We always ask: where do your best existing clients spend time online? Start there.

5. “How Long Before We See Results?”

For SEO and content: typically, it takes six to twelve months before you can point to it as a meaningful driver of traffic or leads. That sounds long until you realize the content you publish in month one is still working in month eighteen.

For email: it’s faster. A well-run email program with a clean list can start generating engagement within the first few sends. But the list has to be built first.

For paid: immediate traffic, but results depend entirely on the quality of the campaign, the budget allocation, and the conversion path.

The businesses that get frustrated with marketing timelines are usually the ones treating it like a campaign instead of a system. Campaigns have a beginning and an end. Systems compound. The ones we’ve watched grow steadily over five or ten years treat marketing like infrastructure. Good marketing is something you build and maintain, not something you run and stop.

If you’ve got a question that isn’t on this list, it’s probably one we’ve answered before. Let’s chat. Btw, we love to chat – so what are you losing?