Why average marketers keep beating brilliant ones

Imagine a bloke with a garage full of tyres.

Seventeen sets. Proper top-shelf stuff too, the kind of rubber F1 teams would kill for.

Thing is, he's got no engine. No chassis either. Just world-class tyres.

Now picture his neighbour. She's got a proper old banger. Tired engine, second-hand suspension, tyres that are so worn you can almost see through 'em.

But... her car drives.

She can get to work, do the shopping, head out for dinner or whatever.

And when she gets a bit of spare cash from the job she turns up to, she can upgrade the worst part.

Give it a year and she's running something half-decent.
Give it three and it might be genuinely quick.

Meanwhile, the tyre guy is still in his garage. He's got some incredible tyres in there, but he's been fired from his job as he can't actually make it into the office.

I've watched this exact thing play out in marketing across 450+ brands now, and it's the closest thing to a law I've found in this game...

A complete model beats a great tactic, every single day of the week.

Here's what I mean.

The businesses that focus on the whole of the marketing strategy always win.

They might have average ads, sales pages, email sequences and the rest. But because they've built them as one model, where each asset feeds into the next, they get results.

On the other hand, I've seen brands put all their money into something like a top tier ad agency, but fail to work on anything that comes after the ad click. These people get ad clicks, but leads and sales barely ever increase.

When you focus on the larger model and all assets are connected, everything compounds.

The ad feeds the page. The page feeds the list. The list buys again and tells their mates. Improve any single piece and every other piece gets a bit better with it.

Take the wiring away and you get what I described earlier this week. Every new thing starting from zero, feeding nothing, and being a standalone asset that has no impact on the business.

The most annoying thing is that most stuck businesses I look at have the tyre collector's setup.

One stage they're genuinely good at, cause it's the bit they enjoy, and a bunch of neglected stages leaking revenue the whole time.

Be honest, you probably already know which stage is your garage full of tyres. The bit you keep polishing cause you're good at it.

You need to stop looking at those best-in-class assets that ain;t doing anything for you, and look at how you can build a better growth model.

Every business that sells anything online runs on the same five stages. You need to...

... Attract people who don't know you exist
... Capture their details so you can actually talk to them
... Convert them into paying customers
... Engage them so they stick around and buy again
... and get them to Refer the next lot in.

That's the ACCER model.

If you've been round here a while, you'll have heard me chatting about it. It's the framework behind those 450+ brands I've helped with strategy, and I wrote a full breakdown of how it works a while back if you're newer to it.​

Seen individually, there's nothing clever in that list.

The power's in wiring everything together.

Getting the five stages feeding each other in the right order for YOUR business.

AI might be able to produce all of your marketing at scale. But if it ain't wired up into one coherent strategy, it's a lot of noise that's not helping.

It's adding more tyres to your garage and wondering why you can't use them to get yourself to the office on time.

Tomorrow I'll show you where all this is heading. Cause the gap between the businesses that get this and the ones that don't is about to get a lot wider, and AI is the reason why.

Pete "stop buying tyres" Boyle