Nobody walks into A&E and asks for a cast

Read time: 4 mins

Morning — here's this week:

— What a trip to A&E says about how people buy marketing

— Why so much marketing money gets spent on the wrong thing

— One thing worth doing before Friday

My son Alfie broke his wrist playing rugby recently.

Broken in two places, as it turned out.

We spent a fair chunk of the evening in A&E, and somewhere in the middle of it I noticed something I'd never thought about before.

Nobody asked us what we wanted.

Not once. Not "what do you think you need", not "what would you like us to do". They asked what happened, they had a look, and then they sent him for an X-ray before anybody did anything at all.

Only once they could see the actual break did anyone decide on the treatment.

Which is obvious when it's a bone. You'd think it was mad if it worked any other way. Imagine walking into A&E and announcing that you'd like a cast, please, on the left arm, and you've already decided.

They'd send you home.

And yet that is almost exactly how most businesses buy marketing.

I hear this one constantly, usually with a bit of weariness attached.

"We've tried all that. Spent a fortune on it. Didn't do a thing for us."

And the conclusion people draw is nearly always about the supplier. They were no good. They didn't understand our business. They took the money and ran.

Sometimes that's true. More often, something else happened.

Think about how the decision actually got made. At some point somebody — the owner, a sales call, a bloke at a networking thing — decided what the business needed.

We need a new website. We need to be doing more on social. We need to get on Google Ads. We need a rebrand.

Every one of those is a treatment. And every one of them is sometimes exactly right.

But they were all chosen before anybody looked at anything.

Nobody counted the enquiries. Nobody checked where the existing ones came from. Nobody worked out what a customer actually costs, or tested whether the forms on the current website even worked.

The treatment got picked first and the problem got assumed. Then eighteen months and a lot of money later, the conclusion is that marketing doesn't work.

Here's the bit that keeps it going, and it's not stupidity on anyone's part.

Treatment feels like progress. Diagnosis feels like delay.

Buying a new website feels like doing something about it. You can see it being built. There's a launch date. Something is visibly happening.

Being told to go away and work out how many enquiries you got last month and where they came from feels like being stalled. It costs almost nothing, nobody gets excited about it, and there's nothing to show anyone at the end of it.

So people skip it. Every time.

And there's a second reason, which I'll be straight about because it involves my own industry.

Most agencies sell one thing. So if you ask a website company what's wrong, you will, remarkably often, turn out to need a website. Ask an ads company and you'll need ads. That isn't always cynical — people genuinely believe in the thing they do — but it means the diagnosis and the treatment are coming from the same place, which is not how you'd want it done with a bone.

You can't treat what you haven't looked at.

The X-ray is the cheap bit. It's the bit nobody wants to pay for, and it's the bit that decides whether the expensive bit was worth anything at all.

Ten minutes. Do it before Friday.

Write down, in one sentence, what you think your marketing problem is.

Then underneath it, write down how you know that. What did you actually look at? What number told you?

Most people can do the first line in about four seconds and then sit there on the second one.

If that's you, that's not a failure — it's just the X-ray not having been taken yet. And here's roughly what one looks like, none of which needs anybody else:

Four questions. If you can answer all four, you're ready to decide what to buy. If you can't, anything you buy is a guess — and it might be the right guess, but you won't know for a year and a half.

This week's prompt: describe your symptoms and get a list of likely causes, in the order worth checking them.

P.S. Whenever it's useful, three ways I can help:

— Can visitors actually reach you? Two minutes, no email needed, and nothing gets sent or changed. Put your website in and read what comes back. → mot.bamsh.co.uk

— Watch: what AI search means for your business. 12 minutes on where your next enquiries are actually going to come from.

— Stuck with your marketing? Book a 15-minute call, and we'll diagnose the problem and the opportunities.