Before I get too deep into my premise, let me take a second to acknowledge how unbelievably uncomfortable I am making an absolute statement like the one in this article’s title. My entire professional life is based on living in a Willy Wonka world of pure imagination and endless possibility. I’m constantly thinking in terms of “what if,” and doing everything in my power to find (or create) points of leverage that can solve problems. When I hear an absolute statement to the negative, I automatically and frantically start doing whatever I can to find an exception to the rule – it’s just how I’m wired. 

Disclaimer aside, I do believe that advertising won’t save your flailing company in most cases. 

I’ve been advertising on the internet in some form or another for more than 20 years, and have seen an awful lot of scenarios along the way. The one scenario that I hate the most: the company who is turning to advertising in a fevered attempt to get their company back on track. 

Yes, I’ve been a part of some pretty great comeback stories that started from that dreaded scenario, but most of the time there are too many other factors within the business to be overcome by ads alone. Let’s take a look at what some of those limiting factors have been. 

Scenario #1: Major Changes To Product Offerings

Again, I feel like I have to give 5 pages of additional context to explain what I mean, but I’m trying to keep this brief enough to quickly read. What I’m primarily talking about are companies that have made a major change to their product offerings without proper planning, rollout, or expectations. 

Some of the common changes I’ve seen that spark the panic to turn to advertising are things like: 

• Price increases (with or without increased service)
• Decrease in service provided (with or without decrease in price)
• Shift in market demographics
• Increase in audience requirement thresholds (ex. Income, qualification, etc.)

Oftentimes, these big shifts are driven by the whims of a higher-up at the company who isn’t on the frontlines – or even worse, they used to be on the front lines years ago, and are completely unaware of how things have shifted over the years. 

I’ve been pulled into a lot of meetings with prospective clients who have recently seen their leads, sales, revenue, whatever tank, and they now want to run some very specific ad campaign to help them climb back to where they were. They are usually completely oblivious as to how they got to this place of diminished performance, and will only begrudgingly admit to some massive shift in their offerings after I start probing. Even then, they usually don’t believe that their major shift has caused their downfall even when the drop in performance perfectly aligns from a timing perspective with their major business change. 

If you’ve made a change like doubling your price while reducing your offering, you’re putting an awful lot of pressure on your advertising. Yes, you can work your way past a change like that over time through strong brand strategy, but spinning up a LinkedIn campaign to bring back your 50% loss of revenue overnight just isn’t going to happen. 

Scenario #2: Poor Technical Performance

When I say technical performance, I’m primarily referring to a company’s web presence – a slow loading site, poor site architecture, lousy conversion rate optimization, crummy page copy, low organic visibility, etc. 

HOWEVER, it’s also important to look at business operations as well. If you have a sub-par sales team who can’t close deals, blowing up your lead pipeline doesn’t do much for you. If you have a site that keeps crashing or just a site that fails to convert, sending traffic to the site through ads isn’t going to help you. If you have notoriously poor customer service and terrible reviews all over the internet, you get the picture. 

The fact is, advertising works best in cooperation with good business operations, solid organic visibility, and a site optimized to convert visitors into customers. If you don’t have the rest of your house in order, you’re just spending money on visitors who will ultimately turn their nose up at what you have to offer. 

Scenario #3: Low Brand Recognition

Of the 3 scenarios I’m covering today, this is the one that can most easily be overcome through advertising. Still, advertising is not usually an overnight solution to this problem either. Very similar to scenario #2, low (or no) brand recognition puts advertising on its back foot in terms of immediate, low-funnel performance.

Imagine you’ve decided to take up guitar, and you see a killer ad featuring a solid deal for a Fender guitar. Depending on the level of Fender you’re looking at, there may be tons of better options at better price points, but they don’t have the name recognition and cachet of a guitar with Fender on the headstock. How much more might you be willing to pay just for the familiarity of a Fender over a guitar being advertised with the same features at a similar price point from the (fake) brand-new company Romero guitars?

Now, don’t get me wrong: advertising can absolutely move the needle in increasing your brand awareness. If you aren’t quite ready to make your guitar purchase right then and there, and over the next few weeks you’re suddenly seeing retargeting ads featuring your favorite guitar players on stage with a Romero guitar in hand, you might start thinking twice about the virtues of a known quantity like Fender over the guitar your idols play. 

Even in this scenario, we’re talking about necessary time to infiltrate the psyche of the buyer. Without a strong brand presence to lean on, it’s tough to get people over the fence. 

Is Advertising Even Worth It? 

Of course, but that comes with caveats. If your house isn’t in order, it doesn’t make sense to invite people over. The same goes for advertising. If your business is a mess, get it in order before you start buying – and really, that’s what advertising is – attention. 

That said, advertising can actually help you “stress test” your business as well. If people don’t know to check you out, you may not even realize you have a problem. Getting live users onto your site and into your pipeline can help you quickly identify breakpoints so you can get to work optimizing the experience to attract future customers. But keep in mind, if the initial experience is bad enough, you may never win those test users back.

My advice to you: put your best business foot forward before you start spending money for people’s attention.