Chapter 2: The Three Root Causes of “Death Spiral Marketing”

You became an entrepreneur to your business passion into freedom and personal fulfillment. Freedom and fulfillment for yourself, for your family, for your partners, and for your employees.

If you’re reading this guide you and your team are investing in marketing to drive customer growth and new business. But it’s not working. In fact it feels like your marketing is slowly killing your business. 

Every month, you spend hundreds or thousands of dollars a month to attract new business. Yet you are generating just a handful of new customers. And the growth is neither predictable nor exponential. Sometimes, your growth is even negative. 

You’re on a hamster wheel of mediocre growth and can’t stop. But if you don’t diagnose and fix the problem, your business will eventually fail. Or worse, it will limp along like a zombie in the land of the living dead. Barely surviving and making you and your team miserable. 

So the question is, how did you get here? Why is your marketing slowly killing your business and how do you fix it? 

At RevKong, we’ve helped hundreds of clients reverse the effects of “death spiral” marketing and launch programs that deliver 20x or more in monthly customer growth and sales. Through our work we’ve observed several common causes for why marketing fails to achieve expected results.

1. Copying a big, successful brand’s marketing: Copy from the best, right? Wrong. Your marketing priorities and budgets are nothing like Apple’s, IBM’s, and Geico’s. You can’t spend like them or have the infrastructure to juggle complex, multi-channel campaigns.  
2. Imitating a competitor’s marketing: You can’t achieve category leadership by copying your competitor. Copying turns you into their identical twin. And if a customer can’t tell you apart, his decision will come down to price.
3. Confusing the tactics as the plan (aka Winging your marketing): Many confuse the discipline of marketing with tactics and channels. Advertising. SEO. Email. Social Media. Great marketing is orchestration, not activity, focused on attracting customers.

A simple definition of Marketing

A search for the phrase “What is marketing?” gives you a dozen different definitions. We’re going to save you some frustration and share a definition that we find clear, simple and to the point. 

“Marketing is the strategy you use for getting your ideal [customer] to know you, like you, and trust you enough to become a [paying] customer.” 

We first came across this definition in Allan Dib’s “The 1-Page Marketing Plan”. And we love it for two reasons:

1. It frames marketing as a disciplined planning approach that achieves a tangible outcome: paying customers.
2. It puts the customer at the center of the plan.