We interrupt our regular CQ series for a breaking-news-level question: Why is it so hard to tie organic digital marketing efforts to results?

If you haven’t asked yourself this question before, dear Business Owner, then you have met someone else who has.

We certainly have.

Over the past decade, we’ve encountered hundreds of entrepreneurs who, either consciously or subconsciously, have found themselves struggling hard with this problem.

They usually don’t think about it this way, though.

For most business owner, the thought takes the form of:

• How many leads will this content generate?
• How long until people start sending us inbound business requests on social media?
• We got thousands of impressions, which means we got thousands of leads… right?
• Is digital marketing really leading to more sales?
• Or is it just a money drain?
• Why is the ROI of digital marketing so low?

Maybe now that you’ve seen the layman versions, you realize you have wondered about this before.

And rightly so. It’s an important topic. So, let’s investigate it together.

Setting the Stage—The Big Problem with Organic Marketing

Each of these questions reflect the crucial problem that organic digital marketing has, so far, been very difficult to tie back to business-driving metrics. There’s been no clear formula to convert from

• impressions to leads
• number of followers to number of buyers
• organic spend to revenue generated

and so on.

For paid advertising, it’s different. Digital ad platforms usually give you numbers that you can then use to estimate ROI, and the result is usually significant.

But this approach simply doesn’t work for organic social marketing.

Even if you took the viewership and engagement numbers you got in an analytics report on LinkedIn and tried to do some algebra with them and your sales numbers over the same time period, not only would the result not be significant, but that number also might just as well be a guess.

And with content marketing, the problem worsens.

You have the same measurability and attribution problems as other organic digital marketing efforts, but with the added pressure of increased investment, since producing high-quality assets takes resources (time, effort, and money).

So Where Does This Leave Most Business Owners?

• Struggling to understand the value of organic digital marketing, and especially content marketing;
• Suffering from unrealistic or ill-informed expectations of results from the campaigns they launch;
• Unable to make the most of their digital marketing efforts, create synergistic power between sales and marketing, and drive results that grow the business.

What’s worse, all of these blind spots combine to create the ultimate problem for any startup or SMB: ad-hoc marketing.

The Tragedy of Ad-Hoc Marketing

You’ve just finished watching a GaryVee video, and, inspired, you decide to create and post content for your company page.

Good job! 👍

You succeed in posting twice a day for two or three weeks… and then give up, seeing that no one has even noticed. Not even your teammates or employees.

But it’s all right, because you found your solution—a different guru. A fast-talking, anxiety-inducing guru who says that all you need to do is build a funnel, and leads will flow magically to make you millions.

Excited, you buy ClickFunnels for a month, set up a funnel, and… crickets.

Nothing happens.

And you realize it’s because you need to drive traffic to the funnel. 🤔 Hmm…

While you think about what you’ll do next, you scroll through your LinkedIn feed, and a video of Neil Patel talking about SEO pops up.

SEO! Maybe that’s what you need to drive traffic quickly to your funnel.

But SEO works best for blog content, since that tends to rank higher, right?

Who has time to write all that stuff, though? Not you. You’re busy with existing client fulfillment, managing your small team of employees, and paying bills to keep your family going.

So you figure, maybe this is where AI can save you time. You get ChatGPT, ask it to write you SEO-optimized articles where you link to your funnel landing page, and publish them on a blog connected to the landing page.

But after a few weeks, you still don’t see any traction.

That’s odd. Wasn’t SEO supposed to be the final missing piece?

Weeks have already slipped by. Despite the countless hours and resources you’ve poured into your goals, results still seem to elude you. And yet, as you scroll through your feed, it feels like everyone else is thriving, showcasing their successes, and flaunting their financial victories—or, at least, that’s what they want you to believe.

Dejected, you turn to YouTube, where you suddenly find an old video of Alex Hormozi talking about ads.

Ads—that’s it! None of the organic methods you tried worked, so maybe what you need is paid advertising.

You decide to run Facebook ads directly to your funnel landing page, and see what results you get.

Sadly, that story isn’t a hypothetical.

For many business owners, it’s their day-to-day reality. In their quest to find leads and grow their businesses, entrepreneurs hop from one guru to another, one tactic to another, hoping that they’ll finally stumble upon the “one thing” that will make digital marketing work and make marketing profitable.

But the truth is, there is no “one thing.”

Reflect for a moment on the story above. What do you think was the problem that prevented you from getting leads?

Was it the tools? The platforms? The methodology?

Was it the fact that you were following gurus left and right?

Actually, no.

There was nothing wrong with the tools, the platforms, the methodology, or the gurus.

(We at GBB Media, in fact, greatly respect all the names implied or mentioned, and recommend and learn from them, too.)

So, then, why didn’t you achieve success with any of them?

Because of how you used them.

The problem with ad-hoc marketing—publishing a post there, creating a funnel here, doing some SEO, then running some ads, then deciding to go back to LinkedIn and post again, etc.—is that it’s disorganized.

There’s no actual plan behind your marketing efforts, organic or otherwise.

There’s no clear structure underpinning your efforts that groups and deploys assets, tactics, and plans together for maximum effectiveness.

And, believe it or not, it is the lack of structure that makes tying digital marketing efforts (especially organic ones) to results so hard.

So, Why Is It So Hard to Tie Organic Digital Marketing Efforts to Results?

Because you don’t have a strategic framework for your marketing that clearly solidifies the relationships between marketing, sales, revenue, and profit in your business.

You may have tactics, but you’re missing strategy.

And here’s the thing: Without strategy, you can’t win, because, as Jay Abraham likes to say, an inexperienced strategist will always beat an experienced tactician.

Listen to this famous story from Jay Abraham if you’re not convinced about the importance of strategy.

If you’re still in business, it’s either because your market is huge or your competitors are also tacticians.

However, the moment a strategist, or a group of strategists, enters the game, you’ll find yourself losing clients, market share, revenue, and relevance, with no clear way to stop the bleeding.

If this is not an outcome you’re willing to accept, good. We don’t accept it either.

And that’s why we’ve launched our Digital Farm Series.

If you’re tired of a blind approach to marketing, and you’re ready to start seeing some real results, this is the series for you.

Start lesson 1 here and now.

Welcome to the Digital Farm Series

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