If I had a pound for every time a founder told me her marketing wasn't working, I could hire The Ivy for a month.
It comes up in almost every room I sit in. The posts go out, the emails go out, the newsletter goes out when there's time. People are kind about it. They like things and occasionally comment. Very little of it turns into the work she actually wants.
The natural response is to do more. Another platform, a new content plan, a course on Reels, a promise to post every day from Monday. I understand the instinct completely. When something isn't working, effort feels like the responsible answer.
Here's what I've learned from years of looking at businesses as a whole rather than one corner at a time. Most of the time, the marketing isn't the problem. It's where the problem shows up.
Marketing is the loudest symptom
Marketing is the most visible part of your business. It's the part other people see, the part you can measure in likes and opens, and the part that feels most exposed when it goes quiet. So when something underneath isn't settled, marketing is usually where you feel it first.
Think about what good marketing actually needs from you. It needs to know who it's talking to. It needs to know what you want that person to do next. It needs to know which of your offers matters most right now, and which ones are quietly taking up space.
Those aren't marketing questions. They're strategy questions. If they haven't been answered, even brilliant marketing will feel like shouting into a room without knowing who you're hoping will turn round.
The three decisions hiding behind most marketing worries
When I look underneath a marketing problem, I nearly always find one of three unmade decisions.
Who it's really for. Many established founders still talk to everyone, because at the start of the business everyone was a potential client. Five or ten years in, you know exactly who you do your best work with. If your marketing hasn't caught up, it will sound polite, broad and easy to scroll past.
What you actually want to sell. This is the big one. A lot of businesses in midlife are carrying offers that were right three years ago. You keep promoting them because they exist, while the thing you'd love to be doing more of sits quietly on the website with no real push behind it. Your audience can feel that mixed message, even if they couldn't name it.
What happens after someone says yes. Sometimes the marketing is working perfectly well, and the enquiries simply have nowhere clear to go. No obvious next step, no booking link, a "drop me an email" that relies on someone being brave enough to write first. That isn't a content problem. It's a structure problem.
None of these are fixed by posting more. They're fixed by making a decision, and then letting your marketing say it clearly.
Why this is so hard to see from the inside
If this all sounds obvious, it's worth asking why so many capable women miss it in their own businesses.
The honest answer is that you're too close to it. You're the only person who sees the whole picture of your business. Your accountant sees the numbers. Your VA sees the diary. Your marketing support sees the posts. Nobody else sees how all of it fits together, so nobody else is in a position to say, "I don't think this is a marketing issue at all."
Add the rest of life to that. The parent who needs you more than they used to, the teenager who needs you less, or says so. When your thinking time is squeezed into the gaps, you reach for the problem you can act on quickly. You can write a post tonight. You can't make a strategic decision about the future of your business in the ten minutes before school pick up.
So the marketing gets the attention, and the decision underneath waits another month.
What to do instead
Before you change anything about your marketing, try this. Take the one marketing worry that has been niggling at you most, and ask it three questions.
Who exactly am I trying to reach with this?
What do I want her to do once she has seen it?
Is this the offer I most want to be selling over the next six months?
If you can answer all three quickly and confidently, you probably do have a marketing question, and it's worth getting practical help with the execution. If any of them made you pause, you've found the real work. That pause is useful. It's telling you where the decision is.
In my own garden, I've spent more than one spring feeding a plant that was simply in the wrong spot. More feed didn't help. Moving it did. Marketing is often the same. The effort is rarely the issue. The positioning is.
You don't have to work this out alone
This is exactly the kind of thinking that happens best out loud, with someone who can see what you're too close to notice.
Inside Trailblazing Females Online, we bring in experts to cover the practical side of running a business, including live marketing hot seats with Ange Wakeling, founder of Boomfly, where members bring a real question and get it worked through on the spot. Your first month is free, with no contract.
If you'd rather talk it through in person, our Networking Collective meets on Wednesday 21 October at Channel Court, Clevedon. It's a morning with women who run real businesses and understand what you're carrying.
If you already suspect the question is a bigger one, that's where my one to one work comes in. For founders who want someone alongside them, I'm taking on a small number of clients this month as their Fractional Strategy Director, the person who sees the whole picture with you so you're no longer carrying every decision alone.
Your question to take away
What's the marketing worry you keep coming back to, and what decision might be sitting underneath it?
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Niki is a Fractional Strategy Director and the Founder of Trailblazing Females, a curated collective helping female founders over 40 scale with intention.