Are You Running a Marketing Sh*tshow?
I’m willing to bet you weren’t looking for a blog post on this exact topic. I also doubt you were typing “why isn’t my marketing working” into Google.
But since you’re here, let’s chat.
I bet it’s more likely that your calendar has more white space than it should this month, and your bookkeeping is something you’d rather not look at. The question has been sitting there in the back of your mind, and now it’s loud enough that you can’t ignore it.
Before we get too far, let’s address the elephant in the room: Why should you listen to me in the first place?
You have a point. I haven’t earned your trust yet. You know it, and I know it, so let’s not pretend we’re all of a sudden besties, although I’m secretly hoping by the end of this post we will be.
Here’s why.
This isn’t one of those posts where I tell you how I alone can fix it, then leave you with an answer that somehow leads to 10 more questions that never get resolved unless you buy my thing.
It’s the one where I show you exactly how you got here: every step, every pivot, every thing you tried that almost worked, so you can finally see the whole picture instead of just the piece in front of you.
Fine, I’ll Figure It Out Myself.
Since I’m being brutally honest, the only kind of honest I know how to be.
My guess is your problems didn’t start because you couldn’t afford to hire a marketer. It’s that nobody has given you a compelling enough reason to spend hundreds of dollars on their solution. And until they do, spending money on something unproven feels riskier than spending time on something you can control.
So you decided to figure it out yourself.
You’re smart, determined, and not afraid to roll your sleeves up. You have the specific brand of confidence that comes from being someone who figures things out. You’ve done it before in every other area of your life, and there’s no reason this should be any different.
Someone told you it was harder than it looked? “Watch me.”
The flipside of the determination coin that gets you started is the same thing that keeps you going long after something has stopped making sense. Because you don’t quit. You push through.
So when it doesn’t work despite following the directions exactly, it doesn’t feel like the directions were wrong. It feels like you must be missing something. Because you followed them. To the letter. You measured twice and cut once.
The stool should be straight. It isn’t. And you’re standing there, staring at it, trying to figure out why you can’t understand why one leg is two inches shorter than the other. After all, it couldn’t possibly be the directions.
That’s where what I call the Marketing Sh*tshow takes root. It’s where your determination becomes the reason you pick up a new and different set of directions instead of questioning whether the first set was missing anything. You’re not lazy, and it certainly wasn’t for lack of effort. You weren’t told there was a missing step in the space between the promised result and the actual one.
Misstep One: “Everyone’s On Social Media. I Should Be, Too.”
So you got on social media.
You set up the account. Maybe you converted a personal one or started fresh because you wanted something that looked more professional. You picked an aesthetic and started posting.
Your posts weren’t bad. You shared wins, client results, a milestone, or a charity event that showed you were invested in your community. You wrote the “here’s why you need this” posts because that’s what you’d seen other people in your industry do. You showed up. You were consistent. Colleagues told you it looked great.
But the right clients weren’t finding you. Nobody was sliding into your DMs saying I’ve been looking for this. The phone wasn’t ringing any differently than it had before you started.
There’s a difference between being active on social media and using it strategically to market your business. Content that looks professional and content that makes the right person stop and think, she’s talking about me, aren’t the same. Even if you knew that, posting just to check the box on today’s to-do list is not the same as marketing.
The charity event photo tells people you care about your community. The “here’s why you need our service” post tells them what you do. But neither one answers the question your ideal client is actually asking when she stumbles across your account.
Is this for someone like me?
Without a messaging foundation underneath the content, a clear voice, a specific ideal client, a reason why this business exists that goes deeper than the service it provides, you can post every day for a year and still be invisible to the people you’re trying to reach.
But you didn’t know that yet. So you kept posting and waited to see what would change.
The answer: not much.
Misstep Two: “You Just Need a Clearer Message,” They Said.
So you went looking for one.
Maybe you found a template. Something like:
For [target customer] who [pain point], [business name] is the [category] that [unique benefit].
You’re thinking great. This is easy. You filled in the blanks and ended up with something that sounded better than what you could free-think on your own. You put it in your bio, added it to your website header. Maybe you even used a version of it as your elevator pitch at your next networking event.
And unless you started with no message at all, that template isn’t any better.
Because it produced a message so broad, it could apply to half the businesses in your category. Formal enough to sound legitimate, but vague enough to mean nothing to anyone specific. Zero personality. No real promise. And definitely no reason for the exact right person to stop and think—finally, someone who gets it.
Again, you can’t carry all of the blame. You trusted someone who said this works, and filled in the blanks. It’s not rocket science. It’s not naivety either. It’s what reasonable people do.
What that Google article or AI search query definitely didn’t tell you is this: how do you know you have an actual message just because you strung a few words together? Seriously, if you don’t actually know what a good USP looks or sounds like, how do you know if what you wrote is clear enough to get the job done?
You don’t.
When you’re doing this alone, you have no way of knowing. So you assume the template worked because the template said it would.
What you end up with is a message that just looks and sounds more official instead of stronger and clearer.
If it did what it promised, the right clients would have found you.
Misstep Three: “You Just Need to Figure Out What to Post and Do It Consistently.”
So you made a plan.
A content calendar. Specific days, specific platforms, specific post types. Three times a week minimum. Maybe every day if you could manage it. You’d heard enough times that consistency was the key and that the algorithm rewards showing up, so you were going to show up.
The first couple of weeks felt productive. You customized some Canva templates or bought some on Pinterest that were more professional than what you would have created without a graphic design background. And you started creating promotional posts about your services, and behind the scenes Stories that felt authentic, even if you weren’t totally sure how they connected to your brand. Maybe you tried a motivational quote or two because everyone loves to be inspired, and you’d seen other people in your industry post them and get engagement, so it should work for you, too.
You posted, and you waited.
You got a notification that someone liked your post. Turns out it was your mom.
You told yourself it takes time. Consistency compounds. Keep going.
So you kept going. Posting into what felt increasingly like a void, watching the follower count inch up by bots and people who would never buy from you, wondering why the engagement felt hollow even on the posts that did okay.
Then life got busy. A client needed something, and the content calendar slipped for a week, then two, then you looked up, and before you knew it, it had been three months since you’d posted anything.
So you started over. New calendar. New templates. New commitment to consistency.
Rinse and repeat.
At some point, you started blaming the algorithm. And honestly, you’re not entirely wrong. The algorithm does favor certain things. It rewards consistency and engagement. But it’s not designed with your business goals in mind. It’s reflecting back exactly what the content is producing: people scrolling past because nothing made them stop
That’s a message problem. And no amount of posting at the right time on the right day with the right hashtags fixes a message that isn’t connecting with anyone.
You’re thinking the algorithm failed you, when really it just showed you the truth faster than you wanted to see it.
Misstep Four: Short-Form Video Is The Future. I Need To Do This.
You’d heard “short-form video is the future” enough times that it started to feel like a FOMO mandate that read “If you’re not doing Reels, you’re leaving visibility on the table,” and a million other reasons you’ve heard enough times you can recite them in your sleep.
And they’re not wrong. Those are all reasons short-form video performs well. That doesn’t make it right for your particular brand, but you try anyway because, FOMO. Even though you hate being on camera and you’d rather sell a kidney before posting yourself stumbling through a video where you clearly have no idea what you’re trying to say.
But the problem was never the camera. The camera is just the delivery mechanism. Without a clear message, Reels take forever to make when you don’t know what you’re saying before you hit record. Not to mention you’re spending an hour plus on something that was supposed to take fifteen minutes. Then another hour editing. So, you post it anyway, half hoping no one sees it or scrap the whole thing and tell yourself you’d try again tomorrow.
Without that foundation, the camera will always feel like the enemy. When the message is already there, it still feels awkward at first. But it gets easier. Instead of spending your time searching for the right words, you’re spending time working on ways to deliver the message in a way that your audience connects to.
Misstep Five: “Okay, If Reels Aren’t the Answer, Then What?”
The same creator who swore by Reels a month ago is now walking it back because the algorithm changed. Reels weren’t getting the reach they used to, so she pivoted to Carousels.
You’d already spent weeks trying to make Reels work.
But she’s the “Instagram expert,” so you pivoted too. You created Carousels with captions that were essentially buy my thing, but as a slide show. Somewhere in the back of your mind, you knew it wasn’t going to work because you hate being sold to, but you didn’t know what else to say.
And as you predicted, the Carousels didn’t work either.
Somewhere between the Reels and the Carousels and the static posts and the Stories, you started to wonder if the problem was the platform. Maybe you needed to be somewhere else. Maybe your people weren’t on Instagram at all.
So you chose a different platform, and the cycle started again.
Misstep Six: “No, Email Is Where It’s At.”
I love email marketing. I think it’s one of the most underutilized channels for small business owners, so you dismiss it because you don’t want to be spammy, or you get too many emails, and you talk yourself out of it before you’ve even tried —before you’ve had a chance to see what happens when it’s done right.
When I was still a massage therapist, clients on my table would casually mention something they found funny or insightful in my latest email. Yes, I sent out promotional emails, but I didn’t only email my list when I had something to sell them.
I had better-than-industry-average open rates, so I knew people were opening them. But it feels different when you get validation that the reader actually got something out of it, too, because they tell you.
Email works. But not the way most people try to use it.
If you’re a service brand and your idea of email marketing is sending a monthly newsletter about company updates or generic industry info, or only when you want to stimulate sales, followed by three or four weeks of radio silence. No wonder those emails feel like interruptions. Because they are.
If there’s no relationship underneath them, people aren’t opening your emails because you haven’t given them a reason to. You have no strategy for growing your list. There’s no segmentation to make sure people are getting information that’s relevant to them. And you’re sending them out manually when you think of it because automation feels impersonal and sounds complicated.
You convince yourself that email doesn’t work, and you abandon it, too.
Same problem. Different vehicle.
Misstep Seven: “I Just Need a Real Strategy.”
At this point, you’ve been reading long enough to know that tactics without a strategy is just you throwing spaghetti at the wall, but nothing is sticking.
Great, I’ll build a strategy, you say.
Wait, how do I do that?
You think, I’ll just Google: “How to create a marketing strategy.” Suddenly, your social feed is flooded with “Watch my free webinar where I’ll teach you the secrets to getting clients while you sleep”. The give-them-just-enough-to-want-more sessions that promised to show you how to build a real marketing strategy.
You watched them. You took notes. You tried to cobble together something that resembled a plan from the pieces people were willing to give away for free. You weren’t convinced enough to spend $1,000 on the course or $5,000 on the group program, yet.
What you ended up with was the marketing equivalent of missing class and borrowing your classmate’s notes to study for the final exam. You get the concept. But since you weren’t in the room, you’re missing the context. And the context is exactly what these courses teach—the how behind the what. The part they give away just enough of to make you want the rest.
The problem you create when you’ve watched 47 different webinars trying to cobble together something from free advice without committing to any one direction is that the cobbled-together strategy won’t hold together.
There are too many conflicting strategies that don’t give you context into how the creator made it work. You’re probably trying too many things at once, and you have no way to know what’s actually working, so you become impatient and try something else.
This leads to burnout, and you decide that marketing is a waste of time. Besides, word of mouth has always been more reliable, or you bit the bullet and invested in the program.
And if you invested, you got someone else’s strategy. Built on someone else’s foundation, designed for someone else’s audience, their voice, their specific combination of who they are and who they talk to. Maybe it worked for a while. Maybe it never quite clicked. Either way, at some point, it stopped, and you were back to figuring out what to try next.
Misstep Eight: “Maybe Marketing Just Doesn’t Work For Me.”
At some point, the accumulation gets heavy enough that it starts feeling like a you problem.
You’ve followed multiple sets of directions. From multiple people who all seemed to know what they were talking about.
And you’re still here wondering why the hell none of it’s working.
Which leads you to only one conclusion. It’s me. Hi. I’m the problem, it’s me.
I’m about to commit one of the cardinal sins of marketing. Admitting I don’t always have it figured out 100% of the time right away, and I’m not into the whole never let them see you sweat vibe.
I have a doom spiral every other week. Not about whether the work is good—I know it is. I spiral out about the same things you do. Whether I’m visible enough, whether the right people are finding me, whether what I’m building is going to be enough.
Imposter syndrome doesn’t leave you alone when you’re running a Marketing Sh*tshow. It follows you around like a lost dog. And eventually, if you’re not careful, you’re going to trip over it and break your hip.
But there’s a big difference between imposter syndrome and self doubt. Imposter syndrome is when you’re genuinely trying to figure it out and spiraling because you don’t know if the direction you’ve chosen is the right one. Self-doubt is a different animal altogether. That’s the version that hits when you’re questioning if your message will land in front of a stage of 500 people, you have hundreds of glowing testimonials, and you hope your idea hits its revenue goals.
Here’s what I need you to hear before we go any further.
Your imposter syndrome isn’t evidence that you’re the problem. It’s evidence that you’ve been fighting the admission that something isn’t working, and instead of facing it, you’re trying to justify it. Because justifying it lets us off the hook for owning the solution to fixing the problem.
It only feels like a personal failing when really it’s a sequence problem.
And the problem is that nobody handed you the missing step because they want you to buy it. Me included. That’s not a conspiracy. That’s just business. Everyone needs to make sales to survive —we just don’t like saying it out loud because we’re afraid it makes us sound greedy instead of helpful.
The difference is I’m telling you that upfront.
Here’s What I Want You to See
Every single thing you tried could have worked.
Reels, Carousels, email, social media consistency, someone else’s strategy. None of it was wrong exactly. People build real businesses with all of those tools. The problem was never the tactics.
The problem was the sequence.
You were trying to build marketing before you had anything solid to build it on. No clear foundation. No real message. No deep understanding of who you’re actually talking to and what she needs to hear before she’ll trust you. Just tactics stacked on top of tactics, each one borrowed from someone whose business looks nothing like yours.
That’s the Marketing Sh*tshow. A completely predictable result of trying to execute before you have a foundation. And here’s what it’s actually costing you beyond the time spent on Carousels nobody saved and emails nobody opened.
The revenue rollercoaster isn’t a sales problem. It’s a foundation problem. When your message is off, the right clients don’t recognize themselves in it. So you get some clients, then silence, then some clients, then silence. Not because you’re inconsistent. Because your marketing has been speaking to a version of you that isn’t quite real, and the people who need the real version keep scrolling past.
The longer that runs, the more evidence accumulates that you’re the problem.
You’re not the problem. But you are missing something. And it’s not a better tactic.
What If I Told You There Was a Way Out
If I told you there was a way out of the Marketing Sh*tshow—one that once you understand it, puts everything else into perspective—would you want me to tell you?
That’s not a rhetorical question. This is the part where you actually decide.
The first step is the Brand Snapshot. It’s free. I take a look at your marketing and tell you honestly what’s working, what isn’t, and what’s missing. And there’s no obligation to buy my thing after, although if you did, I wouldn’t hate that.
I’m not going to promise it fixes everything. It won’t. Think of it as a flashlight. It shows you exactly what you’re working with, so you stop tripping over the same things in the dark.
You’ve been handed enough tools that promised to do the work for you. You know how that ends.
It’s my job to shine the flashlight on the truth about where you are. What you do with it is up to you.
Show Me Where I’m Going Wrong →
Sara Kotila is the founder of Quirk & Quill Creative. She works with women business owners who are genuinely excellent at what they do and can’t figure out why their marketing isn’t landing. The answer is almost never what they think it is.