Studio Bananas
Almost nobody has a marketing effort problem. Campaigns get built, dashboards fill up, posts go out — and the pipeline sits exactly where it was.
When that happens it is usually one of four things, and they need different answers. Below is how to tell which one you have.
You are describing what you do rather than what you are for. The copy could belong to three competitors with the logo swapped.
How to tell: show your homepage to someone in your market with the logo covered. If they cannot name the company, the problem is not the channel.
Why more spend does not fix it: you are paying to distribute a message that was not persuasive at any volume.
The work is good and it is happening where the buyer is not. Most often this is inherited — the channels were chosen when the business sold something else, to someone else, and nobody revisited them.
How to tell: ask where your last five real opportunities actually came from. If the answer is not where the budget goes, you have found it.
Some things do not sell from a page. If the purchase is high-consideration, the marketing’s job is to start a conversation, not to close.
How to tell: if traffic is fine and nothing converts, look at what you are asking a stranger to commit to.
The most common one, and the least discussed. Marketing is split across a founder, an agency and whoever has time. Everyone is doing their part and no one is accountable for the whole.
How to tell: ask who decides what gets stopped. If there is no clean answer, that is the problem — and no campaign fixes it.
Usually the brief. Agencies are good at doing what they are asked and poor at telling you that the ask is wrong — that conversation risks the account.
We wrote a longer diagnosis of this: is my marketing agency working? — it gives the questions to ask before you fire anyone, because replacing an agency that was executing a flawed brief just buys the same result more slowly.
More leads into a system that does not convert produces more disappointment at higher cost. Before adding volume, the question is what happens to the ones you already get.
Also written up separately: marketing isn’t generating leads — what to check first, in order.
In our experience, in this order: decide the position, cut the channels that do not serve it, fix what happens after the click, and put one person in charge of the whole thing.
The last one is the hard part — and it is why most marketing problems are really ownership problems. A founder cannot hold it and run the company. An agency cannot hold it because it does not have the authority. A junior hire cannot hold it because the decisions are senior ones.
A fractional CMO — a marketing executive, two days a month or more, in your meetings, answerable for what happens next. Not a report and not a retainer for activity: the person who decides what to stop, what to start, and what “working” means in numbers you agreed in advance.
And never working from one opinion. When the question turns out to be pricing, cash or what the product actually does, they turn to the colleague here who does that for a living — a CFO, an AI lead, a designer.
Learn what it costs →Two weeks. $2,500. A written recommendation you own — which of the four problems above you actually have, in what order to fix them, and what to do first.
Most people start here. It is a complete piece of work, not an interview.
Sometimes the answer is that the offer needs work before the marketing does. We would rather say that in week two than sell you a year of campaigns.
Usually positioning, channel fit, the offer, or the fact that nobody owns it. The four above, with how to tell them apart.
Not until you know whether the brief was right. See the longer piece.
Not as a standalone service. Marketing work runs through a seat — the executive decides and the work follows. The one exception is design: brand and web projects run standalone with Melissa.
$5,500 a month for two days, $9,500 for four, $16,000 for eight. Full detail on the CMO seat page.
Then a seat is the wrong shape. Melissa runs brand and web work as standalone projects — see her page. If it is not that either, we will say so.