Why I Don't Specialize in One Marketing Channel
People ask me what I specialize in all the time. They’re expecting “Google Ads” or “SEO” or “I’m the TikTok person.”
My answer is “the whole thing,” which gets the same polite nod you’d give a child who says they can run faster than a cheetah.
But there’s a real reason I work this way, and it’s probably the most useful thing I can tell you about how to spend your marketing money.
One piece of the puzzle mostly shows you what’s broken
Say you hire a great ads specialist. They know their stuff. The campaigns are tight, the targeting is smart, and the phone starts ringing.
Then calls go to voicemail when the team is busy on jobs, and callbacks happen whenever someone gets a minute. Website form submissions land in an inbox nobody’s watching closely, so leads sit for a day or two before anyone follows up. There’s no follow-up text, no reminder, no way to tell which ad brought in the one job you did book.
Three months later, the verdict is in: “Ads don’t work for us.”
The ads did their job. Everything after the ads dropped the ball. And you paid a specialist good money to find that out.
This happens with every channel. SEO sends people to a website that doesn’t give them an easy way to book. Email marketing stalls because customer contact info is scattered across phones, inboxes and spreadsheets. A content creator makes great posts that send people to a Google profile with only a handful of reviews.
Each specialist delivers their piece. The piece works. The rest of the business can’t catch what it throws.
Marketing in a vacuum is an expensive way to spend your dollars
Your marketing channels depend on each other. When one runs alone, you pay full price and get partial value.
Here’s what usually needs to be in place before any single channel can pay off:
Tracking. So you know which channel brought in which customer, and can stop paying for the ones that don’t.
A CRM. One home for every lead and customer, so nobody falls through the cracks.
Fast follow-up. Automated texts and emails that reach a new lead in minutes, including at 9 p.m. on a Sunday.
A website that converts. Clear next steps and an easy way to call, book, or request a quote.
Reviews on autopilot. A request that goes out after every job, so your reputation keeps growing without you remembering to ask.
None of this is flashy. Nobody posts about their CRM setup on Instagram (well, I do, but I’m not a normal person). It’s the plumbing that makes everything else work.
So I build the system first
When I work with a business, I start by connecting the pieces: tracking, CRM, follow-up, website, reviews. The goal is a marketing system that keeps running when you’re busy doing the actual work you got into business to do.
Once it’s built, a few nice things happen. Leads get answered fast, whether or not anyone is near a phone. Past customers hear from you again. You can see what’s working in plain numbers instead of guessing. And marketing stops depending on whether you had a spare Tuesday afternoon.
Then hire the specialists
I have nothing against ads people or content creators. I love them. I hire them constantly
. I just want you to hire them at the right time. (If you’re deciding who to hire first, I wrote about generalists vs. specialists here.)
With a working system underneath, a specialist becomes the icing on the cake. Their leads land somewhere. Their results show up in your reports. You can tell whether they’re worth what you pay them, which is a sentence I wish more business owners could say about their marketing.
Hiring a specialist before the system exists is like frosting a cake you haven’t baked yet. It’s a lot of effort, it looks okay for about a minute, and then it gets messy.
Where to start
If you’ve tried a channel and walked away saying “that didn’t work,” it may have worked fine. The question is what happened to the leads after they showed up.
That’s the part I like to figure out first.
