A common pitfall for businesses and marketers looks like this: You spend a bunch of time and resources to get a piece of marketing to work, it does great for the business, and then no one pays attention to it anymore, assuming that since it’s working today that it will still be working tomorrow. If you aren’t careful, a part of your new business engine can break for all sorts of reasons and the longer it takes you to recognize it, the more damage it does to your bottomline.

Many marketers mistakenly believe that repeating logos and taglines is the heart of branding. The research disagrees. Real branding, the kind that builds legendary companies and products, is emotionally-driven, which means that your marketing needs to reinforce that emotion, not just your brand identity.

Retargeting ads can be the smartest ad spend in your marketing budget for several reasons: They are often cost effective, they make your highest value web traffic even more valuable, and they allow you to target the right prospects with the exact messages they need for where they are in the customer journey.

Plateaus are a normal part of any marketing and growth strategy. No matter how good your marketing is, you will eventually reach a point where you have to do something different, where you have to make changes. The problem, however, is that many brands don’t actually address their plateaus and instead start to drift into decline.

One time we had a client whose marketing looked great, but their sales were not improving. After a lot of tests and troubleshooting, we tracked down the problem to a disgruntled sales associate driving customers away. And this is why you need to look beyond your marketing when you assess its performance.