#11 - The Four Horsemen of Marketing: What’s Really Wrecking Your Campaigns

What if the biggest threats to your marketing success aren’t your competitors — but your own habits?

In this episode of Over The Bull, host Ken Carroll breaks down the Four Horsemen of Marketing: Panic, Ego, Indecision, and Tech Obsession. These aren’t just abstract concepts — they’re the real-world behaviors that quietly derail campaigns, exhaust budgets, and leave business owners wondering why “nothing seems to work.”

From impulsive ad buys to overcomplicated tech stacks, Ken shares the signs to watch for and how to steer clear. Whether you’re launching your first campaign or managing a seasoned brand, this episode will help you rethink how you approach creative, strategy, and decision-making.

If you’re ready to identify what’s really holding your marketing back — this one’s for you.

Over The Bull is brought to you by IntegrisDesign.com. All rights reserved.

Transcript

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You're listening to Over the Bull, where we cut through marketing noise. Here's your host, Ken Carroll.

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The Four Horsemen on this episode of Over the Bull. You know, the Four Horsemen have always been known with doom and gloom. you know, or the bad guys. You know, if you go back to the 80s, you know, back in the days of Ric Flair and pro wrestling, you know, there was a group that called themselves the Four Horsemen. And obviously, you know, in the Book of Revelation, we have the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. And, you know, they represent, obviously, you know, something you don't want to encounter. And what I've identified recently are Four Horsemen of... marketing, basically. What's unusual about this is that it's pretty consistent. And what I mean by that are businesses typically make these mistakes, and it doesn't matter if they're startups or 30-year-old businesses or whatever. It seems like that a lot of businesses just get into these habits of making these mistakes. Now, When I go through this, if you recognize that you're probably doing one or more of these, this is not a blame game. This is not a, you know, hey, you know, you should be doing this and not that. The idea is that we learn from each other. And if you can learn from me what I'm seeing in other businesses, and if you're falling into the same traps, and then you can pull yourself out of it and then avoid one or more of these four horsemen, then I think what you're going to be able to do is be much more successful at what you do. And of course, each one of these does have a challenge. So with that, let's jump right in to the four horsemen. Okay, the horseman number one is the we need leads now. The single most indicator that there is an issue is when a business becomes reactive rather than proactive in their marketing. You know, sometimes it's in a bad situation. They spend a lot of money, they chase the wrong things, they bought into the wrong advertisements, and they've blown through thousands and thousands of dollars and have garnered no results from it. Now, usually when they do something like this, it's also cultivated by sales decreasing. So if you're a business and traditionally you're doing very well in your business, you may think that'll never dry up. And so you don't proactively market and you wait until you see things starting to go down. And then you start to think, maybe I need to do something. So then you start, you know, reaching out. And now you've got this elephant in a relatively short period of time because marketing is extremely complicated. And there are all kinds of little fine tunings and nuances and everything that you've got to do in order to make them work. And so by waiting and then trying to react and hire someone to try to build those ads, it's just a recipe for disaster. And normally that reactionary process doesn't end very well. Normally you just spend a lot of money and you end up thinking things like, well, Google Ads does not work. Now, that's not the case. Google Ads can be a very powerful tool. Now, obviously, within the right context of the right business, but it's one single tool. And when you look at something like this, oftentimes people do look at things like Google Ads or paid advertising or No one should ever think SEO is reactionary and should be quick. Search engine optimization is far from being quick. It's definitely slow momentum over a period of time. So if anyone's telling you something quickly with SEO, obviously there's something wrong there. But in looking at some data we've been running for the last, I don't know, we've been running this data for about two months now with a certain group. And what it shows is something that I've always called the snowball effect is really more prevalent today than it's ever been. Now, what I mean by that is these campaigns, they have a very strategic application of social media, local SEO, paid advertising, and a few other components. Now, If we looked at it strictly from a paid ad perspective, this group, if you will, are garnering somewhere between, I don't know, 175 to 200, you know, about 300 leads basically a month. But if you looked at the paid ads, you would see that that was maybe a quarter of the overall leads. Now, If we track the phone calls and we track all the lead sources and look at how everything's playing together, we're seeing that it's really symbiotic. And all of those things are harmonizing together. And what they're doing is generating a large influx of phone calls. And so by tracking it and looking at it, we can see that this methodology is working. Now, here's the challenge with it. The challenge is it's no single one thing. It's a little bit of doing everything but strategically. Now, when I say everything, I don't mean go out and spend a fortune on social and spend a fortune on paid ads, a fortune on SEO, and a fortune on these other things. As a matter of fact, when it comes to us, we find that having too many cooks often messes things up. Now, so what we do is we manage it, but we use each one of these outlets in a very specific way for specific businesses. It doesn't work for every single business. So how does this tie back in to being reactionary? Well, I can tell you, for example, in one of the cases in building this clientele up, changing the messaging slightly really made a huge difference, especially when we went back and we looked at the competition within their service area. Now, I can also tell you that this particular series of businesses are in different geographical locations, but they offer the same service. Now, what's interesting about that is that we're not running this same process the same way for any of those businesses. Now, that seems unusual, right? Because you think if we got one down, we could rubber stamp it for each location. However, that's not the case. Now, we'll start with a baseline. And after we start with that baseline, we start looking at what are the competitors in that area doing as far as their price point? What are their call to actions? How long have they been in business? What do they do that's slightly unique? And then what we do is we start to mold a campaign gradually based on the data that comes in and based upon what we're seeing in that particular geographic area. It's not just turning on ads because we service electricians or plumbers or roofers or whatever may have you. That's a mistake. You can't just do that. What you have to do is actually dig a lot deeper. So if you're reacting. Typically, you just want to spin those things up, get them out there as quick as you can, try to drum up some sales. And if you're expecting that from anyone in marketing, you're really setting yourself up to be disappointed and probably be frustrated in your marketing person. And so the idea is to understand that it is a process. It's a process of growth. And what I do is often tell clients that it's a process of building your ATM machine. And what I mean by that is you can't just throw together a bunch of parts. You have to figure out the rhythm that works in your business. Now, what's also interesting about that is once you build it out, then you'll also adjust it over a period of time as well. And so as you're working through it, the wrong mentality is to go, okay, I need to do this. I need to hire somebody. I need more sales. I'm desperate, and I want to throw money at it and see what happens. You're setting yourself up to be taken advantage of, and you're also setting yourself up, as I mentioned, for disappointment, regardless of the quality of the person that's working on your project. There is no magic recipe. You can't rub on a lamp and get it. And so the idea is to be able to put a budget aside, set goals, and then start working toward those goals and understanding. And you know your campaign is moving in the right direction if you're constantly learning. If you're not learning anything, then you're spinning your tires. So that's the first horseman. Waiting and reacting will kill your business forever. And really, it'll just take the wind out of your sails. So let's move on to the second horseman. And this one may be a little more sensitive for some of you guys. But this is the process of making decisions based on ego. Now, when we hear the word ego, a lot of us go, well, it's a negative word. But basically, it's personal preference, you know, versus what the audience, what your customers want to see. Now, if the brand that you're working on, like for example, if you would say, I wouldn't click on that or my spouse said it looked off, it didn't look like it made a lot of sense. You know, if you're getting this kind of internal feedback, this internal feedback typically is based on personal preference. Now, the one thing that I've often told clients many times is, you know, give them a choice. And I'll say, okay, choice number one, you get the ugliest site on the planet, your wife hates it, your kids hate it, your employees hate it, everybody hates it, but it sells really good. Or you get a really pretty site that everybody loves. Your wife loves it, your kids love it, everybody loves it, but it doesn't sell anything. Now, the question is, which one would you choose? Now, of course... everybody's going to react and say, well, I want to sell more product. Now, actually, that's not true. I've had a couple people, they'll actually stop and think about that for a second because they try to think how they could do both. But when you're presented with the idea of choosing one or the other, oftentimes, you know, choosing what's best to sell, this is what we do. We're in business to make money. We're not in business to– pacify what our personal preference is or the personal preference of the people that we love. We're out to generate business and serve a group of people. And so if you come back and you find yourself in a loop where you're giving your designer developer feedback based upon certain messaging or certain imagery or certain headings, And you're not basing that based upon real data. You're setting that project up to not succeed. Because what you feel is not always what your customers feel. Now, when it comes to designers, here's the thing. A lot of designers and a lot of marketers, what they do is they try to please the client. So please you as the owner of a business. Now, this is good and a mistake at the same time because oftentimes you cannot serve two masters. Oftentimes you have to make the tough decision of going, okay, I know this will sell better, but I know the client wants this look. I know the client likes these colors, but I know their customers like this other set of colors. And so in order to keep the client, a lot of times they will compromise the difference. And in making those compromises, a lot of times it sacrifices the success of that business. And so being able to pull yourself out of the creative process and really the ultimate measuring stick is which one is more effective at achieving the goal of serving customers. And if you can get to that point, then you're going to be much more successful. However, you will have this thing where you may feel pulled in, where certain things just aren't as appealing. Now, here's where it gets a little bit tricky. There are a lot of designers and marketers out there who really don't know what they're doing. Now, It's not nice to say. It's not the best thing in the world to say. But part of what I do is I look at other agencies and everything. I'm actually paid to investigate them. And when you get into a lot of these situations, you find out that the designers are doing nothing more than pulling templates. And the marketing people are just buying third-party services and not really doing any real work. They just kind of put it on autopilot and start collecting a check. So the idea is, you know, if your sense is going off and you're going, well, maybe something's wrong here or this doesn't look right or it doesn't look balanced, it could entirely be possible. And you could entirely be picking up on something that you know is intuitively wrong. And that is you've hired a group or a person that really isn't a professional and really doesn't have the experience in order to do things correctly. It could also be your ego getting in the way where you personally don't like something. Now, there's a tough decision there because which one is it? Now, sometimes you can tell by doing things like A-B testing. So basically you say, well, let's say, for example, it is a message. Let's run message A and run message B. Or I think this. I want to test this design versus that design and see which one performs better. We often find with our agency that empirical data really gets away from the subjective argument. So, for example, if we feel something should be a certain way, we'll talk to our client and we'll say, well, we really think this is the case, but let's go ahead and run two parallel tests. campaigns. One where we're testing one thing and one where we're testing another thing. And oftentimes you don't want to make a lot of differences between the two. You kind of want to make sure you're directly testing something certain. And then once you do that, Then you can look at the data. You can find out which one is attracting more your customers. And more importantly, which ones are converting people visiting your website into paying customers. And then what you could do is look at the data. Now, when it comes to that, it's really good because on our end, we really don't care if... We win or lose on that. Ultimately, our main goal is to help the business grow. And so the designer oftentimes, speaking of ego, my goodness, designers have incredible egos, and they're usually pretty sensitive too. Back when I started doing design work, it was way back in the 1900s. Sorry, I'm being a little bit facetious here. But it was back in– I started as early as like 1986 when I was first exposed to Max. And then– I was a freehand illustrator and did a bunch of other things and was heavily involved in an annual catalog. And anyway, that's when computers started taking off more and more. But during that time, luckily, I was around some really talented creatives and also around a proofing team and a bunch of other people. So you quickly learn to have tough skin and you quickly learn that you don't know everything. You know, if you're a designer who's been designing a while. However, if you're new to it, a lot of times the designer ego may conflict with your ego. And then you've got a real mess there. The other thing you want to avoid when it comes to if it's client or marketing ego, be real careful because a lot of times people will start using big words. Or they'll start saying things that, you know, things they've done or something in order to try to justify their position. And if you start seeing them trying to, you know, intellectually stronghold the conversation, usually a great test is to do A-B testing. And then look who wins. And that way, no matter who wins, you win because it's your business that's doing it. So, oh, and I'll share this story with you too. Speaking of back when I was a freehand illustrator, we were doing educational books. And the owner of the company, she loved coloring things digitally. So what we would do is we would– Typically, we would draw traditionally early on before we got a hold of tablets and things like that. And we would freehand illustrate and then we would scan them. And then we would run them through a product called Adobe Streamline back in the day, which would convert them to where you could click and color in shirts and, you know, hair and faces and things like that. And she found herself, you know, where she loved to color and she was really bad at it. I mean, really, really, really bad at it. I mean, you know, the colors wouldn't, you know, they wouldn't be complimentary. There would be all kinds of issues. But she felt that she was. And she knew that we thought she wasn't, but she didn't care. Now, that was her company, and she could do whatever she wanted to with it. However, she heard her product through that. Now, in your case, you could hurt yourselves. You could go completely sideways by making a poor decision. So again, remember the big take home is, yep, honey, I love you. I thank the world of you. But we really got to do what's best for the customer and what's going to sell the most product the one that's going to gain the most trust, the message that's going to resonate the most with the client. And then what you could do is start to break through by doing those A-B tests. And again, that's just a really nice way to do it. But you're going to have to distance yourself emotionally from the product and distance your personal taste from it. And believe it or not, that's a really, really big deal in marketing. And I can't tell you how many private conversations I've had with real quality designers. And it's like, boy, they really just destroyed this logo or this concept. And it's not going the way that it should. And we know it's going to hurt the product. And a lot of times they stay silent. No joke. Now, with us, we typically will say something to the client. Sometimes we'll try to strategically work in the design changes and things like that. But all in all, we're really blessed with good clients, and ultimately they just want to succeed. And most of them do a pretty good job pulling themselves away from it. So now let's look at the third horseman. This kind of ties into the second horseman a little bit. So they may be riding side by side here. But that is the let's get more feedback. Now, this is a tough one. Because what happens is people will start bringing in multiple decision makers. And then you get these unclear roles of who does what. And then you get these never-ending revisions. Now, there's a power game in this. And it's a big one. Because what happens is that a lot of times when you're dealing with certain people who are making money as contractors or employees from your company, They want to be tied in to this decision-making process. And so what they'll typically do is they'll kind of bring themselves in. And if they sense that they're losing a little bit of control, a lot of times you'll see these guys kind of give this weird vibe about just how they should take control and they know more, when in reality... They don't know what they're talking about. And I have seen this, especially like with coaches, like especially small business coaching, like putting together businesses. It's really common when you have those people for the owner of a business to tie in that person into the design and marketing conversation. And, man, they completely gum it up. I've never seen that where someone who is like setting up a business says, and looking at certain KPIs and things like that who've come in and contributed positively to a marketing strategy, but they have derailed the train. A lot of times we have to kind of slow down and reset. And once in a blue moon, we run into problems where it's kind of hard to work with the client and be able to turn the corner. And sometimes, you know, setting those boundaries is difficult. The other thing is, you know, you bring your assistant in, your secretary in, you know, your key sales guy in. You know, if you bring in the wrong mix and you start having this committee style selection process. Now, this really does happen like with nonprofits. And it really happens also with larger businesses where they start bringing in everyone in because they want to have like this, you know, team structure. kind of like healing session, bringing everybody together to contribute in the design. Absolutely, it just slows the process down, makes it more expensive, and usually makes a poorer product at the same time. So this could be, like I said, your secretary. It could be your coach that's helping you out with business. It could be your spouse, your relatives. It could be anyone. Getting that more feedback doesn't contribute. And again, if you go back to A-B testing, and then ultimately, you know, I guess if you really want to say it, it kind of comes down to, do you trust the person that you hired? You know, I know a little bit about, you know, carpentry and things like that, but, you know, I'm not a professional. You know, I know a little bit about plumbing, but not a lot. I'm not a professional. You know, I turn that over. You know, I would never go to the guy who's doing the plumbing and then suggest that they do something the way I would want that done. Design is one of those weird places where people think it's subjective. And in reality, it's not subjective. There's a lot of, like, really technical and aesthetic and emotional things And reinforcement. There's a lot of factors that go into design that really makes it where it's not really committee-friendly. And if certain people don't have those skill sets, just trying to stop and explain why you're thinking the way you're thinking and what you're trying to do can just really bog down the process. So part of this may also be the idea that you need to make sure you hire people that you trust in order to make those decisions. And of course, the fallback is A-B testing. You know, if you think this and we think that, then let's do that. And then you can start to build trust in your designer. And then, of course, just like the last horseman, the problem is there are a lot of designers and marketing people that absolutely don't know what they're doing. But the committee usually don't help with that. The committee just usually adds another layer of complexity on top of something that's already kind of messed up. And so... Remember that indecision is a decision. It's just a slow one that's going to cost you a lot more money. So streamline your feedback. Trust the people you hire and assign one single authority for approvals. And you also got to get this rapport. So let's talk about rapport for a little bit. This is always tough. You hire somebody. And then that new person you bring on, you start talking with them, and that person wants to please you and make you think that they know what they're doing and build trust. And so they're trying to get that trust factor and that rapport built with you, and so they don't want to conflict with you that much. Once you get to be a certain age, you just kind of let that go out the window, I guess. But one thing that I do is I try to get it as open and honest as I can as quick as I can. I talk in my regular language. I treat people as they're just another person. And then when you do that, then oftentimes what it does is open the dialogue up where there can be more meaningful conversation. And so I guess in ways, one thing you could do also is think about the people that you're working with and then say, can I talk to this person? Can I be honest with this person? Can I let them know things that may make... me personally more vulnerable or do I feel like they're going to take advantage of that or they're going to try to do other things. And those are tough decisions. And so I think maybe that also plays into this equation. But indecision– And getting that more feedback is a killer for businesses. And it can absolutely blow your budget out of the water when it comes to time and hours. And if your designer marketing person is not charging you for it or trying to get it done and dealing with all those extra layers, if they're good, you're going to end up losing them. And you don't want to do that. Okay, so the fourth horseman, and my goodness, this horseman is absolutely riding harder and faster than any other of these horsemen today. And that is the tack obsession. My goodness, I have never seen it so bad in my life. It seems like every day, you know, we're getting emails or calls from our clients or different situations where somebody has cold called a client or a client has stumbled onto a product or somebody has said something at a trade show about this latest and greatest tech. And this tech is supposed to absolutely just be the next big thing. Now, with the advent of artificial intelligence, this is going into hyperspeed. It's like everyone is claiming that, you know, they can cold email people, SMS people, write the right messaging, create content for nothing. You name it. I mean, they're saying they've got the product. Now, I can tell you with 100% accuracy that Of that 100%, this is weird. All right, the 100% accuracy, I can tell you that 99% of those don't work. Okay, it's like a movie quote somewhere. But basically what I'm saying is, is that I test them out. Like I've had it where one of my clients, he ran across this person and they'll say, okay, we're going to guarantee you this number of leads. And we know we can do that per month for this price per lead. And that's just it. We've watched that. I'm telling you, there are so many little things going on in the language, so many things going on. These never work out the way they're supposed to. They're scams. Now, the other side is, is there's a lot of good tech out there, but it's tech you don't need to be messing with. I mean, there may be, you know, great ERP, CRMs, technology tools, whatever the case may be, and they could be great tech and they do work for a lot of people. But here's the thing. They could also be a huge distraction for your business. You see, the more overhead, the more complexity you add to your business, the And the less streamlined it becomes, the more frustrating it becomes for your team. But then it also adds overhead to everything, and it can also bleed down into poor customer service. So the idea is, yeah, you know, keep your eye out for tech. But some of this tech is incredibly bloated, and it's not a good fit, and you really don't have any business messing with it anyway. Now, that's tough. I know it's a tough way to put it, but it's true. You know, you really don't want to be playing around and then having people do all this kind of tech. I've known several people who bought into this because, you know, if you look at emotional triggers, one of them is fear of missing out. FOMO, right? Fear of missing out.

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Okay.

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So the idea is that these people are telling you that their product will sell and help you grow your business. And if you're in the middle of trying to develop a serious campaign and then you hear that there's this product out there that may be working for all your competitors and you're worried that maybe this is going to be more cost effective and help you grow and you should buy into it, boy, they're going to hook you. And when they hook you, they're going to take you for whatever they can take you for. They already know about how long you're going to stay with them before you get tired of them and leave them. But they're not worried about that. They're probably used to a high turnover and they probably already have their out anyway. And the real sad truth is, to a lot of these programs is they know you're not really going to look hard at how well it's optimizing your business, how well it's contributing to the sales cycle. I mean, if we go back to marketing, I can't tell you how many people that I have worked with and they have no idea how how well their marketing is working for them. They have no idea what's going on. They just keep buying and piling on marketing and piling on marketing, and they have this really bloated marketing, and they're making sales, but they have no idea that 60% to 70% of that marketing could be eliminated. Well, it's the same thing when it comes to this tech. If it's bloated, if it's not serving a purpose, if it's not filling a hole that you've identified that needs to be filled, then maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. It can be an overall distraction. So these are truly, as I'm sitting here thinking about it, four real horsemen that businesses have to deal with. You know, As I'm concluding with this, you know, I can see the people bounce around in my head, the ones that have struggled with these. And I can tell you our most successful clients are the ones that are somewhat detached from the creative. It's like they know we do it and they know we do it very well. And so they trust us to knock those things out. And when they trust us to do that, and then we combine that with us managing the marketing and us managing the design and the creative and putting it together and then giving reports and showing analytically how it's working, those are our most successful clients. Just to put this out there, too, our business, we don't work with third parties. Like we don't want someone, we don't want a client bringing in someone that, you know, claims to be an SEO expert or claims to be this or that and, you know, can be a sounding board. We typically don't like that and we're resistant to it. And it's primarily for one reason. They may know or may not know, most time it's not know, but they may know what they're talking about, but they have no clue how what they know fits into the bigger picture. And they may not understand that there's some give and take that has to happen to make that snowball effect when you put together an entire package. You know, there may be aspects of social that don't need to be addressed frequently. with certain businesses, at least not at this time. And for them to argue the process or the methodology or whatever, and then they go back, and then they would start talking to the client, it just makes a mess. It just makes a mess. And that's why we do everything. We do everything from videography all the way down, and our customers are the most successful. So my advice to you as we wrap up, kill these horsemen. Kill them. Kill them as quick as you can. Work on it. Ask questions and do that A-B testing. Hire people you can trust and then lean on them to do their job. And always learn. Always learn. What did you learn in the last time period? And are you buying stuff that really is not helping you anyway? All right, guys. Thank you so much for listening to Over the Bull this episode. A couple of notes. I do apologize for not posting last week. We have been incredibly busy. And I just see the gas pedal. getting faster and faster and not slower and slower. And I just didn't make it in with that week, you know, leading up to Memorial Day. So I apologize. I'll work harder at making sure I get these planned and done. But a lot of times these podcasts, frankly, are just from the result of what I run into during the week and things that I think could help you as a business without, you know, obviously betraying the clients that we're working with. So until next we meet, thank you so much for attending. I hope this does help you out. And take care of yourself out there. And don't respond to those spam emails. And if they come in, block them. Don't entertain them. Don't write them back. That's one of the best things I could tell you to do. Until next time.

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Thanks for tuning in to Over the Bowl, brought to you by Integris Design, a full-service design and marketing agency out of Asheville, North Carolina. Until next time.