Good Enough Marketing Is the Most Expensive Kind

Bad marketing is obvious. The phone stops ringing. The leads dry up. You notice, you panic, you fix it.

Good marketing is also obvious. You're busy. The numbers climb. You reinvest.

But "good enough" marketing? That sits quietly in the corner, burning money you'll never see. Not enough pain to trigger action. Not enough performance to trigger growth. Just... fine. Month after month, fine.

Here's what nobody tells you about "fine": it compounds. Not in your favour. Every month your marketing runs at 60% of its potential is a month where the gap between you and your best competitor widens. And unlike bad marketing, which gets fixed in weeks, "fine" can persist for years because there's nothing to fix. Nothing's broken. It's just not working particularly well, either.

The data on this is brutal.

The Industry Just Proved That "Efficient" and "Effective" Are Different Things

Les Binet and Will Davis presented their latest research at the IPA Effectiveness Conference in October 2025, and one finding should keep every business owner awake.

Since the pandemic, media ROI has increased by 4%. At the same time, net profit generated by advertising has fallen 11%.

Read that again. Marketers are getting more efficient. And making less money.

How? Because efficiency and effectiveness diverge when you optimise for the wrong things. A tightly targeted, narrowly focused campaign hits a higher ROI percentage on paper. But it reaches fewer people. Fewer people reached means fewer potential buyers, which means less total revenue, which means less profit. Regardless of how "efficient" each individual impression was.

Binet's data from the IPA Effectiveness Databank is striking: budget accounts for 89% of the variation in incremental profit generated by advertising. ROI accounts for 11%. Budget is eight times more important than ROI.

Most SMEs optimise for ROI. They reduce budgets on underperforming campaigns. They narrow targeting. They cut the "wasteful" broad reach. And their marketing gets more efficient and less effective, all at once. The dashboard looks fine. The bank account tells a different story.

We've written before about how the hardest skill in marketing is knowing when to do nothing. The flipside is just as damaging: not recognising when "doing fine" is actually leaving money on the table.

Why Your Brain Protects "Fine" (Even When It Shouldn't)

Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky's research on loss aversion explains why "good enough" is so sticky. Their foundational finding: people feel the pain of losing something roughly twice as intensely as they feel the pleasure of gaining something equivalent.

Applied to marketing decisions, this creates a trap.

Your current campaigns are generating leads. They're not spectacular leads, and they're not cheap leads, but they're real leads. Changing the approach risks losing those leads. Even if the expected upside is double the current performance, the psychological weight of potentially losing what you already have outweighs the potential gain.

This is status quo bias in action. Kahneman and Tversky found that individuals routinely forego substantial gains out of fear of minor losses. In practical terms: you'd rather keep getting 40 leads a month at $75 each than risk a restructure that could get you 70 leads at $43, because for two weeks during the transition you might get 25.

The result? Businesses stick with campaigns performing at 50-60% of their potential because the alternative involves temporary uncertainty. And they never even know they're doing it, because "fine" doesn't feel like a problem. It feels like stability.

The 85% Trap

Natalia Quintero, head of consulting at Every, recently described a pattern she encountered while building an AI system to automate project management:

"We got 85 percent of the way there three times and then had to scrap it and start again to get to a new framework that actually got us to 100 percent."

This pattern should sound familiar to anyone who's managed a marketing campaign for longer than six months.

You set up the campaign. The first round of optimisation gets you from terrible to decent. The second round gets you from decent to good. Then everything stalls. You tweak bids, adjust budgets, test new headlines. The needle barely moves. You're at 85%, and no amount of incremental adjustment will get you to 100%.

Because the path from 85% to 100% isn't more of the same work. It's different work entirely.

In campaign management, the 85% trap looks like this:

• Restructuring the campaign from scratch (new keyword groups, new match types, new landing page strategy) instead of tweaking the existing structure
• Rethinking the conversion tracking (feeding the algorithm offline conversion data instead of just form fills) instead of adjusting bid targets
• Rewriting the value proposition from the customer's perspective instead of A/B testing headline word order

The uncomfortable truth: getting from "fine" to "great" usually means throwing away something that's working and rebuilding it. Most businesses and most agencies won't do this, because everyone can create marketing, but almost nobody can edit it. Killing something that works requires conviction. Conviction requires judgment. Judgment requires experience.

What "Fine" Costs You Over 12 Months

Let's make this concrete.

Take a home services business spending $3,000 per month on Google Ads. Current performance: average for their industry.

According to WordStream's 2025 benchmarks for Home & Home Improvement:

• Average CTR: 6.37%
• Average conversion rate: 7.33%
• Average CPL: ~$140 AUD

Now look at the top performers in the same category. Businesses with well-optimised accounts regularly achieve 2-3x the average conversion rate. That means the same $3,000 budget, with the same clicks, generating 42 to 63 leads per month instead of 21.

Over 12 months:

If 1 in 5 of those leads converts to a job at an average ticket of $800, that's 40 additional jobs and $32,000 in revenue from the same ad spend. The cost of "fine" isn't $3,000 a month. The cost of "fine" is $32,000 in revenue you never knew you were missing.

And this is just Google Ads. The same dynamic plays out across every channel. System1 and the IPA found that fewer than 20% of tested ads clear the 3-star threshold associated with measurable business impact. The remaining 80% are "fine." They run. They get impressions. They generate some clicks. They just don't move the business forward in any meaningful way.

The IPA Effectiveness Databank puts a number on the creative gap: campaigns that score in the top tier of creative effectiveness generate 10-20x the ROI of average campaigns. Not 10-20% more. Ten to twenty times more. The gap between "fine" and "great" isn't linear. It's exponential.

What Actually Breaks Through the Plateau

Rory Sutherland has a rule that applies directly here: "Dare to be trivial." His point is that the biggest improvements often come from the smallest, most overlooked changes. Things that seem too obvious or too simple to matter.

His favourite example: an e-commerce site changed one button from "Register" to "Continue" and added a line of reassuring text. Annual revenue increased by $300 million. No infrastructure change. No new product. No bigger budget. One word and one sentence.

For SMEs running lead-gen campaigns, the equivalent changes are often hiding in plain sight.

Most "fine" campaigns are optimising for the wrong conversion. Form fills, phone clicks, page views. The algorithm is doing exactly what you told it to do. You just told it the wrong thing. The businesses breaking through are feeding offline conversion data back to Google: which leads actually answered the phone, which ones booked a job, which ones paid. The algorithm stops optimising for the cheapest lead and starts optimising for the most valuable one.

Sam Tomlinson puts it directly: 80% of the effort goes to the creative, but 80% of the impact is after the click. We've covered this before: the gap between your ads and your website is where leads die. The ad gets the click. The landing page gets the conversion. If your conversion rate is "fine," the ad probably isn't the problem. The page is.

This is the hardest one. Find the campaign, ad group, or channel that's generating activity but not genuine results. The one that makes the report look busy without making the phone ring with qualified buyers. Kill it. Redirect that budget to what's actually converting. Binet's research is clear: the businesses generating real profit aren't the ones running the most campaigns. They're the ones concentrating budget where it matters.

"If we launched this business today and had to build its marketing from scratch, would we build it the way it's currently set up?" If the answer is no, you're maintaining a legacy system. Maintaining is easier than rebuilding. It's also more expensive over time.

What This Means for Your Business

"Fine" is not a performance level. It's a psychological state. It's the absence of enough pain to trigger change, combined with the absence of enough success to trigger confidence.

The gap between average and top-performing campaigns isn't a gap in tools or budget. It's a gap in judgment, honesty, and the willingness to question what appears to be working. Binet's data shows the gap is worth 10-20x in ROI when you get creative quality right. System1's data shows 80% of ads never clear the bar for measurable impact. The maths is straightforward: your marketing is almost certainly performing below its potential. The longer you accept "fine," the more it costs you.

The fix isn't a bigger budget or a new platform. It's a harder conversation about whether "good enough" is actually good enough. Or whether it's the most expensive decision you make every month by not making a decision at all.

Further Reading

• Go Big or Go Home - Les Binet and Will Davis's 2025 IPA paper on why budget matters 8x more than ROI
• Sam Tomlinson's Digital Download - Weekly newsletter on creative effectiveness, auditing, and the psychology of conversions
• System1 and IPA: Compound Creativity - Research showing how creative consistency compounds business effects over time
• More Budget, Less Impact: The Creativity Crisis - The data behind $1 trillion in ad spend and declining effectiveness
• Every's Head of Consulting Just Automated Her Job - Natalia Quintero on the 85% trap and why starting over beats incremental improvement