What should you stop doing in marketing?
Almost every marketing operation is running things nobody would start today. A channel someone tried two years ago, a monthly newsletter nobody reads, a report that takes a day to produce and gets skimmed, a social account posting into silence. None of it is stopped, because stopping requires someone to say it was a mistake, and adding a new activity requires nobody to say anything at all.
Why is stopping harder than starting?
Because starting is attributed to ambition and stopping is attributed to failure, even when the same person is responsible for both. Adding a channel needs a plan and a budget line. Removing one needs an admission, usually in front of whoever approved it, which is why activities outlive their usefulness by years.
There is also a structural reason. Ongoing activities have owners, and an owner whose work is being stopped is being told their work does not matter. This is why the things that get cut in practice are usually the ones with no owner, which are frequently the cheapest and least harmful rather than the least productive.
The way around both is to make stopping routine rather than exceptional. If every quarterly review names at least one thing to stop, the act stops carrying a verdict, and the decision can be made on the merits instead of on who proposed it.
What are the usual candidates?
The same short list appears in most operations. What differs is which of them are genuinely dead and which are being measured wrongly, which is why the middle column matters more than the first.
| Activity | Why it persists | Stop it when | Keep it when |
|---|---|---|---|
| A social account with no engagement | Deleting it looks like retreat | Nobody has posted a considered thing in months | Customers use it for support or checks |
| The monthly newsletter | It has always existed | Nobody opens it and nothing is written for it | It reaches buyers during a long decision |
| A long weekly report | Someone senior once asked for it | No decision has ever changed because of it | It is genuinely read and acted on |
| Content published to a schedule | Volume targets are easy to set | The pages get no traffic and no links | The archive still earns from older work |
| A conference you always attend | Relationships and habit | You cannot name a deal from three years of it | Your buyers are there and you follow up |
| Broad-match or untargeted paid spend | It fills the budget and reports activity | The search terms report is full of irrelevance | It is producing terms worth targeting properly |
How do you decide without guessing?
Pause it and watch what happens. This is the only reliable method and it is available for almost every activity, because most marketing can be switched off for a period and switched back on. The alternative, arguing about whether it works from the reports, has been tried for as long as the activity has been running and has not resolved it.
The pause needs a defined length, a defined thing being watched, and a decision written down beforehand about what result means stop permanently. Without those three it becomes a suspension that quietly reverts, which is the usual outcome and worse than not pausing, because the effort was spent and nothing was learned.
For anything with a long lag, watch total enquiries and branded search rather than the activity's own metrics, because the activity's own metrics disappear the moment you pause it. This is precisely the case where an argument from reports is impossible and a pause is the only route to an answer.
What looks unproductive but should be kept?
Anything whose output is familiarity rather than response. Awareness activity reports badly by nature, accumulates slowly, and loses that accumulation when stopped, which makes it the most frequently cut and the most expensive thing to have cut. If you pause it, the cost appears two quarters later as a fall in branded search that gets blamed on something else.
The customer list is the second. It costs almost nothing to maintain, produces revenue on demand, and takes years to rebuild, yet it is often neglected because the effort has no immediate result. The same applies to the content archive: maintenance work on pages that already earn is invisible in a monthly report and is what keeps them earning.
Third is anything that exists to answer a question buyers actually ask, even at low traffic. A page on pricing, or on what the product does not do, may attract very few visits and be read by a large share of people who go on to buy. Traffic is the wrong measure for these, and cutting on traffic removes them first.
How do you stop something properly?
Decide whether you are pausing, retiring or deleting, because they require different work and confusing them causes the damage. Pausing means the thing can resume, so accounts stay open and access is retained. Retiring means it ends but the artefacts stay, so pages remain live and the archive is intact. Deleting means the artefacts go, and that is the one with consequences.
Deleting content is the most common way a stop causes harm. Removing pages breaks inbound links, loses accumulated search visibility and produces errors for anyone who bookmarked them. If content must come off the site, redirect each address to the closest remaining page rather than leaving it to fail, and check afterwards that the redirects actually resolve.
The equivalent for channels is access. Before closing an advertising account, export the historical performance data and the audience definitions, and make sure the account remains under your own ownership rather than an agency's. Accounts that get closed inside somebody else's structure take their history with them, and restarting later begins from nothing.
What does a good stop list look like?
Short, specific and dated. Three items, each with the thing being stopped, the date it stops, who is affected, and what will be watched to confirm the decision was right. A list of ten vague intentions produces no action; three dated commitments produce three fewer things to maintain.
It should also record what the freed capacity goes to, because the value of stopping is not the money saved. It is the attention released, and attention that is released without a destination gets absorbed by whatever is loudest, which is usually the activity you were about to stop next.
Run this at the same meeting each quarter, with the reports in front of you, and ask one question per line: if this stopped tomorrow, what would we lose and when would we notice. Anything nobody can answer is the candidate, and the pause test settles it.
Common questions
- How do you decide which marketing activities to stop?
- Pause the activity for a defined period and watch a defined outcome, with the decision rule written down before starting. Arguing from existing reports rarely resolves it, because those reports have been available for as long as the activity has run. For anything with a long lag, watch total enquiries and branded search rather than the activity's own metrics, since those vanish the moment it is paused.
- Why do companies keep running marketing that does not work?
- Because starting reads as ambition and stopping reads as an admission of failure, often in front of whoever approved it. Ongoing activities also have owners, and stopping their work implies it did not matter. The result is that the things actually cut are usually the ones with no owner, which tend to be the cheapest rather than the least productive.
- What marketing should you not cut even when it looks unproductive?
- Awareness activity, the customer list and the content archive. Awareness reports badly by nature, accumulates slowly and loses that accumulation when stopped, so the cost of cutting appears two quarters later. Lists and archives cost little to maintain and take years to rebuild. Also keep low-traffic pages that answer questions buyers genuinely ask, such as pricing and limitations, since traffic is the wrong measure for those.
- What happens if you delete old marketing content?
- Removing pages breaks inbound links, loses accumulated search visibility and produces errors for anyone who saved the address. If content must come off a site, redirect each address to the closest remaining page and verify afterwards that the redirects resolve. Retiring content while leaving it live is usually safer than deleting, and costs nothing.
- How often should marketing activity be reviewed for removal?
- Quarterly, at a scheduled meeting, with the intention of naming at least one thing to stop each time. Making it routine removes the implied verdict and lets the decision be made on merit. Ask one question per line: if this stopped tomorrow, what would we lose and when would we notice. Anything nobody can answer becomes a candidate for a pause test.
