In this solo presentation, Areeb Mirza, drawing on experience with over 300 service‑business owners across 55+ industries, outlines five recurring marketing mistakes that bleed budgets and prevent growth. He explains each mistake with real‑world call excerpts, why the practice fails, and what a business should do instead. The mistakes are: (1) boosting random social posts without targeting or a funnel, (2) running the same ad creative for months without refresh, (3) relying 100% on referrals with no lead‑generation system, (4) cycling through multiple low‑cost marketers instead of hiring a system‑builder, and (5) spending large sums on SEO or a website that lacks a conversion funnel. Mirza then shows the common pattern – spending money without a system – and offers a quick five‑question diagnostic to help owners identify which mistakes apply to them. He closes by urging viewers to fix the underlying system rather than keep buying tactics, and provides a Calendly link for those who want professional help.
Chapters
Here are 5 marketing mistakes I see on every sales call. Pretty much every single sales call I run, I see business owners making the same 5 mistakes. And I'm not talking about small stuff. I'm talking about the things that are bleeding their marketing budget every single month. So today I'm not selling you anything. I'm just going to lay out all 5 of them. Be honest with yourself. See how many of these you're guilty of right now. For context, we work with over 300 service businesses across 55+ industries, generated over millions of views. So I'm not pulling this out of thin air. These are real-time, real conversations with real business owners. So let's get into it. So mistake number 1 is boosting random posts, hoping something hits. Pretty much every business owner I talk to has tried this. They post something, look at it and go like, yeah, you know what? Let me just throw $20 at it and see what happens. Then that $20 becomes $50 and then $200 and then it becomes $1,000 because it just compiles every single day. So one of my recent calls with a financial service owner told me almost word for word, I find myself paying for boosts a lot. I don't know why my marketing is not performing. And this is the exact pattern I'm talking about. You have to be honest with yourself. Boosting is not advertising, especially the way most of the business owners we, of course, speak to, and maybe even some of you guys watching are doing it. Just getting your views up and likes up for no reason is not a strategy. Listen, if all you want is more likes and bigger numbers on the post, just go advertise in India or something for $5 a day. You'll get the numbers up, but that's it. None of these people are ever going to buy from you because none of them care about your service. You just paid Meta to inflate a vanity number. And here's another thing nobody talks about. When also you boost using your phone, your iPhone, Apple always takes a cut from it too. So Meta charges you more to make up for the Apple charge. You're literally paying a premium just to boost from your phone. Like, think about it as kind of like a convenience fee. Now ask yourself the question nobody asks: where is this person supposed to go after they see your boosted post? Is your bio optimized? Do you want them to message you? Is there a link? Is there a real call to action? Most of the time the answer is no. The post gets views and the journey pretty much ends right there. Meta also lets the algorithm pick who sees your boost, which means you might end up showing your content to followers that are completely irrelevant to your business. So you're paying to put your content in front of people who will never buy. Listen, boosting has its place. Like, do not get me wrong. There are times when you can take a top-performing organic post and put some paid spend behind it to extend its reach. That is a legitimate strategy. And the way most business owners we talk to are doing it is an inherent waste of money. Let's talk about mistake number 2, running the same ad creative creative for 6 months, 8 months, sometimes even longer. I had a sales call recently with a pediatric chiropractor. She showed me an ad campaign her agency had been running for 8 months. She started with a good return. First, the return was 5x, but by the time she got on the call with me, the same creative was doing like 1.5x. Now listen, if you're running the same ad for months on your end and you're curious why the performance is dipping, it's because the way Meta operated in 2025 and the way it operates after 2025 are completely two different things. You need to be adding more creatives more consistently. If your media buyer doesn't know this, or if the person running your ads does not know this, then it just might be time to find somebody new. Another thing, focus more on video ads. Video ads bring in the best quality lead. We're not going for more quantity. We're going for better quality. Image versus a video, a video will always bring you a better quality lead. So if your ad was performing and now it's not, it's a very simple fix. It does require work, but we need to be updating ad creatives more consistently. If you're spending $50 a day, refreshing every 2 weeks is probably enough. If you're spending $1,000 to $2,000 a day, you need to be a lot more aggressive than that. Let's talk about mistake number 3: 100% dependency on referrals with basically zero systems. So this is a sales call I had with a hotel renovation contractor recently, and 150+ projects under his belt, real legit operator. 100% of his business pretty much came from word of mouth. No socials, not even a CRM, and his client base is aging out, like some retired, some even passed away. And honestly, this isn't necessarily even a marketing mistake. It's just not marketing at all. It's worth calling out. And the reason it's worth calling out as mistake number 3, because if you're not marketing, you're just going with the wind. You're waiting for referrals to magically show up the next month. And if they don't, you're pretty much in trouble. Now, of course, this depends on the business as well. Like if you're absolutely flooded with referrals and people are lined up wanting to work with you, maybe you don't even need to market. I haven't necessarily spoken to a lot of business owners yet with that problem. Definitely there are some, but I still tell you to market anyways because the way the business is doing today is not necessarily the way it'll be doing next year. You always need to market no matter how good the things look right now. Mistake number 4, hiring 3 different marketers in a row and hiring different results. So I had a med spa owner tell me that she'd been through 3 marketers. And if you've been going around agencies left, right, and center, there are a couple of things I've heard all the time. Like, A, you'll always go with the cheaper option. You go with the person who's selling you absolutely anything just to get the deal done, and you just keep cycling. You have to realize you're going to spend the money anyways. So instead of going around wasting money with 3 or 4 smaller agencies, consolidate all of those expenses and go with somebody good, somebody with proven systems and has done this for themselves as well. Somebody with a real team that's going to increase the percentage chance of you having better luck. Nothing in this life is guaranteed. Pretty much the only thing guaranteed in life is death. You have to play a game of probabilities and percentages. Who do you have more chance of seeing success with? Instead of wasting months on end with people who are charging pennies on the dollar because they're either experimenting or super new, go with somebody who can actually bring you results, especially if you have the money for it. All right, let's talk about the last mistake. Mistake number 5: spending $20,000 on SEO and on a website with no funnel behind it. So this was a call with a mortgage broker. He told me before we hopped on, he had spent $20,000 on SEO alone, on a website redesign and a chunk on leads and some of it on a videographer as well. And of course, the results was he said he didn't get anything. So if you're already a big spender and if you spend thousands on SEO and a website with no proper funnel mechanism behind it, that is an issue. Don't just spend money to spend. Understand what the process is. Understand what the customer journey actually looks like. Just map it out and ask questions like, what does the person see when they hit your ad? Because you have to understand the marketing and the actual ad that you put out is the most important part. But after that, what should they do? Do you get the information first and somebody on the team calls them? Do you have a meeting book with them directly? Do you have a nice offer enough that they can just opt into? So you have to ask all these questions. You need to write these down before you go out and spend a lot of money on ads. Otherwise, you're just lighting some cash on fire and hoping something catches. And you can also consolidate all of this research by just speaking to an expert instead of just spending months on months on researching stuff that might not be true either way. Now let me show you something. All 5 of these mistakes shared the exact same pattern. There's no system. There's just money being spent. Mistake number 1, spending on boosts with no targeting system. Mistake number 2, spending on ads with no refresh system, meaning no new creatives. Mistake number 3, depending on referrals with no lead generation system. Mistake number 4, hiring marketers with no accountability system. Mistake number 5, buying tactics with no funnel system. And if you see the pattern clearly, pretty much most of the people we talk to is already spending more than enough money. They're just not spending it inside of a system. And without a system, more spend, it just means more waste. That is just the game. And here's kind of like a 30-second diagnostic you can run yourself. Just ask yourself these 5 questions. Number 1, could you tell me your cost per booked call right now or your cost per qualified lead? Like an actual number, not just lead, like a qualified lead. Number 2, have you refreshed your ads in the last 30 days or have you been running the same exact thing. Number 3, do you have a second lead source beyond referrals? Number 4, when you hire marketing help, are you hiring a content vendor or a system builder? Number 5, do all of your marketing pieces, your ads, your content, your website, your CRM, do they all connect into one funnel? If you said no to at least 3 or more, then you don't necessarily have a marketing problem. You have a system problem. And here's the thing you need to know. Pretty much every business owner we run a sales call with has 4 or 5 of these unchecked. So if that's you, you're not alone. You're just operating without a system right now. And look, I didn't necessarily make this video to sell you on to our program. Honestly, even if we don't end up working together, just go fix the system, stop buying tactics and start building an infrastructure. But of course, if you do need help, there's a Calendly link in the description. And like I said in the video, we've done this for 300+ service businesses across 55+ unique industries. We know what a system actually looks like. So either way, just be honest with yourself about which of these 5 mistakes you're making right now and which one you need to fix first. And I'll see you in the next one.
