The Leaky Bucket Problem: Why Your Traffic Isn't Converting (And What to Do About It)
Release Date: 01/15/2026
One Platform, No Plan B: The Danger of Building Your Brand on Borrowed Land
The Brand Marketing Show
Stop and think for a moment about where your customers come from. Is it mostly Meta ads? Mostly Instagram? Have you built a following on TikTok that's driving a lot of your brand awareness? Now here's the uncomfortable question: If that channel disappeared tomorrow — not scaled back, not got more expensive, but actually disappeared — what would happen to your business? Could you survive it? Could you pivot? Or would you be scrambling to rebuild from scratch? Because here's the thing. This isn't a hypothetical. This isn't one of those "imagine if" thought experiments. This is happening...
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The Discount Trap: Why Constant Sales Are Killing Premium Brands
The Brand Marketing Show
In the last 2 weeks alone I've had three brand owners come to me, all with the same story. They've been told by marketing "experts" that every single EDM, every Meta ad needs a discount incentive. Every website needs a countdown timer or some other kind of FOMO bells and whistles. One of them showed me her email marketing calendar. Every. Single. Week. A different discount code. Flash sale this, 20% off that, "last chance" the other thing. And here's the part that really gets me — some of these countdown timers? They're not even counting down to anything real. They literally reset when you...
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The Leaky Bucket Problem: Why Your Traffic Isn't Converting (And What to Do About It)
The Brand Marketing Show
Let me paint a picture that I see all the time with ecommerce brands. You're spending money on marketing. Ads, SEO, social media, maybe influencers. You're driving traffic to your website. And you can see in your analytics that people are visiting. Some of them are even adding things to their cart. But then... they just disappear. They don't buy. They don't come back. They vanish into the ether. And you're left wondering — where did they go? What happened? Why didn't they buy? This is what I call the leaky bucket problem. You keep pouring traffic into your website, but sales are draining out...
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Is Your 2026 Plan Starting in the Wrong Place?
The Brand Marketing Show
January is supposed to be about. It's goal-setting season. It's "new year, new you" energy. It's the time when every business podcast – including, historically, this one – tells you to set your revenue targets, map out your marketing calendar, and basically plan your way to world domination. And look, I'm not going to tell you planning doesn't matter. It absolutely does – all of that stuff IS important. I'm not saying ignore your metrics. But somewhere along the way, we started treating the metrics as the goal instead of as indicators of whether we're achieving the actual goal. The...
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Reflect, Reset, Design: Your 2026 Planning Framework
The Brand Marketing Show
We're in that strange, liminal week between Christmas and New Year. The turkey's been eaten, the presents have been opened, and there's this quiet space before the new year kicks off. It's a natural time for reflection as well as for looking ahead. I know many of you are ambitious and have big goals you want to achieve. But that kind of impact requires reach. Reach requires visibility. Visibility requires consistency. Consistency requires support. And sadly, so many entrepreneurs don’t ask for help or support. If your business can't stay in business because you're exhausted,...
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“Oh What A Year!” Reflections on 2025 in Ecommerce Marketing
The Brand Marketing Show
It's Christmas week. The orders have shipped – or at least, most of them have. The mad rush is behind you. And hopefully, you're either on a beach somewhere or at least within striking distance of a cold drink and a good book. So today's episode is a little different. This isn't a tactical deep-dive. I'm not going to give you a framework or a checklist or an action plan. Instead, I just want to pause with you for a moment and reflect on what a year it's been. Because honestly? 2025 has been one of the strangest, most challenging, most thrilling and most transformative years I can remember in...
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The Q5 Opportunity: Why Smart Brands Don't Go Dark Between Christmas and New Year
The Brand Marketing Show
Right now, you've got about a week to prepare for what could genuinely be one of the most profitable – and least stressful – marketing periods of your entire year. Now, I know what you might be thinking. "Cath, I'm exhausted. I've just pushed through the Christmas rush. The last thing I want to think about is more marketing." And honestly? I get it. By mid-December, most of us are running on fumes and dreaming of a week at the beach with our phones on silent. But here's what I want you to consider: what if you could capture significant revenue during the week after Christmas...
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Your 14-Day Christmas Marketing Plan: What To Prioritise With Your Marketing Now
The Brand Marketing Show
We're in the first week of December now. Which means you've got roughly 14 days of meaningful marketing time before most of your customers mentally check out for the holidays — and before your shipping cut-off dates make the whole thing a bit irrelevant anyway. Now, I know what you might be feeling right now. It's that familiar end-of-year cocktail of exhaustion, overwhelm, and a nagging sense that you should be doing more. Your inbox is full of articles telling you about the 47 things you absolutely must do before Christmas. Your competitors seem to have their act together with perfectly...
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How To Survive The Black Friday Madness, Stay Energised And Set Up Your December Success
The Brand Marketing Show
I know exactly where you're at right now. We're in the thick of Black Friday promos – or as I like to call it, the 'beautiful chaos' portion of the retail calendar. Your ads are running, your inbox is overflowing, your inventory is moving, and you're probably surviving on caffeine and pure adrenaline. I also know that this period isn't just physically exhausting – it's emotionally exhausting too. There's this rollercoaster that happens during BFCM. You swing between moments of 'oh my goodness, the sales are coming in!' to 'why did that ad suddenly stop performing?' to 'I haven't...
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Why Better Stories Beat Bigger Discounts: Your BFCM Survival Guide
The Brand Marketing Show
If you run the kind of premium brand that either does not participate in Black Friday, or does so differently to the mass-market brands running huge discount promos and turning Black Friday into Black Month…. Then I bet your November started slower than you expected… Maybe not disastrously slow, but quieter than you'd like… Meanwhile, your inbox is absolutely exploding with promotional emails. 50% off. 60% off. "Our biggest sale ever!"... You might be starting to think that maybe you should have gone harder. Maybe you should have started your promotions earlier. Maybe you should have...
info_outlineLet me paint a picture that I see all the time with ecommerce brands.
You're spending money on marketing. Ads, SEO, social media, maybe influencers. You're driving traffic to your website. And you can see in your analytics that people are visiting. Some of them are even adding things to their cart.
But then... they just disappear. They don't buy. They don't come back. They vanish into the ether.
And you're left wondering — where did they go? What happened? Why didn't they buy?
This is what I call the leaky bucket problem. You keep pouring traffic into your website, but sales are draining out the bottom. And no matter how much you spend on ads or how clever your marketing is, if your bucket has holes in it, you're never going to fill it up.
The frustrating part is that your website won't tell you what's wrong. At least, not in plain English.
You can stare at your analytics all day, but unless you know exactly what to look for, you're just looking at numbers that don't mean much.
If it’s been a while since you thoroughly and objectively reviewed your website — specifically, whether it's actually doing its job of bringing in and converting customers — you might find that it's quietly leaking sales every single day without you even realising it…
In this episode, I go through the 3 layers of a website audit: are the right people discovering your brand (including via AI search), are they getting to your website, and are they converting into buyers?
And given AI search is so new, there’s a real first-mover advantage if you master this now!
Links mentioned in this episode:
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https://productpreneurmarketing.com/lets-talk
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