I’ve seen more dead marketing channels than a cemetery full of MySpace profiles. And just like that bloke at the pub who keeps banging on about his “groundbreaking business idea” while nursing the same beer for three hours, sometimes you just need to know when to pull the plug.

The thing is, marketing channels are a bit like pets. You get attached. You’ve invested time, money, and probably a concerning amount of emotional energy into them. But unlike your labradoodle, marketing channels don’t love you back. They either perform, or they don’t. And knowing the difference between a channel that’s genuinely cactus and one that just needs a bit of nurturing? That’s the million-dollar question.

The Sunk Cost Fallacy Is Your Enemy (And Also Your Mate’s Crypto Portfolio)

Here’s where most marketers completely stuff it up: they’ve poured six months and twelve grand into a TikTok campaign that’s generating about as much engagement as a vegan at a Bunnings sausage sizzle, but they can’t bring themselves to kill it because “we’ve already invested so much.”

This is the sunk cost fallacy, and it’s absolutely everywhere. It’s the same reason people sit through terrible movies because they’ve already paid for the ticket, or why your uncle still owns that Commodore he bought in 1987 that hasn’t run since Howard was PM.

The money you’ve already spent? Gone. Vanished. Obliterated into the marketing ether. The only question that matters is: will continuing to invest in this channel generate a positive return from this point forward?

If the answer’s no, mate, it’s time to move on.

But What Actually Counts As “Not Performing”?

Right, so this is where it gets properly nuanced. Because “not performing” doesn’t just mean “not making me an instant millionaire.” Different channels serve different purposes, and you need to understand what you’re actually measuring.

The Revenue Channel That’s Actually Just Expensive Brand Awareness

Let’s say you’re running Google Ads and your cost per acquisition is sitting at $280 when your average customer lifetime value is $150. On the surface, that’s a disaster. You’re losing $130 every time someone converts.

But hold up. Are those customers coming back? Are they referring others? Are they boosting your organic search rankings because they’re landing on your site and engaging with content?

Sometimes what looks like a failing direct response channel is actually functioning as brand awareness. The question isn’t whether it’s failing at its intended purpose, but whether the unintended value justifies the cost.

(Spoiler: usually it doesn’t, but sometimes it does, and that’s what makes this whole thing complicated.)

The Channel That’s “Building Community” (But Actually Isn’t)

On the flip side, you’ve got the Instagram account with 8,000 followers that generates approximately zero sales. But you keep it running because “it’s building community” and “you can’t put a price on brand loyalty.”

Mate, you absolutely can put a price on brand loyalty. It’s called customer lifetime value, and if your Instagram community isn’t converting into actual customers who buy actual things, then you’re not building a community. You’re building a monument to your own procrastination.

Look at your analytics. Are these followers engaging? Are they clicking through? Are they real humans or did you accidentally buy a bunch of bots from some dodgy overseas marketing agency that promised you the moon?

If your “community” is just a collection of fake accounts and people who followed you three years ago and haven’t looked at your content since, it’s not a community. It’s a ghost town.

The Three-Month Rule (Unless It’s TikTok, Then It’s The Six-Week Rule)

Here’s a general principle that’s saved me more times than I can count: give a new marketing channel three months to show promise. Not three months to become profitable, but three months to demonstrate that it could become profitable with optimization.

If after three months you’re seeing absolutely zero traction, no engagement, no conversions, no signs of life whatsoever? Pull the plug. You’re not going to suddenly crack the code in month four.

The exception is fast-moving platforms like TikTok where trends change faster than Australian prime ministers. On TikTok, if you haven’t figured out what resonates with your audience in six weeks, you probably never will. The algorithm either picks you up or it doesn’t, and if it doesn’t, you’re basically shouting into the void.

The Numbers Don’t Lie (But They Do Require Context)

Alright, let’s talk metrics. Because “this isn’t working” is meaningless without actual data to back it up.

What You Should Actually Be Tracking

First up: conversion rate. Not impressions, not reach, not “brand awareness points” or whatever made-up metric your agency is trying to sell you. How many people who see your content actually do the thing you want them to do?

Second: cost per acquisition relative to customer lifetime value. If it costs you $50 to acquire a customer who spends $200 over their lifetime, that’s solid. If it costs you $200 to acquire a customer who spends $50, that’s a one-way ticket to bankruptcy.

Third: engagement quality. Are people actually interacting with your content in meaningful ways, or are you just getting the occasional pity like from your mum’s friends?

But here’s the critical bit: these numbers need context. A 2% conversion rate might be brilliant for B2B enterprise software and absolutely abysmal for e-commerce selling phone cases. Your industry, your product, your price point, all of it matters.

The Danger Of Vanity Metrics

Instagram followers. Facebook likes. Twitter impressions. LinkedIn connections. These are vanity metrics, and they’re about as useful as a screen door on a submarine.

I’ve seen businesses with 50,000 Instagram followers that couldn’t sell out a pop-up stall at the local markets. I’ve also seen businesses with 500 highly engaged followers that do six figures a year.

The difference? One was chasing numbers that made them feel good. The other was building actual relationships with people who gave a toss about what they were selling.

Sometimes The Channel Isn’t Dead, It’s Just Being Used Wrong

Before you completely write off a marketing channel, make absolutely certain you’ve actually given it a proper go. And by “proper go,” I mean you’ve understood the platform, created content that suits it, and engaged with it in the way it’s meant to be used.

The LinkedIn Tragedy

Classic example: LinkedIn. I cannot tell you how many businesses I’ve seen completely bail on LinkedIn because “it doesn’t work,” when what they actually mean is “we posted the same promotional garbage we post on Facebook and nobody cared.”

LinkedIn isn’t Facebook. It’s not Instagram. You can’t just spray the same content across every platform and expect it to work. LinkedIn rewards thought leadership, industry insights, and genuine professional value. If you’re using it to post memes about your weekend, yeah, it’s not going to work.

That doesn’t mean LinkedIn is dead. It means you’re doing LinkedIn wrong.

The Email Marketing Renaissance

Similarly, I regularly hear people declare email marketing dead. “Nobody reads emails anymore,” they say, while checking their email for the seventeenth time that hour.

Email marketing isn’t dead. Boring, generic, impersonal email marketing is dead. Email marketing that treats your subscribers like actual humans with actual interests? Still one of the highest ROI channels available.

The Warning Signs That It’s Actually Time To Pull The Plug

Right, so we’ve established that you shouldn’t kill a channel just because you’re impatient or because you’re doing it wrong. But there are genuine red flags that indicate a channel is properly stuffed:

1. Declining engagement despite increased investment. If you’re putting more money and effort in and getting less out, that’s not a plateau. That’s a death spiral.

2. The platform itself is dying. If the user base is shrinking, the algorithm is getting worse, or the company’s clearly in trouble, get out. Don’t be the last person on Google+.

3. Your audience genuinely isn’t there. Sometimes you’re trying to sell retirement village memberships on TikTok, and no amount of optimization is going to fix that fundamental mismatch.

4. The cost per acquisition is increasing faster than your customer lifetime value. This is basic maths. If the gap is widening in the wrong direction, you’re heading toward insolvency.

5. You’re the only one left. If your competitors have all abandoned the channel, there’s probably a reason. Don’t assume you’re a genius who’s spotted an opportunity everyone else missed. Usually, everyone else just figured it out before you did.

The Transition Strategy (Or: How To Kill Something Without Destroying Your Entire Marketing Stack)

Alright, you’ve decided to kill a channel. Good on you for making the tough call. But here’s the thing: you can’t just switch it off overnight and hope for the best.

The Six-Week Wind-Down

Give yourself six weeks to transition. Use the first two weeks to ramp up investment in alternative channels. Weeks three and four, start scaling back the dying channel while monitoring your overall performance. Weeks five and six, kill it completely and make sure your replacement channels are picking up the slack.

This gives you time to identify any unexpected consequences (like, turns out that “useless” Facebook page was actually driving 20% of your organic search traffic through backlinks, who knew?) and adjust accordingly.

Where To Redirect The Budget

The money you were wasting on the dead channel? Don’t just dump it randomly into whatever’s new and shiny. Look at your existing channels that are actually performing and scale them up.

If your email marketing is generating a 400% ROI, maybe pump some more money into growing that list. If your Google Ads are profitable at current spend levels, test whether they remain profitable with higher budgets.

Sometimes the best “new” marketing channel is just doing more of what already works.

The Channels That Deserve More Time Than You Think

Before we finish up, let’s talk about the channels that people often kill prematurely, because they require more patience than the average marketer possesses.

SEO And Content Marketing

If you’re expecting SEO to deliver results in three months, I’ve got some disappointing news for you. Proper SEO and content marketing takes six to twelve months to really gain traction. Sometimes longer.

The problem is that most businesses treat SEO like it’s Google Ads. They want immediate results, and when they don’t get them, they declare it dead and move on.

SEO is a long game. If you’re not prepared to invest at least a year into it, don’t bother starting. You’ll just waste money and convince yourself it doesn’t work when really, you just didn’t give it enough time.

Proper Brand Building

Similarly, actual brand building, the kind that involves consistent messaging and identity over extended periods, takes ages to pay off. You’re not going to see a measurable ROI in quarter one. Possibly not even in year one.

But when it does pay off, it creates a moat around your business that’s incredibly valuable. People will pay more for brands they trust, choose you over competitors, and recommend you to others.

The challenge is that brand building is hard to measure and even harder to justify to a CFO who wants to see concrete numbers. But just because something’s hard to measure doesn’t mean it’s not working.

The Uncomfortable Truth About Marketing Channels

Here’s what nobody wants to admit: most marketing channels eventually die. The social media platform you’re crushing it on today will be irrelevant in five years. The advertising strategy that’s printing money right now will become saturated and expensive.

This isn’t pessimism; it’s reality. Marketing channels have lifecycles, just like products. Early adopters get amazing results because there’s no competition. Then everyone piles in, performance declines, costs increase, and eventually the platform becomes either too expensive or too irrelevant to bother with.

Your job as a marketer isn’t to find the one perfect channel that’ll work forever. It’s to stay ahead of the curve, identify declining channels early enough to transition gracefully, and constantly test new opportunities.

The Final Call

So when should you actually kill a marketing channel that isn’t performing?

Kill it when the data shows clearly that continuing to invest will lose you money. Kill it when you’ve given it a genuine fair go and it’s still not delivering. Kill it when the platform itself is circling the drain. Kill it when you’ve tested every reasonable variation and nothing’s working.

But don’t kill it just because you’re impatient. Don’t kill it because you’re using it wrong. And definitely don’t kill it because some marketing guru on LinkedIn told you it’s dead when it’s actually just evolved.

The difference between a good marketer and a great one isn’t the ability to make every channel work. It’s the wisdom to know which channels are worth saving and which ones need to be put out of their misery.

And honestly? Sometimes the best marketing decision you’ll ever make is admitting that something isn’t working and having the guts to move on.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a Facebook campaign from 2019 that’s been on life support for way too long, and it’s time to finally pull the plug.