Should You Stop Doing What Made Your Business Successful?

Your Google Ads campaign is generating 40 leads a month. Your email list converts at 4%. Your blog has ranked for three target keywords for the past six months and pulls consistent traffic. Business is good.

And somehow, standing in that room with your team, the most urgent agenda item is: "Should we be doing TikTok?"

This is one of the most expensive habits in small business marketing. Not the TikTok question itself (that can be answered sensibly). The habit of abandoning what works because something else feels newer, shinier, or more interesting. It's a failure mode that quietly costs more than bad ads ever could.

Seth Godin wrote about this recently in the context of musicians. A band with a hit song faces a particular tension: keep playing the hit because audiences love it, or evolve into new work because the artist wants to grow? His test for businesses is the one worth borrowing: don't change when the founder gets bored. Change when the accountant gets bored. If the numbers are strong and the channel is delivering, the desire to change is about you, not your business.

Why Founders Get Restless with Things That Work

Three things reliably produce the itch to abandon a working marketing channel.

It becomes invisible. You forget how long it took to build. That Google Ads account you want to scrap? You spent four months optimising it, went through three rounds of copy testing, rebuilt the landing page twice. Now it hums along without drama, so it doesn't feel like an achievement anymore. It feels like furniture.

New platforms promise faster results. Every platform launch comes with a wave of early-adopter success stories. The first few restaurants on TikTok Shop. The first renovation companies on Instagram Reels. These stories are real, but they typically reflect the platform's own promotional push and the novelty advantage of being early. By the time most SMEs join, the advantage has normalised.

Competitor noise. Someone in your industry posts about their TikTok results. A supplier's marketing manager mentions WhatsApp Channels at an event. Suddenly the conversation has shifted even though your own numbers haven't changed.

The common thread: none of these are reasons grounded in your own data. They're all forms of boredom dressed up as strategy.

The irony worth noting: marketing channels usually get boring at exactly the point they start working. You've optimised the campaigns, settled into a rhythm, stopped having emergencies to manage. Of course it feels dull. That's what running a good campaign actually looks like.

The Singapore FOMO Landscape Is Particularly Loud

The marketing noise here is real and persistent. TikTok Shop's aggressive launch pushed F&B and retail owners to question every other channel. WhatsApp Channels became the new thing finance advisory and insurance teams were discussing. AI search tools (Perplexity, ChatGPT, SearchGPT) have created a fresh wave of "is SEO dead?" anxiety among business owners who spent years building search presence.

None of these developments are irrelevant. Some of them matter. The question is whether they matter to your business, for your audience, right now, or whether they're just loud.

For most SMEs running a team of one to five people on marketing, pursuing every channel simultaneously is not a strategy. It's the appearance of one. When bandwidth is limited, diversification often just means doing everything poorly instead of one thing well.

How to Know When the Numbers Are Actually Telling You to Change

There's a real version of this conversation, where the data genuinely signals it's time to evolve a channel or strategy. Here's what it looks like:

Lead quality is declining, not just volume. If the leads coming in are increasingly poor fit, that's a signal worth investigating. Volume holding but close rates dropping by 20% over six months? That's a data question.

Cost per lead is rising consistently. Not seasonally. Not in response to a specific campaign change. But a steady upward drift over 12 to 18 months, despite optimisation attempts. That's a channel maturing.

The audience has genuinely moved. This is different from a new platform launching. If the audience you're trying to reach has demonstrably shifted their discovery behaviour, your channel mix should follow. The key word is demonstrably: survey data, conversion data, or first-party evidence, not an article about what Gen Z does in general.

Competitors are getting meaningfully better results elsewhere, at scale. One competitor doing well on a new platform is a data point. Five of them, for 12 months, across different segments? That's a signal.

What these all have in common: they're grounded in your data, not theirs.

The Exploit-Then-Explore Rule

A useful mental model for channel strategy: exploit before you explore.

Exploitation means squeezing what's already working to its maximum potential. Exploration means testing something new. Most SMEs flip the order, exploring new channels while their exploitation work is still half-finished.

Practical test: if your Google Ads campaign is profitable at current spend, have you actually tried running it at two times the budget? If your email list converts but you're sending once a month, have you tried sending twice? If your blog traffic drives enquiries, have you produced more content targeting the same keyword cluster?

If the answer to most of these is no, you haven't maxed out what's working. You've gotten bored. Those are different things.

The rule isn't "never explore." It's "don't explore at the cost of exploitation." New channels deserve a real test, with dedicated budget and time, not the leftover attention of a team already stretched across five things.

When Evolution Is Actually Right

Seth Godin's "hit song" analogy is subtle in a way worth catching. He's not arguing for the cover band that plays the same set forever. He acknowledges there's a time to move forward, to do new work. His distinction is between a band that keeps playing the hit because the audience wants it (sensible exploitation) versus one that stops playing it because the lead singer is bored (misaligned decision-making).

There are real reasons to evolve:

The channel's fundamentals have changed. Organic reach on Facebook collapsed years ago for most SMEs. That required a genuine strategic response. When a platform's economics change structurally, not cyclically, the conversation is different.

Your business has moved upmarket. If you've shifted your ICP from micro-SMEs to mid-market companies, the channels that worked for the former may not be right for the latter. LinkedIn over Instagram. Search over social. The numbers will tell you this if you're watching them.

You've genuinely saturated the channel. If you're running Google Ads at full viable budget, have achieved strong quality scores and impression share, and incremental spend stops producing results, that's exhaustion. You've extracted most of what's available. Now explore.

The bar for "genuine evolution" should be high. It's not "we've been doing this for 18 months and I'm a bit over it." It's "we have evidence the channel is plateauing and a hypothesis about what to test next."

Putting the Accountant Test to Work

The next time the conversation in your team shifts to "should we try [new platform / new format / new channel]", run the accountant test before the meeting agenda moves on.

Ask four questions:

1. What are our current channel results, and are they trending up, flat, or down?
2. Have we fully optimised what we're already running?
3. Is the desire to change driven by our numbers or by external noise?
4. If we add this new channel, what gets less attention as a result?

If questions one and two aren't answered clearly, the meeting is too early. Get the data first.

If question three's honest answer is "external noise," table the new platform discussion for 90 days. Revisit it then with data, not feelings.

If question four produces discomfort, that discomfort is the real conversation. Adding a channel always costs something. Usually, it costs the channel that was working.

A useful boundary: if you can't fund a new channel experiment with genuinely dedicated budget and at least 90 days of focused effort, it's not a real test. It's a hobby. And hobbies don't tell you whether a channel works. They tell you whether a channel works when nobody's really trying.

Run the accountant test quarterly. Most founders find that the boring answer (keep doing what's working, do it better) is right far more often than the exciting answer. That's not a reason to stop asking the question. It's a reason to trust the data when it tells you to hold course.

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Magnified helps SMEs build and sustain the digital marketing channels that produce consistent results: SEO, Google Ads, and content that compounds over time. If you're reviewing your channel mix and want a second opinion on what's worth keeping, we're happy to have that conversation.