Website, social media and ads run by different suppliers: why the customers aren't coming

The ads supplier says the clicks are there. The person running social media shows you the likes going up. Whoever built the website reminds you it's fast and everyone loves it. They're all right. And yet quote requests are where they were a year ago, and nobody can explain why.

The short answer: when different suppliers run your website, social media and ads, the problem is rarely the quality of the work. It's that nobody owns the whole journey, from the moment someone first sees you to the moment they ask for a quote. Everyone optimises their own piece, and the pieces don't talk to each other.

Why it happens to almost everyone

No company decides to have disconnected suppliers. It happens one step at a time. The website gets rebuilt when it needs to be, with whoever seems best at that moment. Social media comes later, perhaps with a freelancer a friend recommended. The ads get set up by someone who "knows Google". Each choice, on its own, makes sense.

The trouble comes later. Each supplier has a different brief, or no brief at all. Each measures their favourite number: clicks for one, followers for another, time on page for a third. And meetings are about what each of them controls, never about the customer moving from one piece to the next.

How to spot the problem

Some signs come up in almost every company we meet. If you recognise two or three of them, the problem is probably there.

• Every report says things are fine. But nobody can tell you how many customers that channel brought in this month.
• The ad promises one thing, the page says another. Someone clicks on "quote in 24 hours" and lands on a generic home page, left to work out what to do next.
• Social media speaks a different language. The website is formal and sells reliability; Instagram is chatty and full of jokes. People who follow you in both places struggle to recognise you.
• Enquiries get lost in the handover. A message arrives on Instagram, a form goes to an inbox nobody reads, a phone call isn't logged anywhere.
• You are the bridge. You forward emails from one supplier to another, explain to each what the other did, and spend your evenings pulling the numbers together in a spreadsheet.

Illustrative scenario. A company launches an autumn promotion. The ads go live on Monday, but the promotion page is published on Thursday and social media mentions it the week after. For three days, anyone clicking the ad finds a website that knows nothing about the offer. Nobody did their own job badly: what was missing was someone looking at everyone's calendar.

What it really costs

The most visible cost is the ad budget that sends people to pages that don't convert. But it isn't the biggest one.

The biggest cost is your time. Every hour spent passing messages between suppliers is an hour taken away from customers, product and your people. Then there's the cost of wrong decisions: if every channel is measured differently, you cut the one that looks weakest, which is often the very one bringing in your best customers.

And finally, your brand. A customer who finds three different tones in three places doesn't think "they have three suppliers". They think you don't know who you are.

How to put the pieces back together, without replacing every supplier

You don't need to fire anyone. You need to give everyone the same starting point and the same way of measuring.

1. A shared brief, on one page. Who the customer is, what you offer them, what they should do after finding you, how the brand speaks. The same document for every supplier, updated whenever something changes.
2. One number that matters to everyone. Not clicks, not likes: real enquiries, and where they came from. Everyone can keep their own metrics, but the question in the meeting becomes: how many useful enquiries this month, and which route did they take?
3. The journey mapped, from ad to reply. Take a typical customer and follow them: where they see you, where they click, what they read, how they get in touch, who replies and how quickly. Every gap is a place where money leaks.
4. A shared calendar. Launches, promotions, new pages, campaigns. Everyone can see it, everyone knows what goes out and when. It's the most basic tool, and the one most often missing.
5. Someone responsible for the journey. They can be in-house or external, but their written job is to look at the whole, not a piece. If that person is you, that's fine, as long as it's a choice and not a fallback.

Where to start this week

Try a simple test. Put yourself in a customer's shoes: search for your service on Google, click your ad, land on the website, fill in the form or send a message on Instagram. Then wait, and note how long it takes for someone to reply, and what they say.

Write down every snag you hit. That list is your first shared brief: send it to all your suppliers, in the same message, and ask each of them what they can fix within a month.

It's the work we do too when we start with a company: before touching any channel, we look at the whole journey and find where it breaks. Often the problem isn't in any single piece, but in between them.

In short

• With several suppliers, the risk isn't the quality of each piece of work, but the journey nobody looks at as a whole.
• The clearest sign: every report says things are fine, but customers aren't growing.
• The highest cost isn't wasted budget, it's your time and decisions made on different numbers.
• The fix: a shared brief, one number that matters to everyone, a mapped journey, a shared calendar and someone responsible for the whole.
• The first step takes an hour: walk your customer's journey and note every snag.

If you want to find out where your journey breaks, write to us: in the first call we follow it together, from the ad to the reply, and tell you where to start.