Why Most of Your Marketing Efforts Aren’t Moving the Needle (The Pareto Principle in Marketing)

Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian economist with a sharp eye for patterns, once noticed that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population. This was in the late 1800s, but the pattern has since turned up everywhere: in sales figures, software bugs, customer complaints, and, yes, marketing results. If you look closely enough, you’ll probably find that a small slice of your efforts produces the bulk of your returns. The problem is, most businesses don’t look closely enough.

Why the 80/20 Rule Matters for Your Marketing

The 80/20 rule is seductive because it promises efficiency. It tells you that if you focus on the few things that matter and ignore the rest, you’ll make the most of your time and effort. The trouble is that marketing rarely presents its winners and losers in neat, labelled boxes. Instead, activity is spread across channels, campaigns, and formats, all of which take time and budget. Without some deliberate examination, the underperformers look just as deserving of your attention as the high performers. In many companies, the underperformers are even more demanding.

The Cost of Keeping Everything Alive

This is partly because marketing teams, whether it’s a single founder or a department of ten, are conditioned to keep every channel alive. If you’ve ever kept posting to a social platform “just so it doesn’t go quiet,” you’ve experienced the inertia that keeps low-return work in the mix. It feels like maintaining a presence. In reality, it can be siphoning resources away from the activities that are already doing the heavy lifting.

How to Identify the 20% of Marketing Activities That Drive 80% of Results

The first step to breaking that pattern is measurement, but not in the "let's add this dashboard to track the numbers" sense. You do not need a 40-page analytics report to spot your 20%. You need to identify the key outcomes that matter (like your sales, qualified leads, newsletter sign-ups, etc.) and see which activities are driving the majority of them. It is surprising how often a simple spreadsheet can show that most of your valuable results are coming from a small cluster of campaigns or even a single channel.

I once worked with a business that was splitting its ad budget across five different platforms. Each had its own creative requirements, each had its own learning curve, and its own little algorithm to feed. And they did this all in the name of trying to cover as many touchpoints as possible... to "be where the market is". But, when we finally lined up the results, more than 80% of sales were coming from one platform, and two others produced almost nothing measurable. The logical move was to reallocate time, money, and effort, but that meant letting go of the idea that “being everywhere” was a strength.

Avoiding the Trap of Static Thinking

This is where the Pareto Principle becomes less of a tidy ratio and more of a discipline. It asks you to make peace with unevenness. To accept that most of your results will come from a small set of actions, and that doubling down on them will yield far more than giving equal time to everything. It also asks you to stop defending the rest simply because they feel like part of the furniture.

Of course, there’s a trap here. The 80/20 split is not permanent. The activities in your high-performing 20% will not hold that position forever. Algorithms change. Customer behaviour changes. Things change. Which is fine, because the point of using this principle is not to freeze your marketing in place, though, but to make your allocation of effort proportionate to the evidence you have today… and to keep checking... and changing. Treat it like gardening (*cough* The Marketing Garden): you keep watering the plants that are thriving, but you also notice when one starts to wilt and another begins to bloom.

Why Focusing on the Top 20% Feels Uncomfortable

Applying this thinking can be uncomfortable at first. There is an instinct to defend the underperformers with “but it builds brand awareness” or “but someone might see it and buy later”. Sometimes that’s true. More often than not, it’s an excuse for avoiding the harder decision of cutting a channel loose. When you focus on the activities that demonstrably work, you create room to test new ones with the time and budget you’ve freed up.

For a small business owner, this might mean finally dropping the social platform that has become a time sink, so you can invest that energy into a newsletter that actually drives sales. For a marketing lead in a mid-sized company, it might mean ending a long-running campaign that no longer delivers, despite its internal fan club. Either way, the principle is the same: use your resources where they matter most, and don’t apologise for not spreading them evenly.

A Simple 80/20 Pareto Principle in Marketing Audit You Can Do This Week

The most practical way to start using the Pareto principle in your marketing is with a quick audit. Here's what you can do.

• Pull your last three months of marketing activity.

• For each channel or campaign, write down the spend, the time invested, and the direct results.

• Rank them by return.

• Then circle the top 20%... the ones bringing in the bulk of your outcomes.

• Then ask yourself two questions: 

1. How can we give these more oxygen? 

2. And what can we stop doing to make that possible?

You might discover that this exercise saves you more than just money because the 80/20 rule, after all, isn’t really about numbers... It’s about respect. Respect for your time, respect for your budget, and respect for the work that actually works.