Do you have a Marketing Problem or a Strategy Problem?

“We need more leads.”

I’ve heard some version of that sentence throughout most of my career. Sometimes it’s more leads. Sometimes it’s a new website, better social media, more events, a bigger marketing team or, lately, an AI strategy.

And sometimes that really is what the business needs.

But I’ve learned to ask a few more questions before jumping to the solution, because what looks like a marketing problem is often something else entirely.

You can have a great marketing team producing a lot of work and still not see the growth you expected. You can generate leads that never become opportunities. You can spend a fortune on events without being able to explain what they’re contributing to the business. You can hire another marketer and somehow end up with an even longer list of things everyone thinks marketing should be doing.

Usually, that’s when it’s worth looking beyond the tactics and asking whether the strategy is actually clear.

Start with what the business is trying to accomplish

Marketing strategy should start with the business, not with marketing.

That sounds obvious, but it’s surprisingly easy to skip. A company sets a revenue goal, the marketing team gets a pipeline or lead target, and everyone starts building a calendar of campaigns and activities.

But if a business wants to add $5 million in revenue next year, I don’t want to start by talking about paid media or events. I want marketing at the table helping determine where that growth can realistically come from.

What is the addressable market? Where are the strongest opportunities for growth? Is it acquiring new customers, expanding within the existing customer base, moving into a new segment or market, increasing deal size, improving retention, or some combination of those things? And do we have the market opportunity to support the growth goal we’ve set?

Those are business strategy questions, but they’re also marketing questions.

Once we understand where the opportunity is, we can work backward. Who are the customers most likely to get us there? What do they care about? How are they buying today? Where are we losing them? What does sales need in order to close more of them? What does the customer experience look like after the sale?

Now we’re getting somewhere.

“We need more leads” might not mean you need more leads

This is one of my favorite examples because lead generation is such an easy thing to blame.

If sales needs more pipeline, the natural response is to turn up the volume at the top of the funnel. Spend more. Run more campaigns. Go to more events. Generate more leads.

But before doing that, I’d want to know what’s happening to the leads you already have.

Maybe you really don’t have enough demand. Or maybe:

• You’re attracting people who were never a good fit in the first place.
• People are interested, but your website or sales process is losing them.
• Marketing and sales have different ideas about what a qualified opportunity looks like.
• You have plenty of opportunities, but they aren’t converting.
• Your best growth opportunity is sitting inside your existing customer base.

Those are completely different business problems. Asking marketing to simply “get more leads” could mean spending more money to feed an already broken process.

More resources won’t fix unclear priorities

The same thing happens with marketing headcount.

When a marketing team is overwhelmed, hiring another person feels like the obvious answer. And sometimes it is. There are absolutely situations where the strategy is sound and the team simply needs more hands to execute it.

But I’ve also seen teams that are overwhelmed because everything is a priority.

They’re supporting sales, planning events, writing content, managing social, running campaigns, updating the website, responding to executive requests and chasing whatever new idea came up in a meeting that week.

Adding another person to that environment gives you another person who is busy.

It doesn’t necessarily give you better marketing.

A good strategy should help the team understand what matters most, what can wait and, just as importantly, what they are not going to do.

Strategy should make the day-to-day easier

I think marketing strategy gets overcomplicated.

It doesn’t have to be a massive presentation filled with frameworks that nobody looks at again after the planning meeting. The real test is whether it helps the business make better decisions.

When a new opportunity comes up, you should be able to look at the strategy and determine whether it makes sense.

Should we sponsor this event? Should we invest in paid search? Should we build a new website? Should we launch a webinar series? Should we hire someone? Should we go after this new customer segment?

Those decisions become much easier when everyone agrees on who you’re trying to reach, what you’re trying to accomplish and where the biggest opportunities actually are.

That’s also why I don’t think the answer to an underperforming marketing program is automatically “do more marketing.”

Sometimes you do need more leads. Sometimes you need another person. Sometimes you absolutely need a new website.

But before spending more money or adding another tactic, I’d make sure you can clearly answer a few things:

• What are we actually trying to accomplish as a business?
• Where is that growth expected to come from?
• Who matters most to that growth?
• What is keeping those people from buying, buying more or staying longer?
• What role should marketing play in changing that?

If those answers are clear, building the marketing plan gets a whole lot easier.

And if they aren’t, that may be the problem worth solving first.