More often than not, your marketing problem isn’t actually a marketing problem.

I have a suspicion about companies that find themselves investing more and more in marketing and starting to wonder why results are struggling to keep pace with that investment.

I suspect some of them have become very good at funding the symptoms of their own business decisions.

I know that sounds a little brutal, but let’s look at what actually happens inside an organisation that has grown enough to start feeling the weight of its own complexity.

Over the years, the business has evolved. Commercial opportunities have emerged, along with new clients, products developed to meet specific requests, and services added to make more of existing relationships. Each of these decisions probably made sense at the time. Revenue grew, the organisation expanded, and the whole operation became considerably more sophisticated.

Marketing kept up as best it could. It incorporated the new offerings into communications, adapted the messaging, and tried to build a coherent presence for a business that kept changing.

Until one day, management started to feel that something wasn’t quite working.

Acquisition costs have risen. Sales is complaining about lead quality. Campaigns are delivering uneven results, and differentiation from competitors has become increasingly difficult to substantiate. Naturally, the question arises: is the current marketing strategy still right for the business?

I would pay very close attention to what happens next.

Because once the problem has been defined as a marketing problem, the organisation starts looking for solutions within the department’s remit. And that can seriously limit the quality of the answer.

It is very easy to conclude that you need a better performance marketing strategy. Perhaps you do. But if the business has started pursuing customer segments with lower purchase intent, longer sales cycles, and a different commercial value, acquisition cost tells only part of the story.

In this context, I would want to understand why the company is pursuing those segments, what economic contribution it expects from them, and whether the assumptions underpinning that expansion still hold.

And I would want us to discuss this with the people who made those decisions.

Because although there is this temptation to believe we can find every problem crammed into the marketing dashboard, their source is actually in the boardroom.

This is where I think there is a serious vulnerability in the way many companies manage their growth.

More often than not, commercial decisions are made around the opportunities the business wants to pursue, while marketing is given responsibility for building the demand required. Over time, the organisation starts treating almost every growth objective as a marketing challenge, assuming there is a sufficiently clever combination of strategy, creativity, and budget that can make it achievable.

That assumption deserves to be tested much more rigorously.

A market that looks attractive because of its size can be extremely difficult to enter profitably. An offering that is competitive from a product perspective may have limited commercial relevance. A segment that brings in additional revenue may consume a disproportionate amount of resources to win and retain.

If the response stays at the level of cost per lead or conversion rate, we can end up continually improving the performance of a commercial direction that should have been reconsidered.

If the response stays at the level of cost per lead or conversion rate, we can end up continually improving the performance of a commercial direction that should have been reconsidered.

I find this an uncomfortable conversation, but a necessary one.

Especially for companies that have already invested enough in marketing to believe that the next level of performance depends on a better team, a more capable agency, or a more aggressive strategy.

In situations like these, I would start by examining the assumptions the business currently operates on. How relevant is the offering to the market it serves? What has changed in buying behaviour? How well does the organisation understand why it wins or loses customers? And how much of the current commercial strategy is based on recent information validated in the market?

The answers can significantly change the direction of a marketing investment.

In my view, strategic marketing needs access to these conversations and enough professional authority to question growth assumptions.

That also requires leadership to be willing to engage seriously with what marketing discovers in the market, including when the findings are uncomfortable.

After almost two decades spent in different roles, including situations where I have had to answer personally for the consequences of commercial decisions, I have come to pay a great deal of attention to this stage.

I want to understand what the business is trying to achieve, how sound the logic behind that objective is, and where marketing can make a real contribution. Only then does it make sense to discuss investment.

Otherwise, we can end up spending a great deal of money to demonstrate that we know how to do marketing.And still have the problem we started with left to solve.

Here are 7 checks worth making before you set your next marketing communications budget.

How well can you support each of the statements below with recent data?

• We know which customers generate profit for us, beyond revenue. We have visibility into margins and the costs of acquiring and serving customers, including in the segments where we want to grow.

• We know why we win and lose contracts. We have recent information from the sales process and real conversations with customers, consistent enough for us to identify patterns.

• We have checked whether our priority segments still justify the investment. We know how sales cycles, customer value, and the costs of acquiring those customers are evolving.

• We can explain the difference between campaign performance and commercial performance. We track what happens to the opportunities generated through to revenue and, where the data allows, through to their economic contribution.

• We know which assumptions underpin our growth objectives. We have current evidence supporting our demand estimates, the market’s potential, and the company’s ability to capitalise on the opportunity.

• We have checked whether our offering is still relevant enough. We understand how customers compare us with the alternatives available and what actually influences their buying decisions.

• We know who can reconsider the commercial direction. Insights from marketing and sales reach the people who make decisions about the offering, priority segments, and resource allocation.

  
  

A simple exercise: for each statement you have ticked off, identify the information that supports it and the date it was last checked.

If the answer is “we how we know the market works”, you already have your first red flag.

And if you have several boxes left unticked, perhaps the next meeting about the marketing budget should begin with a discussion about the business decisions that budget is going to support.