You probably don't need more marketing

Marketing Unzipped is back. New series, same idea: take marketing apart, look at the bits honestly, and put it back together in a way that actually helps a business. This is episode one, and it starts with the thing I say more often than anything else in a first conversation.

Most businesses I speak to are not short of marketing activity. They are doing SEO, running Google Ads, posting on LinkedIn, sending emails, creating content, making videos and experimenting with AI. Some of them have started a podcast. There is usually plenty happening.

Then you ask one simple question. Why are you doing all of this? And things suddenly become a little less clear.

That is the problem. Adding another marketing tactic is not going to fix a strategy that does not make sense in the first place.

Sometimes the best thing you can do for your marketing is not to add something new. It is to stop. Look at what you are already doing, work out what you are actually trying to achieve, and decide what the next sensible step is.

Activity is not the same as progress

Marketing makes it incredibly easy to confuse being busy with moving forward. Activity feels productive because you can see it. We published four posts. We sent an email. We launched a campaign. We redesigned the landing page. We started using TikTok. Things are happening, and things happening feels a lot better than sitting in a room asking difficult questions about whether any of it actually matters.

But being busy and making progress are not the same thing. You can be incredibly busy moving in completely the wrong direction.

Marketing makes this worse because there is always another opportunity. Another platform, another format, another piece of software, another trend, another person telling you that your business is missing something enormous. Right now, AI is adding even more possibilities.

None of that means the tactics are bad. I am not anti SEO. I am not anti paid media. I am definitely not anti AI. The problem is not the tactic. The problem is when the tactic comes first.

Business first. Strategy second. Tactics third.

This is probably the simplest way I think about marketing. Start with the business. What are we actually trying to achieve? Then think about marketing strategy. What needs to happen in the market to help us achieve that? Only then should we start discussing tactics. What are we actually going to do?

Business Strategy Tactics

Not the other way round.

Unfortunately, businesses often do this backwards. Someone hears LinkedIn is working well, so suddenly they need a LinkedIn strategy. Someone goes to a conference, hears about programmatic SEO, and now that is on the plan. A competitor starts a podcast, so should we start one? Another business is creating loads of video, so we need more video. Something new happens with AI, so we need an AI strategy.

Before long you have a collection of tactics desperately looking for a reason to exist. That is not a marketing strategy. It is a shopping list.

Start with boring business questions

Some of the most useful questions in marketing are also the least exciting. What are we trying to achieve over the next twelve months? Where does growth actually need to come from? Do we need more customers, or better customers? Higher average order values, more repeat purchases, better retention? Do we have unused capacity? Are we trying to enter a new market, launch something new, or protect something we already have?

Those answers completely change what good marketing looks like.

Imagine two businesses both tell you they need to grow. Business A has plenty of enquiries, but hardly any of them turn into customers. Business B converts enquiries brilliantly, but simply does not have enough opportunities coming in. They both want growth. They do not have the same problem.

Business B might genuinely need more leads. Business A almost certainly does not. Give Business A twice as many leads and you have not solved anything. You have simply doubled the number of opportunities being wasted.

"We just need more leads"

This might be the most common marketing brief in existence. Maybe you do need more leads. But the next question should be: do you?

How many leads are you generating now? Where are they coming from? How many are actually suitable? How quickly do you respond? How many become conversations? How many receive proposals? How many convert? Why do you lose the opportunities you lose? How many customers buy again?

Once you start looking properly, the problem might turn out to be something completely different. Your positioning might be unclear. Your website might be confusing. Nobody follows up quickly enough. Your proposals might be weak. Your sales process might take too long. Your offer might look identical to every competitor. Prospects might not trust you yet. Or your marketing might be attracting completely the wrong people.

More traffic does not fix any of that. It simply exposes more people to the problem.

Find the bottleneck

Instead of asking what marketing we should be doing, try asking what is currently stopping us getting where we want to go. That changes the entire conversation, because now you are looking for the bottleneck.

Maybe not enough people know you exist, which is an awareness problem. Perhaps people know you exist but do not understand why they should choose you, which is a positioning problem. Maybe they understand what you do but do not trust you yet, and now you have a credibility problem. Perhaps they trust you, but the offer is not compelling enough. Maybe people are enquiring and not converting. Or customers buy once and never return.

Different problem. Different strategy. Different tactics.

A lot of marketing budget gets wasted not because businesses choose bad channels, but because they use perfectly good channels to solve the wrong problem.

Marketing has an obsession with more

There is an uncomfortable reality here too. The marketing industry is financially incentivised to encourage businesses to do more. More campaigns, more content, more channels, more platforms, more creative, more software, more everything. "You should stop doing three things" is considerably harder to turn into an exciting agency proposal.

But sometimes stopping something is exactly the right answer. There are businesses still running campaigns because they have always run them, publishing content because the calendar says Tuesday, paying for software nobody really uses, and trying to maintain five social channels because somebody once told them they needed to be everywhere.

You do not need to be everywhere. You need to be useful somewhere, preferably somewhere your customers actually are.

Before adding anything, look at what already exists

Before starting another campaign, I would ask five questions.

1. What are we actually trying to achieve? Not impressions. Not followers. Not traffic for the sake of traffic. What does the business genuinely need?
2. What is working right now? Where are your best customers coming from? What content creates conversations? Which campaigns generate profitable business? What keeps appearing in the customer journey? Businesses can become so focused on finding the next thing that they overlook what is already working.
3. What is not working, and why? There is a difference between something that does not work and something that has been badly executed. SEO might not be the problem. Your SEO might be. Email might not be ineffective. Sending one email every four months might be. The channel and the execution are not the same thing.
4. What have we learnt? Marketing creates information, even when something fails. What happened? What did customers respond to? What surprised you? Which assumption was wrong? If a campaign fails but teaches you something valuable, that information still has value. If it fails and everybody immediately moves on to the next campaign, you have paid for the lesson and then thrown it away.
5. What is the next sensible step? Not the perfect step. Not the five-year answer. The next sensible one.

The Next Sensible Step

Businesses understandably want certainty. They want a marketing plan that says month one we do this, month two this happens, month three revenue increases. Lovely. Unfortunately, customers were not invited to the planning meeting.

Competitors change. Markets change. Google changes. Technology changes. And human beings behave like human beings.

So a good marketing strategy needs direction, but it also needs room to learn. You need enough of a plan to know where you are going. Then you start. Test things. Learn. Adjust. And ask again: given what we know now, what is the next sensible step?

Sometimes that means doing more. Sometimes it means changing something. Sometimes it means waiting. And sometimes it means stopping something completely. That is not inconsistency. That is what strategy looks like when it meets reality.

Treat marketing as a hypothesis, not a promise

One of the most useful mindset changes a business can make is to stop treating marketing like a promise.

Instead of "this campaign will generate 100 leads", try "we believe this audience has this problem, this message will resonate with them, and this channel gives us a sensible way to reach them".

Now you have something you can test. Did the audience respond? Was the problem important enough? Did the message work? Were the leads any good? What did you discover? Then make another decision.

That does not reduce accountability. It increases it. You become much clearer about what you know, what you think, and what you are trying to find out. There is far too much certainty in marketing, particularly from the people trying to sell it.

You cannot do everything properly

Spend ten minutes scrolling through marketing advice and you can quickly convince yourself that your business urgently needs a founder brand, a newsletter, a podcast, short-form video, long-form video, SEO, AI search optimisation, paid social, Google Ads, webinars, a community, and probably a downloadable PDF containing seventeen AI prompts.

Most businesses cannot do all of that properly. And they probably should not try.

Every new tactic requires something. Time, budget, creative, management, measurement, optimisation and attention. Attention is finite. Every time you say yes to something, you are quietly saying no to something else. The question is whether you made that decision deliberately.

Fewer things, done better

There is something incredibly powerful about a business saying: for the next ninety days, these are the two things that matter. Not twelve priorities. Two. And we are going to do them properly, measure them, talk about them, learn from them and improve them. Then decide what happens next.

That is not a lack of ambition. It is focus.

Because most successful marketing is actually quite boring when you look closely. It is rarely one genius campaign that changes everything. More often it is a handful of sensible things done consistently, with the business gradually learning what works and getting better at it.

The spectacular stuff gets shared. The compounding stuff builds businesses.

Try this before adding anything new

If your marketing currently feels messy, try something. For one week, do not add anything. No new channel. No new software. No campaign because somebody sent you an exciting LinkedIn post.

Instead, put everything you currently do on one page. SEO, paid media, social, email, events, content, PR, whatever applies to your business. Then ask of every activity: why are we doing this? What business outcome is it supposed to influence? What evidence do we have that it is working? What have we learnt from it?

And then ask the uncomfortable one. If we stopped doing this tomorrow, what would actually happen?

You may discover some things deserve more investment. Some may need fixing. And some may exist purely because nobody has ever suggested stopping them. That is useful, because good marketing strategy is not about having the longest list of activities. It is about making better choices.

You might need more marketing. But earn the right to add it.

There absolutely are businesses that need more marketing. More reach, more content, more leads, more investment, more activity. But do not assume that is automatically the answer.

Understand the business problem first. Work out where the real bottleneck sits. Look at what is already working. Learn from what is not. Then decide what deserves your attention next.

Less chasing tactics. More understanding why those tactics matter.

You do not need twenty new things to do. Sometimes you just need to work out the next sensible one.