Your marketing isn't broken. Your order of operations is.

There is a particular type of conversation I have surprisingly often.

A business is doing marketing. Usually quite a lot of it. There is somebody working on SEO. Google Ads are running. LinkedIn is being fed. There is an email database everyone agrees they should probably do more with. Video is on the list. AI has inevitably entered the conversation.

And then somebody says, 'Our marketing just isn't working.'

Sometimes they are right. Sometimes the activity is weak, the execution is poor or the offer simply is not landing.

But quite often I do not think the marketing is broken. I think the business is doing sensible things in a completely unhelpful order.

More marketing is a very tempting answer

When growth slows down, the natural reaction is to add something. Another campaign. Another channel. Another agency. Another piece of software. Another person. Another meeting about TikTok.

Marketing has an almost unlimited menu of things you could do. That is part of the problem. Because the question is not, 'What could we do?'

You could do hundreds of things. The better question is, 'What deserves our attention now?'

That distinction sounds ridiculously simple. In practice, it changes the quality of almost every marketing decision that follows.

Start with the business

Before talking about SEO, paid media, social, email, content or whatever else is fashionable this week, I want to understand what the business is actually trying to achieve.

Not the marketing objective. The business objective.

What needs to be different twelve months from now? More revenue? Better margins? More of a particular type of customer? Greater retention? Entry into a new market? Less dependence on one enormous client? A stronger sales pipeline? A business that does not rely quite so heavily on the founder?

These are different problems. They should not automatically produce the same marketing plan.

Yet businesses routinely jump from 'we need to grow' to 'we need more marketing', and from there to 'let's run ads' or 'we should post more on LinkedIn'. There are quite a few missing decisions in the middle.

Business. Strategy. Tactics.

This is the order I come back to again and again.

Business means the outcome we are trying to create. Strategy means the choices we are making about how we are going to create it. Tactics are the things we actually do.

Simple. Also remarkably easy to do backwards.

We become excited about a tactic and then invent the strategy afterwards.

'We should start a podcast.' Why? 'Brand awareness.' Why do we need more awareness? 'Because nobody knows who we are.' Do the right people need to know who you are? Is lack of awareness actually stopping the business growing? What happens if awareness goes up but nothing else changes?

This is not me saying podcasts are bad. I host one. It is me saying a tactic is not a strategy just because we can explain it on a PowerPoint slide.

The same applies to SEO, PPC, email, AI, events, founder content and almost everything else in marketing. They can all be brilliant. They can all be a complete waste of money. Context is everything.

Give the next twelve weeks a job

One thing I have increasingly come to believe is that businesses try to solve too much at once. They have twenty marketing problems and create twenty projects. Suddenly everyone is busy and very little actually changes.

Instead, I like thinking in shorter periods. Take the next twelve weeks. What are those twelve weeks for?

Maybe you have plenty of website traffic but hardly anybody enquires. Your next sensible step probably is not generating more traffic. It is understanding why the traffic you already have is not converting.

Maybe your sales team is excellent once they get a conversation, but there are not enough conversations happening. Now demand generation deserves attention.

Maybe you are generating plenty of enquiries, but half of them are wrong for the business. That is not necessarily a lead-volume problem. It could be targeting, positioning, messaging or qualification.

Maybe people get to the website and still cannot tell why you are different from the five competitors sitting next to you in Google. Fix that before paying to send more people there.

Each diagnosis creates a different next step.

Strategy is partly a list of things you are not doing yet

Constraints are useful because they force you to choose.

You might genuinely benefit from doing SEO, LinkedIn, email, paid search, video and events. That does not mean you need to do all six properly this quarter.

Most businesses do not have unlimited money. They definitely do not have unlimited time. Marketing teams do not have unlimited attention either.

So part of strategy is deciding, 'Not yet.'

That is uncomfortable, especially when LinkedIn is full of people explaining that the one thing you are not doing is the one thing standing between you and enormous success.

Marketing creates dependencies

Some activities make other activities work better. This is where order of operations really matters.

Imagine spending £5,000 a month sending people to a website that does not clearly explain what the business does. Increasing the advertising budget is probably not the first answer. Fixing the proposition and the website might be.

Or imagine investing heavily in content before anybody has agreed what the business wants to become known for. You will create content. Lots of it. But you are building the machine before deciding where you are going.

Sometimes step one is not particularly exciting. It might be fixing tracking. Talking to customers. Improving the sales process. Cleaning up the CRM. Working out why deals are being lost. Finding out which customers are actually profitable.

None of those will win Marketing Campaign of the Year. They might make everything you do afterwards considerably more effective.

The Next Sensible Step

I have started calling this way of thinking The Next Sensible Step.

It is not a revolutionary marketing methodology. There are no seventeen boxes and I have resisted the urge to turn it into an acronym.

It is deliberately simple. When marketing feels messy, ask:

• What are we actually trying to achieve?
• What is stopping that from happening?
• What deserves our attention now?
• What becomes easier if we fix that first?

Then do that. Learn from it. Decide what the next sensible step is from there.

Marketing is always going to be messy. Customers do not move neatly through funnels. Attribution is imperfect. Algorithms change. Competitors react. Ideas fail. Unexpected things work.

You cannot remove all of that uncertainty. You can stop making it worse by trying to do everything at the same time.

So if your marketing currently feels broken, do not immediately add another tactic. Look at the order. The thing you need next might already be sitting underneath something you are trying to do now.