How I think about marketing

Start with the business problem, not the marketing tactic

Marketing is not the starting point. The business is.

Before deciding what marketing needs to do, I want to understand what the business actually needs — more enquiries, better ones, a clearer position in the market, or a way to compete with someone twice your size. The tactics come after that, not before it.

A lot of marketing goes wrong simply because it started in the wrong place. Someone decided social media was the answer before anyone had agreed what the question was.

Diagnose before you prescribe

When enquiries are down, the instinct is usually to add something. More leads. More traffic. More content. Another campaign.

But marketing can only work with what it's given. If the proposition isn't clear, the website loses people, or the sales process drops prospects after they've enquired, no amount of additional marketing activity fixes that. It just sends more people into a journey that isn't working — at greater cost.

I'd rather spend time understanding where a problem actually sits before deciding that marketing is the answer. Sometimes it is. Often, it's only part of the answer.

Clarity beats activity

It's entirely possible to be busy with marketing and still not be doing anything useful.

Posting, sending, launching, testing — all of that can happen without anyone being able to explain what the priority actually is, or whether any of it is working. Activity feels like progress. It isn't the same thing.

I'd rather have a business doing three things clearly, with a real answer for why each one matters, than ten things done because someone said they should.

Do fewer things, properly

There's always another channel worth trying. Another platform. Another tool.

Sometimes that's genuinely the right call. More often, adding something new to marketing that already lacks focus just creates more activity, not better marketing — and it spreads an already limited budget thinner.

Before adding anything, I'd rather ask whether what's already running is working as well as it could. Usually, there's more value sitting in what you already have than in whatever's new.

The attention you've already earned matters as much as the attention you're chasing

Getting more visitors, more followers and more reach is only useful if what happens next is working.

If a website isn't converting the traffic it already gets, sending more people to it won't fix that — it will just mean more people leave. Sometimes the better investment isn't acquisition. It's making better use of the attention already there: clearer messaging, a better journey and fewer unnecessary barriers.

Acquisition matters. But it's only half the equation.

Good marketing should be usable, not just impressive

I've seen plenty of marketing strategies that look thorough and explain very little. Lots of research. Lots of slides. Not much clarity about what to actually do on Monday morning.

A strategy is only useful if the people responsible for delivering it can understand it, use it and make decisions from it. That doesn't require less thinking. It requires the output to be as clear as the thinking behind it.

Good strategy should make the next decision easier, not harder.

What this means in practice

None of this is about doing less for the sake of it, or being deliberately contrarian about marketing. It's a genuine belief, built over years of watching businesses spend money and effort on activity that never had a clear job to do.

So when we work together, this is roughly the order I'll want to work in:

1. Understand the actual business problem.
2. Work out what marketing can realistically do about it.
3. Get clear on priority — what matters most, and what can wait.
4. Make sure what already exists is working before adding anything new.
5. Keep the plan simple enough that you could hand it to someone else and they'd know what to do.