The Cost of Not Having Strategic Marketing Leadership

The Cost of Not Having Strategic Marketing Leadership

If you feel like your marketing should be working by now, but it's not, you're not alone. Most B2B tech businesses aren't struggling because they're doing too little. They're struggling because they're doing too many of the wrong things in the wrong order. In this episode, I'm breaking down the most common traps businesses fall into when there's no strategic marketing leadership maintaining and optimizing the engine. If your marketing feels inconsistent, frustrating, or like a guessing game, this is going to hit home for you, and I think you'll find a ton of value in it.

Hi, I am Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing, where we believe marketing shouldn't be difficult, and it definitely shouldn't be guesswork. Thank you so much for taking the time to watch, listen, however you're consuming this. Appreciate you doing so. This is a topic near and dear to my heart because I see this happen all the time. So if any of these are ringing true for you, do not feel bad. You are not on the beach by yourself. This happens all the time. But we're talking about this today so that you can have visibility to it. And then once you have visibility to it, then you can actually do something about it to address it and fix it. I'm just going to jump into these. I have eight different signs that are costing you money. And these signs are signs that there is a strategic marketing leadership gap.

8 Signs There's No Strategic Marketing Leadership

So the first one is random acts of marketing. This may sound familiar. You're doing stuff, but nothing's working. You're throwing stuff up against a wall, hoping something is going to stick. What is happening here is it's just a bunch of disconnected tactics with no unifying strategy or plan behind it. And what tends to happen is there's a lot of activity going on, but that activity is creating this illusion of progress, but you're really not getting anywhere because none of it's working. This leads to a bunch of wasted time, money, and confusion for you and your team. What's happening with random acts of marketing is it's like building an engine with a bunch of random parts that don't actually go together. So trying to build this engine and put it together, but none of the parts fit. So it just doesn't work. Random acts of marketing is one that I see all the time.

Next one is chasing shiny objects. You're jumping from one tactic to the next. And some of these are interwoven together. Random acts of marketing tends to also display some chasing shiny objects. One week it's SEO, and the next it's paid ads, and then it's social media. We're trying all these different things to see what's going to work. And when you're chasing shiny objects, it's very easy to be influenced by your peers, vendors, the industry noise, all the gurus that are out there saying, you need to do this. This is the hot thing. This is what's working for everybody. There is a lack of a filter when you're chasing shiny objects. You have no filter to sort things through to go, is this worth my time or is it not worth my time? And I know oftentimes, friends can feel safe because somebody's saying, hey, these things are working right now, but it often derails progress because it takes you off the path that you need to be on. And what ends up happening is you're constantly starting , stopping, restarting again. You're stuck in the marketing maze, right? You're like, Oh, let's chase this shiny object. You go down one path, you hit a dead end. So then you go back to the start and you go down another path and you hit another dead end. So there's just random acts of marketing and chasing shiny objects are intertwined and connected. Usually, they're happening at the same time together.

Next thing is no clear ideal client focus. You're targeting everybody. Anybody that has a heartbeat that's willing to pay you is an ideal client. You're trying to market to everyone. And what happens is because you're trying to target everyone, your message naturally just becomes generic. And when you have a generic message, it just blends in. It's the same as everybody else. Your sales conversations tend to be much harder and much longer because there's no clear differentiation as to why somebody should work with you. Why are you the best choice? When you try to target everybody, that message is generic. There's no differentiation. You just don't stand out. And that makes marketing and sales very, very difficult. When we narrow our focus, it actually increases opportunities. Most people think it's going to limit opportunities. It increases opportunities because, one, you know exactly where to go to get in front of those people. It becomes much easier to identify where you need to go to get in front of them. So your marketing is much more targeted, which in turn makes it a lot more effective, and your message can become much more specific. One of my mentors said, Specificity sells. So the narrower we go with our ideal client focus, the more specific our message can be. It's going to sell better. It's going to help differentiate us. You've got to have an ideal client focus. But this is one of the common things that people skip when they just don't have that strategic marketing leadership. And it's okay. I get it. It is very difficult if you are trying to manage marketing and it is not in your wheelhouse. It's nearly impossible to do effectively, which is why it's so important to bring in support from a strategic marketing leadership perspective that can help you there. It doesn't mean you need hire somebody full-time to do this. You can hire a fractional marketing executive. You can hire a consultant. This is one of the things we help clients with. This does not have to be a full-time thing, but you need somebody who can help fill those gaps and support you so that you're getting the strategic marketing leadership you need. Because as I continue to go down these things, these are the things that happen when you don't have strategic marketing leadership.

Fourth thing is confusing activity with progress. I've already touched on this one a little bit, but I'll dig a little bit deeper here. When you're confusing activity with progress, you tend to chase vanity metrics. You're celebrating things like clicks and traffic to your website and impressions. But the reality is these don't matter unless they are driving leads that are becoming clients. That's really all that matters. Is the activity you are taking connecting to increased pipeline that is translating to increased revenue. If it's not, they're vanity metrics and they don't matter. They may make you feel good. Hey, how many followers do I have on Facebook? I've got a million followers on Facebook. Well, that's awesome. Is it generating revenue? If it's not, then who cares? When you're confusing activity with progress, what's happening is your team, you and your team, whether that's an internal team or an external team or a combination of both, are staying busy, but they're not really being productive. So instead of confusing activity with progress, we need to determine what we should actually be measuring instead of the activity to determine whether what we're doing is actually working.

Number five, delegating strategy to tacticians. Really simple one to fall into here. Again, I see this all the time. I'm going to hire a Marketing Manager, and they're just going to do marketing. They're going to take care of it all. Or I'm going to hire an agency, and the agency is going to put together my strategy and my plan, and they're going to do all the implementation and execution. But the reality is marketing managers and agencies, most of them, I'm not going to say all, but most of them are not strategic. They're not strategic, and they are not really taking a leadership capacity because that's just not what they do. So you can't go into it with that mindset, and you can't go into the mindset of, I'm just going to hire them, and they're just going to figure it out. That's like throwing somebody in the middle of the ocean without a life preserver. You're asking them to execute without direction, which is just not going to work. Tacticians don't own outcomes. They execute tasks. You have to have somebody else outside of that is owning the outcomes and is keeping everybody that is executing the tasks on the same page and working towards the same goal. When you've got this leadership gap and you're just delegating strategy to tacticians, there's a lack of accountability that's happening. And the end result of this is it's just expensive guesswork. It becomes, oh, I worked with an agency for a year and we generated some leads, but we didn't generate any new clients. It's no good. No good, and I don't want that for you.

Number 6. Okay, I've got three more here. Number 6 is inconsistent messaging across channels. Inconsistent messaging across your marketing channels. I go to your website, I get one message, I have a sales conversation, I'm hearing something slightly different. I go to your social media and I see something even different than that. What happens when this occurs? It creates confusion because prospects are getting different messages in different locations. And guess what? Confused people do not buy. They put the brakes on. The other thing that happens when you confuse people is you're not building trust. You're not building trust, authority or credibility, which is so, so important for the types of clients that we're working with in the B2B tech space, MSPs, IT consultants, cyber firms. Heavy, heavy trust-based selling environment. If your marketing on the front-end is not building that trust, authority, and credibility, sales are going to be really, really difficult. And what's happening here, too, when you've got this inconsistent messaging, there's a misalignment between sales and marketing and customer service. But when you have a messaging playbook for your entire company, marketing on the front-end starts. When it transfers over to sale, that message is consistent. And after sales close and they go to customer service, the message is still consistent. We have to have that consistency throughout the entire customer journey. But it's really difficult to do that when you don't have a messaging playbook that is creating clear messaging, positioning, and what that core message is to your ideal clients. But we've got to have that consistency if you want to build credibility, trust, and authority in your sales and your marketing processes. Have to have it.

Number seven, burnout. Burnout from do it yourself marketing. Marketing can be really challenging. It should be simple, but that doesn't mean that it's easy. When your internal people or your agency doesn't have strategic leadership because you're trying to do it, but it's not in your wheelhouse, they're getting burned out. And guess what? You're getting burned out. You've become the default marketing leader as the owner, but you're constantly second-guessing everything. You're running into decision fatigue. You're getting frustrated. And that translates to the rest of your team that is involved in marketing. Everybody just burns out. And as the owner, marketing is probably pulling your focus from your core business, where your zone of genius actually is. So it's really, really challenging. And this is not something that is sustainable long term. Yet marketing is a long term investment. It is something that needs to be done consistently every month, over and over again. If you expect to build a marketing engine that's going to help your business grow more predictably. But you can't do that long term if everybody's burning out.

Number eight, last, certainly not least, investing in tactics that don't make sense or are out of sequence. What you do in marketing is just as important as when you actually do it. You can have the right tactic, but if you do it at the wrong time, it's not going to work. This is why oftentimes I hear people say, Oh, well, I did this and that didn't work. And I tried that, and that didn't work either. None of this stuff is working. We've tried all of it. Well, it's not the tactics. It's something in your marketing engine that is out of alignment. You're putting things out of sequence, and that's why those things are not working. It's a case of good tactics, but the wrong timing. If you're trying to run paid ads, but you have not honed in on your ideal clients, and you do not have messaging to attract those types of ideal clients, you are burning money with ads. Things are out of sequence. If again, you're trying to do SEO. You're trying to create content, but you haven't nailed down your strategy. Again, it comes back to if you don't know who your ideal clients are and you haven't crafted a messaging playbook that's going to resonate and attract those people, you have no business jumping into tactics. Yet that's what most people do, is they jump into tactics and skip strategy. Strategy has got to come before tactics always. Otherwise, you're not ready for the tactics that you're trying to use and implement. The tactics are not going to work if you have things out of sequence. Or if you are not ready for them. And this just points to, again, a strategic marketing leadership gap. And it's okay. Tons of people have this gap. But you've got to be able to recognize it and then do something about it, because otherwise, marketing is just going to be this constant place of frustration, which is not what I want for you, and it's not what you want either.

Conclusion

I hope this has resonated with you. Some of these things have hit home. This is not a tactics problem. It is a marketing engine problem that ties back to one of the core components of building a marketing engine, which is leadership. All of these things tie back to a gap in strategy, planning, or leadership somewhere. Most businesses don't need more marketing. They need direction and clarity so that they're focusing on the right things.

I hope you found this helpful. I appreciate you jumping in. If you've got more questions, connect with us, rialtomarketing.com. That's rialtomarketing.com. Feel free to schedule a discovery call. It's in the upper right-hand corner of our website. Be happy to talk to you. The other resource that I've got for you is over at marketingenginescorecard.com. When we help clients build or update or finetune their marketing engine, we look at strategy planning and leadership as the core components, and then there's three subcomponents to each of those. If you want to know which of the nine components are slowing down your growth and getting in your way, you can do that at marketingenginescorecard.com. It takes less than two minutes. Tons of value there, so go take advantage of it. I think you'll find it super helpful. And thank you again. Till next time. Take care.