In this episode of Marketing, Properly!, Sean Makin looks at why increasing marketing activity isn’t always the answer to a growth problem and why doing more of something that isn’t working can simply allow you to waste money at greater speed.

“We need to do more marketing.”

Sales are slow?

More marketing.

The pipeline looks thin?

More marketing.

Competitors seem to be everywhere?

Definitely more marketing.

More campaigns. More content. More advertising. More emails. More events. More leads. More budget.

But before increasing everything, there’s a question worth asking:

Do you actually need more marketing or do you need the marketing you’re already doing to work considerably better?

The first step is understanding where the real problem lies.

• Are too few people aware of you? That could be an awareness problem.
• Are people visiting the website but not enquiring? Perhaps it’s conversion.
• Are you generating plenty of enquiries, but they’re the wrong ones? Look at targeting and positioning.
• Are you generating good opportunities but failing to win them? The problem might be Sales, pricing, proposition, trust or customer experience.

Yet remarkably often, the answer to all of these problems is: “We need more leads.”

We look at why more website traffic won’t fix a weak website, why filling the CRM with hundreds of unsuitable prospects doesn’t necessarily help Sales, and why producing more content simply because the content calendar has empty spaces isn’t much of a strategy.

Before increasing the budget, there’s another useful exercise: Find the waste.

Google Ads. Agency retainers. Software. Events. Sponsorship. Content. PR. SEO. CRM. Freelancers.

Why are you spending that money? Who is it supposed to influence? What outcome are you trying to create? And what evidence suggests it’s working?

You may discover that the business doesn’t need another £50,000 of marketing budget.

It might simply need to stop wasting 20% of the budget it already has.

Better marketing can also mean doing less.

Fewer audiences. Fewer messages. Fewer priorities. Fewer channels.

But doing the right ones properly.

Of course, sometimes the answer genuinely is more. If your proposition is strong, the website converts, Sales is performing, customers stay, and marketing is reliably producing profitable opportunities, then scale it.

If the machine works, turn it up.

If smoke is coming out of the machine, don’t make it run faster.

So before launching another campaign, adding another channel or increasing the budget, ask: “What’s preventing what we’re already doing from working harder?”

Solve that first.

Because good marketing scales.

Bad marketing scales too. It just scales the waste.

Marketing, Properly! – practical marketing thinking for business owners and Managing Directors who want clearer strategy, better decisions and considerably less wasted marketing.

Produced in Scotland.