Don't Ignore the Marketer When It Comes to Your Marketing Strategy
By Matthew Ward, Founder and Director1 March 2022
Digital marketing gets talked about as a list of channels: social, SEO, digital PR, video, podcasts, and so on. But before deciding where to focus, a business needs to get the basics right, and that starts with strategy, not tactics.
No software or channel replaces a skilled marketer. Technology executes a strategy, but people are what make it actually work, and getting that balance right is what separates a strategy that delivers from one that burns through budget.
Get the strategy right first
Trying to run every digital marketing tactic at once gets expensive fast, and rapid growth doesn't come cheap. A good strategy balances the short term against the long term. Businesses want results quickly, but the changes that actually move the numbers that matter, market share, profit, revenue, tend to play out over a longer horizon. Lean too hard into short-term tactics and the results are volatile. Lean too hard into long-term thinking and there's no revenue to show for it in the meantime. The right approach usually sits somewhere in between, with budget spread deliberately rather than chasing whatever looks urgent that week.
Tactics come after strategy, not before
SEO, PPC, content marketing, downloadable resources, email and social all sit under "digital" as the tactic, not the strategy itself. Smaller businesses in particular benefit from a more measured approach: building brand awareness and community organically first, rather than putting a few hundred pounds behind a PPC campaign and expecting an instant return. Consumer trust builds customers, and trust doesn't happen instantly. Without a clear strategy behind it, quality content and a sales funnel that actually converts, the appeal of quick wins fades fast, and budget disappears with it.
As Lead Kinetics director Matthew Ward puts it, the real starting point is being pragmatic about where your resources genuinely need to go, not chasing every channel at once.
Who actually delivers the results
Once the budget question is settled, the next one matters more: who's actually going to deliver this? It's easy to get swept up in automation and forget that every tool still needs a skilled person behind it. Expensive software doesn't compensate for a mediocre marketer. Commerce is still driven by human interaction, and the marketers who understand your customers are the ones who can create content that genuinely resonates rather than just technically performs.
Data matters, but data alone doesn't replace judgement built on experience and intuition. As digital skills become more essential across every part of a business, competition for that talent is only going to increase. One option worth considering is treating a specialist freelancer or contractor as a genuine part of the team, even while they remain outside the payroll, which tends to close the talent gap faster than waiting for the perfect permanent hire. It's also worth not writing off less experienced marketers on this basis alone, see experience is not always king when it comes to digital marketing.
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