Why More Marketing Doesn't Always Mean Better Marketing

Marketing has become one of the busiest functions in many businesses. Social media calendars are full, blogs are published every month, email campaigns are sent regularly and advertising budgets continue to grow. AI has made it possible to produce more content than ever before and businesses have more opportunities to market themselves than at any other point in history.

On paper, that sounds like progress.

The difficulty is that more marketing doesn't automatically mean better marketing.

It's entirely possible for a business to publish twice as much content, spend twice as much on advertising and send twice as many emails while generating fewer enquiries than it did twelve months earlier. Equally, another business might reduce the amount of marketing it's doing while producing better commercial results because it's become more focused on the activities that genuinely influence customer behaviour.

The amount of marketing taking place and the value it creates are two very different things.

Measuring What Matters

Let’s get this straight, businesses don't deliberately set out to measure the wrong things.

Every advertising platform reports impressions, clicks and conversions. Social media platforms report reach, engagement and follower growth. Email platforms tell you open rates and click-through rates. Website analytics measure sessions, page views and time on site. These metrics are readily available, and the platforms make it incredibly easy to build reports around them.

We wouldn’t go as far as saying these metrics are unhelpful either. They have their place and can provide valuable insight when they’re viewed in the right context and, more importantly, aligned with the goal of the activity.

However, it’s when they become the objective rather than the outcome that problems start to appear.

A business launching a brand-new product might quite reasonably focus on awareness. An organisation entering a new market may care far more about reach than immediate sales, and that's fair enough. In those situations, impressions and visibility genuinely matter because they're closely linked to what the business is trying to achieve.

Most established businesses, though, aren't investing in marketing simply because they want more impressions or a wider audience. They want more enquiries, more sales, better quality leads, greater efficiency and, most importantly, increased profitability. More often than not, the number of Instagram followers a business has has very little bearing on any of those things.

We always make the argument, and rightly so, that every piece of marketing activity should be aligned with a clear commercial objective. If the goal is to generate more enquiries, impressions on their own won't tell you whether that happened. If the goal is to increase online sales, doubling website traffic means very little if revenue remains exactly the same.

An Agile Approach Changes The Conversation

Agile marketing means the objective comes first, and our argument is that's how marketing is supposed to be. Every recommendation, campaign and piece of content should be able to answer a simple question: what commercial objective is this trying to achieve?

If your business objective is to increase revenue, then we'll help you increase online sales or generate more leads. If the goal is to retain more customers or encourage repeat custom, then that's where our focus will be. If you're opening a new store or expanding into a different geographical area, then the priority becomes making sure the right people know you're there. Objectives change from business to business, but there's always an objective that the marketing should be working towards.

The conversation then becomes about how that objective is achieved and whether the metrics are moving in the right direction, either month to month or year on year. It stops being about whether a social media post reached more people than the last one. Higher website traffic is great, but more traffic means nothing if those visitors didn't do what you wanted them to do, whether that's buying a product, submitting an enquiry or signing up to a newsletter. Every piece of marketing is judged against the reason it was commissioned in the first place.

There's an honesty to working this way too. Performance sits at the centre of every conversation, allowing the businesses we work with to clearly see the impact the marketing is having on their commercial objectives. It also helps identify what's not working much sooner, giving us the opportunity to change direction rather than continuing with activity simply because it's written into a marketing plan. Businesses change, markets move and customer behaviour evolves. Marketing should evolve with them too.

More Marketing Isn't Always The Answer

“We’re coming to you because we know we need to do more.”

We hear that on a regular basis. More often than not, the response is, “Do you need to do more, or do you need to do more of the thing that's already proving to be most effective?” That usually stops people in their tracks.

Many of these businesses have previously worked with other agencies or freelancers or, in some cases, have an in-house marketing team. They're used to conversations about producing more content, increasing advertising budgets or adding another marketing channel. Very few have been challenged to think about whether doing more is actually the answer.

'More marketing' typically means increasing activity. More content, more campaigns, more advertising, more emails, more meetings and more reports. Better marketing starts by understanding what's already working. You need to understand where the business is now, what it's trying to achieve and what has or hasn't worked previously. Only then can you focus time, budget and effort on the activities most likely to help the business achieve its current objectives.

Sometimes that means taking a step back before moving forward.

It might mean stopping the weekly newsletter that nobody opens. It might mean reducing spend on an underperforming Google Ads campaign or accepting that a particular social media platform simply isn't contributing to the business in any meaningful way. Those aren't always easy conversations to have, but they're often the ones that create the biggest improvements.

None of that happens unless business owners, marketing directors and everyone else involved are completely honest about what's working and what isn't. Without that honesty, it's almost impossible to identify what should stop, what should continue and where the next opportunity actually sits.

Businesses evolve, customer behaviour changes, markets become more competitive and priorities shift throughout the year. Marketing should be flexible enough to respond to those changes rather than continuing with activity that no longer serves a purpose.

Doing more for the sake of doing more rarely produces better results. Understanding what's working, measuring it properly and having the confidence to change course usually does.

Start Asking The Right Questions

If there's one thing we'd encourage every business owner or marketing director to do after reading this, it's to start asking different questions.

Not "Can we post more often?", "Should we increase the budget?" or "How many people saw that campaign?".

Instead, ask why. Why are we doing this activity? What business objective is it supporting? How are we measuring whether it's actually working?

If you're working with an agency, challenge them on it too. Ask why they're recommending a particular campaign. Ask what success looks like before the work begins. Ask how they'll know if it's been successful, and what they'll do if it isn't.

Those conversations shouldn't feel uncomfortable. In fact, they should happen regularly.

Marketing should never become a checklist of activity that simply repeats month after month because that's what happened last month. Markets change, competitors change and businesses change. Your marketing should change with them.

The businesses that achieve the strongest return from marketing aren't necessarily the ones spending the most or producing the most content. More often than not, they're the ones asking better questions, making better decisions and being prepared to change direction when the evidence tells them to.