When "Doing Marketing" Isn't Enough
Here's something we see all the time: a company invests in marketing (social media campaigns, paid ads, content, email, etc.) and leadership assumes the problem is execution when results fall short. But often it's not an execution problem at all.
Sixty percent of marketing budgets get wasted on activities that don't move the business forward. Not neccesarily because anyone chose bad tactics. Because there's no strategy connecting those tactics to what actually matters.
The companies that figure this out? They see returns that are 2 to 5 times higher than their competitors. McKinsey estimates that $150 to $200 billion in marketing spend globally could work harder if it had strategic direction. Even well-run companies leave 10-20% of their budgets on the table.
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What We Found
Three out of four business failures trace back to marketing problems. But they're not creative problems or campaign problems. They're positioning problems. Pricing problems. Problems with how a company talks about what it does and why it matters.
The research also shows companies with documented marketing strategies are 313% more likely to report success. They achieve 50% median ROI improvement compared to businesses that just execute tactics. Those aren't small differences.
Your marketing budget is funding someone's growth. The only question is whether it's yours or your competitors'.
The shift toward strategic marketing has created new opportunities for accessing expertise too. Sixty-four percent of marketing leaders now work with fractional strategic talent. Fractional CMO adoption is growing 60%+ annually. Companies are realizing they don't necessarily need full-time strategic leadership but they do need the right strategic framework executed well.
Strategy isn't overhead. It's what makes everything else work. Without it, you're running expensive experiments that teach your competitors what works in your market.
