There’s a conversation I’ve had dozens of times over the years, and it almost always starts the same way.
A business owner gets in touch about their marketing. The website isn’t converting. The social media isn’t gaining traction. The campaigns they’ve run haven’t produced the results they were hoping for. They want a fresh approach, a new strategy, something that will finally start to move the needle.
And I genuinely love those conversations, because marketing is something I care about deeply – I’ve spent over twenty years in it, I hold Chartered Marketer status, and I’ve seen what good marketing can do for a growing business.
But fairly early in most of those conversations, something becomes clear. The marketing isn’t actually the problem.
The symptoms are marketing. The cause is usually strategy.
When a business’s messaging feels unclear or inconsistent, it’s rarely because the copywriter wasn’t good enough or the design wasn’t on-brand. It’s because the positioning – who this business is for, what it uniquely offers, why someone should choose it over the alternatives – was never clearly defined in the first place.
When campaigns don’t convert, it’s rarely a targeting issue or a budget issue. It’s usually because the offer itself hasn’t been properly thought through. What are we asking people to do? Why would they do it now? What’s the specific value they’ll receive?
When a brand feels scattered or incoherent across different channels and touchpoints, it’s almost always a symptom of a leadership team that hasn’t sat down and agreed clearly, specifically, collectively, on what this business stands for and where it’s going.
These are strategy problems. Marketing can’t fix them, no matter how much you spend.
What happens when you fix the strategy first
I worked with a business a couple of years ago that had invested significantly in a new website, a rebrand, and a social media programme. Twelve months in, the results were disappointing. Enquiries hadn’t increased meaningfully. Conversion was still frustratingly low.
When we sat down together, it didn’t take long to see what was happening. The business was trying to serve four distinctly different types of clients with one marketing voice, and inevitably, the message was landing clearly with none of them.
We spent a day on strategy. We defined their primary audience with real specificity. We articulated what made their offer different in language that actually meant something to that audience. We agreed on a clear positioning statement that the whole team could work from.
Then we rewrote the homepage in an afternoon.
Within six weeks, enquiry quality had improved noticeably. Within three months, conversion was up significantly, not because we’d spent more on marketing, but because the marketing was finally saying something clear to the right people.
The questions worth asking before your next marketing investment
Before commissioning a new website, a rebrand, or a fresh round of campaigns, it’s worth sitting honestly with a few questions.
Do we have a clear, agreed definition of who our ideal client is, specifically, not generally? Can every member of the leadership team articulate what makes this business genuinely different from its competitors? Do we have a positioning that is distinct enough to be memorable, and honest enough to be credible? Is our strategy, our direction, our priorities, our goals for the next one to three years – clear enough to inform every marketing decision we make?
If the answers to those questions are uncertain or inconsistent across the team, more marketing spend is unlikely to be the solution. A strategic conversation probably is.
Where to start
The good news is that getting this clarity doesn’t require a six-month project or an enormous investment of time. In our experience, a focused one or two-day strategic workshop with the right people and the right facilitation can produce the kind of clarity that transforms how a business communicates – and how it grows.
If this resonates and you’d like to explore what that might look like for your business, we’d love to have a conversation. You can book a free discovery call with us at justelle.co.uk or call Jo directly on 07843 428711.
