Marketing teams are always busy. They run campaigns, write content, manage social networks, perfect landing pages, and track a whole lot of metrics. However, busy is not the same as effective and doing a lot of things does not necessarily mean making progress.
The most costly mistake in marketing is not doing things badly, but rather doing the right things that lead in the wrong direction. A team can get every tactical execution right, meet all their internal deadlines, and come up with creative work, yet grow their business by the wrong approach entirely. In essence, a team is still selling but not to those customers who pay the most.
Discovering such a disconnect from the business early on will spare you months of wasted effort and budget. The signs of trouble reveal themselves in a number of ways such as the language teams use to describe their work, their choice of metrics, and how they allocate their time. Most startup founders do not notice these clues until the gap becomes so large that it can no longer be ignored.
They’re Obsessed With Metrics That Don’t Connect to Revenue
Enter a marketing meeting and hear what people are talking about. If their talk is mainly about social media engagement rates, growth of website traffic, the size of the email list, or the amount of content produced, then you are witnessing a team that is optimizing for vanity metrics.
These figures seem like a good idea to be tracked because they move. You can publish more content and see the number of followers go up. You can modify your SEO strategy and watch the traffic go up. The metrics react to the efforts, thus giving a false feeling of progress, which at the same time, hides the fact that none of them is contributing to actual business outcomes.
The true test lies in your marketing team’s capability to establish a direct connection between their work and the company’s revenue. If they tell you about a twenty percent rise in Instagram followers but cannot specify how many of these followers became leads or customers, they are working on the wrong problem. If they boast about publishing fifty blog posts in this quarter but have no record of which ones resulted in sales, then they are simply keeping themselves busy without adding value.
Every Problem Gets Solved With More Creative
When marketing teams are desperate to get creative solutions to every problem, what they are doing in fact is usually finding some nice easy, less painful problems which they can avoid. Low conversion rates? Let’s redesign the landing page. Declining engagement? We need fresher content. Poor ad performance? Time to refresh the creative.
Creative is sometimes the solution, but hardly ever the only solution or even the main one. Quite frequently the problem is positioning, targeting, offer structure, pricing perception, or channel selection. These are strategic problems that creative can’t fix, but teams still run to creative solutions because they are more exciting and feel more like “marketing.”
This creative, first bias reveals itself in how teams allocate their time. They can spend three weeks on a brand refresh while not realizing that their targeting is wrong and they are attracting the wrong audience. They can be so concerned about the visual identity and the messaging tone while there are clear gaps in their conversion funnel that lose eighty percent of interested prospects.
The deeper issue is that creative work is how many marketers define themselves professionally. They joined marketing to be creative, so they instinctively frame problems in ways that allow creative solutions. Without someone pushing them to think strategically about business fundamentals the kind of perspective a Mark Evans business coach would bring teams drift toward what’s comfortable rather than what’s necessary.
They Can’t Explain Why They Chose Their Current Priorities
Ask your marketing folks why they are doing their current projects and really listen to the answer. If you get “because it’s in the plan,” “we always do this in Q1” or “our competitor is doing it, ” then you are watching a team that is executing without great strategic thinking.
Great marketing departments can explain to you the business rationale behind their priorities. They decided to work on customer retention this quarter because the data shows that while acquisition is good, churn is killing growth. They are creating case studies as sales have been losing deals at the final stage due to lack of proof. They are redoing the email nurture sequence because analysis showed a significant drop, off at day fourteen.
Teams that are working on the wrong problems cannot give this kind of strategic explanation. Their priorities come from laziness, imitation, or their personal interests rather than a thorough investigation of where marketing can have the greatest impact on business right now.
There’s a Growing Gap Between Marketing and Sales
When marketing and sales start to have different perspectives of reality, it is often the case that marketing is solving problems sales dont have while at the same time ignoring the problems that sales are in desperate need to have solved. Marketing praises itself for hitting its MQL targets while sales complain about the lead quality. Marketing brags about engagement metrics while sales is unable to get prospects to take meetings.
This misunderstanding manifests in the way the two teams communicate. Sales mentions the specific objections they are hearing, the size of the deals they are seeing and the competitors they are losing to. Marketing, on the other hand, talks about impressions, reach, and brand sentiment. They are in different worlds, which means that marketing is not addressing the issues that sales needs in order to close business.
The distance becomes even more significant if marketing continues to be a lone ranger, throwing their own metrics around and not having regular, meaningful discussions with the revenue team. They are setting themselves up against targets that are not in line with what sales needs to be successful, thereby creating activities that, from an internal perspective, look productive but dont result in closed deals.
They’re Reacting Instead of Preventing
One of the major reasons for teams always being in the reactive mode is them solving the wrong problems. They are always reacting to the symptoms and not the causes. For instance, they will be redesigning the landing pages because the conversion rate has dropped when they should have been continuously testing and optimizing the landing pages. They will be creating content for the next day, screaming when they should have been keeping the content engine running consistently.
This reactive cycle turns into a vicious cycle. The team is so overwhelmed with the present fire that they are never getting a chance to do the strategic work which would prevent the crises in the future. They are aware that they should be creating better systems, refining their targeting, or clarifying their positioning, but something urgent always comes up, and it takes precedence.
The root cause is mostly a lack of a clear prioritization framework. In the absence of mutually agreed-upon criteria on what matters most, everything appears equally important, and the loudest voice or the newest crisis wins the day. Teams thus focus on reducing the time it takes to respond to problems rather than on their ability to solve the right problems in the first place.
The Work Looks Good But Results Stay Flat
One of the most deceiving symptoms of a team tackling the wrong issues is that everything seems to be going well on the surface but business outcomes don’t get any better. The campaigns are perfectly carried out, the content is refined, the analytics dashboards are detailed, nevertheless, the revenue growth does not show any signs of change.
This trouble is more difficult to solve than a clear failure because there is no obvious failure to blame. The team is achieving their internal metrics, their work quality is excellent, and they’re always active. The problem is not execution but that they are executing on the wrong strategy or solving problems that don’t contribute to growth.
To get out of this being marketing requires enthusiastic questioning whether marketing activities are leading to business outcomes. Posing the question of whether the solutions the team is providing are actually the issues that are limiting the business from growing. Being open to the idea of giving up things that seem productive but in fact don’t drive results.