I’ve walked into a lot of marketing orgs. Different industries, different stages, different acronyms on the org chart. And almost every time, the “strategy” deck looks the same: six or seven initiatives on one slide, no connective tissue between them. Run more webinars. Refresh the website. Launch an ABM motion. Post more on LinkedIn. Try podcast sponsorships, because someone’s neighbor tried podcast sponsorships and it “seemed to work.”
That’s not a strategy. That’s a shopping list with a font upgrade.
A strategy tells you why those things, and not the other twenty things you could’ve picked instead. A to-do list just tells you what’s next. Most teams never notice the difference, because a to-do list feels productive — you can point to it in a QBR, check things off, watch the bar chart move. It feels like progress.
But motion isn’t the same as progress. I’ve watched teams sprint hard, sweat visibly, hit every deadline on the list — in a direction nobody actually chose on purpose.
The question nobody asks first
Before anyone picks a tactic, somebody has to answer a much less exciting question: what’s actually going on. Not what should we do — what’s true, right now. Where’s demand coming from. Where’s it drying up. What’s broken in the funnel that everyone’s been politely stepping around for two quarters because fixing it would mean admitting someone built it wrong.
That’s the diagnosis. Nobody gets promoted for writing a sharp one. Skip it anyway, and every tactic downstream is a guess wearing a decision’s clothes.
I’ve made this mistake myself. Early on, I inherited a marketing function where the instinct — mine included — was to just start adding channels. More content, more paid, more automation, more everything, like we were trying to win an eating contest against a competitor we’d never actually met. It took sitting with the real numbers, and with actual customers, to realize the problem wasn’t a lack of activity. We were spending real money capturing demand that didn’t exist yet, in a market where almost nobody was shopping.
Once you see that, the fix isn’t “do more.” It’s “do the right two things, and quietly retire the other eight before anyone asks who approved them.”
Strategy is a filter, not a wishlist
Here’s the part people get backwards. Strategy isn’t the exciting stuff — the big swing, the bold campaign, the rebrand nobody asked for. It’s mostly a filter. The thing that lets you say no to good ideas because they’re not the right ideas for where you are right now.
If your diagnosis says nobody remembers you when they finally enter the market, your strategy is about reach and memorability — not squeezing another three percent out of a retargeting campaign that’s already working exactly as hard as it’s ever going to work. If your diagnosis says brand recognition is fine but the conversion path is broken, do the opposite. Same company, same budget, same team, a completely different plan — depending entirely on what’s actually true underneath it.
Most plans skip straight to tactics because tactics are where the fun is. Nobody dreams about writing a diagnosis. Everybody dreams about the campaign. But the campaign only works if it’s solving the actual problem, and you don’t know the actual problem until you’ve gone and looked for it — which takes longer than an afternoon and is considerably less fun than naming a campaign.
A simple gut check
Next time someone hands you a marketing plan, yours or someone else’s, ask: what problem is this solving, and how do we know that’s the real one? If the answer is a shrug, or “well, everyone’s doing content marketing,” you’re holding a to-do list in a strategy costume, and it’s not even a good costume. The seams are showing.
The plans that actually move a business almost always start somewhere less exciting than a big idea. They start with someone willing to sit with an uncomfortable, specific truth — and build backward from there. Everything else is just staying busy, professionally.