Why your marketing isn’t successful—and how to fix it.
One common symptom your business, brand and marketing strategies are out of alignment?
Your teams struggle to write crisp copy.
I often see this when companies race straight to marketing, hoping their content and campaigns will solve for a lack of upstream strategic decision-making to define the business and brand.
But what ends up happening is this marketing never quite hits the mark because there’s no firm platform established for teams to anchor to. No shared business objectives or brand strategy, including a value proposition, brand positioning, tone or storyline people know is “right.”
So, marketing team leads often instead default to briefs that focus solely on their specific remit without articulating the broader context and alignment to the overall business. And in turn, creative teams then default to generic, high-level messages that don’t really say much and a tone that is more middle of the road so they don’t risk getting it “wrong.”
The biggest risk with this “marketing-first” approach is a “me-too” brand that sounds and acts like most of the others in its category. The gains from marketing become marginal.
While it’s tempting to see copy and campaigns as a quick fix for strategy, working this way can be a big waste of resources—and fail to deliver a strong return on investment. (The same goes for developing business and brand strategies in parallel, as marketing is rolled out.)
But solving this doesn’t take an overhaul, necessarily.
It does take assessing where marketing messages and campaigns don’t sync up to business, brand and customer ambitions. Then shoring up the strategic platform and connecting the spaces in-between so nothing falls through the cracks.
Only then can content and campaigns work together as one with the broader business and brand to deliver tangible value.