Key Takeaways
- Companies often mistake marketing activity for growth strategy, leading them to solve the wrong problem.
- Sustainable growth starts with understanding where your acquisition system is breaking down, rather than simply launching more campaigns.
- Before investing more in marketing, build the visibility needed to make better growth decisions.
One of my first conversations with a financial services client stayed with me for years.
I had been brought in to help improve how the company acquired customers digitally and what it could do to improve what was a far below expectation performance of its digital customer acquisition. As introductions made their way around the organisation, I kept hearing the same explanation.
“Lola is here to run some campaigns for us.”
That was not exactly the whole truth; yes, as part of the entire process, I would design some new campaigns for the client, but this was just a minute part of the engagement. Yet, this was what was mentioned the most….campaigns.
The issue, however, was that the business already had campaigns. Several, in fact. Different agencies were running paid media. Budgets were being spent every month. New creatives were going live. Reports were being circulated. From the outside, it looked like a busy, well-oiled marketing machine.
But activity and effectiveness aren’t the same thing.
The company didn’t need more campaigns. It needed a clearer understanding of why all that activity wasn’t producing the level of growth it expected.
Looking Beneath the Surface: the Growth vs Marketing Conversation
That experience reinforced something I’ve seen repeatedly over the years; when growth slows, many organisations instinctively look to marketing for answers. The assumption is that if results aren’t improving, the campaigns must need fixing. In fairness, this is sometimes true; however, it quite often isn’t.
In this case, as we dug into the acquisition process, it became obvious that marketing was only a small part of the story. The issues were as colourful as they were situated within different departments:
- Audience targeting had become so broad that different customer groups were often treated the same way.
- There was little visibility into how people moved through the acquisition journey from the top of the funnel, making it difficult to pinpoint where potential customers were dropping off.
- Attribution was inconsistent, so connecting marketing activity to business outcomes involved more guesswork than evidence.
- Even performance reporting focused largely on channel metrics, offering very little insight into how the overall acquisition engine was performing.
None of those problems could be solved simply by launching another campaign.
In fact, introducing new campaigns would probably have made things worse. More activity would simply create more data, more variables and more noise without addressing the underlying issues.
One of my favourite analogies around this is trying to improve the fuel efficiency of a car without first checking whether the engine is working properly. You might see small improvements, but you’ll never know what’s really holding performance back.
The Danger of Solving the Wrong Problem
One of the biggest misconceptions about growth is that it’s primarily a marketing challenge.
It’s understandable why people think that way. Marketing is the most visible part of customer acquisition. It’s where the campaigns, creative assets and media spend live, so it’s often the first place leadership looks when numbers start to slow down.
But growth is rarely the responsibility of one function. It’s the result of how marketing, product, data, technology, customer experience and analytics work together. Weakness in any one of those areas can limit the performance of everything else.
I’ve seen organisations invest heavily in new campaigns when what they really needed was better measurement. Others have changed agencies when the real issue was poor audience segmentation. Some have doubled marketing budgets without first understanding which parts of the customer journey were leaking potential customers.
In each case, marketing became the answer before anyone had even properly diagnosed the question.
Better Growth Starts with Better Diagnosis
One key principle I’ve carried into every growth engagement since then is to encourage clients to resist the urge to prescribe solutions before the issues have been diagnosed. As a mandatory requirement, every engagement kicks off with a detailed audit of the client’s current systems and setup. That also forms the baseline for measuring impact and the results achieved from the engagement.
Before discussing campaign ideas or media budgets, I want to understand how the entire acquisition system works. Can we see where prospects enter the funnel? Do we know where they’re dropping off? Can we confidently attribute conversions to the activities influencing them? Are we measuring business outcomes or just marketing outputs?
Those questions usually reveal far more than another creative review ever could.
Yes, marketing matters. Great marketing absolutely drives growth. But it can only perform as well as the system surrounding it.
Want to Improve Growth? Improve the Structure
When organisations improve the visibility, measurement and structure of their entire acquisition system, marketing becomes more effective almost by default. That’s not because the campaigns changed overnight, but because the business finally understands where to focus its effort.
That’s why I’ve come to believe that not every growth challenge is a marketing challenge. More often than not, it’s first a diagnosis challenge. And until you solve that, every solution risks being aimed at the wrong problem.