A company once came to us wanting help with a paid search campaign to drive more traffic to its website. Makes sense. More traffic meant more opportunities, and paid search could get them there.
Then we looked at the website. The bounce rate was nearly 90%. There were no meaningful calls to action. The messaging was me-too, and the content was out of date, among other things. Sending more people there would have meant paying a premium just to leave a bad first impression.
Paid search wasn’t the problem. The order of operations was.
For decades, we’ve worked to avoid becoming a push-button marketing partner. We want to be as easy as possible for clients to work with, but there’s a balancing act. Easy shouldn’t mean a client pushes the website button and we build a website, pushes the SEO button and we do SEO, or pushes the brand button, and we start designing a logo.
Push-button marketing is a little like buying lunch from a vending machine. You’re hungry, you push a button, and something drops into the tray. Immediate need satisfied. But most of us wouldn’t mistake that for a thoughtful way to eat. Marketing projects can work the same way. The request may be perfectly reasonable, but without enough context, one project leads to another without anyone stopping to ask what the business actually needs next.
Push-button marketing usually starts with a reasonable request
“We need a new website” is often a legitimate need. So is getting the word out, doing more on social media, sponsoring an event, improving SEO, or ordering something for the next trade show. The trouble starts when one of those requests gets considered on its own, without enough regard for the rest of the plan, the budget, or the business problem marketing is supposed to help solve.
That matters because marketing decisions compete with one another for time and for budget. If the goal is to increase awareness, advertising might be worth considering, but so might PR, events, content, partnerships, or something else. If the bigger need is to help people who are already considering the company make a decision, the answer may be completely different. The discipline shouldn’t drive the decision. The goal should.
Customer understanding should influence it, too. Research can tell us more than what customers think or which messages resonate. It can help us understand how they make decisions, where they go for information, what sources they trust, and which channels are part of that process. If customers in a particular market rely heavily on industry events to learn about companies, events deserve consideration. If certain social platforms, trade publications, search, or referrals play a larger role, that should influence where we allocate time and budget.
This is where specialists are enormously valuable. An advertising firm brings deep advertising expertise. A PR firm understands earned media. An SEO specialist knows search. We want that expertise at the table. We just don’t want one discipline, working in isolation, deciding how the whole marketing budget gets spent.
Without that bigger view, marketing can become a collection of individually reasonable recommendations. A website company builds the website. An SEO specialist works on search. A freelancer handles social. An event firm produces the event. Everybody does what they were hired to do, but nobody is necessarily responsible for deciding which priorities deserve more of the budget, which should wait, what needs to happen first, or how one piece could make the others more useful.
We’ve inherited plenty of good specialists from clients and kept working with them. If someone is smart, understands the business, and is providing value, we’d rather connect their work to the larger plan than replace them. The weak spot isn’t specialization. It’s expecting separately assigned work to somehow add up to a coherent marketing program on its own.
We’ve seen what happens. A recently completed website needs substantial messaging work. A CRM has been installed, but nobody knows how to use it. A social account with a real following has gone dark for months because the freelancer responsible disappeared. Different partners may be doing perfectly respectable work, but they’re working from different assumptions, different priorities, and sometimes different definitions of success.
Even good work can underperform when the pieces were never designed to work together.
First, figure out what deserves to be done
One of the principles we’ve used at Outmark for decades is simple:
You have to inventory everything before you prioritize anything.
That sounds obvious until an opportunity lands in somebody’s inbox. There’s a sponsorship available. Somebody has a new campaign idea. A salesperson wants a new piece of collateral. A software company has a compelling pitch. Each idea can look pretty good when the rest of the marketing isn’t sitting on the table next to it.
Whether a $20,000 opportunity is worth doing depends partly on what else that $20,000 could accomplish. Whether a website should come first depends on the condition of the positioning, messaging, brand, content, and other things the website will need. Whether the next dollar belongs in search, events, content, PR, sales support, or something else depends on what the business is trying to accomplish, what we know about customers, what has worked before, and what else is competing for the same money and attention.
You can’t make those comparisons one project at a time.
This is why planning matters to us in a very practical way. We inventory the possibilities, establish priorities, allocate time and budget, and make choices. Then we work the plan and learn from it. Our shorthand for that is Plan. Do. Review.
There’s research behind the value of bringing more than one function into marketing decisions, too. A cross-national study examining how influence over marketing activities was distributed inside companies link to article on jpworkman.com. opens in a new tab. found better business-unit performance when marketing decisions drew on more than one function rather than being concentrated in a single organizational silo. The details varied depending on the marketing activity, which is useful in itself: coordination doesn’t mean everybody gets an equal vote on everything. It means the right knowledge makes its way into the decision.
You pay for the silos whether you see them or not
Some of the cost of disconnected marketing is obvious. A website gets rewritten because the messaging should have been addressed first. Creative gets produced multiple times for different purposes because nobody saw the needs together. Partners spend time getting up to speed independently, and work gets revised when assumptions made in one silo don’t match decisions made somewhere else.
Some of the cost is much more mundane. Take printing. There are setup costs associated with a print run, so thinking ahead about quantities and related needs can change the economics considerably. Repeated small orders can mean paying those front-loaded costs over and over. The same basic problem shows up when media is bought one or two placements at a time, creative is commissioned à la carte, or content is repeatedly written from scratch because there isn’t an agreed messaging foundation to work from.
We’ve seen the physical version of this in swag closets. Companies accumulate boxes of promotional items bought for one event, one request, or one moment, with little thought given to inventory, actual demand, future uses, departmental needs, upcoming events, or what people might genuinely want. Sometimes they run out of useful things they could have purchased more efficiently. And sometimes they end up donating all the things nobody wanted in the first place.
Each decision can be defended on its own, but the waste becomes obvious when you see them together.
The work should make the other work better
The cost savings matter, but integration gives us something more valuable than efficiency. Work planned together can create opportunities that isolated projects miss.
An event is always more than an event. Planned with the rest of marketing in view, it can create a reason for sales outreach beforehand, useful content leading into it, photography or video while it’s happening, social material, customer conversations, follow-up afterward, and ideas that inform what the company does next.
The same thing is true with research, messaging, content, photography, creative, and dozens of other marketing investments. Customer research informs positioning, sales conversations, web copy, content, channel choices, and campaigns. A well-developed piece of source content can feed several channels. A photo shoot planned around upcoming needs can create an asset library instead of just solving one immediate request.
Marketing is hard enough without giving away the advantages that come from connecting the work. It takes time, money, attention, patience, and a willingness to learn when something doesn’t work the way everyone hoped. In all our years doing this, we’ve yet to encounter a client of any size with more time and money than they needed. Creating avoidable rework and missing opportunities to make one investment support another is an unforced error.
Research involving small and mid-sized companies points in the same direction. A study of marketing resources and performance among SMEs (abstract) link to article on sciencedirect.com. opens in a new tab. found that two stood out: a customer-oriented way of making decisions and an organizational structure that helped departments coordinate their work. In practical terms, companies performed better when customer needs helped shape decisions and when the organization was built to share that knowledge and act on it across functions.
That reinforces an important part of the push-button marketing problem. The voice of the customer shouldn’t live in a research report while individual marketing disciplines go off and make their own decisions. What we learn should affect what gets prioritized, where the budget goes, and how the pieces work together.
Somebody has to know enough to ask the right questions
There’s another practical problem with managing marketing one specialty at a time: the person investing in the work usually doesn’t know as much about the discipline as the person selling it.
That’s normal. A good web developer should know more about building websites than the client. An SEO specialist should know more about search. The same goes for media, PR, research, creative, social, events, and the rest. Clients hire specialists because they know things they don’t.
Now put six of those specialties around one company.
Who decides how much budget each deserves? Who knows whether the website really needs to be rebuilt or whether the bigger problem is the messaging? Who can tell whether the SEO recommendation fits what customers actually do? Who knows whether the event opportunity deserves another $20,000 or whether that money is more valuable somewhere else? And who makes sure the people doing all of that work know what the others are doing?
For small and mid-market companies, marketing often sits with a founder, sales leader, operations executive, or another capable person who already has a full-time job. They may understand the business extraordinarily well but have only a few hours a week available to manage marketing, and marketing may not be an area where they have deep experience. Once enough specialties are involved, it becomes unrealistic to expect someone running another part of the company to understand every discipline well enough to challenge recommendations, set priorities, and coordinate the work.
Another common answer is to hire someone junior and hand them marketing. Those people often work incredibly hard, but the structure puts them in a difficult position. They may be perfectly capable of executing campaigns, managing vendors, coordinating projects, or producing content while still being asked to provide a level of strategic leadership they haven’t had the chance to develop yet.
The company still needs experienced marketing leadership with enough visibility and enough time to see across the disciplines, challenge assumptions, make tradeoffs, and connect the work.
Without that, marketing can slowly become a series of push-button asks by default. A request comes in, somebody handles it, and everyone moves on to the next one. The company stays busy, but there’s not enough visibility of the whole picture to know whether all that activity is adding up to something.
Plans should change when there’s a reason to change them
During the year, we learn things. Something works better than expected, and we consider putting more behind it. Something struggles, and we have to decide whether it needs more time to gain traction or whether we’ve learned enough to stop. A new opportunity appears. Business priorities or budgets change.
The plan gives us a way to evaluate those changes against everything else we already agreed mattered.
If a worthwhile opportunity appears in month seven, we can look at what we’ve already prioritized, the budget we’ve committed, the results we’re seeing, and what remains ahead. Maybe we add budget. Maybe we defer something else. Maybe the new opportunity isn’t nearly as attractive once we see what we’d have to give up to pursue it.
We want those new ideas and opportunities. Some of the best changes we make during the year come from paying attention, asking questions, and learning as we go. The advantage of having a plan is that we can evaluate a new idea in context instead of treating it as one more thing to add to the pile.
Without that context, the decision is mostly a guess. The new thing gets added because it sounds good, or rejected because there doesn’t seem to be room, without a clear understanding of the tradeoff.
Review is what keeps the whole process honest. Plan. Do. Review. What did we expect? What actually happened? What did we learn? What, if anything, should we do differently because of it? Otherwise, measurement becomes reporting for reporting’s sake, and the next round of marketing starts back at square one.
Zoom out before you invest your time or money
Go back to the company that wanted more website traffic. If we’d treated the request as the assignment, we could have scoped a paid search campaign, built it, and reported on clicks and traffic. We might even have generated some inquiries.
But we would also have been paying to send more people into an experience that was already giving us cause for concern. The site didn’t make a strong case for the company, didn’t give visitors clear next steps, and was losing nearly nine out of 10 visitors. Before deciding how much to spend attracting more visitors, it made sense to understand what was happening to the ones already coming there.
Push-button marketing skips that question. The request becomes the assignment before anyone has stopped to ask whether it’s really the next thing that needs to happen.
Over time, a company can accumulate a surprising amount of marketing this way: partners, campaigns, platforms, assets, software, events, subscriptions, and invoices. Every decision has a story behind it. What’s harder to answer is whether those choices represent the best use of the company’s time and budget.
That’s why we inventory before we prioritize. Put the whole thing on the table. Look at the goals. Listen to customers. Look at what we’ve learned. Decide what matters most, allocate the resources, and make the pieces work together.
Then we get to work.
