Why Your Marketing Isn't Driving Revenue

Jul 15

7 min read

Why isn't your marketing driving revenue? Explore the strategic, positioning and leadership issues that can prevent marketing from supporting business growth with Erica Fraser, Founder Withers & Sloane.

Marketing is under increasing pressure to demonstrate commercial value. Businesses want to understand how their investment in marketing is contributing to growth, generating opportunities and ultimately supporting revenue.

Yet many organisations reach a point where marketing activity is increasing without a corresponding improvement in commercial performance. There are campaigns running, content being produced, social channels being maintained and agencies or specialists working across different areas, but the business is still asking the same question: where is the return?

The answer often requires a closer look at how the marketing function is structured, how clearly the business understands its audience and proposition, and how closely marketing is connected to the wider commercial strategy.

Marketing activity needs commercial direction

It is possible for a business to be extremely active in marketing while lacking a clear understanding of what that activity is designed to achieve.

A company might publish regularly, invest in paid media, attend events, send email campaigns and generate substantial website traffic. Those activities can all have a legitimate role within a marketing strategy, but their value depends on whether they are contributing to clearly defined business objectives.

Marketing needs a clear sense of direction. That starts with understanding what the business wants to achieve, which customers it needs to reach and what those customers need to understand before they are prepared to engage.

When those decisions have not been made clearly, marketing teams can find themselves moving from one activity to another without a consistent strategic framework.

This can also make performance difficult to evaluate. If the organisation has not established what marketing is expected to contribute, it becomes difficult to distinguish meaningful progress from activity that simply looks productive.

Your positioning may be limiting your growth

One of the first areas to examine when marketing performance is disappointing is positioning.

Customers need to understand what a business offers, who it is for and why its proposition deserves consideration. If that message is unclear, inconsistent or too similar to competitors, marketing becomes considerably harder.

This is particularly relevant for established businesses that have evolved over time. Their services may have changed, their customers may have changed and their ambitions may have changed, while their messaging has remained rooted in an earlier stage of the business.

Marketing then has to work harder to explain the organisation.

Strong positioning gives marketing a clearer foundation. It allows the business to communicate its value more consistently across its website, content, campaigns, sales activity and wider brand presence.

This was a significant part of one Withers & Sloane client engagement, which began with a detailed assessment of market positioning and a diagnostic focused on audience, customer needs, problem-solving, brand perception and the communication of services.

That work provided the foundation for a structured marketing strategy and subsequent implementation.

You may be reaching the wrong customers

Marketing performance also depends heavily on the quality of the audience being reached.

A campaign can generate strong engagement while producing very little commercial value if it reaches people who are unlikely to become customers. Similarly, increasing website traffic will have limited impact if the additional visitors have little relevance to the business.

Understanding the customer therefore needs to go further than defining an audience by industry, job title, location or company size.

Businesses need to understand the problems their customers are trying to solve, the circumstances that create demand, the factors influencing their decisions and the reasons they may hesitate before buying.

This understanding should shape the marketing strategy.

When the organisation knows who it is trying to reach and what matters to those people, decisions around content, channels, messaging and campaigns become considerably more focused.

Marketing and sales need to work from the same commercial understanding

Another reason marketing can struggle to generate revenue is a lack of alignment between marketing and sales.

Marketing may be measured on leads while sales is measured on opportunities and revenue. If those functions are operating from different definitions of a valuable prospect, tension can develop quickly.

Marketing may believe it is generating strong opportunities, while sales considers many of them unsuitable. Sales may identify recurring objections from prospects without those insights feeding back into marketing strategy.

The result is a disconnect between the way demand is generated and the way it is converted.

A commercially focused marketing function should have a close understanding of the sales process. Marketing should know what makes a prospect valuable, which objections regularly arise and what information customers need before making a decision.

Sales insight should then inform positioning, content, campaigns and customer communications.

This creates a much stronger connection between marketing activity and commercial outcomes.

Your business may need a stronger marketing strategy

A marketing strategy provides the framework for making those decisions.

It should establish the audiences that matter, the position the organisation wants to occupy, the messages it needs to communicate, the channels it should prioritise and the role marketing will play in achieving the wider objectives of the business.

This gives the marketing function a basis for deciding where to focus investment and resources.

Without that strategic foundation, organisations can become overly dependent on individual campaigns or channels. When something performs well, they do more of it. When something performs poorly, they replace it. Over time, marketing can become a sequence of disconnected decisions rather than a coherent programme of activity.

Strategy creates greater consistency.

It also makes it easier for everyone involved in marketing to understand what they are working towards.

You may need marketing leadership before you need more resource

When marketing performance is disappointing, increasing headcount can appear to be the obvious solution.

There are circumstances where additional resource is necessary. However, businesses should first establish whether the existing function has sufficient leadership, structure and strategic direction.

A business can have talented marketing professionals and still lack someone with responsibility for the overall marketing function. It can have several specialist agencies and still lack coordination. It can have a substantial marketing budget and still lack a clear framework for allocating it.

In these circumstances, additional resource may increase activity without addressing the underlying issue.

Senior marketing leadership can provide a different kind of intervention. A Fractional CMO or Fractional Marketing Director can assess the current position, establish priorities, develop the strategy and determine what capability the organisation actually requires.

That capability can then be built around the strategy rather than assembling a team first and attempting to determine its purpose afterwards.

Fractional marketing leadership can provide the missing layer

Fractional marketing leadership is particularly relevant to businesses that have reached a level of complexity where marketing requires senior direction but do not necessarily need a permanent full-time CMO.

The model provides access to experienced marketing leadership while allowing the organisation to bring in specialist capability according to its requirements.

One Withers & Sloane client used this approach to create a hybrid structure that combined senior strategic leadership with specialist expertise across areas including content, organic social media, business development, lead generation, sales engagement, video, photography and digital content.

The resulting marketing capability was described as fully functioning while avoiding the cost and rigidity associated with building a traditional internal team.

The commercial results provided a further indication of the impact. The organisation attributed three new contracts directly to LinkedIn campaigns developed through the marketing strategy, alongside an estimated return on investment of more than 1200%.

Start with the business rather than the channel

One of the most useful questions a leadership team can ask is whether it is starting its marketing decisions in the right place.

It is easy to begin with channels. Should we invest more in LinkedIn? Should we increase our SEO budget? Should we run more paid advertising? Should we produce more content?

Those decisions should follow a much more fundamental set of questions.

What is the business trying to achieve? Which customers represent the greatest opportunity? What makes the organisation relevant to them? Where does the current customer journey perform well? Where are opportunities being lost? What does the market currently think about the brand? What needs to change?

Once those questions have been answered, the role of individual marketing channels becomes much clearer.

The channel becomes part of the strategy rather than the strategy itself.

Marketing needs to demonstrate its contribution to the business

Marketing should be capable of explaining how it contributes to the organisation's objectives.

That does not mean every piece of activity can be directly attributed to revenue. Brand awareness, reputation, positioning and long-term demand creation can all have significant commercial value.

It does mean that marketing leadership should understand the relationship between investment, activity and business performance.

The client experience at the centre of the Withers & Sloane case study demonstrates this principle. Alongside the development of a structured marketing strategy and stronger digital presence, the work generated measurable commercial outcomes and improved the organisation's marketing infrastructure.

The client's assessment of the partnership was particularly strong, describing the work as having a “significant impact” on ongoing performance and representing “the true meaning of working in partnership.”

If your marketing isn't driving revenue, look at the whole function

When marketing performance is disappointing, the answer may involve changing campaigns, channels or investment. But those decisions should come after the organisation has examined the fundamentals.

Look at the positioning. Look at the audience. Look at the proposition. Look at the customer journey. Look at the relationship between marketing and sales. Look at the strategy. Look at the capability and leadership behind the function.

A business may discover that it needs additional specialists. It may need to change its positioning. It may need to improve its sales process. It may need to invest in a particular channel.

It may also discover that what it needs most is experienced marketing leadership capable of bringing all of those elements together.

Withers & Sloane works with organisations that want marketing to become more strategic, commercially focused and aligned with the realities of the business. The approach combines senior marketing leadership with specialist capability, creating a marketing function designed around the organisation's objectives and requirements.

Effective marketing starts with understanding the business, understanding the customer and having the leadership to connect the two.