Marketing feels chaotic and you don’t know what works.
Your problem is that you are thinking about doing marketing as one thing. A big complicated activity that only someone experienced can deliver.
To understand it start by breaking it down.
There are three different seats you need at the table in order to not only do marketing, but know that you’re doing it well.
Seat 1: Market insights
Understanding your market. Understanding the client, the industry, what problems people have, and what solutions they’re going to look for.
Seat 2: Strategy
With those insights, you have to work out a way to win. Which can be as simple as knowing what to post on LinkedIn, or as complex as a positioning strategy, a content strategy, channel strategies.
Seat 3: Execution
Actually doing the thing you decided to do. The LinkedIn posting, the networking, etc.
The mistake you can make is thinking of all of this as one activity - “marketing”.
Firstly, no-one can do all of these things really well, so you won’t be able to, so you’ll give up and not do marketing.
And if you don’t give up you’ll outsource and find an expert.
But if you’re outsourcing all three of these things together, then that won’t work either.
Because no one can do all of these things well. That was my ‘firstly’. I’ve lost track of my secondly. Let’s not worry and instead get into what you should do.
Your responsibility
The market insights seat is one you have to sit in as the founder.
Not sitting in it is basically not doing your job.
You can’t outsource this for two reasons.
Firstly, you need that market intelligence to lead your business. You have this in your head, it’s how you got here, you just need to get it out and organise it.
Secondly (nailed it), if you outsource it, the person you’re outsourcing it to just will never understand it as well as you do.
They might be a marketer for agencies, even specialising in your type of agency. But, as they’ll probably remind you in their pitch deck, positioning is about being different. There’s only one of your agency.
Your market insights are unique and you have to own them.
So if you want to do marketing well, outsourcing this bit means you’re already not doing it as well as you could be.
Then strategy.
Your responsibility about strategy is to understand it, believe in it, and ensure that it gets seen through until it’s either working or needs changing.
You don’t have to form the strategy. It’s fine to get someone more experienced to do that. But you can’t just get a PDF off them, shake hands and pay an invoice. You need to be involved.
You also need to make sure the strategy is independent from execution.
A common mistake is to outsource strategy to the executors.
There is an incredible amount of things you can choose to execute on. Common tactics, less common tactics, variants on tactics. Every channel’s got an expert. And every channel expert believes you should start with their channel.
If you just pick a channel, go and ask them, “How are you going to get more leads?” They will reverse engineer a strategy, probably asking you insight and strategy questions about your ICP and positioning and they’ll come up with a really tight-sounding strategy for their channel.
They won’t consider other channels, hugely limiting your strategy.
They’re a social media agency, so they’re going to recommend social. They do SEO, so they’re going to find SEO problems. They run ads, so ads are the answer.
That’s not their fault and it’s not dishonest. It’s their business model. Just like you believe in and recommend your own agency’s particular specialism.
They start with the tactic they sell and work backwards to justify it. That can’t be your marketing plan. You need to start with a strategy-agnostic strategy and then you can outsource the execution to someone brilliant and any extra strategic depth they bring is a value add.
The reality
In practice the three seats are an abstraction you need to be aware of. In reality they do blend.
Finding independent strategists is hard and finding executors who are great at strategy can be valuable (if they are doing the right channel for you, or you get lucky).
The three seats help you see clearly how it all works and the principles to stay on top of are:
- Own market insights
- Have strategy separate from execution
- Don’t start execution first
The opportunity
So to recap: you have to sit in the market insights seat. You need to understand the marketing strategy work. And then you can outsource the execution.
But as well as a responsibility, getting involved in the right seats is also an opportunity.
When you own market insights and combine that with strategic thinking, something interesting happens.
You can do unique things.
And unique things are the best marketing.
Here’s what I mean: if you hand your client knowledge to an agency and say “go do marketing,” they’re going to run it through their standard playbook.
You’ll end up with marketing that looks like everyone else’s. Because they’re using the same approach as every other agency in your space.
But if you sit in seat 1 and understand seat 2, you can collaborate with execution partners and create something actually different.
Your deep understanding of the client + strategic marketing thinking = details that actually differentiate you.
This is why some agencies have marketing that feels authentic and distinctive while others feel generic and interchangeable.
It’s not that one hired better marketers. It’s that one owned their area while the other outsourced the whole thing.
You already have the unfair advantage (you know your client). You just need to protect it by staying in seat 1 and learning enough about seat 2 to direct seat 3 intelligently.
That’s how you create marketing that’s you understand and that’s actually yours.