The scariest thing? ☠️ No marketing strategy.

Welcome to this month’s edition of the Ask a Fractional CMO newsletter - where NIM’s Fractional CMOs Jen Kelly & Nicole Croizier answer the most pressing marketing questions from B2B leaders. If you have a question for us, submit it HERE.   

This month, we’re tackling a question about going ahead with "many marketing things" without first creating a marketing strategy.

Here's the question:

"We don't think we need to spend time on creating a marketing strategy, we'll just do a few of the marketing things to get started as that is a faster way for us to get traction. What would we be missing by not creating a marketing strategy for our company?"

Our answer:  When you jump straight into marketing tactics without a clear strategy, you risk creating a chaotic, disconnected mess that does more harm than good. Here’s what you miss—and the pain it brings—if you skip strategy and dive straight into isolated actions:  

No Support for Your Company Goals

When marketing operates without alignment with the company's broader goals, it often feels like a team working in isolation—ticking boxes on campaigns that seem relevant but ultimately miss the mark. The fundamental purpose of a marketing strategy is to serve as a bridge, directly connecting marketing initiatives to the company’s core objectives and demonstrating marketing’s value as a driver of growth. Without this bridge, leadership is left in the dark, questioning the role of marketing and potentially writing it off as just a “swag department.”

The first critical phase of building a marketing strategy—whether executed by an internal team or an external agency like ours—begins with understanding your company’s business goals in detail. This stage is about digging into the purpose behind every goal: What are the revenue targets? Who are the key audiences to win over this year? Are there new markets we are launching into?  How can marketing support sales most effectively? Armed with these insights, marketing can craft initiatives that speak directly to what matters most to the leadership team, positioning itself as an essential lever for the company’s success.  

Without this foundational understanding, the marketing team risks working in a silo, relying on last year’s campaigns or interpreting analytics without full context.

The result is often a set of well-intentioned but misaligned campaigns that don’t resonate with leadership’s vision.

This disconnect can leave executives feeling frustrated, saying things like, “Marketing doesn’t work for us,” or worse, dismissing it as mere fluff or a source of costly giveaways.  

By starting with an in-depth discovery of company goals, a strategic marketing team or agency aligns every piece of its work—from audience targeting to messaging, from content calendars to advertising spend—to ensure every initiative is tied back to those overarching goals. It’s this alignment that turns marketing from an isolated function into a strategic partner, actively contributing to the company’s growth and delivering visible, measurable value that leadership can see and appreciate.  

No Real Client Understanding

Without a discovery phase, you’re working with a blindfold on. Each ad, post, or email you launch is a shot in the dark, assuming you know what your customers want. Just because all of your leadership team gets together and says what they think your clients know and like about your products/services, we will tell you that 100 times out of 100 with all the client insights interviews we have done, we are ALWAYS reporting back interesting/insightful/little known messages from the clients about what they like and what they don't. The messages are always surprising. You need to know this stuff about your clients. Do not skip this step. Otherwise, you think you’re speaking their language, but they don’t even recognize your message. The result? Wasted time, wasted budget, and a constant churn of messaging that sounds hollow—failing to hit the mark because it’s built on guesswork instead of insight.

Competitors: You Look Just Like Them

Forgoing competitive analysis is like choosing to ignore what’s happening on the battlefield. Your competitors are out there, seizing market share, learning from each other, and targeting your clients with laser precision. Meanwhile, you’re charging ahead without a clue, setting up tactics that may already be obsolete or ineffective. Instead of standing out, you’re blending in—or worse, getting drowned out.

Lack of Clear Message and Client Focus

When you skip the work of defining your core message and client personas, you’re essentially shouting into the void. Your marketing becomes a muddle of mixed messages that appeal to no one in particular. Your audience may see you as inconsistent or worse—irrelevant. Imagine pouring your budget into campaigns that don’t resonate because they don’t even know who you’re talking to.

Disjointed Customer Journey

Without mapping your customers' journey, your tactics are just random touchpoints. A client clicks an ad, reads a blog post, and then... nothing. They’re left hanging, unsure where to go next. Each step is disconnected from the last, and without a clear path forward, clients drop off, baffled by the lack of coherence or get stuck in your pipeline without a follow-up plan. Then you're demanding MORE LEADS when perfectly good almost-ready-to-be-customers leads wilt in your CRM. The pain? All that effort is just to watch potential clients slip through the cracks due to a broken, incomplete journey.

Random, Ineffective Content

Operating without a content plan means producing content on a whim—one blog post here, a social media update there. There’s no story, no consistent presence, and your credibility suffers. Instead of building authority, you look unfocused, sporadic, and frankly, amateur. Without a strategic plan, your content flounders in obscurity, failing to attract, engage, or retain clients. "Maybe marketing doesn't work for us". 

Wasting Resources on Low-Impact Activities

When you lack priority growth recommendations, you’re essentially throwing money at every idea, hoping something sticks. But nothing does. You’ll find yourself chasing after low-impact activities, spreading your budget thin, and watching minimal returns come back. The result? Burned-out teams, strained budgets, and the frustrating realization that you’ve been busy, but not effective.

Stagnant, Scattershot Marketing

Without a unifying action plan, your team is left scrambling, unsure where to focus their energy. Initiatives collide, budgets overspend, and at the end of the quarter, there’s little to show for it. Instead of a well-oiled machine, your marketing becomes a pile of parts, each spinning in its own direction, perhaps working well on its own, but working at cross-purposes and leaving you wondering where the results are.

What's Next?

Skipping strategy is more than just a risk—it’s setting yourself up for confusion, inconsistency, and lost opportunities. It’s working hard but having little to show, watching competitors speed past while you’re bogged down by your own missteps.

Ready for a different way? Our proven Strategy First Program will get you on your way to clarity and cohesion in under 60 days.  

Want to talk about it?   Book Your Call Now

As of this month, we are an official Ally partner of the Association of Consulting Engineering Companies of Ontario.

Could we be more different? Engineering and marketing?Not as far apart as you may think. 

You may be surprised to learn that many of the large engineering firms have equally large marketing departments.

One company I spoke to had an in-house team of 40 in their marketing department!

We'll be keen to support the larger firm's in-house teams as well as the smaller firms as they explore what marketing can do for them even in a very RFP-driven sales cycle. 

We've had a lot of experience raising the professional and executive profiles of leadership in RFP-driven environments, going so far as to have a client tell us "We're getting invited to RFPs we hadn't been considered for before working with your team."

Lead a Company? Let's do Lunch

Our monthly Founder's Lunch is a 90-minute meal at a local (Greater Toronto Area) restaurant with 4-8 other business owners.

Typically all are meeting for the first time. It is a meaningful and effective way to meet other owners/founders/leaders and to share a meal and good conversation in a small group setting.

These have been wildly successful with many attendees benefitting greatly from the new connections and the leap taken to meet new people.

If you would like to join the next one on November 28, 2024, please email [email protected] for details.