Build around intent, not channels: Why growing businesses need marketing leadership, not just marketing activity.

Marketing can look very busy from the outside.

You might have someone managing social. An agency running paid media. Someone looking after the website. Email campaigns going out. SEO work happening. Content being produced. You might even have a marketing manager doing a very good job of keeping all those plates spinning.

As the owner or founder, you can still find yourself asking: Is all this working together? Are we spending money in the right places? What should we stop doing? Where should the next £ go? Why are we getting traffic but not enough customers? Why are customers choosing us, or not choosing us? Perhaps most importantly, who is looking at the whole picture?

That is often where a growing business doesn't have a marketing problem. It has a marketing leadership problem.

The world around your marketing has changed

The challenge is getting harder because customer behaviour is changing faster than many businesses can reorganise around it. People discover businesses through social content, communities, creators, recommendations and reviews. Increasingly, AI is becoming part of how people research and compare too. They can form an opinion about you without ever visiting your website or speaking to your sales team. They can discover you in one place, research you somewhere completely different and eventually buy through another channel altogether.

Meanwhile, many businesses are still organised around the places they publish. Search does search. Social does social. Email does email. An agency does paid media. Someone else looks after the website.

Each might be doing a perfectly reasonable job, but the customer isn't experiencing your business as a collection of channels. They experience one business. That's where things can start to break down.

The paid media is generating customers, but nobody is asking whether those customers are the right ones. Social is getting engagement, but nobody knows whether it is helping create demand. The website is getting traffic, but something in the journey is stopping people buying. CRM is sending campaigns, but the business isn't clear on how much additional value they are creating.

Everyone is busy. Nobody is necessarily looking at the system.

Start with the customer, not the channel

This is why I think we need to start organising marketing around intent, rather than channels.

What is the customer trying to do? What do they need to believe before they'll act? Where are they looking? What's stopping them? What happens when they decide they're ready? And what happens after they buy?

Those questions are more useful than starting with, “What should we do on Instagram?” or “How much should we spend on Google?”

They force you to look at the whole journey.

You need to give people a reason to choose you. That's where proposition, positioning, brand, storytelling and customer understanding matter. You need to be discoverable when intent appears, wherever that intent happens to be. That might be search, social, a community, a recommendation, a review, a creator or an AI-generated answer.

You need to make it easy for that intent to become action. The website, sales process, order journey, proposition and payment experience can all create friction.

And once someone buys, you need to think about what happens next. Retention, repeat purchase, loyalty and recommendation all influence what that customer is ultimately worth.

Underneath all of it, you need enough intelligence to understand what is happening and decide what to do next.

You don't necessarily need five teams to do all of this. You need someone to make sure all of it is being thought about.

That might be the business owner. It might be an experienced marketing leader. It might be a great marketing manager who has developed into that role. It might involve agencies and specialists around them. The important thing is that someone is looking beyond the individual activities and asking whether the whole thing is working.

Marketing is bigger than marketing

This is where the role of marketing leadership becomes interesting. If you don't control the whole customer journey, you don't control everything that determines whether your marketing works.

You can create a brilliant campaign. You can drive someone to the website. You can persuade them to buy.

But then the product disappoints.

The delivery is late.

Customer service doesn't resolve the problem.

The experience doesn't match the promise.

What happens then?

The cost of your next customer just got harder.

This is why I think trust should be treated as part of the growth system, not something that sits outside marketing. It leads to a question I increasingly think marketing leaders should ask:

Would you spend some of your marketing budget to fix a customer service problem?

It sounds like the wrong budget.

Imagine customers are abandoning because the buying process is confusing. Or complaints are damaging recommendations. Or a delivery issue is creating poor reviews. Or the product isn't quite delivering what your marketing promises.

Would spending another £10,000 on media necessarily be the best way to create another £20,000 of value? Or could fixing the problem make everything you're already spending work harder?

If fixing a customer problem makes more of your existing marketing effective, isn't that part of marketing performance?

That's the shift.

Marketing doesn't have to own every problem, but good marketing leadership needs to recognise when something outside marketing is preventing marketing from working. Sometimes the best marketing decision isn't another campaign. It's fixing the things that get in the way.

Efficiency isn't the same as value

This brings us to another problem. Marketing has become very good at measuring things that are easy to see.

Clicks. Impressions. Cost Per Acquisition. Return On Ad Spend, Last-click attribution.

These are useful. But they can become dangerous when they become the definition of success, because an efficient channel isn't necessarily creating additional value for the business.

The question I increasingly want to ask is: What will the next £ actually create? Not just, “What did the last £ produce?”

If you put another £1,000 into paid media, what additional value will it create?

If you doubled your social output, what would you expect to happen?

If you stopped the activity for a month, what would you lose?

That last question is particularly useful. Not because everything needs to prove itself immediately. Brand, content, Search Engine Optimisation and customer experience can all create value over longer periods. If nobody can explain what an activity is supposed to achieve, what evidence would tell you it is working, or what you would expect to lose by stopping it, it's difficult to know whether you are investing or simply maintaining activity.

Your existing channel metrics still matter. They help you optimise the activity in front of you, but they shouldn't be the only thing deciding where the business invests.

Your bank balance doesn't care about ‘Return On Ad Spend’. It cares about value.

So, what does this mean if you have a small team?

You don't need to suddenly build a large marketing department. You don't need another 80-slide strategy, and you don't need to try every new channel because customer behaviour has changed.

You need clarity.

You need to understand what the business is trying to achieve and what customers are actually doing. You need to identify where the biggest opportunities and friction points are. You need to decide what matters now, and what doesn't.

Then you need the right capabilities around the table.

Some of those capabilities may already exist inside your business. Some might sit with an agency, specialist or trusted adviser. Some may need to be hired and sometimes the biggest gap is simply someone experienced enough to decide what is needed and make the different pieces work together.

That doesn't necessarily mean hiring a full-time marketing leader.

For some businesses, it means developing the marketing person they already have. For others, it means building their first proper marketing capability. For others, it means bringing together a fragmented mix of agencies, freelancers and internal people.

There isn't one answer, and that's important, because good marketing leadership shouldn't arrive with a pre-packaged solution. It should start by understanding the business.

So where do you start?

I don't think you start with a 90-day marketing plan template. You start by asking better questions.

What are we trying to achieve?

What are customers actually doing?

Where are we creating demand?

Where are we losing it?

What is getting in the way of customers choosing us?

Which activity is creating value?

What are we doing because it works, and what are we doing because we've always done it? What does the business need that it doesn't currently have?

Once you understand that, the next step becomes much clearer. You can decide what to protect, what to stop, what to fix and what to test. You can bring the right people together, whether they're employees, agencies, freelancers or specialists. You can start making changes and learn from what happens.

And then you do it again.

90 days, a quarter, is a cycle that fits a business, and 90 days is better understood as a rhythm, not an end point.

You spend the first part understanding what's really happening. Then you prioritise where to focus. You act on the things that can make a difference. Then you learn from the numbers, from the customer and from what the business is telling you.

Then the cycle starts again. Understand. Prioritise. Act. Learn.

The point isn't to produce a perfect 90-day plan. It's to build a business that gets better at responding over time.

Good marketing leadership isn't about doing everything

An owner who has built a business to a certain size can often become the accidental head of marketing. They make the big decisions. They approve the agency. They look at the numbers. They have an opinion on the website. They know what customers are saying.

But eventually, there are too many moving parts to keep joining together. That's often the point where a business doesn't necessarily need a bigger marketing team; it needs marketing leadership.

Someone who can understand the commercial objective, get close to the customer, figure out what matters, challenge what doesn't, develop the people already there, and bring in specialist expertise where it's needed.

Someone who can sit between the business and the marketing activity and ask a deceptively simple question:

Are we doing the right things, for the right reasons, for the right customers?

Sometimes an owner can provide that leadership themselves. Sometimes an existing marketing leader can grow into it. Sometimes the business needs someone to come in alongside them for a period, when it needs senior thinking but doesn't necessarily need another full-time executive.

That's the space I'm interested in, not adding more marketing for the sake of it. Helping businesses understand what they need, build the capability around it and turn marketing into something that works as part of the business rather than alongside it.

Build around intent, not channels.

Connect the work.

Measure the value.

Keep responding to the customer.

That's what I think modern marketing leadership should enable.

Dave Ody | Aloud To Think

Senior marketing and commercial leadership without the full-time cost.