“So, tell me about your marketing strategy?” Never has there been a more revealing question for a marketer – or a senior commercial leader, for that matter.
It’s a question I now love to ask. It gives you a fast sense of where an organisation really is on its go‑to‑market journey. It helps assess the true level of marketing candidates in a job interview. And it’s a very efficient way of seeing how full of s*** someone is, particularly after they’ve just told you they ‘know all about marketing’.
Try it and see. In my experience, the typical response is for the individual in question to rattle off some of the stuff their marketing team is working on. And since, in many B2B organisations, ‘marketing’ just means sales aids, events and comms, that’s what you’ll hear about.
Email campaigns. LinkedIn posts. Perhaps a sales promotion. You may get a few buzzwords sprinkled in for good measure as well – a ‘thought leadership’ or two, or a nod to ‘purpose’ and a reference to the organisation’s ‘why’. If you’re really lucky, you’ll get to wash it all down with some acronym soup: “This year we’re focused on ROI, lowering CPC, improving CTR, using AI to transform SEO, while deploying ABM to the TAL within our TAM.” LOL.
That’s not to say these things don’t matter. Tactical execution is a vital part of marketing’s remit. It’s just that they’re not answering the question. A collection of tactics does not a strategy make – no matter how well organised or eloquently described it may be.
A good, well‑trained marketer – and a well‑aligned sales leader or CEO – can answer a question about marketing strategy with clarity.
So, what is marketing strategy? And what should a good answer contain? As an advocate of the Ritsonian view of marketing, I regard strategy as being about three things: targeting, positioning, and clear marketing objectives.
When strategy goes wrong, it is usually because one or more of these decisions is missing, or muddled, or poorly grounded in reality. Here’s some of the common failure points I’ve see in practice:
Lack of market and buyer insights
Before the strategic decisions themselves, a word on the work that must precede them. ‘Seek first to understand, then to be understood’ may be Habit #5 in Stephen Covey’s book, but it should be Habit #1 for marketers.
Any meaningful strategy has to be shaped and underpinned by proper diagnosis and market insight. That means a solid understanding of the category, and the commercial reality you’re operating in: Who buys? Why do they buy? When do they buy? What matters to them? What does their buying process actually look like? What does the competitive set look like? How do our current capabilities compare?
If you can’t answer those questions, your ‘marketing strategy’ is unlikely to be much of a strategy at all – which means many B2B marketing teams fall at the first hurdle.
Unclear and misaligned targeting
Targeting is the first real strategic decision point. A credible answer to the strategy question should be clear about who the company is going after – and, just as importantly, who it’s not.
In theory, it sounds simple. In practice, it often gets messy. Firstly, good targeting assumes that a robust market segmentation exists, but that’s frequently not the case. Many firms’ market maps may be outdated, incomplete, or fuzzy.
Personally, I like to see a segmentation that is account‑based, sized with a clear Target Addressable Market expressed in £ value and account numbers, and with segments that are mutually exclusive and meaningfully different. It also needs to be simple enough to be used, rather than admired in a PowerPoint deck. It’s easy to over‑engineer this, and I’ve done it myself: trying to mash buyer attributes, personas, and account segmentation into a single model, and ending up with a hybrid hot mess that no one could actually interpret or apply.
A good test: can you easily place existing, named accounts into your defined segments? If not, your segmentation probably needs some work.
Once segmentation is in place, targeting should be a deliberate commercial choice, made jointly by marketing and sales, with full alignment on where to play. This is another common failure point. Research has shown that targeting overlap between sales and marketing in B2B is often alarmingly low. I’ve seen this play out repeatedly: sales teams chasing ‘big fish’ accounts where we have no right to win, but whose names sound impressive on a pipeline update call. Marketers investing time and budget in segments that are misaligned with sales priorities, with little real commercial potential at all.
Poorly‑defined (or overly complex) positioning
Next, positioning. Often misunderstood, positioning can be simplified to the question: what do we want target customers to think about us, relative to competitors?
Good positioning should be comparative, focused, intentional. It should exist in the context of the competitive set, make explicit choices about what to emphasise and what to dial down, and reflect a deliberate strategic intent rather than just an accidental by‑product of tactical activity.
I also believe positioning can and should be measurable – you should be able to tell whether your intended position is landing through brand tracking, customer research, and market feedback.
At its best, a clear positioning acts as a guiding mechanism. It simplifies decisions, aligns teams, disciplines creative, and ensures that tactical choices pull in the same direction. At its worst, positioning is fluffy, overcomplicated, performative, even ostentatious – think death‑by‑PowerPoint, mood boards, hierarchies of needs, ‘start with why’, and other such marketing guff.
I try to shoot for a positioning statement that is tightly documented, anchored in the priorities of the target segment or segments, and supported by specific proof points, rather than generic claims like ‘better service’.
Badly written objectives
The third crucial strategic decision point comes in the form of objective setting. The aim here is to define a small number of 12‑month objectives for marketing.
These objectives should be SMART, of course, but they should also be funnel‑based – meaning they explicitly relate to stages of the buyer journey and the path to revenue.
In most cases, one to three objectives is plenty. Less really is more here, because budget and activity will need to support every objective – and I’ve yet to meet a marketer with excess budget burning a hole in their pocket!
Where things tend to go wrong is in the quality of the objectives themselves. Many marketing plans are built on objectives that are vague, overly numerous, or not measurable. They read more like general statements of intent or direction of travel than clear, commercial commitments for the year ahead.
I was very guilty of this myself earlier in my career, but more recently I’ve tried to push harder on the discipline of writing objectives, because it forces clarity and accountability. A good objective should make commit explicit: we will invest X, do Y, in order to achieve Z.
Making objectives public and measurable also forces better upstream thinking: baselines need to be established, metrics need to be agreed, and measurement gaps get exposed. Some of this work ain’t particularly glamorous, but all of it is strategically healthy – and still less common than it should be.
Lack of focus
With a clear target, well‑defined positioning, and strong objectives, you have crucial aspect of a marketing strategy. Yet one of the biggest barriers to getting there is not technical failure in the process, but a lack of focus on strategy at all.
This is the issue I see most often: marketers who are well intentioned and wanting to do good work but who are busy, trapped in the gravity of day‑to‑day execution. Time to think, diagnose, and choose is squeezed out by continuously spinning plates.
A related focus problem shows up in the inability to prioritise – and therefore to deprioritise. Businesses can ask their marketing teams to do many things, but not all of them matter equally. A core responsibility of senior marketing leadership is to make explicit choices about what not to do, so that budget and effort can be concentrated on the work that genuinely matters.
This is rarely comfortable, and can be politically challenging: product owners and sales leaders are passionate, persuasive, and often persistent, so saying no requires evidence, confidence, and organisational air cover.
Capability gaps
Which brings us to the final and perhaps most fundamental issue: capability.
By some estimates between two‑thirds and three‑quarters of people working in marketing roles in the UK have no formal marketing training, at all… let alone quality training in strategic marketing principles. And even those with some education behind them often lack the repetition and feedback loops that come from having run multiple planning cycles over time.
Many organisations compound the problem by not knowing what good looks like. If leadership does not have a clear view of marketing’s strategic role, or does not invest in strategic capability, then weak strategy is the probable outcome…. and answers to ‘tell me about your marketing strategy?’ will likely underwhelm.
What effective marketing strategy looks like
When marketing strategy fails, it is rarely because marketers lack effort or intent. It fails because diagnosis is shallow, hard choices are avoided, objectives are soft, or because organisations have not built the capability required to think and act strategically.
A clear marketing strategy should be explainable in a few tight sentences: it should state who you are targeting, how you intend to win in their minds, and what success will look like over the next year. If you cannot answer those questions cleanly, you don’t yet have a marketing strategy. But that could be where I come in…