Why marketing support
doesn't deliver results.
If you've used freelancers, fractionals, consultants, and/or agencies before, it wouldn’t be unusual if you ended up a bit frustrated with them. The optimism from the bold assurances and grand promises was quickly replaced by dismay at the mediocre outputs and underwhelming results. In my experience, it’s for a simple reason: they were giving you "marketing", an approach that looks and sounds good on the outside, but it's broken inside. They know a lot of 'what' without really knowing 'why', so they don’t really know what needs to be done. This scenario is all too common, which raises the question: why does it happen?
Note: for the purpose of this article I’m using “expertise” as shorthand for the combination of education and experience, and extent of the contractor’s ability to combine theory and practice in an effectual way.
PART 1: WHO THEY ARE
The freelancer, fractional, consultant, or agency doesn’t have balanced and holistic expertise; though they sell themselves on being a complete package, typically marketing support will be either theory-heavy, practice-heavy, or over-reachers.
All practice and little theory.
They know what to do, but they don’t really know why. Without a grounding in the principles of effective marketing, they don’t know what the best options are, so they will throw a lot of actions out there and hope something works. Their knowledge is limited to things they have worked on, so they tend to struggle when something new is required. What they implement largely relies on replicating what has worked for them before, which may not be the relevant or appropriate approach to the problem at hand.
The majority of marketing support falls into this category. Did you know that, adjusting for response bias, it is estimated that over 70% of marketers in the U.K. are not trained in the end-to-end marketing discipline? They may have training in particular tools or specialisms, but they are not trained in the foundational elements of diagnosis, strategy, and tactical planning, and execution. This means they don’t know their relationship to each other, how they work together, how they can be used for better synergy with other business functions, and how they effect business performance. I’d guess those gaps sound awfully familiar if you have previous experience with underwhelming fractionals, consultants, and agencies.
All theory and little practice.
They talk a lot, but little seems to get done. They think that academia has given them all the answers, but all they know is what theoretically should happen, which rarely aligns with what actually does happen; when they don’t align, they don’t have experience in developing practical workarounds to get things back on track. They recommend things that don’t work the way they think they do, or are not as quick and easy to do as they think they are. As they haven’t done the things they are telling you to do, they set unrealistic expectations and make undeliverable promises, and they have no idea how to rectify the repercussions of either.
Specialists pretending to be generalists.
Trained and highly competent in specific areas of marketing, they also think that expertise in parts qualifies them in the whole, so they oversell themselves as experts across the entire marketing discipline. Underneath this veneer of all-encompassing expertise, their bias toward their specialism, plus a lack of knowledge about the others, leads to suboptimal decisions and the dismissal of potentially better options outside their comfort zone. They overestimate their ability to deliver work outside of their specialism, so they take your money for work they don't have the expertise to provide.
The result: imbalanced expertise makes imbalanced solutions.
Imbalanced expertise is dangerous as your project inevitably pushes them out of their depth, but they won’t let you know that. Whichever category they are in, or whether they span multiple ones, they invariably deliver mediocre results because they are too inclined to either the details or the bigger picture, without having much idea how to connect them together. At best, they don’t understand how to combine the proven, evidence-based theory with the appropriate practices to influence the mechanics that drive commercial performance; they only understand one or the other, or neither. At worst they don’t really understand marketing as business function at all, they see it as an exercise in “creativity”, “storytelling”, or any other buzzword skill being treated as an end in itself rather than as a means to the end of business success; in more familiar terms, they are the colouring-in department.
PART II: WHAT THEY DO
Standardized solutions.
Most fractionals, consultants and agencies are not creating solutions: they are shoehorning clients into a stock programme that they copy-and-paste from one to the next. They have pre-prepared templates that they can adjust and recycle, giving the illusion of customization when they are presented to the client. The standardized solutions they use are not designed to address each client’s specific issues in their specific situation: they are generic solutions to generic problems that are not the specific ones the client is facing.
Tactics without strategy.
Whether they are rushing to look efficient and proactive, or they lack the expertise to do it, they will bypass any diagnostic work and skip straight to action. Without the diagnostic work, there is no strategy: what they call “strategy” is either the tactical plan, or post-rationalizations of the pre-decided tactical elements of their standardized solution. Tactics are decided before or without strategy, not in response to it; this is why the outputs don’t align with the market, and the market doesn’t do much in response to it.
Appearance is everything.
The work they are doing is partly about helping you, but it is largely an advert for prospective clients. With that in mind, what they implement must look up-to-date and cutting-edge, which is more important than doing what is best. Established best practice risks them looking boring and predictable, so you get trend-chasing, fad-hopping, and bandwagon-jumping justified as necessary agility, reactivity, and dynamism, making the marketing outputs inconsistent and incoherent.
The result: more luck than skill.
You get disappointing results because their solutions are not made for you, or to address your particular issues: they are using generic solutions which produce generic outputs, designed to tackle generic, assumed problems. They don’t have the expertise to create solutions that are tailored, strategically led, or based on quality evidence or proven efficacy.
All of these have a common consequence: solutions that are essentially hit-and-hope. They are throwing out activity trusting that enough of it happens to align with the market’s needs and wants, and that it happens to land in the right place and at the right time, all the while devising clever-sounding post-justifications to pretend there is strategy behind it. The net result: a mediocre marketing output that gets mediocre returns.
PART III: WHY THEY DO IT
Sometimes, the mediocrity is somewhat accidental; it’s simply the result of support who are not aware of their own limitations taking on things they don’t have the expertise to do. An innocent mistake, a bit of naivety; it happens.
Unfortunately, a lot of the time, it is the result of something much more deliberate. There is a fourth category who provide their clients with intentionally poor solutions, and they do it deliberately for a simple, cynical, and self-serving reason. Meet the Machiavellian: if you’ve had underwhelming marketing support before, especially at very senior levels, it’s highly likely you had one.
What’s best for their business.
It may seem counterintuitive for a contractor to give you an intentionally poor solution, but often the best thing for their business is to actively avoid doing what’s best for yours.
They bloat invoices using two common tactics. The first is packing the project with unnecessary additional tasks and knowingly overcomplicated elements to artificially increase the number of billable hours. The second is to include known issues and pretend they were unforeseeable, and then charge you additional fees for "unexpected" fixes. They will engineer input-output dependencies, implementing tactics and approaches that will stop working if you stop working with them, so you're locked in to paying them to keep the numbers coming in. They get maximum money for minimal work, as a further advantage of standardized solutions is that everything can be templated and pre-prepared. Rather than creating, they are editing; but they pass the latter off as the former to justify higher charges.
None of this improves the end product, it just improves their bank balance, all while burning your resources to do it: wasted time on tasks that didn’t need to be done, wasted energy on processes that didn’t improve the outputs, and most importantly wasted money on work that didn’t really happen.
OUTCOME
They are doing "marketing", a superficially impressive but effectually shallow imitation of the real thing. They shoehorn you into their preferred predetermined solutions built on trends, fads and bandwagons, designed to get quick and cosmetically impressive spikes against inconsequential metrics that they tell you are important and valuable. They create generic plans that address generic problems with generic solutions, intentionally overcomplicating them to inflate the invoices they send you while irresponsibly burning through your resources for their own benefit. By the time you realize that any or all of this is happening, they've taken your money and gone.
The best marketing support has a good balance between theory and practice. They can deliver work that is built with genuine, appropriate, and relevant best practice, and they have the depth and breadth of expertise to work around problems that arise without compromising effectiveness. It will make responsible use of your resources, giving you a lean and focused solution that doesn’t force in anything that doesn’t need to be there.
EPILOGUE: THE PLUG
Marketing, not “marketing”.
If you’ve been left with the fallout from poor marketing support and need help cleaning up the mess, or you are looking for marketing support but can’t risk any of these things happening to you, then I offer my expertise in a way that work for you: you can have the breadth of skill and depth of knowledge to create a solution that is tailored to solve your marketing problems while avoiding the mistakes that damage effectiveness; it simply depends on whether you prefer it on a freelance, fractional, or consultative model. We start from a blank sheet of paper: nothing pre-prepared, nothing pre-decided, nothing pre-determined. We keep it as clean, clear, and simple as possible: no fluff, no filler, no nonsense.
Even if you decide not to hire me, I don’t want you hiring a chancer or a charlatan instead: I’m more than happy to give you some guidance on what to look for and what to ask so you don’t get caught out by one of them.
If you’re interested in marketing support, let’s talk.