Why your Marketing Strategy should come before your Marketing spend
The number one marketing mistake I see founders make is spending large on marketing activity or external support before they’re ready for it.
Meta ads before you have organic content. An ad in a magazine before you know what your target consumer reads. A paid social media specialist before a brief.
And I’ve seen all these things happen before you've done the work and thinking, to clearly identify your target consumer, brand positioning, and consideration of the marketing funnel (more on this soon). And it goes without saying, but asking ChatGPT ‘who is my target consumer’ isn’t going to cut it!
Marketing is arguably your biggest growth lever. I love marketing. I've spent close to twenty years in marketing, strategy and new product development roles at some of the biggest food and drink businesses in the UK and NZ.
That's probably why it frustrates me so much. It's not that you shouldn’t invest in marketing support (which you absolutely should do at the right time). It's the order in which you do the work on your marketing. I watch you go straight to an agency. Thousands of dollars into a retainer. Before you're even clear on your strategy.
It's like hiring a builder before you've agreed on the plans. The builder can still build something. It just might not be what you needed.
The $10,000 Ad that went nowhere
Here's a pattern I see often. Founders invest in external marketing support, an agency, a publication, a sponsorship, before they've done the thinking themselves.
I love this story, because it says everything about why the order matters. One founder I worked with had spent $10,000 on an ad in a Health & Wellness publication before we started working together. When I asked what she wanted the ad to achieve, she couldn't answer. When I asked why she'd picked that magazine, she told me they'd offered her the spot and it seemed like a good fit.
The ad wasn't the problem. The magazine wasn't the problem. The problem was the absence of a strategy behind the decision. And once that's missing, there's no way to know what a good result even looks like, let alone whether $10,000 had achieved it.
That's not a criticism of her. And when an agency is involved, it's not a criticism of them either. They work from a brief, or from whatever's on offer. They couldn't write her strategy for her. That's the brand owners job.
It takes real thought, and first and foremost, a deep understanding of your target consumer. Consumer obsession, if you will.
Activity isn't momentum
This was drilled into me from the start of my marketing career: strategy before tactics. Always. And it’s something that continued to be drilled into me through the Marketing guru that is Mark Ritson when I completed his Mini MBA in Marketing five years ago.
Tactics are the visible part. The ads, the content, the influencer deals, the sampling. They're also the part everyone wants to jump to first, because they feel like progress. Something goes live. Something gets posted. It looks like momentum and let’s be honest - it feels good chasing those shiny objects.
However, tactics without strategy are just activity. Activity is not the same as momentum. Momentum comes from making good choices, not from doing all the things.
A marketing strategy sits above all of that. It's a one-page document. It tells you, and anyone working on your brand, what you're trying to achieve. Who you're trying to reach. And why those consumers should pick you over what's sitting next to you on the shelf.
Get that page right, and every decision after it gets faster and cheaper to make. Skip it, and you're paying someone, agency or otherwise, to guess on your behalf.
Who, What, How. That's the whole strategy, and it should fit on one page.
You might assume a marketing strategy is a big, complicated job. That's often why it gets put off.
It doesn't need to be.
Your marketing strategy can be captured on one page. It simply needs to answer three important questions: who, what and how.
WHO: Your Target Consumer
Not "women aged 25 to 45." That's a demographic, not a consumer.
Your target consumer is a real person. They have specific beliefs, habits and reasons for buying what they buy. What do they buy instead of you right now? What are they really trying to get from your category, beyond the product itself? What would make them stop and pick you up instead of what's already in their basket?
This is the foundation everything else sits on. Get your target consumer wrong, and every decision after it, positioning, channel, messaging, inherits that mistake.
WHAT: Your Brand Positioning
Brand positioning is what your consumer thinks of you, inside their own head, when they're not looking at your packaging. It's how you're different, or better, in a way that matters to them. Not just to you.
Perception is reality here. It doesn't matter how strong you think your positioning is. What matters is what your target consumer believes. And that has to be checked with real consumers. Go beyond friends, family, or your own gut feel.
HOW: Your Marketing Funnel
This is where you need to understand the consumer journey.
People need to know you exist before they can consider you. They need to consider you before they try you. And they need a reason to come back before you have a repeat customer.
Awareness – the right consumer finds out you exist
Consideration and trial – you earn consideration and / or a first purchase
Repeat – you earn the second, third and tenth
Here's the part that catches you out. Awareness isn't one and done.
Depending on your category and the consumer, it can take repeated exposure before your brand becomes mentally available when they're ready to buy. Research from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science shows the importance of building mental availability by getting your brand thought of in the situations when people are considering a category purchase.
Not through one burst of activity. It’s more likely 8-10 exposures before your ideal consumer is most likely aware of you.
That should change how you think about your marketing budget. One campaign, one influencer post or one sponsored ad is rarely enough to build meaningful awareness on its own.
You need repetition. You need consistency. You need patience.
And most importantly, you need to keep showing up for the right consumer, with a clear and consistent message they can recognise over time.
Everything gets easier once you’ve got your one page Marketing Strategy.
Once the one-page strategy exists, tactics stop being a guessing game.
You're not choosing channels because a family member told you to. Or because a brand you admire is doing it. You're choosing them because that's where your target consumer already spends their time. And you know which part of the funnel you're building for (Awareness → Consideration → Trial → Repeat).
Your messaging stays consistent everywhere, because it's built on the same brand positioning. You're not reinventing it for every campaign. Your brand identity stays recognisable, because you're not starting from scratch every quarter.
And your marketing starts connecting with consumers on more than a product level. It speaks to what they value and what they're trying to achieve. Not just what's in the pack. That's consumer centricity. It's the difference between marketing that gets noticed and marketing that gets remembered.
Sound familiar?
If you nod along to even one or two of the following, it’s time to get that Marketing Strategy sorted.
You've already spent money on marketing activity and you can't say clearly what it achieved.
You're heading into your busiest trading months without a clear answer to who you're targeting or why they should choose you.
Every new campaign feels like it's starting from scratch, because there's no positioning underneath it to build on.
You're about to brief an agency, or you already have, and you're not sure what to actually ask them for.
If any of that sounds familiar, the fix isn't more marketing. It's writing the page that should have come before it.
You don't have to build this alone
This is the work we build together inside the RISE Growth Accelerator™. In Phase 1 we Focus First™ to build your strategic foundation, your one-page marketing strategy among it, then Phase 2 is Momentum in Action™, turning that strategy into real, consistent execution, right through to repeat.
Head into summer without this page written, and you'll be making your biggest spend decisions of the year with nothing to guide them.
Book a Focus First Call and we'll pressure-test where the gaps in your marketing strategy actually are. Not ready yet? Take the free Scale-Up Readiness Scorecard instead. It takes a few minutes.
And trust me, taking the time to do the thinking behind your marketing strategy, will save you a fortune in both money and time in the future.
Strategy before tactics. Always.
Related read: 4 questions every CPG founder should ask before backing a growth opportunity