There is a point in almost every marketing project where everything starts to feel important.
The website needs improving, SEO needs attention, the social channels haven’t been posted consistently enough, the email list could be growing faster, the customer journey needs work, there are competitors doing things you aren’t doing, someone has suggested a new campaign, Google Analytics has revealed something interesting and, of course, there is always another article you could write.
I know this feeling well.
One of the things I have learned during my own move into digital marketing is how easy it is to confuse having lots of opportunities with having lots of priorities. When I first started learning SEO and CRO, there always seemed to be another area that deserved attention. Keyword research led to search intent, which led to content, which led to customer journeys, which led to positioning, which eventually led me to marketing strategy.
The more I learned, the more things I could see that could be improved.
That sounds positive, but it creates an interesting problem.
If everything looks important, how do you decide what actually matters most?
Strategy Is About Making Choices
This is one of the things I misunderstood when I first started thinking seriously about marketing strategy. I initially saw strategy as having a good plan. The more I have learned, however, the more I think strategy is often about making choices about what not to do.
A business can have ten things it could improve, but that doesn’t mean all ten deserve equal attention right now.
Perhaps the website conversion rate could be better, perhaps the company’s social presence could be stronger, perhaps there is an opportunity to create more content, improve email marketing, target another audience or launch another product.
All of those things might be worthwhile.
But if the business has a positioning problem, improving the colour of the website buttons probably isn’t the most important thing to work on.
This sounds obvious when you put it like that, yet marketing can make it remarkably easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. There is always another channel, another tactic or another metric that can be improved.
The question isn’t necessarily:
“What could we improve?”
There will always be an answer to that.
A more useful question is:
“What improvement would make the biggest difference to what we are trying to achieve?”
That is a much harder question …. It is also a much more strategic one.
When Everything Is Important, Look for the Constraint
One way I have started thinking about this is to look for the thing that is currently limiting progress.
Imagine a business getting plenty of website traffic but very few enquiries. Creating another hundred pieces of content might increase traffic further, but it doesn’t address the immediate problem.
Or perhaps the website converts reasonably well, but the business is attracting the wrong audience. In that situation, improving conversion rates may not solve the underlying issue either.
The problem isn’t necessarily that the business isn’t doing enough, it may be doing the wrong things in the wrong order.
This is where I think marketing strategy becomes much more interesting.
Instead of asking whether SEO is important, whether social media is important or whether email marketing is important, you start asking what the business actually needs now.
That word matters …. Now.
Not Everything Deserves Equal Attention
I have found this particularly useful when thinking about the customer journey.
Someone discovering a business for the first time doesn’t necessarily need the same information as someone who is comparing two products or someone who is ready to buy.
That sounds simple, but it changes how you think about marketing.
You don’t necessarily need more content.
You may need the right content for the right stage of the customer’s decision.
I explored this in From Search to Action: Understanding the Customer Journey, where I looked at how SEO becomes much more useful when you stop thinking about ranking pages and start thinking about how people actually move towards a decision.
The same principle applies to the wider marketing strategy.
If you understand where the customer is, what they are trying to decide and what is currently stopping them from moving forward, the list of possible marketing activities becomes easier to evaluate.
Some things suddenly become more important, others become less important and some can probably wait.
I Have Started to See This Differently
This is probably where my own learning has changed the most.
When I started this journey, I was focused heavily on learning SEO and CRO. I wanted to understand how websites attracted people, how search worked and how visitors behaved once they arrived.
Those skills are still important to me.
But the more I learned, the more I realised that they sit inside a much bigger system.
You can optimise a page perfectly and still be targeting the wrong audience.
You can rank for valuable keywords and still have weak positioning.
You can increase traffic and still struggle to turn that traffic into customers.
You can have a beautifully designed website and still make it difficult for somebody to understand why they should choose you.
That is what pushed me towards marketing strategy.
I became less interested in simply asking, “How can I improve this?” and more interested in asking, “Why is this happening in the first place?”
That distinction feels small.
It isn’t.
A Simple Question I Keep Coming Back To
When I look at a long list of things that could be improved, I have started using a very simple filter:
What happens if we don’t do this?
It is surprisingly effective.
If the answer is that nothing particularly important happens, perhaps it isn’t a priority.
If the answer is that customers won’t understand the offer, the business will continue attracting the wrong audience or an important part of the customer journey will remain broken, then perhaps it deserves attention.
It isn’t a perfect framework, but it forces you to think about consequences rather than activity.
And I think that is important because marketing activity can feel productive even when it isn’t moving the business forward.
Publishing another post feels productive.
Launching another campaign feels productive.
Changing another page feels productive.
But activity isn’t the same thing as progress.
Sometimes the most strategic decision is to leave something alone.
Positioning Can Make the Decision Easier
This is also why I have become increasingly interested in positioning.
If you are clear about who you are trying to reach, what problem you are solving and why your solution matters to that particular audience, many marketing decisions become easier.
I explored this in How to Build Marketing Positioning Around a Real Audience.
Without that clarity, everything can look like an opportunity.
With it, you have something to judge the opportunity against.
Does this help us reach the audience we actually want?
Does it reinforce what we want to be known for?
Does it help the customer move closer to a decision?
Does it solve an important problem?
If the answer is no, perhaps it isn’t necessarily a bad idea.
It just might not be the right idea right now.
That distinction has become increasingly important to me.
Marketing Strategy Doesn’t Mean Doing Less for the Sake of It
There is a danger here of taking the idea too far, doing less isn’t automatically better. Sometimes a business genuinely needs more content, better SEO, a stronger website, more consistent social media or a better email strategy.
The point isn’t to avoid work, it is to make sure the work is connected to something that matters.
That is what I now think good marketing strategy should do.
It gives all those individual activities somewhere to fit. SEO isn’t just SEO, it can support visibility at a particular stage of the customer journey.
Content isn’t just content, it can answer a question, change a perception or help someone make a decision.
CRO isn’t just about improving a button or a landing page, it can reveal where friction is preventing someone from taking the next step.
And positioning isn’t simply a sentence on a website, it influences who you attract, what you say and why someone should pay attention.
Once you start seeing marketing as a connected system rather than a collection of separate channels, the list of things that need attention starts to look very different.
So What Should You Do When Everything Seems Important?
I don’t think there is a magic prioritisation formula, I would start by stepping back.
Look at what the business is trying to achieve, who it is trying to reach and where the customer is currently getting stuck.
Then look at the list of possible marketing activities again.
Which one addresses the biggest constraint?
Which one has the potential to make the biggest difference?
Which things are genuinely necessary and which are simply available?
And perhaps most importantly, what can wait?
That last question is easy to overlook.
A good idea doesn’t become a priority simply because it is a good idea.
Sometimes it is just a good idea for later.
Final Thought
The more I learn about marketing strategy, the less I think strategy is about finding more things to do.
It is about understanding which things matter.
When everything seems important, the temptation is to work harder, create more, optimise more and try to keep every opportunity moving at once.
I understand that temptation because I have been there myself.
But sometimes the more useful move is to step back and ask what the business actually needs at this particular point in time.
Perhaps there are ten things that could be improved.
Perhaps three would make a meaningful difference.
And perhaps one of those three is currently holding everything else back.
That is the one I would want to understand first.
Because marketing strategy isn’t about making everything important.
It is about making it clearer what matters most.
Here’s to more success (and fewer 404s)
Chris
