Marketing Not Working? Why Your Strategy Might Be Stuck

Marketing can feel like a maze: big investment, high hopes, minimal yield. If you’re feeling stuck at the CEO level, working hard without forward motion, it’s rarely a question of effort, it’s an issue of misalignment. For Australian CEOs, the gap is in diagnosing where strategy is failing: whether that's planning, execution, audience resonance, channel use, measurement, or creativity. Let’s unpack the most common reasons marketing stalls, and outline how to get back on track.

If after reading you'd like tailored help, you can book a FREE 60‑min session with Cemoh to unpack and align your strategy, execution and growth goals.

Strategy Isn’t Strategic: The Foundation Is Missing

No documented, coherent strategy

A formal plan is a framework tying your business goals to clear marketing outcomes. Too many companies launch marketing tactics without a unified, strategic approach. Without this alignment, every campaign becomes reactive. Having a documented marketing strategy boosts clarity, coordination, and accountability across teams. For example, firms with documented strategies often report up to three times higher ROI. Creating this requires connecting your long‑term business objectives to specific marketing goals, each backed by timelines, roles, and evaluation methods.

Marketing myopia and product‑centric thinking

Naming your offering after your product instead of the underlying customer need can limit market perception. Theodore Levitt’s “marketing myopia” warns against fixating on features rather than the broader value your customers seek. Australian companies sometimes fail to redefine the value they provide as customer needs evolve. When strategies are rooted in product‑centric storytelling rather than outcomes, they feel stale and miss deeper connections. Expanding your view to see your solution as part of a larger experience, rather than just a feature, opens new growth paths.

Execution Gaps & Cross‑Functional Misalignment

Marketing isolated from broader business goals

When the marketing team operates separately from executives, sales, operations or finance, the result is disjointed campaigns and wasted effort. Marketing metrics become vanity rather than business outcomes. That’s why marketing alignment means linking every campaign to revenue, retention or operational goals. Bring leadership, sales and service teams, and even fractional CMOs, into planning sessions to ensure your marketing truly reflects cross‑functional objectives.

Weak integrated marketing communications (IMC)

Consistency across all channels, digital, offline, PR, social, events, is needed. Without integrated messaging, each campaign looks and feels different, weakening brand recognition and narrative power. This is especially a risk in larger Australian businesses where internal silos restrict coordination. A strong IMC system ensures your voice and visuals are consistent across every touchpoint, strengthening recall and cohesion.

Strategy stalls in execution

Research shows the vast majority of strategic plans, up to 60–90%, never properly launch. Often the failure point is in execution: unclear responsibilities, missing accountability, and no tracking timetable. Even great ideas stall if no one owns execution or deadlines slip. CEOs should ensure every strategy is paired with a detailed execution plan: who does what, by when, monitored week by week, not just revisited quarterly.

Audience and Value Misunderstanding

Marketing doesn’t deeply know the audience

Successful marketing is rooted in deeply knowing your customer: what keeps them up at night, where they look for information, what drives trust. Generic audience profiling leads to generic messages. In Australia, many organisations have underinvested in buyer persona research, surveys and interviews. The result: messaging that misses tone, channel and timing. Conduct direct customer interviews to get insights that few competitors will have.

Marketing fails to provide value

Too many campaigns feel like ads repackaged as content. If your marketing doesn’t teach, help or solve pain, audiences disengage fast. Value-driven marketing, insights, tools, templates, guides, builds trust and positions your brand as a resource, not just a seller. For CEOs, this often means investing in thought leadership, community-led offerings or downloadable resources that genuinely provide value before asking for commitment.

Channel Limitations & Shifting Engagement Trends

Overreliance on a single channel

A common trap: stacking your strategy on organic search or a single platform and watching performance plateau as algorithms and behaviour shift. With AI summarisation, voice search, and platform model changes, some businesses have seen dramatic drops in search traffic up to 70%. Diversify: expand into short‑form video, paid social, long‑tail content, email automation, and even emerging platforms.

Missing an omnichannel presence

Australians consume content across TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, podcasts, webinars and more. A one-channel strategy misses significant reach and frequency. “Search‑everywhere optimisation” and omnichannel presence mean adapting your message and format for each touchpoint: YouTube for instructional video, LinkedIn for thought leadership, Instagram for engagement stories. This layered presence builds recognition and trust across stages of awareness and decision.

Falling behind on video, personalised and AI trends

Video is now the top performing format, nearly 90% of marketers report high engagement. Personalisation drives growth too: 44% saw revenue lifts from tailored experiences; 88% say personalised service increases loyalty. AI is reshaping shopping behaviour, with bots recommending products where brands need to be discoverable in AI‑led journeys. Marketing strategies that don’t embrace personalised messaging, AI‑driven insights or video formats risk falling behind.

Measurement Challenges & Budget Inefficiency

Vague or scattergun objectives

With too many KPIs or poorly defined goals, teams spin wheels without traction. Set a small number of aligned objectives, like improved revenue per customer, qualified lead count or engagement time, and orient marketing against those. Fewer, sharper goals enhance focus and enable better analysis.

Mis‑allocated budget

Some businesses overinvest in underperforming channels; others underfund high‑potential areas. Without real‑time visibility into campaign effectiveness and funnel performance, budgets become wasteful. Set up systems to track cost per lead, cost per customer, and attribution models so you can reallocate spend where it delivers value. To better plan your spend, explore our marketing consultant rate guide for benchmarks on value-based hiring.

Poor ROI tracking

Studies show that roughly 37% of marketing spend is wasted due to poor targeting, messaging or media mix. Even strong campaigns fail without proper attribution and analytics. Regularly review campaign performance, feedback loops and data dashboards to back decisions with hard metrics. Implement tagging, CRM integration and dashboards so your team can see what’s working and pivot quickly.

Creative Weakness & Lack of Authenticity

Creative fatigue and brand distrust

Content creators burn out fast in hyper‑competitive social environments. Audiences are increasingly sceptical of AI‑generated personas or overly polished content lacking personality. This erodes trust. Creative energy, with authentic human perspectives, cuts through. Encourage storytelling from actual voices, whether internal staff or freelance marketers, to bring fresh perspective without losing authenticity.

Conservative culture limits innovation

In some Australian corporate cultures, short‑termism and risk‑aversion suppress bold thinking. Yet brand attempts that avoid risk often lack distinction. The most recognisable Australian brands on global podiums invest in long‑term creative vision, nurturing standout campaigns rather than incremental tweaks. Encourage experimentation, reward creative risk‑taking, and build runway for ideas to develop depth.

How to Get Your Strategy Unstuck: Concrete Steps for CEOs

Clarify your strategic foundation

• Invest time to define your customer personas: who they are, what they worry about, and how they buy.
• Document strategic objectives that tie directly to outcome metrics like lead generation, conversion or retention.
• Run internal alignment sessions: ensure marketing, sales, product, operations and leadership share the same mission and belief sets.

Audit your execution framework

• Connect every marketing tactic to a concrete strategic goal, no campaign exists in isolation.
• Implement an integrated communications schedule so voice, visuals and messaging are consistent.
• Assign ownership: every activity has a responsible person and a deadline; monitor weekly to prevent slippage.

Elevate value delivery and customer insight

• Conduct customer interviews, focus groups or surveys to refine messaging and channel strategy.
• Create content that adds value, tools, templates, insights, not just lead generation.
• Monitor customer feedback and journey touchpoints to continuously refine tone, offer and experience.

Embrace omnichannel strategies and emerging formats

• Use video formats: TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, behind‑the‑scenes insights.
• Optimise for shifting search behaviour: voice, AI‑assisted discovery, local intent.
• Introduce personalisation via CRM and data tools, small tailored experiences deliver outsized returns.

Measure intelligently and invest smartly

• Simplify KPIs to a few meaningful ones (leads, conversions, engagement).
• Build systems for real‑time tracking and dashboards.
• Analyse and pivot budgets post‑campaign, double down on what works, pause what doesn’t.

Encourage authentic creativity and maintain trust

• Prioritise human insight and storytelling over automated generation.
• Be transparent about how you use AI; never lean on anonymised personas.
• Support your creative teams to maintain energy and innovation; burnout kills brand distinctiveness.

Why CEOs Must Act Now

Setting strategy and execution right is urgent in today’s Australian business environment:

• Cost‑of‑living pressures mean consumers are more selective, they gravitate toward brands that offer value and trust, not just visibility.
• Economic headwinds in 2025 are tightening budgets. Marketing must be lean, focused and high‑impact, or risk being cut entirely.
• Regulatory changes, including new restrictions on advertising, such as bans on junk food ads on public transport, are reshaping engagement opportunities. Marketers must innovate within evolving rules.

In this context, vague marketing doesn’t cut it. CEOs need marketing strategies that align tightly with business priorities, and execute with agility, creativity and insight.

Get Unstuck with Expert Strategy

If your marketing feels stuck, it's rarely about effort, it’s about alignment. When marketing, business goals and execution diverge, even the best intentions stall. CEOs who fix underperforming marketing don’t solve with tweaks, they realign strategy, execution and customer value. They measure precisely, support creativity and diversify presence across channels.

Ready for clarity and momentum? Book a session with Cemoh to align your strategy, execution and customer growth goals, and turn marketing from a black box into a growth engine.