Your Marketing Isn’t Broken. Your Setup Probably Is.

In this insightful article, Tommy Holt cuts through the noise to highlight a problem most Australian businesses don’t realise they have: it’s not their channels, budget, or team that’s underperforming, it’s the way their marketing function is structured. In this piece, Tommy unpacks why busy marketing doesn’t always translate to real commercial results, and how a lack of clear diagnosis leads to wasted spend, misaligned strategy, and a whole lot of activity without impact.

After nearly 20 years in marketing, the problem I see most often in Australian businesses has nothing to do with budgets, channels, or creative. It has to do with how marketing functions are built in the first place, and the gap that opens up between what a business actually needs and what it ends up getting.

If you are a CEO or founder who feels like your marketing is busy but not effective, that spend keeps shifting from one channel to the next without a clear throughline, or that you are getting plenty of activity reports but not much commercial clarity, you are not alone.

And it is probably not a talent problem. It is a structural one. You can usually spot it in a few familiar patterns. Output is high, but pipeline quality is inconsistent. Reporting is full of channel metrics and light on commercial answers. Budget debates become political, because each channel has its own logic and its own definitions of success. The plan changes every quarter because the latest channel result gets mistaken for strategy.

None of that means the people are bad. It means the setup is producing the outcome it is designed to produce: lots of activity, not enough clarity.

The Specialist Trap

The way many businesses build their marketing function today almost guarantees this outcome. Faced with a noisy landscape of platforms, channels, and tools, the instinct is to hire or engage people who are expert in a specific area. A paid media specialist. An SEO specialist. A social media manager. A content team. Each one capable in their lane. Few of them positioned to look at the whole picture.

That is not a criticism of specialists. Specialists are valuable. The trap is hiring specialists before you have someone accountable for diagnosis. When channel owners are the loudest voices in the room, the function starts optimising for its own activity rather than for business outcomes. Budgets fragment. Measurement becomes complicated. Strategy becomes a patchwork of what can be executed, rather than what the business actually needs.

At that point, it becomes easy to treat marketing like a vending machine. Put more money into the channel that looks underpowered. Expect more “results” to come out. When they do not, assume the channel is broken, or that the creative is not good enough, or that you need a better specialist. Sometimes that is true. Often it is not.

Strategy is Not a 365-Days-a-Year Job

One reason businesses default to specialists is that “strategy” can feel like a luxury. It sounds expensive, slow, and ongoing. In reality, good strategy is often a short, focused piece of work. The value is not in having someone “do strategy” forever. The value is in getting a clear diagnosis, an agreed plan, and decision rules that everyone can execute against.

A simple analogy: if you have a sore knee, you see a GP first. You do not go straight to an orthopaedic surgeon. The GP does the initial diagnosis, rules out the obvious causes, and creates a plan. If you need specialists after that, great. You just want them working off the right blueprint.

Marketing works the same way. Specialists are highly effective when they have a blueprint to work to, with clear objectives based on commercial outcomes. Channel performance and effectiveness still matter, but they need to contribute to an overarching goal. Otherwise you get local optimisation and organisational noise, rather than a system that compounds.

A Real Example: When The Channel Was Not The Problem

I supported an enterprise SaaS platform that kept pushing for larger and larger SEO and SEM budgets. The brief was straightforward: diagnose why SEO and SEM were not working.

The first thing we did was get clear on the actual commercial goal. In an enterprise SaaS environment, awareness on its own counts for very little if it is not connected to the creation of high-quality, high-revenue opportunities for sales. The sales cycle is long. Decision-making is complex. And only a portion of the market is genuinely “in-market” at any given time. That changes what good marketing looks like. It did not matter if 600,000 people saw their digital adverts, because the business was not trying to be famous. It was trying to create qualified leads that could convert into revenue over a long cycle.

Reach without relevance was not progress. It was noise. Working backwards from what a great qualified lead looked like changed the conversation quickly. Instead of asking, “How do we get more traffic?”, we were asking, “What does sales actually need, and what has to be true before a lead is valuable?” From there, we could define the stages that had to be true before a lead was genuinely qualified. We could map the phases of the marketing approach required to create those conditions. We could see where the drop-offs were happening, and which messages and proof points mattered at each stage. Only then did it make sense to decide which channels were doing useful work and which were simply producing activity.

In that context, SEO and SEM performance was not the underlying issue. The issue was that marketing had been set up with the wrong objective in mind. If the organisation treats awareness as the goal, it will optimise for awareness. It will buy impressions, clicks, and traffic. It will celebrate dashboards full of activity. It will still struggle to generate the leads sales actually wants. Once the objective was reset around lead quality and commercial conversion, the entire function looked different. The marketing mix changed, because investment was now tied to what created qualified opportunities, not what created the most visible activity.

Awareness became a supporting measure, not the headline objective. And the relationship between marketing and sales improved because both were working towards the same definition of success. This was not an SEO or SEM efficiency issue. It was a strategic mistake in objective setting. It was a diagnosis problem. The business had skipped the GP and gone straight to the surgeon.

The Proximity Problem

Underneath the structural issue is another one that is harder to see but just as costly. The people making marketing decisions are often far removed from the daily lives of the customers they are trying to influence.

This is not unique to any one business. It is a feature of how marketing teams tend to form. They cluster in similar environments, draw on similar references, and rely on research and data that has been aggregated and processed to the point where the actual human being at the end of the funnel is barely visible.

Consider the reality of your addressable market. A significant portion of your customers are making professional and personal purchasing decisions under real financial pressure, in circumstances that might look nothing like the environment in which your marketing is being planned. Even the most informed marketing leader cannot bridge that gap from a desk. Genuine customer understanding comes from genuine customer contact. Not just focus groups or quarterly research reports. Real, unmediated engagement with real people, in their actual lives.

When that kind of understanding informs strategy, the difference is tangible. Messaging sharpens because it is anchored in how customers actually think and speak. Spend becomes more targeted because you know what matters at decision time. Creative stops being generic and starts being relevant. The brand builds trust that holds when competitors get louder.

What This Means For Your Business

If you are responsible for commercial performance and your marketing does not feel like it is pulling its weight, the answer is rarely to add another specialist or invest more in the channels you are already using.

The more useful questions are structural. Do you have someone in your marketing setup with the range, knowledge, and perspective to diagnose what is actually needed before recommending a solution? Do the people making decisions about your customers genuinely understand who those customers are and what their lives look like? Is measurement designed for learning and decision-making, or is it designed for reporting and impressive slide decks?

Businesses that get honest about those questions tend to find that the path to better marketing performance is clearer than they expected. And the returns, in efficiency, effectiveness, and commercial impact, follow.

If you want a quick self-audit, here are three prompts that tend to reveal the truth quickly:

• What problem are we paying marketing to solve this quarter?
• If we had to cut 20 percent of spend tomorrow, what would we stop first, and why?
• When did we last hear the customer describe, in their own words, why they chose us or did not?

If the answers feel vague, it is probably not a channel problem. It is a setup problem. Fix the setup, and the marketing usually improves faster than another round of channel tinkering ever will.

Tommy Holt is an award-winning senior marketing and communications executive with a proven record of leading high-performance teams and driving brand growth.

He has over a decade of leadership experience in marketing, communications and branding roles across a diverse range of industries, including Woolworths Group, and has created industry-leading marketing programs that have delivered significant ROI.

His experience extends across leadership roles in the internal, external and digital communication fields through to branding, public relations, customer experience and strategic planning.