Most businesses I meet don’t have a marketing problem. They have six small marketing efforts that nobody has ever joined together.
There’s a website built three years ago by someone who has since left. A social media freelancer posting twice a week. An agency running Google Ads. An email list that gets used when somebody remembers. A brochure from a rebrand that never quite finished. Each piece is fine. Together they don’t add up to anything.
This is the single most common thing I’m brought in to fix, and it has very little to do with the quality of the individual bits.
How businesses end up here
Nobody plans it. It happens one sensible decision at a time.
Sales dip, so somebody suggests ads and an agency gets appointed. A competitor launches a slick website, so yours gets rebuilt. Someone says you should be on LinkedIn, so a freelancer starts posting. An exhibition comes up, so there’s a stand and a leaflet. Each decision is reasonable on the day it’s made.
What’s missing is anyone standing back and asking whether the whole collection points in the same direction, or what should be dropped to pay for the next thing. In businesses between £1m and £20m that job usually belongs to a managing director who has a business to run, so it doesn’t get done.
How to tell if this is you
A few signs come up again and again.
Your suppliers all report good news and your enquiry numbers are flat. Everyone is hitting their channel metrics while the thing that matters doesn’t move.
Nobody can tell you what a customer costs to acquire. Individual campaigns have numbers, but nobody has put them together with what a customer is worth.
Your marketing spend is a set of separate bills rather than a budget. You know what the agency costs and what the freelancer costs, but there’s no single figure you’re managing against.
Different parts of the business describe what you do differently. Compare your website, your LinkedIn and what your sales team says on the phone. If a customer would hear three different pitches, they will.
And the giveaway: when something good happens, nobody’s sure why. Enquiries jump one month and the explanations vary depending who you ask.
What joined up actually means
It doesn’t mean doing more. Usually it means doing less, on purpose.
One strategy that says who you’re going after and what you’re saying to them. One budget across every channel, so you can move money to what works. One set of numbers everyone is judged on, including suppliers. One person accountable for the whole thing rather than each piece.
With Rucklidge Law that’s exactly what changed. They’re a family law firm, and they didn’t need another supplier. They needed someone to own marketing end to end. I created the strategy and manage it, along with the budget behind it. I run their Google Ads, manage the website and the quarterly video programme in partnership with Genius Division, and look after the strategy for social and email.
The website brings in 30 to 50 qualified leads a month. That’s the visible result. The underlying change is that every channel now supports the same argument to the same people, and when something works we know why.
Where to start if the budget is already committed
You don’t need to blow everything up in one go. This is the order I’d work in.
Get all the costs on one page. Every supplier, every subscription, every retainer, annualised. Most businesses find something they’d forgotten they were paying for.
Fix measurement before you change anything else. If you can’t see which activity produces enquiries, every decision after this is guesswork. Broken conversion tracking is the most common version of this, and it’s usually a day’s work to sort.
Work out what a customer is worth. Average order or contract value, how often they come back, how long they stay. Without that number you can’t judge whether anything is working.
Write the one-page plan. Who, what we say, which channels, what we’ve stopped, what we’ll judge it by. One page, not forty slides.
Then brief every supplier against it. Same strategy, same numbers, same language. Good suppliers are relieved when this happens, because most of them have been guessing too.
The bit people find hardest
Stopping things. There’s always at least one activity everyone knows isn’t working, kept going because somebody championed it, or because stopping feels like waste after all that investment.
The money is already spent either way. The only question is whether next month’s budget goes to something better. I’ve yet to audit a business where the answer was to keep doing everything.
If this sounds like your marketing, book a free consultation and talk me through what you’ve got. I’ll tell you which parts are worth keeping, and you’re welcome to ignore me. Or have a look at what joined-up marketing has produced for other businesses first.