A mildly radical suggestion in an industry that can turn sending an email into a six-platform workflow.
Marketing has become complicated.
Not necessarily because marketing itself has become more complicated, but because we’ve spent the last twenty years enthusiastically adding things to it.
More channels. More platforms. More data. More dashboards. More specialists. More automation. More acronyms.
And now AI, which has helpfully arrived to make everything simpler by giving us approximately 47,000 additional things we could be doing.
Perhaps there’s another option.
What if we just made marketing simpler?
We Have a Slight Addition Problem
Marketing responds in interesting ways when something isn’t working.
We add something.
Is website traffic down? Start making videos.
Are leads down? Launch a webinar.
Is engagement down? Post more often.
Are sales down? Install another piece of software.
Eventually, the average marketing department resembles a kitchen drawer containing batteries, three obsolete phone chargers, seventeen mystery keys and a cable that absolutely must belong to something.
Nobody knows what half of it does, but throwing anything away feels dangerously irresponsible.
Start With the Boring Questions
Before adding another tactic, platform or AI-powered widget, we should answer a few rather unfashionable questions.
- Who are we trying to reach?
- What problem do they have?
- Why should they choose us?
- What are we trying to achieve?
- What’s actually working?
These aren’t particularly exciting questions.
Nobody is going to invite you onto a conference stage to unveil The Five Questions Marketing Framework™ while dramatic music plays. But answering them properly tends to make everything else considerably easier.
Simpler Doesn’t Mean Less Sophisticated
As I explore in Episode 15 of The Overthinker’s Guide to Modern Marketing Podcast, many of the things that have made marketing complicated are genuinely useful.
Data is useful. Automation is useful. AI is useful. CRM systems are useful. Analytics are useful.
The problem begins when managing all these things becomes the marketing.
A sophisticated marketing operation doing seventeen things badly isn’t necessarily better than a focused one doing three things exceptionally well.
Sometimes sophistication is knowing what to add.
Sometimes it’s knowing what to remove.
Do Fewer Things Better
Imagine a marketing strategy that fits comfortably on one page.
A clearly defined audience.
A compelling reason to choose you.
A small number of priorities.
A handful of channels that genuinely reach your customers.
Useful measurement that helps you make decisions rather than producing decorative graphs for monthly meetings.
And enough time for the people doing the marketing to think occasionally.
Radical stuff.
But perhaps the future of marketing isn’t about doing more.
Perhaps it’s about getting much better at deciding what actually matters.
For more on how marketing became quite so complicated, and why simpler thinking might be the answer, listen to Episode 15: Why Marketing Has Become So Complicated.
Because marketing doesn’t necessarily need another tool, tactic, channel or dashboard. It needs a good clear-out.
