Most founders, CEOs and business owners that I speak to aren’t short of marketing information. In fact, they’re drowning in it. And everyone seems to be an AI expert, because they live on their ChatGPT or Claude tab on their browser, and whatever they need access to, they simply tap a few questions and get the answers they were looking for. Whether the answers they get back are right or wrong for their business, they feel that because they got a detailed response... you know, a silicon chip gave you an answer that feels good because you’ve got a 12 page report on it all, it doesn’t mean that it’s right.

And for those not dabbling in AI, it’s no different. You’ll subscribe to dozens of newsletters, sat through seminars and webinars, bought the courses, stacked up the books. You’ve even jumped into some lifetime or annual high ticket program that gives you access to a mentor at an unprecedented level.

Information on marketing is not something you need more of. What you’re short of is implementation that actually fits your business.

What worked for that bro marketer, or that course creator, or the guru that you followed for the last decade, it won’t drop into your business and work out of the box. Their audience is different. Their offer is different to yours, and their context is different to yours.

So how do you take what you’ve learned and actually use it?

Because I’m a trainer, I’m a coach. I do a lot of this, and I want people who listen to me to actually implement some things and get things working. So what I tell them to do is three simple things.

1. Test whether it’s even relevant for their business or not, because actually, most strategies aren’t, and you only need one or two strategies for your business to actually make things work well.

2. You run a simplified version of it to see if your market responds, and you can do that through your email list or your already existing audience.

3. And then you measure success based on the sales that you make, not on the metrics that make the strategy look good on paper, like likes or comments or clicks or something like that. You actually need to count the money.

I see this all the time. When running strategy sessions with business owners to create a simplified strategy for growth, they’ve followed the mentor’s playbook for the last 90 days and seen nothing move, and then blame the marketing, not the strategy.

Their ego is so great they can’t admit that what they’ve bought into is the wrong person, who operates a business that is totally different from theirs. But they still keep plowing on because they think they’re going to get a result eventually.

Let me tell you, if over 90 days of maintained visibility you keep the calls to action sharp, you’ve communicated your message consistently and shown up, the marketing didn’t let you down. The strategy was wrong for your business.

The strategy should always be the thing that gets tested first, not the execution.

That’s why I do the work inside of a strategy session with clients. Before we even get into implementation, we map out four 90-day sprints across 12 months, built around what will work for you in your business. And as your fractional CMO, I can work with you over the next period of time to help you implement, or you can keep them and work on them yourself with your team.

If you want to understand strategies that will work for your business right now, then simply book a call with me over at www.anthodges.com and let’s see what we can do to actually make a plan that will work for your marketing efforts in your business, not just on paper or from the horse’s mouth of that mentor or coach that you’re listening to thinking, “Will this work?”

Let’s find a strategy that will work for your business. Book that call over at www.anthodges.com.

My focus is on one thing, one thing only, simplification, and when we simplify, we streamline things. Part of the first job that I do is I look at how we connect the marketing activity to revenue, because it has to be linked.

When marketing is seen as a cost center, it’s because marketing has not been linked to revenue.

I was on a call a few months back with a founder who said something that stuck with me all weekend. He said, “I need to cut my marketing budget by 30% because revenue is down.” I asked him, obviously the right kind of questions, “what’s the return on your current marketing spend?” and things like that - I was trying to dig into the challenges. But his response was, “I don’t know the answers to these questions, but it just feels like it’s too much at the moment”,” and that’s the moment I knew we had a bigger problem than just marketing budgets.

In businesses where marketing is treated as a cost center, the first thing that gets cut when revenue dips is marketing. The logic goes, revenue’s down, costs need to come down, marketing is a cost, so let’s cut marketing, let’s even chuck AI into the mix and reduce headcount.

There’s all kinds of different things that happen, and what happens then is when revenue drops further because the one engine that was bringing in new customers got throttled. Then there’s a bigger challenge!

In businesses where marketing is treated as an investment, the conversation is completely different. When revenue dips, the question becomes, which marketing activity is producing the best return, and how can we double down on it - together with and how can we simplify and strip back the activity that isn’t producing revenue?

The difference between those two conversations is not the size of business, it’s not the industry, it’s not the budget, it’s whether the CMO has done the work to prove that marketing is an engine, not an expense. That is on us as CMOs.

If the CEO and CFO see marketing as a cost, it’s because marketing has presented itself as a cost, campaigns, creative agency fees, video studio time, platform subscriptions, headcount, all of it shown as money going out, but there’s no clear picture of money coming back in.

The modern CMO has to flip that switch. Every dollar of marketing spend needs to be tied to revenue, outcome, a pipeline, contribution, a customer lifetime, value, not as a post event report, but as a live view that the finance team can see at the same time we see it.

When marketing is an investment the CFO becomes your ally, not your enemy. This is because the CFOs job is to align capital to the highest returning activities, and if marketing is one of those, the CFO will fight for your budget harder than you will.

So if you’re a founder and you’re about to think about cutting marketing because revenue’s down, just pause for one moment ask the question…

“What’s working? What’s not? And what could happen if we doubled down on the things that were working and stripped back the things that weren’t?”

That’s a very different conversation to let’s cut 30% of the marketing budget.

If this resonates with you and you want your marketing to turn from just a cost center to an investment with measurable returns, email me cmo@anthodges.com or find me on LinkedIn.

We need to make sure that we’re stepping into the right situation, the right conversations, with the right numbers to show a return on investment, not just showing our pretty graphs and campaigns, which all just really talk about the costs that are going out.

Please share this with colleagues who also need to hear this message.