Why Marketing Strategy Has to Come First
The Big Shift
On September 1st, Google began moving advertisers onto its own AI system for running search ads. For years, running Google ads meant picking which searches you showed up for, setting what you'd pay per click, writing the ad, and adjusting all of it week after week. Those settings were levers, and knowing how to use them was worth money. Google's AI now makes most of those calls itself. The switch runs through the end of September, you can't opt out, and once your account moves there's no going back. Microsoft also turned on its own version by default.
How buyers find you is changing too. Many now ask ChatGPT or a similar tool for a recommendation before they ever run a search, which means they get handed a short list of three or four companies instead of choosing from a page of results. If you're not on that list, you're not in the running and you'll never know you were skipped. The tools also don't agree with each other. Research published in early September found one AI assistant recommending a group of companies in 81% of its answers while another, asked the same questions, named them only 43% of the time.
Both changes point in the same direction.The parts of marketing you used to handle by hand are moving into systems you can’t see into. What you can still decide is who you're trying to reach and what you're offering them.
The Five Decisions
Strategy is a set of decisions made before the work starts. A plan is the list of what you'll do and when, and it follows from the strategy. There are five decisions.
Who you're for. Your ideal customer profile, defined by company size, industry, and the situation that creates the need. It drives ad targeting, keyword selection, and who your content speaks to. A profile that rules nobody out can't guide a single targeting decision.
What you promise. Your positioning, stated as a claim a buyer could actually verify. Our own industry is a good example of getting this wrong. "Full service digital marketing" tells a prospect nothing, because every agency says it. "Every report we send ties your spend to closed revenue, not impressions" tells them what they're buying, and they can hold us to it. A claim that holds up gives your ads, your site, and your team the same thing to say.
What you're competing against. A buyer can hire you, hire a competitor, or continue with their current process. The third outcome is common enough that there's a term for it: the no-decision loss. Reviewing which type of loss is more frequent in your own closed-lost records tells you what to produce. Losses to competitors call for comparison pages and case studies. Losses to inaction call for material showing what the current process costs in time or missed sales, because those buyers never reached the stage of comparing vendors.
Where you'll compete. Choose two or three channels instead of spreading the budget across multiple.When a budget is divided too many ways, each channel receives too little to produce meaningful results, and it becomes hard to tell which ones are worth continuing. Concentrating the budget in fewer places makes performance easier to evaluate.
How you'll measure success. Agree on metrics before spending begins, and choose ones connected to revenue rather than activity. Qualified pipeline, close rate, and cost to acquire a customer indicate whether marketing is working. Impressions and follower counts indicate only that a campaign ran.
When these five things are not settled in advance, each person doing the work settles them on their own as they go, and the website, the ad campaign, and the sales deck end up describing the business in slightly different terms. A buyer rarely meets a company in one place. They might see an ad, read an article, and speak with a salesperson weeks apart. If each employee describes a somewhat different company, the buyer has to sort out which version is accurate instead of building a single impression.
What Gets Skipped When You Publish Faster
Content is cheap and quick to make now, and the tempting version is to let AI write it and post whatever comes out. Two things get lost that way.
The first is checking the work. AI tools state wrong things confidently, so mistakes about your prices or your services go out under your company's name. Anyone who spots one has reason to doubt the rest of your site.
The second is knowing what worked. A team posting thirty pieces a month is moving faster than anyone can keep track of, so nobody sees which ones brought in customers and which ones nobody reads. The money still gets spent, but you learn nothing you can use next month. Ten pieces you actually look at afterward are worth more than thirty you never check.
Search results reflect this too. Google rolled out a ranking update between August 18 and 21, applied worldwide in every language. Sites that had posted large amounts of automated content lost visibility, and in one case documented by SEO analyst Glenn Gabe, a single site lost rankings for more than 200,000 search terms. Sites that used AI to write but had a person review it first were affected much less. Google runs updates like this a few times a year to catch pages that break its rules on low-value bulk content. It described this one as normal maintenance and never said it was aimed at AI, so what changed is how well Google catches this, not what it allows.
Why Strategy Is Worth The Time
Strategy doesn't bring in money by itself. What it does is keep money from going toward marketing that was never going to work. A focused budget goes further than a scattered one, clear positioning gives buyers something to weigh besides price, and narrower targeting brings in fewer inquiries but more of the right ones. And now that the ad platforms handle the daily adjustments themselves, the direction you give them is the one piece still in your hands.
This is more important today than it was a few years ago. For twenty years, the companies that won at marketing were usually the ones with the biggest budgets, because money bought reach and a bigger team meant more material. Today, whether a buyer ever sees your company depends on how clearly you describe what you do and whether there's proof behind it. Spending more doesn't produce either one, which means smaller companies can now compete with much larger ones.
Writing down the five decisions doesn't take money, just a few hours and the people who can commit to the answers. In most companies those answers already exist. They've just never been put in one place.
Sign up for our newsletter for more Marketing Strategy Insights!
References:
Comments