Why Your Marketing Strategy Might Not Actually Be A Strategy

You sit down on a Sunday afternoon with the intention of “working on your marketing strategy.” You open the content calendar, shift a few posts around, colour-code the email sends, maybe even draft a reel script or two. Two hours pass. There’s now a plan... sort of. It looks neater. But if you’re honest, it doesn’t feel any clearer.

That sense of unease is familiar to many small business owners and marketing leads. It’s not that they’re doing nothing. On the contrary, they’re often doing a lot. But somewhere along the way, “strategy” has come to mean “the thing we’re doing next week”, instead of the thinking behind why we’re doing anything at all.

This is more than just semantics. It’s structural. And it’s an issue that's surprisingly easy to fall into.

Where the Confusion Starts

The word strategy gets used as a catch-all. Sometimes, it's used to describe an objective, sometimes a social media plan, and sometimes a mood board with a Pinterest quote about growth. But there’s a fundamental difference between strategy and the things that sit around it. And if we don’t understand that difference, we end up pouring effort into work that doesn’t move us forward.

Here’s how I define the layers:

• Goals are the outcomes we want to achieve. For example, “Sell 50 seats for the next workshop” is a goal.

• Strategy is the thinking behind how we’ll get there. “Position the workshop as essential learning for HR teams in growing companies and build visibility through webinars and targeted LinkedIn content”. THAT’s the strategy.

• Tactics are the tools and approaches we use. In this case, running LinkedIn Ads, email sequences, a short nurture series, and a referral bonus.

• Tasks are what we actually do with our time. Stuff like writing ad copy, filming a video, building the landing page, and sending the emails.

Most businesses confuse tactics and tasks with strategy. You can see it in the way planning sessions start with platform decisions or “we should try X this month.” Strategy doesn't come up at all. Or if it does, it’s reduced to vague themes like “visibility” or “engagement,” which aren’t really strategies either. They’re metrics.

Why It Feels Like You’re Always Running

When you skip strategy, you don’t immediately feel the consequences. At first, things still move. Posts go out. Emails get sent. But gradually, the cracks appear. You’re suddenly doing more, but feeling less sure. You start saying yes to every channel, but no message is really resonating. You’re tweaking headlines, colours, and formats, but nothing seems to shift the outcome.

And underneath it all, there’s this murky pressure to “be more consistent,” even though consistency without direction just burns time.

It’s not always dramatic. More often, it’s subtle, like a fog that settles in the form of a low-grade marketing fatigue where no one knows exactly what’s working, but no one feels confident enough to stop.

I See This More Often Than You Think

Honestly, this is usually where many of my consulting sessions begin.

The business is active. Content is going out regularly. There’s a newsletter, some social posts, maybe even ads in the mix. It looks like marketing is happening... and it is, technically. But the results are less than exciting, the engagement is inconsistent, and the conversions are lower than they should (and could) be.

And when we take a closer look, the issue isn’t effort. Its direction. The team, or the founder, hasn’t made a clear decision about who they’re speaking to or what they want to be known for. So the content, even when it’s well-made, feels very vague because it’s trying to speak to everyone. Which means it connects with no one in particular.

Once that core decision is made and we get a better understanding of the audience, position, and purpose, everything starts to align. The volume of output doesn’t necessarily change. But the clarity does. And CLARITY is what creates momentum.

What Real Strategy Looks Like

Setting a marketing strategy is not about being clever. It’s about being honest. Honest about who you serve. Honest about what they need. Honest about what you have the capacity to do well.

It’s the part where you ask:

• Who is our work really for?

• What problem are they trying to solve?

• What role do we play in solving it?

• Where are they already looking for answers?

• What can we actually commit to?

  
  

The answers to those questions form a lens. They help you say, “No, we’re not going to spread ourselves thin across seven platforms. We’re going to go deep on two, because that’s where our audience is and where we can show up with substance.”

They also help you decide what not to do. That’s half the value of strategy: permission to focus.

How to Spot the Gap in Your Marketing Strategy

If you’re unsure whether you’re operating with a clear marketing strategy, try this: write down your current marketing goal. Then, in one sentence, explain the logic behind your approach. If that sentence sounds more like a list of things (“post every day, run a giveaway, send emails”), you probably don’t have a strategy yet; you have a list of tactics.

This isn’t a failure. It’s a signpost. And it’s one you can work with.

Because once you know what’s missing, you can start filling in the thinking.

A Simple Way to Start Setting Your Marketing Strategy

Start with just three steps:

1. Define your goal in concrete terms. Not just “grow the business,” but “gain 10 new clients from the consulting offer this quarter.”

2. Clarify your audience in practical terms. Not just “small business owners,” but “service-based founders who’ve grown through referrals and now need marketing systems.”

3. Choose your approach based on what’s most effective and sustainable for your business, not what others are doing.

   
   

That’s strategy... or at least the beginning of it. The rest is refinement.

You Don’t Need a 30-Page Deck

This doesn’t have to be complicated. The most useful strategies I’ve seen fit on one page. They’re written in plain language. And they are focused on helping a team (even a team of one) know what to work on.

If you’re realising that your current “strategy” is mostly a stack of content ideas or a campaign calendar, that’s not something to be embarrassed about. It’s something to build from.

You’re not starting over. You’re starting with a clearer perspective.

And if you want a simple worksheet to help organise those thoughts, I've got you sorted! Clarify Your Strategy in 20 Minutes is a practical workbook that walks you through a calm, step-by-step process to define what you’re actually trying to achieve, who you’re trying to reach, and what kind of marketing activity makes the most sense for your business.

Download your copy of the workbook by clicking on the button below.

Clarify Your Strategy in 20 Minutes