If the problem sits at the bottom of the funnel, you don't need a marketing strategy

Let's start by separating the two, because in companies they sit under one word. The organisation's strategy pulls inwards and answers the question of who we are and where we are heading; its axis is the company and its idea of itself. Marketing strategy pulls outwards, and its focal point is the client, the audience and the market. They share some ground, but they are not the same document and they don't answer the same question. The first also has three layers in a set order: a named challenge or problem, principles that say how we work on it, and only at the end the strategic goals, to which most companies reduce the whole thing. A goal like let's grow threefold or let's hire more people decides nothing, because nobody declares that this year they want lower revenue. That is wishful thinking, not a choice.

Now the thing that makes this episode more than a tidying-up of terms. Most companies that struggle with marketing talk to people who are already aware, people who know they want that kind of service. That is the bottom of the funnel and a red ocean: a hundred other companies talk to the same audience, with practically the same message. All the power of marketing lies higher up, among less aware people, simply because there are more of them, and the question is how to tell them, explain, educate and build a relationship so that they come to understand on their own that they need it. The episode gives a simple example of this shift: an office cleaning company can talk to those who already feel the mess, or about the higher productivity of people working in a tidy space, that is, to someone who isn't looking for a cleaning company yet. Hence the three levels of a good marketing strategy: fit, meaning segments and value proposition; packaging, meaning positioning and tone; and only at the end reach, meaning channels. Clients come with the third and neglect the first two.

In the end both strategies require the same move, and it is their hardest part: exclusion. The organisation decides what it will not do. Marketing decides what we are not and whom we don't talk to, which by definition turns away part of the audience. The episode gives the example of a public statement written plainly: we don't want a big office or dozens of employees, and we won't help you build a corporation. The harder we try to convince everyone who could in theory benefit, the less effective we are. And that leads to the most subversive idea of the whole conversation, one we ourselves are uncomfortable with, because we have the word on our sign above the door: strategy can get in the way, and sometimes it is better not to call it that. It carries a load of associations, it triggers the reflex that there is no time for planning, and it forces an extra level of approval. A better unit of work is often a concrete marketing asset: a one-sentence description of the company, a landing page, an email sequence, a webinar presentation. To make it coherent you have to settle the positioning anyway, so the strategy gets made along the way. A document in a drawer never gets made at all.