Marketing is complex. Your decision making shouldn't be.

Marketing today is complex. There’s no getting away from it. Channels have multiplied, formats have become endless and technical integration has become critical. This means more data to review, more platforms to manage, more ads to set up and more agencies and partners to manage.

The problem isn’t complexity itself. It’s complexity without clarity.

It is easy to get caught up in this, to chase a new format, to obsess over data points, to try and do everything all at once. There is a need to do a lot, but doing it without clarity and direction can result in costly mistakes at worst and suboptimal performance at best.

Having spent my career inside agencies, working with some of the world’s largest advertisers, I have seen how this complexity and the decline of interconnectivity can happen within businesses. It rarely happens in the blink of an eye or with one simple decision. It happens incrementally, slowly but surely, with the addition of a new format, a new agency being onboarded, a new hire with grand ideas, another dashboard, another reporting requirement.

Each decision might make sense in isolation, but eventually the whole system becomes harder to understand, manage and improve. If these businesses don’t step back and consider the strategy, understand the data and review the plans, things can go wrong quickly.

More channels means more questions, metrics, dependencies and decisions to be made. More agencies reduce accountability and increase time spent managing ‘the relationship’. Teams drown in data points and struggle to piece them together to answer the questions the business needs answers to. More tools and technologies are adopted but don’t solve for unclear strategy, poor operations or uncertain ownership.

More data isn't the same as more insight.
More agencies aren't the same as more expertise.
More technology isn't the same as better marketing.

I’ve witnessed it myself. Shift to daily reporting thinking it will enable faster decision making. Launch a new channel that will save you when you haven’t made the old one work. Develop a new dashboard when you don’t know what metrics you should be focused on.

A lot of this is often unnecessary complexity that is driven by a lack of clarity on how marketing activities impact the business and drive the bottom line.

Together, a lack of clarity and unnecessary complexity slows decision making and weakens accountability. It wastes resources and kills time that should be spent on the actual work of delivering against the business goals.

Not vanity metrics, but the KPIs that actually drive performance

These aren’t the same for all businesses, and certainly not for all channels and tactics, which is why upfront work clarifying how marketing impacts the business’ goals and what the priorities are is essential.

Undoubtedly there is almost always a mix of jobs to be done, but where each element of marketing can drive the biggest impact needs to be defined and honed.

I worked with a company that had seen their ad spend against existing customers grow month on month. Driven by a relentless focus on ROAS, it made sense. The numbers looked good, ROAS was up, CPA was down. On the surface, the metrics looked positive.

But new customer growth had slowed and repeat order rate had barely shifted. Money was being spent on customers that would have come back anyway.

Lifetime value analysis showed it was far better to let ad spend focus on new customers, even if CPAs rose, and build out owned channels to more robustly retain customers.

The metric was not wrong. The decision it was driving was.

Not all businesses can pivot this way. I’ve worked with brands where high value products with long purchase cycles mean the initial return is critical. Ad spend must convert extremely profitably, but to do so the organic infrastructure has to handle more of the awareness and consideration.

Upfront investment in this space provided longevity, a steady hum of content and assets that build over time and continue to deliver both directly and indirectly.

The point is not that one approach is right and another is wrong. The point is that the right approach depends on the business, its customers, its economics and what marketing needs to achieve.

Optimisation only works when you know what you're actually trying to optimise for

This shows that a metric can be correct and still lead to the wrong decision. ROAS can show positive return, CPAs can be on target, reach can be high, but that isn’t always the full picture, reflecting the reality of the business.

Optimisation only works when you know what you're actually trying to optimise for.

For that, you need clarity on how the business operates and interacts with the consumer, what the opportunity cost is and what alternative approaches there are. This clarity is essential to maximise marketing effectiveness.

Better marketing has to start with better systems

This means there is no templated approach to marketing. Each business is different, trying to reach a specific audience with their specific selling points and their own nuances. They have different challenges depending on how they operate, where they operate, what their structure looks like, or how they are funded.

Different teams, different restrictions, different tech stacks.

You cannot define a single ‘marketing blueprint’. There are too many factors to consider and, as I said before, you cannot deny the complexity of marketing today.

The answer isn't to eliminate that complexity. It is to create a system that makes it manageable.

That means that better marketing has to start with better systems.

Systems that create the clarity needed for the team to operate well, know their focus and make decisions.

Systems that reduce unnecessary complexity so decisions and actions can be made fast.

Systems that work towards delivering against the business goals.

A strong marketing system consists of:

Clear strategy

A strong strategy grounded in business data and deep audience knowledge is essential to create clarity and understanding of marketing’s role in what the business is trying to achieve.

It must surface the essential requirements of the function and the business and define how they will be delivered.

Focused priorities

The strategy translates into clear priorities: what matters and what doesn't.

Metrics, KPIs, the roles of channels and tactics, specific projects and priorities all matter. Proper prioritisation is essential to minimise complexity that can lead to wastage and poor outcomes.

Priorities must connect with the wider business and be clear at every level, and for every channel and tactic.

Business led measurement

True understanding of the business is critical to ensure teams prioritise correctly and make impactful decisions.

The metrics that matter are business metrics, not vanity ones. The relationship between key marketing data points and the actual business KPIs must be established, acted on and refined.

Getting this right is critical to avoid chasing results that don’t drive the business forward and implementing the wrong solutions to the wrong problems.

Effective operations

Processes should ensure everyone knows who is responsible for what, when and how, from approvals through to implementation across all teams.

Often this can be facilitated and streamlined by technology, turning upfront investment in setup into persistent savings in both time and error reduction.

Clear priorities, objectives and focused data points also facilitate greater concentration on what matters and better internal and external collaboration. Increased clarity and reduced complexity means everyone knows what should be done, how it should be done and when it should be done.

Clarity and focus mean standards are less likely to slip, communications are less likely to be lost and the quality of outputs is more consistent.

The right technology

Technology and tools are important. They deliver measurement, speed up execution and extract insights.

They are essential to operational efficiency within a team and to ensuring marketing and the wider business are in sync.

That does not mean you can replace your entire marketing team with AI. It means choosing the right technology stack can have a multiplier effect on the whole system.

Technology should amplify a good marketing system, not compensate for a broken one.

A rhythm of improvement

Marketing must be reviewed, challenged and adapted rather than simply repeated.

Establishing a culture within the team and across the business that champions the development of insights to support business outcomes is crucial.

Experiments, results and learnings should be accurately documented and referenced. Consistent application of what works, stripping out what doesn’t and finding what works better ensures improvement is built into the system.

Complexity isn't the problem. Unmanaged complexity is.

None of this is easy, but it is essential.

Without having a proper system in place, marketing functions are much more vulnerable to the idea that more is better, that increasing complexity will deliver more.

Yes, ultimately, good marketing is an ecosystem. Channels, content, data, technology, agencies and owned activity all connect and influence one another.

But that doesn't mean everything deserves equal attention at the same time.

When and how you do things matters.

It is not about simplifying for the sake of it. It is about understanding what to start with, what to cut, what to defer and what to pursue that will have the greatest combined impact with the resources you have and the goals you are trying to achieve.

It’s about removing the complexity that gets in the way of making good decisions.

Create clarity. Reduce complexity. Deliver outcomes.