The Biggest Mistakes You’re Making with Your Marketing Strategy

You’re making some big marketing mistakes. There, we said it.

Don’t worry. So is everyone else. Marketing is hard. And most teams are running around like chickens with their heads cut off until one day, something clicks. Or… it never does.

We’ve worked with scrappy startups, scale-ups, and teams at $100M+ ARR — and the same mistakes show up over and over. Not because people aren’t smart or strategic, but because when things move fast, the fundamentals are the first to slip.

Here are the biggest (and most fixable) mistakes we see in marketing strategy—and what to do instead:

1. You lost the “why”

You’re launching campaigns, posting content, spinning up paid ads. But ask your team why you’re doing any of it — and the answers get fuzzy fast.

Getting back to the “why” realigns your efforts with actual business goals and customer needs. Without it, your strategy is just noise in a crowded feed.

2. You’re treating strategy like a deck, not a tool

Too often, strategy becomes a slide that gets approved, not a tool that guides day-to-day decisions. If your team can’t trace what they’re doing back to the strategy… you don’t have a strategy. You have a presentation.

3. You’re skipping the “who”

You can’t market well to people you don’t deeply understand. If your target is “B2B decision-makers” or “millennial consumers,” you’re still at the surface level. Excellent strategy starts with insight — real understanding of pain points, motivations, and context.

4. You’re focused on tactics, not outcomes

You’ve got content going out, email campaigns queued up, paid ads live — and that’s great. But if none of it ladders up to a clear business outcome, it’s just activity. Strategy connects actions to impact. If you’re not clear on the goal, how do you know what’s working?

5. You’re trying to be everywhere at once

Every channel sounds like a good idea, until you’re under-resourced and underperforming across all of them. Focus beats volume. Go deep where your audience actually is.

6. You’re not experimenting or learning from it

Strategy doesn’t mean you have all the answers. It means you know what to test. The best teams treat marketing like a living system: Hypothesis → test → learn → adjust. If you’re not experimenting, you’re standing still.

7. You think your brand is your logo

You refreshed your logo and picked a new font. Cool! But brand is more than how you look. It’s how you sound, what you stand for, what people remember. Without positioning, voice, and narrative, even the best visual identity falls flat.

8. You’re stuck in the agency award cycle

You hired a big-name agency. The work looks incredible. But conversions? Crickets. That’s because the campaign was built to impress, not to perform. You don’t need a trophy piece. You need results.

9. You’re using AI to define your positioning

ChatGPT is great for drafting a blog post. It’s not great for figuring out what makes your brand worth paying attention to. Positioning needs human input, customer insight, and hard decisions. AI can help shape the message—but it can’t create meaning.

Making mistakes is one thing, but avoiding help when you really need it? Come on! Let’s schedule a chat and get you from good to exceptional.