There is a pattern I keep seeing in founder and executive teams: Marketing gets switched on, budget gets deployed, a campaign goes live, invoices come in and the anxiety kicks in. Is this our ICP? Why are we paying this much per click? Can you prove that the leads come from marketing? We need to pause this until analyzed.
It seems rational but it often kills growth before it has even started.
There are two first-principles of marketing concepts in marketing that are consistently misunderstood, even by experienced managers. 1. Always start with quantity and 2. For your ads to stick you need to be accepted by the market.
Quantity comes before quality. Always. You cannot optimize something that does not exist yet. Before you refine, before you chase the perfect ICP, before you obsess over conversion rates, you need reach. How much? Well until you have a steady stream of leads that become sales, do not reduce volume. Shift the budget around to those that seem to drive best quality but now is not the time to cut. And yes, that means you will get a lot of bad leads. Tell everyone to get over it.
If you have to choose between exposure in the approximate market or highly precise targeting with minimal reach, for the same budget, the broader option is almost always the right one.
The second concept is even more fundamental. Marketing only works if there is baseline acceptance in the market. It is very hard to force demand through ads alone. If you or your product are not perceived as relevant or desirable, all ads will struggle or become extremely expensive.
Many B2B teams misunderstand “content marketing”. The goal is not primarily lead gen. Lead magnets, gated assets, and downloads are secondary outcomes. The primary job is to build goodwill, familiarity, and positioning. You are giving and sharing with the market and earning the right to advertise to them. If you get 10 downloads through a lead-magnet, it is pointless. Give the content out for free and get thousands of downloads, then advertise to them.
Not following the above, I’ve seen marketing get more and more expensive. Constant re-planning starts kicking in. Changing the people, the agency etc. Instead of holding the line and slowly pruning the spam sources. Of course, if there is zero understanding of what is working, there are cases where resetting makes sense. Stop everything, reintroduce activities one by one, and measure properly. But that is a specific approach, stuff is reintroduced fast.
Growth rarely starts with efficiency. It starts scrappy, often off-brand, and possibly even a little cringy. That’s OK – now that there’s choice you can pick the stuff that works and cut off the details that don’t. But don’t “reset” all the time.
