10 Signs Your Marketing Person Needs Strategic Support

You've hired a marketing person. You finally have the internal resource to really drive your business into the next phase of growth. With a dedicated resource purely focused on building leads you're bound to succeed.

Yet a constant struggle remains. They're great implementers, and can come up with a few good ideas, but they're not a strategist. You're driving the direction and trying to align the output with your vision.

Then there's the question of results. They're creating content, managing campaigns, and ticking boxes. But somewhere between the daily grind and quarterly reviews, you've also started to wonder if it's all actually working.

Talented marketers can struggle to drive measurable business growth when they lack the right strategic support, and when 'success' is poorly defined. Here are ten signs that indicate it's time to bring in external guidance to take the lead on your implementation.

1. You're too busy to guide marketing

As a business leader, you're pulled in multiple directions. Marketing doesn't get the bandwidth it deserves, yet it still demands decisions: Which channels matter? What's the priority this quarter? Where should we compete?

Your marketing person is skilled at execution (creating emails, writing blogs, managing social posts). But marketing strategy requires business insight, competitive intelligence, and the experience to see what's coming. Without guidance your marketing either becomes reactive, or your marketer leaves for a role where support is given.

An indication that your marketer needs support is that there's a gap between their strategic capability, and your ability to walk them to the activities required.

2. You don't know if it's moving the needle

Many implementation specialist are great at creating assets but are not data analysts. They may be able to find first level data (sessions, open rates, lead sources) but can they piece it together into insight that drives strategy?

This stems from either a lack of knowledge about what to measure, or a lack of time to gather data and analyse performance. The result is marketing that lacks focus and direction. You don't know if cutting costs will hurt performance, or where the waste actually lies.

Without proper measurement frameworks, you can't confidently invest more in what's working or eliminate what's draining budget. Digital marketing support brings the analytical rigour to connect marketing activity to business outcomes.

3. Your marketing is reactive

Product launches, events, promotions, and new legislation all need urgent pushes, but they also need an effective launch or that big news will fall into the ether.

Beyond an outburst of communication, if there's little strategic alignment and no ongoing campaign activity then there is no path to build momentum and cut-through in the market. Your marketing person is fighting fires, busy responding to the next big idea dumped on their desk, unable to craft a 3-6 month campaign supporting your next big initiative.

As a result, there's no sustained effort between each ad hoc task. Everything feels like starting from scratch instead of executing against a plan that compounds results over time. While you've seen marketing activity happen, you might not feel the ripples of success.

These first three signs typically stem from time constraints and competing priorities. The following issues, however, point to deeper structural gaps in how marketing operates.

4. Your marketer works in isolation

They're the only marketing person in the business. That means no one to bounce ideas off, no peer review of their work, and no one to challenge their thinking or share insights as to what has worked on another campaign. They're making decisions in a vacuum without the benefit of an external perspective or industry best practice.

This isolation leads to blind spots, missed opportunities, and a lack of confidence in their recommendations. 

Understanding what to measure is half the battle when it comes to proving marketing's value. Discover the 6 marketing metrics you should actually care about in our guide.

5. Marketing planning happens month to month

There's no coherent six to twelve-month marketing roadmap connecting campaigns to business objectives. Your marketer is planning in short sprints rather than thinking strategically about customer journeys, seasonal opportunities, or building campaigns that create success over time.

This may come from a lack of insight on the 12 month business strategy. It may simply come from campaign planning not being their particular strength. Or it may come from a lack of time due to existing marketing tasks.

This short-term focus means your campaigns come to a halt before they've had a chance to build momentum. That one email and social post you sent didn't flood your inbox with leads so it's marked as a failure.

In reality, a good campaign is multi-channel, and aligns with multiple stages of the buying journey. A failure to plan for that will reduce the results you achieve.

6. Your marketer struggles to say no

Every department wants their project promoted. Every product needs a campaign. Every sales request feels urgent. Without senior support to help prioritise and push back, your marketer becomes a production factory rather than a strategic function.

They're spread too thin across too many initiatives. None get the focus needed to truly succeed. Your marketer either ends up being burnt out trying to please everyone, or requests are never actioned and your team loses faith in marketing's ability to support their objectives.

7. Marketing conversations happen in the hallway, not the boardroom

Marketing activity gets discussed in passing rather than being a regular agenda item with dedicated time and leadership attention. When marketing does come up in meetings, it's often about execution ("Can you create a flyer?", "Let's get a social post out about that..") rather than strategic contribution ("How should we position ourselves against this new competitor?", "How can we build a month-on-month lead funnel for sales?").

Your marketer lacks a voice in strategic business discussions. They're seen as a service function rather than a growth driver. As a result you feel that you've hired someone to execute basics tasks and their skills and expertise are under-utilised.

8. You're unsure about your marketer's development path

They're competent at their current level, but you don't know how to help them grow or what 'good' looks like for their next career stage. After all, you're not a career marketer so how do you know what they need? There's no structured professional development, no exposure to senior marketing thinking, and no clear progression.

This stagnation can lead to losing talented people who seek growth elsewhere. You can sign them up to courses or enrol them on the HubSpot Academy, but do the lessons align with your growth goals?

9. Marketing results are unpredictable

Some months feel successful, others feel flat, but you can't pinpoint why. There's no consistent methodology for testing, learning, and refining. Your marketer may have hunches about what works but lacks the frameworks and experience to systematically improve performance.

You're guessing rather than knowing what will drive results. And before they have time to deep-dive into the results the next task lands on their desk with 'urgent' stamped in bold red letters.

Data analysis may not be a particular strength of your marketer. You may have hired them for the creative skills, their ability to write great blogs, or their savvy on social media. If diving into the numbers isn't a natural skill of theirs you will be missing out on valuable insights that guide activity.

10. Strategic recommendations sit in limbo

Your marketer presents ideas (website redesign, new automation workflows, content strategy), but these proposals lack the authority or business case to get approved. Without a senior marketing perspective to frame recommendations in business terms and provide independent validation, good ideas struggle to get traction and investment.

They need someone who can translate marketing ideas into language that resonates with leadership and builds confidence in the investment. A clear roadmap for implementation and how success will be measured is invaluable but your marketer may not have the support they need to convey these messages.

How do you give your marketing person strategic support?

Recognising these signs is the first step toward unlocking your marketing investment's full potential. Your marketer has the talent and work ethic. They have the capacity to create and deliver a campaign from start to finish. They even have access to your internal knowledge and customers. What's missing is the strategic framework, accountability, and senior perspective that transforms activity into growth.

This is where we come in.

We appreciate that some businesses need their marketing managed by an external agency but others simply want to augment their existing marketer with insights, experience, and strategy.

They need a senior marketing strategist to lead their efforts, but either don't have the HR budget or don't need this to be a full time role.

Our Marketing Guidance and Growth Programme provides exactly that support without the cost of a full-time executive hire. Your business gets senior marketing strategy and planning while your marketing person gets the direction and mentorship they need to become an invaluable driver for your business.

What's included in strategic marketing support?

Our strategic marketing support is our usual 'done with you' marketing but with the implementation stripped out, plus some coaching.

3 month forward plan

We work with senior business leadership to understand the business's goals and communication requirements in 3 month sprints. This translates into a skeleton activity and messaging plan where we can build campaigns while keeping the workload achievable.

Detailed monthly plan

Each of the 3 months gets a more focused monthly plan with a recommended publishing calendar and dependencies. It includes more detail on key messaging and target audiences across the following channels:

• Email marketing
• Website updates
• Blog articles
• Social posts
• Paid media
• Lead capture
• Automation (platform specific)

Weekly guidance

The 30 minute video call is about accountability and the removal of roadblocks. We ensure activities are on track and troubleshoot key blockers.

Your support extends to checking over assets to ensure best practice is applied, within the constraints of your marketing platforms.

Month-end report

We analyse your marketing performance to uncover what worked and where to focus energy for future improvements. Our insights across multiple brands in different sectors enables us to recommend fixes we've seen work, shortening the development cycle.