Apparently, you’re a peon in marketing until you’re seen as strategic. For years, it felt like everyone in my marketing circle was complaining about becoming more strategic at least once a quarter. A manager in a performance review. A speaker at a conference. A LinkedIn post from someone pushing their version of thought leadership. Everyone agreed it was needed to progress a marketing career. But, nobody could tell me what it looked like in practice.
They say focus on business outcomes, so I focused on revenue generating campaigns. They say support all your recommendations with data, so I show up with so many reports the data is coming out of my ass. They say speak up, be vocal and call out issues when you see them, so I name problems, pushback on unrealistic asks and provide alternatives.
I AM being strategic, damn it! But I’m not moving up in my career and the “be more strategic” advice kept coming up. What the heck am I missing??
So, when people in the marketing community continued to preach strategy, I nodded along every time, because disagreeing felt like admitting I didn’t understand my own job. But I’d leave those discussions with zero idea of what I was supposed to do differently that I wasn’t already doing. I’m diving into conversion rates, I’m understanding how to improve lead quality, I’m building cross functional relationships! What am I not doing that they are?
“Be more strategic” became one of those phrases everyone repeats and nobody defines, like “synergy” or “circle back,” except this one actually gates who gets promoted.
I came from marketing operations, so naturally I concluded that “strategic” meant getting sharper at proving marketing’s value. I dug into attribution. I got better at reporting. I learned exactly how long it took an MQL to become an opportunity and which campaigns touched closed revenue. I could walk into any meeting and explain where every lead in the funnel currently was.
I thought I was zooming out. I was actually just getting more sophisticated inside the same tiny space I’d always been standing in.
Marketing can often get trapped in IT helpdesk mode. Someone asks you to fix something or to do a task and you respond with either yes, no, or describe what is possible. What you don’t always understand is that your “what’s possible” is a narrowly controlled space.
And when you don’t completely understand the business that space looks like this. The business needs revenue, so marketing needs pipeline. That means we need more leads, so we need more people to fill out a form.
Every “fix” or “what’s possible” is through the lens of collecting leads. Forms, content, ads, digital assets.
If the form isn’t converting, then we fix the form. I’d suggest fewer fields. If people are dropping off, then we optimize the landing page. I’d suggest new images and shorter copy. If we need better quality leads, then we need to do better targeting. If we need to improve lead conversion, then I suggest we build a new nurture cadence. If we need to get more leads that fit in our target ICP, then we need another platform to fix personalization or intent data or routing. This all sounds perfectly reasonable. But none of these “fixes” has to do with business outcomes. They are tactical fixes focused on execution.
What I didn’t realize at the time was that the business outcome I was supposed to be focused on had disappeared long before it got to me and I didn’t have the business acumen at the time to know which questions to ask to get it back.
What was the business goal? Were we shifting markets, launching a new product category, assuming a new market position? And how was marketing going to support it? Customer retention, channel partner strategy, new customer acquisition? How do I keep that in the forefront and make sure we don’t move away from it?
Because by the time a business goal reaches the person building the campaign, it’s already been translated four or five times, and each translation shrinks it. Leadership sets a revenue number. That becomes a pipeline number. That becomes an MQL number. That becomes a lead number. That becomes and a tactic like “get 600 people registered for this webinar.”
By the time it lands on your desk, the actual business problem is long gone, and you’re just optimizing a form. You can build an entire career getting excellent at solving that smaller problem without ever once asking whether it was the right problem. I know, because I did it for years.
The better approach and the more strategic way to handle marketing challenges isn’t by solving the problem itself.
Let’s say the form isn’t converting. The strategic solution is to say, actually, this program isn’t worth the dollars we put into it, that same spend is better split between our partner support program and retargeting campaigns. That will allow us to grow quicker by using the partners to help us expand our brand presence and by focusing on retargeting, we only spend our ad dollars with people who are visiting our website, reducing waste. See how there is no mention of the tactical problem? We elevated the solution to the business outcome, support market expansion while preventing budget waste.
Let’s say the issue is that people are dropping off the landing page. The strategic solution is to say, we’re using a freelancer to manage landing pages and our SEO strategy. We should just hire a graphic designer and bring SEO back in-house and tie it to the overall website strategy plan, so we streamline operations and while growing our overall web presence. Again, no mention of tactics. The solution is tied to reducing cost and improving brand awareness.
It’s frustrating when people say “be strategic” but no one tells you want that looks like. Spoiler alert, it’s because most people, even some seasoned marketers, don’t know what it really means.
The difference is that the tactical marketer accepts the problem as given. The strategic marketer treats the problem as evidence and then determines what are the tradeoffs required to make improvements and then determines the resources required to make those improvements happen.
Strategy requires deciding where the business should put its finite money, people, and time.
The tactical person asks: How do we improve conversion from 2.1% to 3%?
The strategic thinker asks: Before we spend another quarter improving conversion, is this program still the best place to put $10,000?
Then they investigate.
Maybe the program produces customers but at double the rate of the acquisition cost. Maybe partner-generated opportunities close three times faster. Maybe 70% of closed business involves prospects who visited the website multiple times before engaging with sales.
Once they investigate, they assess the business requirements and then they produce a recommendation. Reduce investment in cold acquisition. Put 40% of the budget into a partner program that expands trusted distribution. Use another portion to retarget existing website visitors showing intent. Keep a smaller acquisition budget to test new audiences.
That person isn’t more strategic because they mentioned revenue. They’re more strategic because they expanded the problem, evaluated alternatives, considered tradeoffs, and recommended where the business should invest.
When your career is built around a function, you learn to defend that function’s importance, often without noticing you’re doing it. Demand gen believes the fix is always more demand gen. Ops believes it’s always better systems. Paid media believes it’s always sharper targeting. And it’s just a wild coincidence how often an agency’s strategic recommendation happens to be exactly the service already sitting on their invoice.
But being genuinely strategic means having enough distance from your own work to say the uncomfortable thing out loud. If I run the nurture program, I have to be willing to recommend spending less on nurture. If I own paid media, I have to be able to say the ad budget isn’t the problem. That’s a genuinely scary thing to say when your headcount, your budget, and your job security are built on people believing your function is essential. It is so much safer to run one more test, build one more dashboard, buy one more platform, launch one more campaign, and ask for one more quarter. You can spend years polishing a program the company should have killed two years ago, and every single report will say you’re doing great.
The C-level and senior leadership isn’t immune to the “strategic” trap. They fall for it too, in a different way. Seasoned marketers can get so deep into the business side that every conversation starts sounding like a finance meeting with better slides. Margins, CAC, retention, growth. All real, important and necessary. However, none of it is the finish line.
The whole point of moving backward through the business problem is to end up back at the customer. If leadership decides to move upmarket, your job is to understand what made bigger customers suddenly worth chasing and then ask what that decision requires those specific buyers to believe, trust, or understand before they’ll ever say yes. That’s the actual bridge between business strategy and marketing strategy. The business decides where to compete. Marketing figures out what has to be true in the customer’s head for that bet to pay off. Only after that do you get to pick the tactic, like the webinar, the ad, the case study, the partner program, whatever it turns out to be.
So the next time someone tells you to “be more strategic”, don’t reach for another dashboard or another finance term to memorize. Take the actual problem sitting on your desk right now and walk it outward. Improve the work if it genuinely needs improving. Diagnose the system around it. Ask honestly whether that system deserves the investment. Compare it to what else the company could be doing with the same time and money. Then, and only then, bring it back to what you actually know about how your customer thinks, decides, and buys.
You might find out the form needs fewer fields. You might also find out your company has spent three years perfecting a form attached to a program it should have shut down two years ago. Knowing the difference is the whole job.
Follow Moni Oloyede at https://www.linkedin.com/in/moni-oloyede/
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