Most days it feels like no one “gets it.” No one really understands marketing.
Monday morning. Pipeline call.
Sales says the leads from last month’s “Thought Leadership in the Age of AI” webinar were junk. Half the registrants were students. Three were competitors. One guy thought you were hiring.
The CFO wants to know why paid spend went up 18 percent and opportunity creation didn’t.
The CEO saw your competitor’s founder post a selfie from some industry summit with the caption “Grateful to build the future of fintech” and 2,400 likes, and now wants to know why you aren’t “showing up more.”
You’re staring at a dashboard that can tell you how many people clicked but not whether any of them are on a buying committee.
And then someone says it. “Can’t we just do more of what they’re doing?”
Ugh, here we go. Let me grab my magic wand and get us more followers. Let me grab my genie and get us more qualified leads.
There is no point in saying what you’re thinking. “It doesn’t work like that” “What don’t have X”, “We need more Y”, We could but it would take more Z”
It just feels safer to say, “We’ll increase posting frequency and test new formats,” than to say, “That tactic only works inside a completely different growth model.”
Everyone thinks they know marketing because it became easy to touch.
Everyone can post, send emails, create a design on Canva and use ChatGPT.
Digital made distribution easy. AI made output cheap. You can draft a LinkedIn post in twelve seconds. Your CRO has a personal brand. Your Head of Product writes threads on weekends. The board member’s daughter runs an Etsy shop and “does marketing.”
So now everyone feels qualified.
And when we respond to strategic pressure with tactical language, we confirm their suspicion. “Sure, we’ll post more.”
That sentence alone has probably cost the profession millions in perceived value.
Because posting isn’t the job.
In B2B especially, posting is just the surface tension of something much heavier underneath.
B2B buying is not a single person scrolling at 10 p.m. and impulse buying a water bottle. It’s six stakeholders on three different timelines, one internal champion trying not to look stupid, procurement asking for discounts, IT worried about integration risk, and a VP who got burned by a similar vendor two years ago and is still defensive about it.
Marketing influences all of that. Controls none of it.
But what do we report on? Impressions. Click-through rate. Webinar registrations. MQL volume.
Because they’re countable. Because they’re visible. Because they fit neatly into a slide.
So when revenue lags, leadership looks at the numbers and says, “We need more leads.”
And instead of asking, “More of what kind?” we say, “We can increase top-of-funnel volume.” That’s where we shrink ourselves.
More leads to who? From where? With what level of intent? For which use case? Against which competitor? Under what budget constraints?
Those are strategic questions. They take longer to explain. They don’t trend nicely in a weekly Slack update.
So we default to volume.
The competitor comparison makes it worse. You’ve heard it in some version.
“They just dropped their 2026 Industry Benchmark Report and it’s everywhere.”
Yes. It’s everywhere because they’ve been building that asset for five years. Because they embedded data collection into their product onboarding flow. Because they have a 40-person research team and a paid media budget that quietly dwarfs your entire marketing headcount.
They didn’t wake up and decide to “create a report.” They architected a data advantage.
But in the room, none of that nuance survives. What survives is the artifact. The PDF. The likes. The conference buzz. They see the output. They don’t see the build.
They don’t see the two failed versions that nobody downloaded. They don’t see the consultant who rewrote the positioning after win-loss interviews revealed the messaging was off. They don’t see the months when the CEO complained that “nothing is happening.”
They see the moment it worked and assume the tactic is portable.
So we start cosplaying. “We should do a report too.”
And now we’re chasing format instead of asking whether we even have the structural inputs to make that format meaningful.
This is where marketing needs to grow up in how it speaks.
When leadership says, “We need more followers,” and we say, “We’ll post three times a week instead of two,” we sound like we’re optimizing a content calendar.
What we should be saying is something closer to this:
“Our close rates improve when prospects have encountered us at least five times before the first sales call. Based on the last twelve closed-won deals, the content that gets mentioned most often is case-based breakdowns of implementation. So the goal of our LinkedIn presence isn’t follower growth. It’s repeated exposure to operational proof inside our ICP. Follower count will move if that works, but it’s not the objective.”
That’s a different conversation. It’s grounded in buying behavior. In evidence. In mechanism. And it subtly repositions marketing from “content producer” to “risk reduction architect.” There’s nuance here that matters.
Sometimes follower growth does matter. If you’re expanding into a new segment, if you’re testing message-market resonance, if you need distribution to validate positioning, reach can be a leading indicator. But that only makes sense if it’s tied to a clearly defined strategic question.
Are we resonating with mid-market IT directors in healthcare? Not “Are we growing?”
Engagement isn’t universal currency. In B2B, sometimes the most valuable content gets 23 likes and is read by three decision-makers at accounts worth seven figures.
But if we don’t say that out loud, if we don’t explain that familiarity inside named accounts is more important than viral reach, we train the organization to chase applause instead of preference.
And then we resent them for it. Tactics are loud. Strategy is quiet. That’s true. But it’s incomplete. Strategy is quiet unless you narrate it.
If you don’t articulate the tradeoffs, it looks like guessing. If you don’t explain why you’re narrowing focus to a specific use case instead of blasting generic thought leadership, it looks like you’re playing small.
So marketing starts defending output instead of explaining judgment. “We ran three campaigns.”
Why those campaigns. Why now. Why that audience. Why that message. Why that channel mix. What did we choose not to do and why. Respect follows judgment. Not activity.
You’re tired because you’re being asked to prove outcomes inside a system that fragments influence and compresses time.
You can’t fully attribute brand familiarity to revenue in a six-month cycle with five touchpoints owned by different teams. But you’ll still be asked to.
So the temptation is to grab the nearest visible metric and defend it. Look at the MQL volume. Look at the engagement rate. Look at the open rate. And every time you do, you reinforce the idea that marketing is a vending machine. Put content in, get pipeline out.
If marketing wants its seat back, it has to stop defending the vending machine. It has to start describing the architecture.
Not “We posted.”
But “We are narrowing our narrative to Use Case X because that’s where our win rate is 18 percent higher and discounting is lower. Our content, paid campaigns, and sales enablement materials are aligned to that narrative for the next two quarters to build cognitive consistency in the market.”
That doesn’t fit neatly in a meme. It does, however, sound like someone who understands the function of marketing.
AI will continue to make content cheaper. Distribution will continue to feel effortless. Everyone will continue to have an opinion. None of that changes the underlying job.
Understanding how humans inside organizations make decisions. Anticipating their objections. Reducing their perceived risk. Increasing their confidence. Aligning perception with business reality over time.
And until we start talking about it that way, we shouldn’t be surprised when the room treats us like we just manage the posts.
Follow Moni Oloyede at https://www.linkedin.com/in/moni-oloyede/
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In content marketing, I often complain tha metrics we measure are too simple.
Because they lack sufficient nuance to explain marketing in three dimensions.
You've found another angle.
That they'rre the same metrics your niece uses to judge the success of a selfie on Instagram.