Marketing Under Pressure? Start by Doing Less…
August is probably not the month for a 40-slide marketing strategy presentation.
For many business owners, it’s one of the few times in the year when there is potentially a little space to think. Somewhere between a holiday, a walk, a coffee, or pretending not to check emails every ten minutes, a useful question often comes to mind:
Are we actually spending our marketing budget on the things that make the biggest difference?
At WYN, we don’t always think the answer is to spend more. Sometimes it’s simply to stop doing a few things that have quietly become habits. Posting because “we need to post something.” We’ve all seen them - a stock image, a vague caption, and a post that disappears without anyone really noticing. We’d rather see one thoughtful post a week than five posts created to keep the calendar moving. Constantly refreshing the visuals: New brochure. New homepage. New presentation template. A business can end up looking as though it is always changing its clothes but never saying anything new. Producing content nobody is asking for. We say this with affection, because we’ve done it ourselves. The beautifully designed PDF that takes two days to create and is read by approximately three people, one of whom is the designer. Chasing every new marketing tool: AI, automation, personalisation, analytics, optimisation… Most B2B businesses we work with don’t have a technology problem. They have a focus problem. If there is only a modest marketing budget to work with this autumn, we’d suggest spending more time:
- talking to clients,
- improving the pages people actually visit on the website,
- helping the sales team explain things more clearly,
- and creating less but genuinely useful content.
Here’s a simple holiday test. Imagine someone asks you, over dinner or on a walk: “What does your business actually do?” Can you explain:
- what you do,
- who you help,
- and why clients choose you
in about 30 seconds? If that feels difficult, we’d worry less about LinkedIn impressions and more about clarity. The businesses we see performing best are rarely the ones doing the most marketing. They are usually the ones doing a small number of things well. That may sound less exciting than launching another campaign, redesigning the website, or experimenting with the latest tool, but in our experience, it is often far more effective. So if August gives you half an hour to step back from the day-to-day, we wouldn’t ask: “What else should we add?” We’d ask: “What could we stop doing tomorrow without anyone noticing?” The answer is often surprisingly liberating, and occasionally rather good for the marketing budget as well.
