When I sit down with business owners or leadership teams and ask what they want marketing to accomplish, one answer comes up more than almost any other:
We want to grow.
Fair enough. But what does growth actually look like? More revenue? More profit? More customers? Larger customers? A new market? Higher revenue from the customers you already have? A stronger position in an industry where you’re already succeeding?
Those are very different growth goals, and they require very different marketing strategies. Yet somewhere along the way, it seems people have started treating “growth” as though it automatically means generating more leads and getting more customers.
We need SEO. We should be running Google Ads. We need to post more on social media. We need a new website. Maybe… But before we can decide any of that, I think it’s far more important to answer:
What kind of business are we actually trying to build?
New Customers Aren’t Always the Best Growth Opportunity
When companies start investing in marketing, they’re often focused on attracting people who aren’t currently buying from them.
Unless you’ve created the next viral product, that’s generally one of the hardest and most expensive ways to grow. A prospect who has never heard of your company starts at the very top of the funnel. You have to earn their attention, establish relevance, build credibility, develop trust and eventually give them a compelling reason to change whatever they’re doing today.
That takes time. Meanwhile, there may be significantly more profitable growth sitting much closer to the business.
Could existing customers buy more from you? Is there a service your best customers consistently need that you aren’t currently providing? Are there former customers worth re-engaging? Could a small shift in your customer mix dramatically improve profitability? Is there an adjacent market where your existing expertise gives you immediate credibility?
Sometimes the fastest path to growth isn’t generating more leads at all. But you don’t know that until you take a step back and ask yourself some critical questions about the future of the business.
Sometimes Growth Means Getting More Specific
I’ve worked with more than one company that entered the strategy process expecting us to figure out how to better market the business they had already built.
Then we started digging.
We looked at their goals, what the market was doing, their portfolio of work and the customers they served particularly well. We began talking to the people who actually buy from them.
And a pattern emerged. The scope of the business they wanted to build was too broad.
They could serve a lot of different customers. But when we looked at where they had been most successful, there was a much clearer opportunity among a specific type of customer where their expertise, experience and value were especially strong.
So the strategy changed.
Instead of focusing on attracting more opportunities across 6 service lines in 10 industries, we shifted to 1-2 complementary service lines focused on 1 specific industry where there was significant opportunity and they had decades of experience and proven results. We realized that capturing even a small percentage of the available market in Michigan could be transformative for their business.
Making those adjustments meant intentionally narrowing the market rather than expanding it. On paper, that can look like limiting growth. Strategically, it can do exactly the opposite.
Do You Want to Be Big, or Do You Want to Be Great?
I don’t believe there’s anything wrong with wanting to build a big company. But “big” and “great” aren’t interchangeable. While there are absolutely some brands that are both, many of them became big as a byproduct of being great.
So what do I mean by that?
To me, a great business understands exactly who it is and who it’s best positioned to serve. Instead of trying to be something to everyone, it directs its attention toward the people who genuinely value what makes the company different.
Over time, that creates something far more valuable than transactions. It creates community around a brand. And then they double down because they know that brand loyalty should never be one-sided.
Great companies don’t expect customers to continue choosing them simply because they’ve earned their business once. They recognize that loyalty is a two-way street, and they’re just as committed to continually improving their products, services and customer experience as their customers are to continuing to choose them.
A company can absolutely be both big and great. But if getting bigger comes at the expense of understanding what made you great in the first place, I’d question whether that’s really growth.
Marketing Has a Tactics Problem
This is where I may upset some people in my own industry. Marketing has a remarkably low barrier to entry. It’s incredibly easy to claim expertise, particularly in areas most business owners or leaders don’t deeply understand.
SEO. PPC. AIEO. Algorithms. Attribution. Optimization… The language alone can make marketing feel inaccessible.
And when results don’t come, the explanations for why can be so technical that the person paying the bill doesn’t really understand what they’re being told. So they trust that the experts know what they’re doing and keep spending.
I have a problem with that. I think it’s negligent to begin purely tactical marketing work without understanding the business, its industry, competitive landscape, goals, customers, and opportunities.
Anyone can post on social media, send an email, or build a website. Heck, AI can do all of those things now.
The value isn’t simply in “doing the marketing” anymore.
The value is knowing what to say, who needs to hear it, why they should care, and where you have the greatest opportunity to reach them.
Without those answers, you can spend a lot of money executing marketing tactics very efficiently without actually accomplishing much of anything. Worse, you can dilute the very positioning that made your business successful in the first place.
Your Best Marketing Strategy is Likely Already Inside Your Business
One of the things I find fascinating about small and midsized businesses, particularly amongst the business owners I know in West Michigan, is how many were founded because someone saw a gap.
They worked in an industry and thought, There’s a better way to do this. They saw something customers needed that existing companies weren’t providing. They believed service could be better. The product could be better. The process could be easier. The relationship could feel different.
So they built it.
Then they got busy starting a business. They hired people, started serving customers, solved problems, paid bills, built processes, put out fires, and somewhere much farther down the list came marketing.
By the time someone finally starts thinking seriously about positioning and messaging, the company may have spent years demonstrating what makes it different without ever actually putting it into words.
That’s one of my favorite things to uncover, because often the answer isn’t creating a new differentiator. It’s recognizing what’s been there all along. It’s what made you successful to the point that marketing entered the conversation. But if you jump right into tactical execution highlighting what you think people want to hear instead of being able to articulate what makes you different and valuable to customers you’re best positioned to serve, then you’re missing a giant opportunity.
Before You Ask for More Leads, Ask Better Questions
If your company wants to grow, I’m not going to tell you that you need more content, more ads or more leads before I understand what you’re actually trying to accomplish.
I always start with questions.
What does growth look like? Where would you like the business to be in three or five years? Which customers are most valuable to your business, and why? Where are you creating the greatest value? Where are you most profitable? What do customers believe makes you different? Where do you already have credibility? What kind of business are you actually trying to build?
These are genuinely some of my favorite conversations to have with business owners and leadership teams because I’m continually fascinated by how few companies actually have the answers. I get it… when you’re in the business it’s easy to get sucked into the daily grind. Setting aside the time needed to ask these types of questions and look into the data, if it even exists, is rarely prioritized.
What ends up happening is a business growth plan that is based on assumptions.
They know why they believe customers choose them. They know which services they believe customers value most. They know who they believe their best audience is and what they believe separates them from competitors.
But they’ve never actually asked their customers.
One of the things I like to establish during the strategy process is:
What do we know? vs. What is still a hypothesis we need to prove?
There’s nothing wrong with having a hypothesis. That’s where a lot of good strategy starts. The problem is building an entire growth strategy around one without ever validating whether it is true.
Sometimes the research confirms exactly what leadership believed. In my experience, most of the time, customers see value in something the company barely or never even talks about. A seemingly secondary service turns out to be a significant growth opportunity. The customers everyone assumed were the most attractive aren’t actually the most profitable. Or the reason customers keep coming back has very little to do with what the company has been promoting.
That’s when these conversations get really interesting.
Because good strategy isn’t about walking into a room already knowing the answer. It’s about asking better questions, being willing to challenge what we think we know, and following the evidence until we understand where the real opportunity is.
Then we can talk about marketing.