Expert Opinion: Is Marketing Leadership Debt holding your business back?

James McCracken, a fractional CMO and Chair of CIM North West, explains why growing businesses can find themselves spending more on marketing without seeing a corresponding performance improvement.

Many businesses do plenty of marketing. They have a website, social channels, campaigns, agencies, freelancers and perhaps an internal marketing team.

What they don’t always have is someone taking responsibility for how everything fits together.

I call this Marketing Leadership Debt: the commercial cost that builds up when a business adds marketing activity, people and suppliers without putting experienced leadership in place.

How does it happen?

It usually develops gradually.

Marketing may initially sit with the founder or managing director. As the business grows, it recruits a marketing executive, appoints an agency and brings in specialists for areas such as advertising, content or SEO.

Each decision is perfectly reasonable. The problem arises when nobody owns the overall strategy.

Different people work toward different priorities. Agencies receive conflicting briefs. Reports are produced, but nobody decides what should change. The managing director stays involved in day-to-day marketing decisions because no senior marketing lead makes them.

The business becomes busier without necessarily becoming more effective.

Signs of Marketing Leadership Debt

A business may be accumulating Marketing Leadership Debt if:

• Sales, marketing and the leadership team disagree about priorities.
• Agencies and internal employees work separately rather than as one team.
• Marketing reports focus on clicks, reach and activity rather than sales.
• Underperforming campaigns continue because nobody wants to stop them.
• The managing director is still approving routine marketing decisions.
• The business keeps adding new suppliers or channels without reviewing what it already has.

These problems are often treated as a shortage of people or specialist skills. This can lead to another hire or agency appointment, adding more activity without addressing the lack of direction.

What does it cost?

The cost rarely appears neatly in the accounts.

It shows up through duplicated work, wasted media spend, slow decisions and missed opportunities. Capable employees become frustrated because priorities keep changing. Suppliers do work that may be good in isolation but does not support a shared commercial plan.

Most importantly, the business struggles to identify which parts of its marketing are contributing to growth.

Reducing the debt

The starting point is clear ownership. One person needs to own the marketing strategy, even when delivery is shared across employees, agencies, and freelancers.

That person should be able to:

• Set a small number of priorities linked to the business plan.
• Decide how to allocate the marketing budget.
• Give employees and suppliers clear roles.
• Agree how performance will be measured.
• Stop work that doesn’t deliver sufficient value.
• Report results and recommendations to the leadership team

This does not always require a full-time marketing director. Depending on the size and complexity of the business, the role could be filled by an existing senior employee, a new appointment or an experienced part-time marketing leader.

A useful test is to ask every employee and supplier involved in marketing to name the company’s three main marketing priorities.

If the answers are different, the business may not need more marketing. It may need somebody to lead the marketing it already has.