About the Author
Corey is the owner and President/CEO of VOLTAGE. He is also founder and author of The Digital Marketing Success Plan® and the START Planning Process. Corey has spent 20+ years working in strategic and leadership roles focused on growing national and local client brands with award-winning, ROI-generating digital strategies. He's the recipient of the KCDMA 2019 Marketer of the Year award and his team at VOLTAGE has won nearly 100 local, national, and global awards for ROI-focused client work in the past decade.
One of the toughest decisions in marketing isn’t what tactic to try next. We often live in a world of optimizing and incremental updates. What we don’t often do and what can be difficult is deciding if the whole system needs to be rebuilt to drive toward our goals today and for tomorrow.
Many businesses continue adjusting campaigns, optimizing pages, or changing vendors—hoping small improvements will finally unlock results. And sometimes, that works.
But other times, it’s like patching a leaky boat. The more you fix, the more issues pop up—until someone finally asks: Is this thing even seaworthy anymore?
That’s the moment when smart teams get outside of the day-to-day and look at things from outside of the current strategy, plan, and work. Sometimes the best way forward isn’t another round of optimizations—it’s a full reset.
When Marketing Efforts Stall
This scenario is all too common:
- Your team is busy, but results are flat
- Campaigns are being executed, but ROI is unclear
- Marketing and sales aren’t aligned
- Leadership is frustrated with the lack of clarity
In these moments, it’s tempting to double down on execution. Write more content. Launch another ad. Change the call-to-action.
But if your strategy, funnel, or website were never truly aligned in the first place, those efforts won’t move the needle in a meaningful way.
This isn’t about failure. It’s about recognizing when incremental improvement is no longer the right tool—and when it’s time for something bigger.
Why Rebuilding Feels Risky (But Isn’t Always)
Rebuilding your digital strategy sounds expensive and time-consuming—and it can be, if you’re doing it without a plan. But what’s riskier is continuing to invest in a system that isn’t designed to produce the results you need.
When we talk about “rebuilding,” we’re not talking about throwing everything out. We’re talking about stepping back, reassessing, and rebuilding from a place of clarity—so your future efforts are grounded in purpose, not guesswork.
This is exactly why, with my team’s help, I created the START Planning Process. It’s a structured way to assess whether your strategy is broken, salvageable, or simply misaligned. Regardless of whether you use START as a whole, parts/pieces, or your own process, it is important at times to take a step back and determine if you need to take bigger actions.
Signs It’s Time for a Reset
If you’re not sure whether to optimize or overhaul, here are some indicators that it might be time to rebuild:
1. Your goals have changed, but your marketing hasn’t
If your business is pursuing new markets, changing product focus, or shifting pricing models, your marketing strategy can’t be stuck in the past. Or, if your audience has shifted. Or, yet again, if tech (including AI) has changed, yet your marketing hasn’t.
2. You can’t clearly explain your strategy
If no one on your team can articulate who your audience is, what value you offer them, and how you’re currently reaching them, that’s not a strategy—it’s a to-do list. Or, if you get different answers from different people on the team!
3. Your results have plateaued
Sometimes performance doesn’t fall off a cliff—it just stays flat. If you’re spending the same (or more) and getting diminishing returns, it may be time to rethink the system, not just the campaign.
4. You’re always reacting instead of planning
If every quarter feels like “fixing what broke last time,” you’re trapped in reactive mode. Strategy gives you a proactive path forward.
5. Your funnel is disconnected
Great awareness efforts followed by poor conversion experiences (or vice versa) are a sign of misalignment. A rebuild brings consistency across the full journey.
What a Rebuild Actually Looks Like
Rebuilding doesn’t mean abandoning your brand, team, or past work. It means asking better questions and being willing to reset assumptions. Here’s what that process might involve:
1. Reclarify Business Goals
Start by reconnecting marketing to real outcomes—revenue, retention, or whatever success looks like for the business today.
2. Redefine Your Target Audience
Markets evolve. Your ideal customers may have changed. Refreshing your audience profiles ensures your messaging and media still match. Focus on quality, not quantity and meaningful 1:1 experiences.
3. Reassess Your Website and Assets
Do your content, design, and CTAs reflect your strategy—or were they built before the current goals took shape?
4. Rebuild the Funnel with START
The START Planning Process helps you assess Strategy, define Tactics, prioritize Application, create systems for Review, and build in Transformation. It gives you a structured approach to rebuilding without losing control.
5. Reset Expectations and Reporting
Once your plan is rebuilt, align your team around how success is measured—and how fast results should come. This clarity builds momentum and avoids misaligned assumptions.
Why It’s Worth It
Rebuilding your digital marketing strategy isn’t about starting from scratch. It’s about giving yourself a better foundation.
With the right structure in place, your campaigns don’t just perform better—they make more sense. Your team knows what to execute and why. Leadership gets clearer ROI. Sales gets better leads.
Most importantly, you stop spinning your wheels and start building real momentum.
So if you’re constantly tweaking, adjusting, or troubleshooting and not seeing progress—maybe it’s time to stop patching the boat and start building a new one.