About the Author
Corey Morris is the President and CEO of VOLTAGE, a search marketing and website agency for expertise-driven organizations. He has spent more than two decades in digital marketing and SEO, and he wrote the book on the Digital Marketing Success Plan® (DMSP), the planning process VOLTAGE uses with clients. Corey has published more than 150 articles and expert contributions across Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land, and Forbes over nearly a decade, and he still writes regularly for the first two. His Search Engine Journal articles alone have been read nearly 1.7 million times. He has spoken at SMX, Digital Summit, and SMPS. He's also a sought-after podcast and media guest, with more than 75 speaking, podcast, and media appearances. He served as an officer on the board of the global search marketing trade association, founded a Kansas City search marketing conference, and was named the 2019 KCDMA Marketer of the Year.
Doing more rarely fixes a stalled marketing program.
When growth stalls or pipelines dry up, the natural instinct for many marketing teams is to simply do more. They decide to launch a new paid search campaign, double their publication velocity or chase a new social media trend, on the assumption that an increase in activity will automatically lead to an increase in revenue.
Throughout my career in digital marketing, I have seen this reactive approach drain budgets and exhaust perfectly capable teams. If your underlying strategy is flawed, throwing more execution at the problem will only speed up your failure, because you cannot outwork a bad plan.
When we focus entirely on execution, we easily lose sight of the overarching business goals and end up running fast in the wrong direction. To achieve sustainable growth, we have to step back and shift our focus from executing isolated tasks to building cohesive marketing systems.
An execution-first mindset shows up in checklists and fragmented ownership.
A common sign that your team is stuck in an execution-first mindset is a heavy reliance on checklists and output metrics. If your team defines success by the number of blog posts published or the number of social updates scheduled, you are measuring effort instead of impact.
Another clear indicator is fragmented ownership. When the paid media team, the search optimization team and the content team are all executing their own independent tactics without a unifying document, the customer journey breaks down.
This disconnected execution creates a confusing experience for the buyer. Your organization might be highly visible, and that visibility will still fail to generate profitable opportunities.
Marketing works better as a system than as a string of campaigns.
If you want to move beyond random acts of marketing, you have to prioritize strategy. Here is how we build a system that ties execution to the business outcomes you care about.
1. Document the master plan.
Before a single dollar is spent on a new campaign, you need a documented strategy, and that is the foundational philosophy behind my START Planning Process and the Digital Marketing Success Plan® (DMSP). You need a centralized plan that clearly defines your ideal customer profile, your core value propositions and your specific financial targets. When every tactic is tied to a documented business goal, wasteful execution gets cut quickly.
2. Audit your current output.
Take a hard look at the campaigns you are currently running. If you cannot directly trace a specific tactic back to a closed-won deal or a qualified lead, you have to have the courage to pause it. We often keep legacy campaigns alive simply because we have always run them.
Subtraction creates focus. By turning off the execution that does not serve your strategy, you free up the budget and the bandwidth needed to innovate.
3. Build an integrated search brief.
To keep your departments from operating in silos, require an integrated brief for every new initiative. This brief should require the search team, the content team and the web development team to agree on the target audience and the expected business outcome before any work begins, and that alignment helps every piece of execution work together to build compounding authority.
I recently wrote about this approach in more depth for Search Engine Journal.
Strategy dictates success more than activity does.
Strategy has to come before activity, and we have to stop building isolated campaigns and start building predictable systems. Ask for clarity from your data, align your teams around a unified plan, and recognize that the most successful marketing departments are often the ones doing fewer things with much greater intention.
The question worth asking is whether you are building a strategy or just checking boxes.