Quick Links
- What Are Random Acts of Marketing?
- Reason 1: Your Team Gets Focus
- Reason 2: Your Vendors Perform Better Inside a Strategy
- Reason 3: Every Future Marketing Idea Gets Evaluated Against Something
- Reason 4: Marketing Becomes Something You Can Manage and Measure
- Reason 5: The Money You’re Already Spending Starts Working Harder
- What Stopping Random Acts of Marketing Actually Looks Like
- Frequently Asked Questions
What Are Random Acts of Marketing?
I once worked with a founder who told me — with complete sincerity — that their marketing strategy was “being active on social media, sending an email when we have something to say, and showing up at the trade show in September.”
Bless him. He wasn’t wrong that those are marketing activities. He was just describing a collection of things, not a strategy for anything.
We call this Random Acts of MarketingTM. It’s the pattern where a business tries a little bit of everything — a social push here, a trade show there, a new website, an email blast, a Google Ads experiment that runs for one quarter and never gets properly evaluated — without any of it connecting to a coherent direction. It’s the marketing equivalent of throwing spaghetti at the wall. And, it shows up in your budget as line items that are hard to justify. It shows up in your leadership meetings as vague updates nobody can do anything with. And it shows up in your results as a lot of activity and not much traction.
But, it’s not laziness. Quite the opposite in fact, Random Acts of Marketing happen because you care about growth and want to do something about it. Doing something and doing the right things are just very different outcomes.
A marketing strategy isn’t a 40-page document that lives in a Google Drive folder nobody opens. It’s a filter. The thing that tells you which ideas to act on, which channels to invest in, and which “opportunities” to politely decline. And a good one turns into an action plan, with due dates, assignees and accountability. Without it, marketing is spending with hope attached.
Here’s what changes when you put the filter in place and stop throwing your proverbial spaghetti against the wall.
Reason 1: Your Team Gets Focus — and Focused Teams Execute Better
Ask most marketing teams what the single most important thing is right now. If there’s no strategy, you’ll get a random list of stuff, and it will be long. This happens because without a defined direction, everything looks equally valid from where each person on your team sits. The trade show in September feels as urgent as the website update that’s been on the list since spring. The new campaign someone mentioned in a meeting feels as pressing as the follow-up sequence that was supposed to launch in Q1.
When a strategy is in place, the list collapses into a prioritized, actionable plan. Your team knows which initiatives matter this quarter, which metrics they’re optimizing for, and which new ideas need to wait their turn. That kind of clarity is the foundation of good team mentorship — giving people the direction they need to do their best work instead of leaving them to guess.
A marketer who knows what they’re optimizing for makes better decisions at every level. From how they spend a Tuesday afternoon to which creative direction to push harder on. They can say no to reactive requests with real confidence, because the strategy gives them permission to.
We see this consistently with the manufacturing clients we work with. Once a clear strategic direction is set and the team has a quarterly priority to work against, execution quality improves without changing headcount or budget. Same people, same resources, meaningfully better results. Focus was the variable that changed.
Side note: if your team is currently working on everything at once and making slow progress on all of it, that’s a clarity problem. Strategy and a good leader is the fix.
Reason 2: Your Vendors Perform Better Inside a Strategy Than Outside One
This is the reason nobody talks about, and it might be the most immediately valuable one on this list. (Why didn’t we save it to the end and create suspense!?!)
When you hire a vendor without a defined marketing strategy — an SEO agency, a social media manager, a paid ads team, a PR firm — you hopefully give them at least a brief. Maybe even a good one. But it’s still disconnected from your business goals and the rest of the marketing effort. Each vendor optimizes for their own channel’s metrics. The SEO team chases rankings. The social team chases engagement. The ads team chases clicks. Nobody is pulling toward the same outcome because nobody was given the same outcome to pull toward.
A strategy and an owner changes this completely. When vendors understand your positioning, your target personas, your quarterly priorities, and what success actually means for the business, their work stops being siloed and starts being additive. SEO strategy reinforces content strategy. Content strategy feeds social strategy. Paid strategy amplifies what’s already working organically. Suddenly you have a system instead of a collection of subscriptions.
One of our clients described working with us as getting “alignment across stakeholders in different departments” — and a big part of why that happened was that every vendor and internal team member was operating from the same strategic brief for the first time. Not a long document. A clear set of priorities that everyone understood.
We act as the strategic owner in several of our fractional CMO engagements specifically to play this coordination role — not managing vendors tactically, but giving them the strategic context that makes their individual work more effective. It’s one of the highest-leverage things a marketing leader does, and it’s invisible until the day it’s missing.
Reason 3: Every Future Marketing Idea Gets Evaluated Against Something
Right now, when someone in your business has a marketing idea — a new platform to try, a sponsorship to consider, a campaign someone saw a competitor run — what happens to it?
If there’s no strategy, the answer is usually some version of: it gets acted on if it sounds compelling, it gets added to a list somewhere and slowly forgotten, or it creates a week of confusion while people figure out if it’s real or just a hallway conversation. The decision-making is informal. There’s no principled way to evaluate whether the idea actually connects to what the business is trying to achieve.
A strategy gives you criteria. When a new idea comes in, you can evaluate it against your positioning, your target audience, your quarterly priorities, and your budget. Some ideas survive that evaluation and become initiatives. Most don’t — and that’s a feature, not a limitation. HBR has written about this extensively: the discipline of saying no to misaligned ideas is where strategy creates real leverage.
For EOS companies, this maps directly to the IDS process (Identify, Discuss, Solve — the structured problem-solving method used in weekly leadership meetings). Marketing ideas that surface between quarterlies go into the Issues list, get triaged against the V/TO (your two-page strategic plan), and either become Rocks (quarterly priorities) or get parked. Not abandoned, not acted on impulsively — just properly triaged. The strategy is what makes that triage possible. Without it, every idea looks like an emergency.
Side note: if your L10 Issues list is full of marketing-related items that never seem to get resolved, that’s usually a sign the strategy underneath them isn’t clear enough to make decisions from.
Reason 4: Marketing Becomes Something You Can Manage and Measure — Not Just Fund and Hope
Here’s a question worth sitting with: how do you currently evaluate whether your marketing is working?
If the answer involves a gut feeling, a general sense of whether things “seem busy,” or a monthly report from a vendor that you mostly skim, that’s worth paying attention to. Not a character flaw — it’s what happens when marketing doesn’t have a clear enough strategy to produce clear enough metrics to produce clear enough accountability. Marketing KPIs should operate like headlights: illuminating the road ahead instead of decorating the dashboard.
A strategy defines what success looks like before you spend the money. It establishes which metrics matter and which ones are vanity. It gives you something to review in your weekly L10 (or your equivalent leadership meeting, whatever you call it) that’s actually worth stopping the room for — not impressions and follower counts, but leads generated, pipeline influenced, conversion rates on pages that matter.
This is the difference between marketing being a cost center and marketing being a business function. A cost center gets funded and hoped for. A business function gets managed and measured. One of the things we hear most often from new clients is some version of “I know we’re spending money on marketing but I can’t tell if it’s working.” That’s almost never a data problem. It’s a strategy problem — because without a strategy, you don’t know what you’re measuring toward.
Marketing strategy is the foundation that everything else runs on. The campaigns, the channels, the Scorecard metrics, the L10 updates — none of them produce useful accountability without a clear strategic direction underneath them.
Reason 5: The Money You’re Already Spending Starts Working Harder — Before You Spend a Dollar More
The instinct when marketing isn’t working is to add. Add a new channel. Add more budget. Add another vendor. Try something new. Something has to stick eventually.
What strategy reveals, almost every time, is that the problem isn’t volume. It’s direction.
Most businesses that come to us with a Random Acts of Marketing problem aren’t underspending on marketing. They’re spending the same dollars across too many directions, which means no single channel has enough concentration to build real momentum. The email list exists but hasn’t been nurtured. The blog has posts but no coherent topic authority. The social channels are active but don’t connect to any conversion path. Each of these things costs money or time to maintain. None of them are working anywhere near their potential.
A strategy consolidates. It identifies which channels are actually earning their place in the plan, concentrates resources there, and either fixes or eliminates the rest. That reallocation alone — before any new investment — typically produces better results than adding a new initiative would have.
We helped one client move from a scattered email program to a properly segmented Klaviyo setup with clear strategy behind it. Email-generated revenue tripled — not because we spent more, but because we consolidated what was already there and gave it direction. The budget didn’t change. The strategy did.
Most marketing budget mistakes aren’t about spending too little. They’re about spreading too much.
The goal isn’t to do more. It’s to do less, but better, and on purpose.
What Stopping Random Acts of Marketing Actually Looks Like
It doesn’t require a 40-page strategic plan or a six-month consulting engagement.
It requires answering a few questions honestly:
- Who are you trying to reach?
- What do you want them to do?
- Which two or three channels are most likely to reach them?
- What does success look like this quarter?
- Who owns the result?
Those answers form the filter. The filter is the strategy. Everything that fits through it gets resourced and executed well. Everything that doesn’t gets parked — not because it’s a bad idea, but because the plan is the plan.
If you’re not sure whether your marketing is currently strategic or reactive, the answer is usually visible in your results. Reactive marketing produces activity. Strategic marketing produces pipeline.
If you’re ready to build the filter, let’s talk. And if you want to understand what fractional CMO leadership actually looks like in practice, that’s a good place to start too.
Frequently Asked Questions
What exactly is a marketing strategy? A marketing strategy is a defined set of decisions about who you’re trying to reach, what you’re trying to get them to do, and which channels and messages you’ll use to do it. It’s not a list of tactics — it’s the criteria that determines which tactics are worth executing. A strategy without tactics is academic. Tactics without strategy are Random Acts of Marketing. Both are needed, in that order.
How is a marketing strategy different from a marketing plan? A strategy defines direction. A plan defines execution. Your strategy tells you you’re targeting mid-market manufacturers who run on EOS and need marketing leadership. Your plan tells you you’ll publish two blogs per week, run a quarterly referral campaign, and attend two trade shows this year. The plan should be derived from the strategy, not invented independently of it. Most marketing plans underperform because they were built without a clear strategy underneath them.
How do I know if my current marketing is strategic or reactive? A few diagnostic questions: Can you articulate in one sentence what makes you different from your competitors? Do you know which two or three channels are producing your most qualified leads? Is there a consistent message across your website, your social media, your proposals, and your sales conversations? If the answers require a long conversation or produce a lot of uncertainty, the strategy work isn’t done yet.
We already have a marketing agency. Do we still need a strategy? Yes — and your agency needs it more than you do. Agencies execute best when they have a clear strategic brief. Without one, they’ll default to best practices for their channel, which may or may not align with what you’re actually trying to accomplish. A fractional CMO sits above the agency layer, provides the strategic direction, and holds the agency accountable to business outcomes rather than channel metrics. One client told us that after we came in, their existing vendors started producing “measurably better work” — same vendors, same budget, just finally operating from a coherent brief.
How often should we revisit our marketing strategy? Annually for the big picture — positioning, target audience, core message. Quarterly for priorities — which initiatives matter most this quarter, which metrics we’re tracking, which channels are earning their investment. For EOS companies, the quarterly Rock-setting process is a natural forcing function for marketing strategy review. More frequently than quarterly and you’re not executing. Less frequently than annually and you’re probably working from a strategy that no longer reflects your business.
What’s the first step to stopping Random Acts of Marketing? An honest audit of what you’re currently doing and what it’s producing. List every marketing initiative that’s active right now — every channel, every vendor, every recurring activity. Next to each one, write the metric you’re using to evaluate it and the last time you actually reviewed that metric. What you’ll usually find is that a third of your activities have no clear metric, a third have metrics nobody actually reviews, and a third are producing something measurable. Start by doubling down on the third that’s working and having a hard conversation about the rest. Or bring someone in to do that audit with you — sometimes the most useful thing is having a strategic partner in the room who can ask the question without politics attached to the answer.
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