Ask any small or mid-sized business CEO what they think of marketing agencies and marketing people. Odds are, you’ll hear frustration: “We spend money but get no results.” “Our marketing people look busy, but don’t bring much return. Nothing is tied to sales.” Or, my personal favorite, “We don’t even know what we paid for.”
Less than 10% of marketing agency start-ups make it to the three-year mark. More than 50% of reported cuts over the past year, national growth rates have dropped 10%, margins are tighter than ever, seasoned talent is scarce and techy, tactical tools are not enough to protect agencies without being able to support customers with a clear strategy and accountability.
The sad truth is that the marketing industry I work in is a hot mess and not trusted by most.
How did we get here?
Over the past 15 years, the explosion of over 33,000 digital platforms — social media, email marketing, SEO, content, automation, and now AI — has created an environment where everyone is armed with a tool and calls themselves a “marketing expert”. A Canva template and a HubSpot login became the new entry ticket. This has created a high volume of noise and confusion about marketing.
So, agencies started leaning into formulas. Freelancers leaned into templates. Technology became the strategy instead of a tool that accelerates the strategy. And business leaders, overwhelmed and under-informed, signed checks hoping for results they couldn’t measure.
What got lost? The most basic principles of marketing and accountability.
Marketing has always had a simple purpose: to build trust, create demand, and drive sales. Not impressions. Not likes. Not clicks. Those are signals, not outcomes. And yet, we’ve created an industry addicted to activity and allergic to accountability.
It’s no wonder CEOs and small business owners are throwing up their hands. They’ve been sold a steady diet of “shiny objects”: social media and SEO hacks, automation funnels, AI prompts, dashboards filled with vanity metrics. The marketing industry has become more about feeding the tools than serving the customer or reaching sales goals.
And here’s the hard truth: the solution is not more technology.
AI will not save small businesses. The next social platform will not save them either. Another piece of software won’t fix a business’s lack of strategy.
What will save marketing is leaders getting realistic about their approach.
That means:
- Stop chasing trends and tools – the people who depend on them.
- Stop hiring entry-level executors without a strategy.
- Tie every marketing action to revenue, not activity.
- Demand proof over poetry.
We don’t need more noise. We need discipline. We need clarity. We need to get back to the basics of marketing — understanding the customer, defining value, building trust, and aligning activity with outcomes.
I’ve run an agency for over two decades. I’ve seen (and confess to having done and learned) the good, the bad and the ugly. And I can tell you, the agency model as we know it is broken for small businesses who desperately just need alignment and clarity. The two are fundamentally at odds.
The answer isn’t to fire all the marketing vendors. Instead, small businesses need to take control of their brand and marketing strategies. Business owners and leaders must own their strategy and be clear about it. I find that most CEOs have it – they just fail to communicate it. Vendors will execute a well-defined strategy and goals to achieve, without it. Your vendors are doing what they want or know best, and that may not be best for you.
Self-guiding business frameworks like EOS, LEAN, and MAPS® help companies self-guide themselves toward success. When businesses do this, they own it. These business systems force teams to align strategy and execution around goals. These tools are not magic. They are not sexy. They’re not shiny tools. They are just the basics, organized into a system businesses can use.
The truth is, small businesses don’t fail because of a lack of effort. They fail because of a lack of focus. Random acts of marketing burn money and morale faster than doing nothing at all. Marketing is the one aspect of business whose job it is to grow sales. Unfortunately, many small businesses realize little to no ROI to justify more spending.
So, here’s my challenge to CEOs and business leaders: before you sign another agency contract, ask one simple question: how will this tie to sales? If your vendor can’t answer it, move on.
Marketing doesn’t need to be fixed with more apps, more dashboards or more jargon. It needs to be fixed with more honesty.
And maybe, just maybe, it starts with admitting that much of the marketing industry itself has been selling the wrong thing.
