Is Your Marketing Team Playing Defense?

There was a stretch where lead volume started to soften, and we did what a lot of teams do when the pressure shows up.

We started throwing money at it. But, as the profit, The Notorious B.I.G. once said in his hit hip-hop song – Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems.

More spend. More ideas. More conversations about what we could launch next. The activity went up, but the problem didn't get better. In a few ways, we made it worse because we were reacting to the symptom instead of deciding what we actually wanted the marketing engine to do.

That period taught me something I still think about when I look at a marketing plan: there is a difference between responding to the market and leading the market.

One is defense. The other is offense.

And your marketing team can't spend every week waiting to see what happens before deciding what to do next.

Reactive marketing usually looks productive from the inside. Sales says the pipeline is light, so marketing launches a campaign. A competitor announces something, so the team scrambles to publish a response. Website traffic is down, so somebody asks for more content. A leader hears a new idea on a podcast, and suddenly the team is supposed to build a campaign around it by Friday.

Nobody is lazy in that environment. In fact, the team is usually working extremely hard.

The problem is that the work is being selected by whatever feels urgent that day. The team is not working from a clear sequence. It is just trying to keep the business from falling behind.

That’s what happened to us when lead volume became a problem. We were looking at the number, getting nervous about the number, and trying to buy our way out of the number. We were not yet asking the better questions: 

Those questions take more discipline than “put more budget behind it.” They also tend to produce better decisions.

I’ve used a football analogy for this before because it makes the difference pretty simple.

An offense usually scripts its first group of plays before the game starts. The coaches have studied the opponent, made a hypothesis about what they will see, and created a starting sequence designed to move the ball. They are not pretending they can predict every play. They are deciding how they want to begin.

Then the defense does something unexpected. A running lane disappears. A quarterback gets pressured. The other team adjusts. The offense responds, but it responds inside a plan. It does not throw the entire playbook into the trash after the first drive.

That’s what proactive marketing should look like.

You make a clear bet about the audience, the problem, the message, the channel, and the outcome you are trying to create. Then you watch the evidence and adjust without losing the plot.

Playing offense doesn’t mean you never react. You should react when the data tells you the audience is wrong, the offer is weak, or the channel is not reaching the people you care about.

It means the reaction is part of the strategy instead of becoming the strategy.

The real advantage of playing offense is not that you get to publish more. It is that you get to decide what you want the market to associate with your company.

That was the lesson I learned at CMI Mechanical. The company had plenty of capabilities. We could talk about commercial HVAC, refrigeration, emergency service, remote coverage, and a long list of technical work. But we didn't try to make every capability the headline at the same time.

We chose a story we could own.

We wanted the market to understand that we were good at handling complex systems in difficult and remote locations. That gave us a much more useful starting point than “we do everything related to HVAC.”

From there, I built content around the questions and search terms that supported that story. We brought in writers, gave them specific subtopics, built internal links between the articles, and used email and outreach to keep the right people moving deeper into the conversation.

The point was not to publish for the sake of publishing. The point was to make the same useful idea easier to find, easier to believe, and easier for a buyer to repeat internally.

We could talk about a 50-year-old boiler. We could talk about the complexity of supporting a national customer with locations in remote areas. We could talk about companies like JCPenney and the Post Office and the operational realities that come with those kinds of accounts.

Those stories gave the market something to remember.

At one point, we were a much smaller company showing up above much larger brands for terms that mattered to us. That didn’t happen because we had the biggest budget. It happened because we stopped trying to sound like every HVAC company and started reinforcing a specific narrative.

That’s what controlling the narrative means. You decide which part of your capability deserves to be understood first, then you build enough proof and repetition around it that the market starts telling the story for you.

If your team is stuck in reaction mode, don't start by asking for 40 more ideas. Start by scripting the next several moves.

Here is the framework I would use in your company.

Start with the result the business needs, not the channel the marketing team wants to use.

These are important questions to ask because “we need more marketing” is not a strategy. It is a feeling. The outcome gives the team something to work backward from.

If you need to create an additional million dollars in revenue, you can start doing the math. 

The numbers may be estimates at first. That’s okay. A hypothesis is still better than a panic response.

Once the outcome is clear, decide who the strategy is actually for.

Not everybody who could buy from you. The audience that gives you the best chance of creating the result you just defined.

This is where sales calls, customer conversations, CRM data, and support tickets matter. Ask who’s already showing up. Ask who gets the most value from the offer. Ask which problem creates urgency instead of polite interest.

At Wrapmate, we learned that lead volume by itself was a terrible measure of progress. We could generate a lot of cheap leads, but only a small percentage were actually in the ideal customer profile (ICP). Once we tightened the targeting around the audience we wanted, the quality changed dramatically.

That gave the team a better foundation for messaging, follow-up, and measurement. We were no longer trying to build a growth plan around whoever happened to fill out a form.

This is where many marketing plans get vague. They list channels and deliverables without deciding what the audience should believe after interacting with the company.

Write that belief down.

The narrative should be narrow enough to repeat and useful enough to matter. “We are a full-service partner” usually doesn't give anybody much to hold onto. 

“We help multi-location operators keep complex systems running in places other providers don't want to go” gives the market a much clearer picture.

The goal is not to create a clever tagline. The goal is to create a point of view that can survive across your website, sales conversations, content, email, and customer proof.

Now decide what the market will actually see.

Maybe the first play is a landing page that gives the audience a clear entry point. The second is a customer story that proves the claim. The third is a practical article that answers the question buyers ask before they are ready to talk to sales. The fourth is an email or outbound motion that puts the story in front of the right people.

Though the individual assets matter, the sequence matters more. Each piece should make the next piece easier to understand.

That was the thinking behind our bigger campaigns at Wrapmate too. The Cybertruck work was not one lucky post. It was a configurator, a landing page, social content, design examples, press outreach, blog content, email, and timing built around a market event. We did not know which part would carry the most weight, but we did know the pieces were supposed to support one another.

That’s a very different approach from throwing one post into the market and deciding the idea failed because it didn't go viral in 24 hours.

An offensive strategy still needs room to adjust.

Before you launch, decide what you are watching. 

Do not wait until the campaign is underperforming to decide what success means. That’s how every metric becomes an argument after the fact.

When we were building out the marketing engine, I had to create a baseline before I could responsibly judge what was working. We tracked things like ROAS, customer acquisition cost (CAC), conversion rates, and the percentage of leads that moved into qualified opportunities. Those numbers were not perfect on day one, but they gave us a way to learn.

The point of the first plan is not to prove that you can predict the future. It’s to create enough structure that the next decision gets smarter.

A busy marketing team can still be completely reactive.

There can be content going out every day, paid campaigns running, meetings on the calendar, and a full project board while the company has no shared answer to a basic question: what are we trying to make the market understand right now?

If the answer changes every week, the market never gets enough repetition to remember anything. The team also never gets enough time to learn whether the original idea had potential.

That’s why I would rather see a team build one thoughtful offensive plan than launch 5 disconnected tactics. 

That is how you stop letting every new fire choose your marketing strategy.

There will always be defensive moments. A lead source will slow down. A competitor will make a move. A sales leader will ask for help with a target account. A campaign will underperform and force a change.

Good marketing teams respond to those things. Great marketing teams don’t let those things become the only reason they move.

If your team is always reacting, the question isn’t “What should we launch this week?” The better question is “What do we want to be true 90 days from now, and what do we need to start doing this week to make that more likely?”

That is the shift from defense to offense. Not more activity. More intention.

If this hit close to home, reply back and tell me where your marketing team is getting stuck. I’d love to hear what you’re seeing.

Javy

P.S. — Is there a topic or strategy that you’d like me to unpack? Drop me a line. Let me know what you’re thinking of. And, I’ll get it queued up for an upcoming newsletter.