Why marketing needs more than just an office admin: the true cost of under-investing in expertise
Let’s be honest, sending a quarterly newsletter and the odd LinkedIn post isn’t “doing marketing”. It’s a box-ticking exercise.
It usually looks like this: someone on the admin team has a Canva account, a few hours spare on a Friday (if they’re lucky), and just enough initiative to put something together. That’s not marketing and that’s certainly not a strategy.
It’s a question I pose to clients all the time: do you know the difference between creating content and doing marketing and, more importantly, do you understand what that difference means for your business?
Because if you don’t, you risk spending time, money and energy on activity that looks good on the surface but does nothing to move the needle.
Under-investing in expertise means you’ll overpay in other ways – through weak messaging, missed opportunities and a brand that no one really notices.
Marketing activity is not the same as having a marketing function
There’s a big difference between having marketing activity and having a marketing function.
Yes, the website might be getting updates. There might be a brochure, a few social posts, maybe even a blog every now and then. But without leadership, direction, and a clear commercial objective, all of that effort adds up to very little.
It’s noise. Occasionally nice-looking noise, but noise all the same.
The average B2B company now uses over six marketing channels simultaneously – but only 23% say they’re confident in their overall strategy.1
That’s not surprising. Because without proper oversight, what you get is a scattergun of disconnected activity that doesn’t build momentum. It looks like progress, but it rarely performs, and you’ll often be left in the dark because you’re either never presented with any reports or reports that aren’t built around your business goals – they’re built to make the individual look good.
This is where many firms fall into the same trap: they hire a junior, hand over a bunch of disconnected tasks and hope they’ll figure it out as they go. Whether you like it or not, shortcuts in marketing tend to take you the long way round.
Marketing is a professional discipline with an unfortunately low barrier to entry and as a result, it suffers from the perspective that everybody can do it. What’s worse is: everybody does do it, and not very well. It should not be something you delegate to whoever’s got a bit of capacity, or hand off to someone just because they “know how to use social media”. It needs to be aligned to the goals of the business and treated with the same seriousness as finance, legal or compliance.
Because when you treat it like an afterthought, it shows — in your messaging and in how your brand is perceived by the people you’re trying to reach.
What under-investing really costs you – and when you’ll notice
It’s easy to feel like you’re winning in the short term. You’ve managed to keep costs down and there’s just enough content going out to give the illusion of progress. Outgoings are lean, the board isn’t asking questions and nobody’s shouting about marketing.
But give it 12 to 24 months, and the cracks start to show.
You’re still attracting the same type of clients. You’re stuck in low-fee work that no longer reflects your capabilities. The good leads don’t convert, or worse, they never find you in the first place. The brand starts
to look tired. Internally, the team feels it too. They don’t see the business they work for reflected in its materials and they stop sharing it. They stop being proud of it.
You lose pace. You lose relevance. And eventually, you lose confidence because nothing’s really broken, but nothing’s really working either.
By the time you realise what’s missing, you’re already behind, and not just by a few weeks either.
Marketing isn’t an on-off switch. You don’t stop today and feel it tomorrow. That’s why it’s so often the first thing to go during times of financial hardship. The phone will still ring and the inbox will still tick along, for a while at least.
But B2B buying cycles are long. Six months is typical. Twelve isn’t unusual.2 And that’s before you even account for the lead-up — the sales and the marketing activity — that got them to your door in the first place.
So when you cut back, you won’t feel it straight away and by the time the slowdown hits, you’re not just back to where you started, you’re a year behind. And it’ll take you another year to rebuild the momentum you lost.
We’ve seen it too many times: firms that deferred serious investment in marketing, only to find themselves years behind where they should be. And when you’re playing catch-up, you’ll pay more, because you’re paying for “fast and good” (remember that analogy?) and you’ll have less time to get it right.
What does good look like?
When marketing is properly embedded in the business, it stops being a support function and starts becoming a growth driver.
The firms that do it well aren’t necessarily producing more content or shouting louder. They’re just more deliberate. There’s clarity in what they’re saying, consistency in how they present themselves and confidence in the value they bring to the market. It may not be perfect and it doesn’t necessarily need to be. You need consistency, which, over time, compounds.
Your BD team isn’t stuck explaining what they do for the hundredth time, they’re not chasing leads that go nowhere, or relying on personal networks or word of mouth to do all the heavy lifting. The brand is doing some of the work, making that sell a — helping them attract better-fit clients, higher-value work, and stronger candidates, without relying on volume or luck.
That’s what happens when marketing is given proper leadership and a seat at the table — not just passed around between people who’ve got a bit of spare capacity.
When it’s done right, marketing helps you:
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- Align your message with the direction of the business
- Prioritise activity based on commercial impact, not assumptions
- Build a brand that grows with you, instead of holding you back
- Spot opportunities that others miss and be ready to act on them
- Create a sense of identity that resonates with clients and motivates your team
But to get to that point, you have to treat it like a function that matters, not just something to outsource, delegate or postpone until things quieten down.
How to get clarity
Marketing doesn’t work when it’s treated as an afterthought. It doesn’t work when it’s given to the nearest available person, or left until the
client pipeline starts looking a bit thin. And it definitely doesn’t work when you’re trying to make strategic decisions based on gut feel and guesswork.
If you want marketing that actually moves the needle, you need to treat it with the same level of thought and investment as the rest of your business. That means clear objectives. That means leadership. That means knowing what good looks like — and being willing to build towards it.
At Edward and James, we work with financial services firms to build marketing strategies that are deliberate, commercially aligned, and built to scale rather than just to look good on paper.
If you’re ready to stop winging it and start making marketing work the way it should, your next strategic move starts here.
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