Four Signs You Don’t Actually Have a Marketing Strategy

Why Activity Isn’t the Same as Strategy

Many business owners confuse activity with strategy. Posting on social media, running ads, or sending emails might feel like progress, but if there’s no plan guiding those actions, you’re just busy. A real strategy creates clarity and results.

Here are four signs you don’t actually have a marketing strategy.

1. You Copy Competitors

If your plan is simply “do what they’re doing,” you don’t have a plan. Watching competitors and trying to replicate their moves is guessing, not strategy. What works for them may not work for you, and it won’t help you stand out.

2. You Chase Trends

Trends come and go, but your customers remain. If every post is about the latest meme, sound, or viral moment, your marketing is built on distractions instead of direction. Strategy is about solving customer problems, not chasing attention.

When you chase trends, you are likely to get attention from people who are never going to be a customer anyway so what good does it do you? You have a limited amount of time to make content and create your marketing messaging, I'd use it for things that can stand the test of time, not for hoping you can get a viral video.

3. You Don’t Measure Anything

Without metrics, you can’t improve. If you don’t know what success looks like or you never track results over time, you’re just throwing content into the void. Measurement gives you the insight to refine, adjust, and grow.

Metrics are important but don't get it twisted. It's not the metrics of entertainment social media or the biggest brands in the world that you need to be concerned with or comparing yourself to. If you don't get a million views on a video like the latest TikTok sensation, it doesn't mean you are failing. I've said in a previous post that you shouldn't chase the metrics. I'm not being contradictory here. I'm telling you to not chase the metrics of entertainment social media.

Compare yourself to yourself, not others. Track your results over time and look for you to improve against your past results. A million views on something might never happen but if you've improved 30% since last month in views, that is a success even if that means just 300 more views. Growth is incremental and slow and you need to know where you started from and where you are today.

Track your results.

4. You Can’t Connect Marketing to Sales

If you can’t explain how your posts, emails, or ads actually lead to new customers and revenue, you don’t have strategy, you just have activity. A real plan connects marketing efforts directly to business outcomes.

This is why so many businesses think that their business is too special for marketing. They don't think there is a connection between marketing and revenue. If you are posting regularly on social media but not seeing many views, you think it's not working. If you get new customers coming in the door, you are not likely to connect it to that social media work that you think is failing even though they are there because they saw you on social media and wanted to check out your business.

The marketing and business world way over-indexed on attribution in the last 20 years so I'm not telling you that you need to be able to track every single activity and assign a direct ROI to every single thing you do, but you should be able to see trends and patterns.

Final Thought

Strategy is more than being active. It’s about clarity, consistency, and knowing why your actions matter. Without that, you’re spinning your wheels and just hoping that what you are doing will work.

Hope is not a strategy.