WHY HAS MARKETING BECOME SO CONFUSING FOR BUSINESS OWNERS?
Marketing has become bigger, noisier and increasingly fragmented. Business owners are expected to make decisions about dozens of tools, channels and specialists, often without anyone explaining how the pieces are supposed to work together.
This is not about learning to become a marketer. It is about understanding what marketing actually is, what you are paying for, and where it fits inside your business.
There is a strange shift I have noticed in business owners for years. The moment the conversation turns to marketing, someone who is completely confident in their own profession can suddenly become a little less certain.
They understand their product. They can talk for hours about production. They know their suppliers and remember their customers. They understand their team. They can look at a project and estimate its complexity, the cost of materials and how long the work will take. Sometimes they will make a decision worth tens of thousands of pounds in fifteen minutes.
And then we start talking about marketing. “I’ll be honest, I don’t really understand this stuff.”
It is usually said with a slight sense of embarrassment. As though, by 2026, every business owner is somehow supposed to know the difference between search advertising and social media advertising, why they need short form video, what is happening to SEO now that artificial intelligence has entered search, how many times a week they should publish something, what a funnel is, why their marketing agency keeps talking about reach, and which metric they are actually supposed to care about.
And if they do not know all of that, perhaps they have somehow fallen behind.
I completely disagree.
After twenty years working inside marketing, I am more surprised that business owners are still trying to understand all of it themselves.
Over the past fifteen years, marketing has become an incredibly noisy place. Not simply because we have more tools. The bigger problem is that we have started using one word, marketing, to describe an enormous amount of completely different work.
Someone manages social media. Marketer.
Someone runs advertising campaigns. Marketer.
Someone writes content. Marketer.
Someone works on SEO. Marketer.
Someone develops a marketing strategy. Marketer.
Someone researches the market. Also a marketer.
Brand strategy, customer journeys, email campaigns. Marketing again.
And somewhere around all of this are designers, developers, advertising specialists, content managers, analysts, project managers, SEO specialists, automation specialists and strategists.
Then the business owner is told: “You need marketing.”
All right. Who, exactly?
When marketing was a little simpler
I do not want to create the impression that twenty years ago marketing was some beautifully clear discipline, and then the internet arrived and ruined everything. It was not. But the structure around it was different.
When I started working in marketing, it was much more closely connected to the business itself. We looked at the market, the product, the customer, competitors, pricing, the offer, sales channels and advertising. To build a marketing strategy, you needed to understand how the company made money and where it stood in the market.
Then the internet began creating new ways for businesses to meet people.
At first, a website was almost a project in its own right. Then search engines became a major channel. Then came social media. Mobile internet followed. Then advertising inside social platforms, video, automation and increasingly detailed analytics. Now artificial intelligence has joined the picture too.
Every new layer created new work. And that is perfectly normal.
We cannot reasonably expect one person to understand business strategy in depth, research the market, manage advertising platforms professionally, shoot and edit video, write strong content, create design, understand SEO, build analytics, manage a website, set up automation and somehow still find time to speak to the sales team.
Somewhere along the way, however, we forgot to explain this properly to businesses.
Instead, marketing began to be sold in pieces.
And that left the business owner in a rather strange position. They need the result of an entire marketing system, but what they are often buying is one person.
And this is where the famous “£500 marketing girl” appears
I am deliberately keeping that phrase because it is exactly how I have heard business owners describe the situation many times.
“I’ve got a girl who does the marketing.”
What does she actually do?
“Well, she manages Instagram. Creates the posts. Runs a few things from time to time. Keeps an eye on the website. I think she did an email campaign. I also asked her to have a look at Google.”
How much time does she actually spend working on your business?
That is usually where the conversation becomes interesting.
Let us say the business pays this specialist £500 a month. I am not arguing here about whether £500 is a lot or a little. Let us simply look at the practical reality.
If that person is an independent professional, that £500 has to cover their working time, tax, software, equipment, training, holidays, sick days and, ultimately, the cost of making a living.
£500 does not buy a month of someone’s work. It buys a limited number of hours.
Perhaps ten or twelve. Let us be generous and say fifteen. There are more than seven hundred hours in a month. Your business occupies ten or fifteen of this person’s hours. Now let us try to fit the actual work into them. They need to speak to you. Understand what has changed. Review last month’s results. Prepare content. Find or create visuals. Publish something. Respond to comments. Check the advertising. Look at the website. Think about the next campaign. Review competitors. Work out why the previous offer performed poorly. Speak to the sales team. Understand which customers are actually buying. Check the analytics. Write the copy. Send it to you for approval. Make the changes after approval.
And, ideally, somewhere in all of that, they are also supposed to think about marketing strategy. When, exactly?There is no unreasonable business owner in this story. And there is no lazy “marketing girl”. There simply are not enough hours for all that work to fit.
But other people manage to do it for £500
Of course they do. The important question is what exactly are they doing for that £500?
It is perfectly possible to buy a defined amount of specific work for £500. That might be managing a certain number of social media posts each month. It might be setting up and monitoring a small advertising campaign. It could buy a set number of specialist hours, or ongoing support for a marketing system that is already in place.
The problem begins when £500 is paying for one function, while the expectation is that it will deliver the results of the entire system. The business owner thinks, “Marketing is covered.” The specialist thinks, “I manage the social media.” Six months later, the business owner says, “I’m not seeing any sales.” And the specialist replies, quite genuinely, “But our reach has increased.” Both of them are right.
They were simply talking about two different things from the very beginning. This is where so much disappointment with business marketing comes from. It is not necessarily the result of poor work. Very often, it begins with the wrong expectations of the role.
Now let us add a little more maths
The person you are paying £500 a month is almost certainly not working only with you. Of course they are not. And there is nothing wrong with that. If they have six clients, they have six products to understand. Six business owners. Six audiences. Six sets of competitors. Six conversations. Six approval processes. Six calendars. Six different brand voices. Six sets of numbers. Six versions of “we urgently need this”. And they are constantly switching between them.
Now compare that with you.
You can wake up in the middle of the night and remember a problem in the business. You overhear a customer conversation and notice something important. You know why a particular supplier was changed three years ago. You remember which product has never really sold properly. You know which member of the team is stronger than their current numbers suggest. You can sense when a customer starts to hesitate. Your business is in your head all the time. An external marketing specialist will never have that same relationship with it. Nor should they.
This is not about commitment. It is about how the relationship is structured.
Expecting someone who spends a few hours a month inside your business to somehow “take care of the marketing” puts both the specialist and the business owner in an unfair position from the start.
And for a while, the business owner really does feel better
And I understand why. You are paying someone. There is now a folder called “marketing”. Posts are being published. Things are happening. Occasionally, a report arrives. You can finally tell yourself, “Goods. Someone is taking care of it.” And for a while, that genuinely does make things feel easier.
The uncomfortable part tends to come later. Three months pass. Then six. Then a year. Money has been spent. Content has been produced. Different things have been tested. Perhaps you changed the specialist. Then tried an agency.
Then went back to another specialist. Each one had a slightly different theory. One said you needed more video. Another thought the website was the problem. Someone suggested changing the way the business was positioned and presented. Another said it was all about advertising. Then someone else explained that “organic reach is dead now”.
Eventually, the business owner stops questioning the individual specialist. They start questioning marketing itself.
“I’ve tried marketing. It doesn’t work.” I always find that a little sad to hear.
Because when you start looking at what the business actually tried, you sometimes discover that there was never really a marketing system in place at all. There were individual activities. And that is not the same thing.
Imagine building any other department like this
Imagine you run a construction company. You need one person who can be the engineer, quantity surveyor, electrician, plumber, client, project manager and interior designer, all at the same time. Your budget is £500 a month.
It sounds absurd. Not because £500 is somehow bad money, but because we understand that these are different professions.
In marketing, those distinctions are often invisible to the business owner. So “marketer” has become a remarkably convenient word into which we can put almost everything.
But let us separate the work into its larger functions. Someone needs to understand where the business is actually going. Someone needs to understand the market and the customer. Someone needs to decide what offer we are taking to market. Someone needs to determine where we should meet potential customers.
Someone attracts attention. Someone creates what people will see. Someone builds the website or another place where those people arrive. Someone works with the data. Someone watches what happens after an enquiry. Someone connects marketing with sales. Someone coordinates all the people involved.
Of course, in a small business, that does not mean ten different employees.
And it is important not to swing too far in the opposite direction.
A small business does not need a corporate marketing department
That would be equally unhelpful advice. I have built and managed marketing systems inside large, complex businesses where there genuinely were separate specialists responsible for different areas and entire streams of work happening at the same time.
But a small business works differently. Thank goodness for that. One strong person can absolutely combine several functions. Some work can be handled by external specialists. There will be things the business owner can sensibly do themselves. Certain specialists may only be needed for a particular stage or project.
Sometimes an agency makes more commercial sense than an in house team. Sometimes the opposite is true. Sometimes there is no need for a permanent marketing person at all.
The question is not how many people you have. The question is whether you understand which marketing functions need to exist in your business, and who is currently responsible for each of them. That distinction matters enormously. You can have five people and still have no functioning marketing system. Or you can have a business owner, one strong marketing specialist and two external contractors, and build a perfectly healthy structure around them.
The size of the team tells you very little on its own.
Business owners do not need to know how to do everyone else’s job
Something rather strange happened here too. At first, business owners understood very little about digital marketing. Then the industry seemed to decide that the answer was to teach them everything.
So now the owner of a small business is taking a course in advertising, learning about short form video, trying to understand SEO, experimenting with artificial intelligence, reading about funnels and editing their own website in the evening. And in the morning, they are still supposed to run the company. I do not think that is the answer.
The owner of a construction company does not need to be the best electrician in the business. But if electricians work for that company, the owner needs to understand what they are responsible for, what a reasonable result looks like, where their responsibility ends and when questions need to be asked.
Marketing is no different. You do not need to know which buttons your advertising specialist presses. But you should understand that they are buying attention, not guaranteeing a sale. You do not need to write professional copy. But you should understand what job the content is supposed to do. You do not need to understand the technical detail of search engine optimisation. But you should understand why your business is investing in SEO and what kind of result that investment can reasonably produce. You do not need to become a marketer.
But if you are responsible for managing marketing, you need to understand how it works.
Otherwise, you are not managing it. You are hoping.
So why is there so much noise?
Because every tool has to prove its own importance.
The social media specialist talks about social media. The advertising specialist talks about advertising. The personal branding expert explains why everyone needs a personal brand. The video specialist tells you the future is video. The artificial intelligence specialist explains why your business will disappear tomorrow if you do not embrace AI.
And each of them may be absolutely right within their own area.
But a business owner does not have ten businesses. They have one. And that business does not need every marketing tool that exists. It needs the tools that solve the problems of this particular business.
That is why I am perfectly comfortable hearing, “We don’t need TikTok.” Perhaps you don’t. Or, “We hardly post anything on Instagram.” So what?
If your customers make their decisions somewhere completely different, why would I make you produce social media content simply to create the appearance that you are doing modern marketing?
A tool should earn its place in the system. Not the other way round.
Meanwhile, people have changed too
I would add another reason why the old formulas give us less and less certainty today. Digital marketing did not stand still. But more importantly, neither did we. I remember a noticeable shift around 2012, when social media and mobile internet began to change people’s everyday behaviour much more significantly.
Then came another stage around 2015 and 2016. The phone became an almost permanent extension of the person carrying it. Search became instant. Social media stopped being a separate form of entertainment and became part of the environment in which people discovered news, encountered businesses, compared themselves with others, found products and formed preferences.
Then Covid happened. In a remarkably short period of time, it changed an enormous number of habits. People learnt to buy differently. Work differently. Access services differently. Think about distance differently. Then came the rising cost of living, the energy crisis, wars and a constant background of instability. And people changed again.
Their relationship with money changed. Their attitude to risk. Their willingness to trust. The way they think about non essential purchases. The promises they are prepared to believe from businesses. Even the amount of time they are willing to spend making a decision.
Which is why I sometimes find myself asking a slightly cheeky question. Why are you so surprised that something which worked before does not work today? Hmm? People have changed. Yet you want to show them an advert that worked brilliantly in 2018 and expect exactly the same result. Markets simply do not work like that.
Marketing always works with people
This is one thing from my earlier way of thinking that I definitely do not want to lose.
Behind all our systems, there is still a person.
I would simply talk about that person much more carefully now. I no longer need to explain customer decisions through the “reptilian brain” or suggest that people online are somehow in a trance. Those explanations are far too crude for behaviour that is much more complex.
But the fundamental observation remains. People do not make decisions like Excel spreadsheets. They get tired. They become distracted. They are afraid of making the wrong choice. They do not want to feel pressured. They compare. They come back. They forget. They look for reassurance. They respond to things that feel familiar. They notice contradictions. They read reviews. They ask people they trust.
Someone might visit your website today and buy from you three months later. They might first see your business on social media, then find you through Google, ask a colleague about you, and eventually return to your website.
If you only look at the final click, you may completely misunderstand what actually happened. That is why business marketing has never been simply a collection of channels. It works with the way a person moves towards a decision.
Search and social media really are not the same thing
When someone searches for “emergency electrician near me”, they already have a clearly defined problem. You do not need to explain why electricians exist. Their questions are different. Who is nearby? Who is available now? Who can I trust? Roughly how much will it cost? How quickly can someone get here?
But when that same person is scrolling through Instagram in the evening, they did not open the app to find an electrician. For a business to earn their attention there, the marketing has to work in a completely different way.
So we cannot simply say, “We do digital marketing,” and treat the internet as one single environment. It is not.
People arrive in different places with different intentions.
And that means even good marketing tools can fail when they are used in the wrong context.
The most expensive thing a person gives you is not their money
First, they give you their attention. They notice an advert. They stop. They read. They click. They look at the website. They open a service page. They read a review. They make a call. Every one of those steps costs them a small amount of attention.
And this is where businesses quietly lose an enormous amount of money.
The advertising brings someone to the website, but it is not clear what they should do next. They leave. The website explains everything. They call. Nobody answers. They leave. Someone answers and promises to send a proposal tomorrow. It arrives four days later. They leave. The proposal arrives on time, but it reads like a technical estimate and gives the customer no clear reason to choose this particular company. They leave. Then the business owner looks at the advertising and says, “Something is wrong with these leads.” Perhaps there is. Or perhaps the advertising did its job perfectly well.
The system simply lost the person somewhere further along the customer journey.
This is exactly why marketing cannot be properly evaluated in pieces
The advertising can work. The website can work. The sales process can work. But if they are all working in different directions, the business will still lose money. The advertising promises one thing. The website says something else. The salesperson gives a third explanation. Then the operations team delivers something different again.
The customer is unlikely to sit down that evening with a notebook and write, “I have identified a brand inconsistency at the third stage of the customer journey.” They will simply feel that something does not quite add up.
And they will choose someone else.
That is why I still like the word ecosystem. Marketing really does behave like a living system. Not because it is a beautiful metaphor, but because its individual parts are constantly affecting one another.
I used to explain this through the human body
Strategy was the brain. Traffic was the blood. Content was the nervous system. Analytics was the diagnostic system. Products were the organs. I still like that picture, although today I would not try to assign every marketing specialist their own particular body part. The point is much simpler.
A heart on its own is not an organism.
Even if it is an excellent heart. In exactly the same way, an excellent advertising specialist is not, on their own, your marketing. A brilliant social media specialist is not your marketing. A brilliant website is not your marketing.
Each one performs a function. The real value appears when we understand how those functions connect and work together. And this is where things become much easier for the business owner.
Instead of this mysterious thing called “marketing”, you begin to see a structure.
This is where we attract attention. This is where we explain. This is where the customer checks us out. This is where they make an enquiry. This is where the sales process begins. This is where the decision happens. This is where they receive the product or service. This is where they return, or do not. And this is where we measure what actually happened across the whole customer journey.
It is no longer magic. It is a system.
So what do we do with the £500?
Nothing. There is nothing wrong with the amount itself. You have £500 available? Fine. Then the question is not, “Where can I find a marketer for £500?”
The question is, “Which important marketing function can we realistically cover with that £500 right now?”
That creates a completely different conversation. Perhaps you need an advertising specialist for a few hours to sort out your campaigns. Perhaps it would be more valuable to properly define the offer first. Perhaps the money would be better spent creating a few strong pages for the website. Perhaps you could train someone already inside the team.
Or perhaps you should not spend that £500 on promotion at all yet, because there is a more fundamental problem in the business that needs to be addressed first.
Having a limited budget does not make it a bad business. It simply means you have to choose. Trying to buy everything at once with a limited budget, however, almost inevitably produces work that only scratches the surface.
I think business owners need clarity, not faith in marketing
You need to understand what you are actually buying. Who you are buying it from. Why you need it. How much of that person’s time is realistically spent inside your business.
You need to know which part of the result they are responsible for, what needs to exist before their work begins, what happens after their part is finished, and how you will know whether their work is actually contributing to the business.
And you also need to understand what it would simply be unfair to expect from them.
When that marketing clarity exists, an enormous amount of frustration disappears.
You stop expecting the person managing your social media to suddenly become your marketing director. You stop blaming the advertising specialist because the sales team failed to call back half the enquiries. You stop expecting a designer to solve a positioning problem that nobody ever defined for them.
And you stop replacing one specialist after another in the hope that the next person will finally turn out to be the one who can somehow do everything. Perhaps you do not need a different person. Perhaps you need to structure the work differently.