The Next Sensible Step: What Should Your Marketing Do Next?

Rob Curtis: What should we do next? It sounds like an incredibly simple question, but I think it might be one of the hardest questions in marketing. Because there is never a shortage of things that you could do. You could go and improve your website, you could start running ads, increase the ad budget, post more on LinkedIn, start a newsletter, fix the SEO, create some videos, even launch podcast, build a lead magnet, change the offer.

Improve your email sequences, do some PR, you see where I'm going with this, things like experimenting with AI, there's always something, and that is part of the problem. Welcome back to Marketing Unzit. I'm Rob Curtis. And today, I want to talk about an idea I find myself coming back to time and time again.

The next sensible step. Not the perfect marketing strategy. Not the ultimate funnel. Not your five year roadmap.

Just this. Given where the business is today, what is the next sensible thing to do? Because I think a lot of marketing just gets unnecessarily complicated when we try to answer 10 different questions at once. Sometimes you just need to answer one simple question.

We love big plans, right? I know I certainly do. The marketing loves a big plan. The 12-month strategy, the massive spreadsheet, every channel mapped, every campaign planned, every KPI assessed and documented, colour coding everywhere, and with my love of spreadsheets, that's certainly a goer.

I am not judging this at all, and there is absolute need for it in the right moments. But there is just something reassuring about seeing the entire year neatly mapped out in front of you. From January, February, March, April, May onwards, everything beautifully organized. Everyone knows what they're supposed to be doing.

The problem is reality generally has very little respect for your spreadsheet. This campaign doesn't perform like you expect. A competitor changes something, Google changes something. I know I've felt enough of that pain over the years.

A customer could behave differently, your sales team Tells you the leaves just aren't right, the product changes, the market changes, the budget changes, you're always learning something. And suddenly the beautiful plan you made four months ago is telling you to do something that no longer makes sense. But because it's on the strategy, we do it anyway, right? And that is where planning can become dangerous.

A plan should help you make decisions. It should not stop you. Making them. I think this distinction matters.

You need direction. You need roughly where you are trying to go, right? But direction and certainty are not the same thing. Imagine you were driving from where we are in Swindon all the way up to Edinburgh.

You absolutely need to know that Edinburgh is where you are trying to get to, right? But you do not need to decide every lane change before leaving the house. You make those decisions as you travel. Because traffic changes, road works appear.

You stop for a coffee. I know I certainly do. And if I'm with my family, someone definitely needs the loo. 30 minutes after you've especially when I've asked them, do you need the toilet?

We're about to stop at our services. These things happen, right? The destination remains useful, but the route has to adapt. So marketing works in a very, very similar way.

Your business objective might be very, very clear. You want to increase revenue from a particular service. Grit. That is the destination.

But exactly how you get there should change as you learn. Maybe you think the answer is increasing traffic. Then you discover there is already plenty of traffic. The problem is that people don't understand the offer.

Now the sensible next step changes. This is not strategy failing. That is strategy working perfectly. Because the order matters.

There is a really simple hierarchy I use when I think about this: business, strategy, tactics. In that order, we have to bring the business first. What does the business actually need? Then the strategy.

What needs to happen for marketing to contribute to that? And then the tactics. What are we actually going to do? It sounds obvious when I say it out loud, but let's just look at how marketing conversations normally happen.

Should we be on TikTok? That's a tactic. Should we invest more in SEO? Another tactic.

Should we run LinkedIn ads? Another tactic. Should our CEO build a personal brand? Tactic.

Should we keep using AI to create more content? Again, another tactic. The question arrives before anybody has established the problem. And without the problem, almost every tactic sounds reasonable.

Should a business do SEO? Maybe. Should a business advertise on Google? Maybe.

Should a founder position and post themselves across LinkedIn? Maybe. Should you start a podcast? I am literally recording one.

And my answer is still maybe. It depends what you're trying to accomplish. So let's start with the business. Imagine somebody says, our marketing isn't working.

My first question isn't what channels are you using? It is what does marketing mean? What does working mean? Because marketing isn't working.

Could mean almost anything. Revenue is down, inquiries are down, inquiries are up, but the quality is poor. Sales are taking longer, customers are leaving, margins are falling, a new service isn't selling. The business wants to enter another market.

The ideas, there's so many different scenarios. The sales team has loads of opportunities, but isn't closing them. Those are completely different. And if we don't define them, if we don't define that business problem properly, we are about to start solving something at complete random.

So that first sensible step might not be marketing activity at all. It might simply be getting everyone in a room to agree. Basically, what the actual problem is. And weirdly, that can be harder than launching a campaign.

Everyone sees a different problem in a team. This happens constantly inside businesses. Ask five people what the biggest marketing problem is, and you will always get five different answers. The managing director says we need more leads.

The sales director says the leads are rubbish. Marketing says sales aren't following them up. Sales says the website doesn't explain anything. Operations are trying to handle everything in the back end.

Please don't generate any more work because we can't deliver what we've already sold. Now we've got something interesting. Because the marketing problem. Well, it might actually be that everybody is optimizing for a different outcome.

And for me, this is where I think strategy often goes wrong. People assume strategy means choosing the cleverest tactic. I think strategy is more about deciding what not to prioritize. It's making choices.

The ones that matter, the ones that don't. The ones that we shouldn't do yet. The word next truly matters. The bit I like most about the next sensible step is actually the word next, because it gives you permission not to solve everything immediately.

Imagine your marketing has those five problems. The website conversion rate is poor. You're not generating enough traffic to the website, your CRM is a mess, you barely email your database, and your messaging is unclear. All five might genuinely need fixing.

But trying to fix all five at the same time, it just usually creates a sixth problem. Nobody has enough time to do anything properly. So instead, ask yourself, which one makes the next improvement possible? That changes things.

Because if your message is unclear, perhaps fixing the website first is pointless. Because you'll simply make the wrong message prettier. If your website isn't converting, driving more traffic might be premature, because you're sending more people into something that doesn't work. If nobody follows up with those inquiries, spending more on lead generation is probably insane.

There is an order, and that order really does matter. I want you to think of the bottlenecks. Because the one way I think about it is at any given moment. Something is constraining growth more than everything else.

Your job is not necessarily to improve all parts of the system. Your job is to find the constraint. Let's take a simple example. A business gets, let's say, 10,000 website leads, 200 inquiries, 100 qualified opportunities, 20 sales.

They want more revenue. So where do they invest? You could immediately say, Less increased traffic, but why? Perhaps going from 10,000 to 15,000 with business works?

Or perhaps there is a much bigger opportunity between those hundred qualified opportunities and 20 sales. Maybe the issue is sales conversion. Perhaps it's the offer? Perhaps competitors are perceived as safer.

Perhaps proposals take five days to arrive. Perhaps nobody follows up. The numbers do not automatically give you the answer, but they tell you where to ask better questions. And that is what a strategy should do.

It should improve the quality of the questions. Things like what deserves attention now? This is probably the most Underutilized phrase within the whole framework. What deserves our attention now?

Because attention is probably one of the most limited resources in a business. Money gets talked about constantly. Time gets talked about constantly. Attention?

Less so. But every business, let's face it, has a limited amount of attention. A limited amount of leadership attention? A limited amount of marketing attention, a limited amount of creative attention, a limited amount of technical attention.

You can technically have 20 priorities. But in reality, you probably have two priorities and 18 things everybody just feels guilty about not doing properly. And there is a huge difference between those two situations. Because focus isn't saying something doesn't matter.

Focus is saying it doesn't matter enough right now. That word changes everything. Not never. Not pointless.

Just not now. And the shiny object problem is something that I see so many business owners struggle with. Because the shiny objects are just relentless, particularly in in today's world, right? Every week there seems to be a new reason why the thing you're currently doing is apparently obsolete.

Email is dead, SEO is dead, Google is dead, websites are dead, organic social is dead. Something is always dead. And simultaneously, there is always a new thing you absolutely must start working on immediately. You need AI agents, generative search, a new social platform, a new content format, a new advertising feature, a new automation tool.

I know that's my ⁓ guilty pleasure. And if you're a business owner trying to keep up with it all, I genuinely understand why marketing just feels overwhelming. Because every new thing creates a tiny bit of anxiety. What are we missing?

What if our competitors start first? What if this is the next massive thing? And sometimes it is worth experimenting. But novelty should not automatically outrank importance.

That is a sentence I think more marketing teams need written on the wall. Because novelty does not automatically outrank importance. Sensible Doesn't mean safe. There is another distinction worth making.

Because a sensible step isn't necessarily a safe step. Sometimes a sensible thing is actually quite bold. Increasing the budget might be sensible. Launching something completely new might be sensible.

Stopping a successful campaign might be sensible if it is attracting the wrong kind of customer. Changing your positioning. might just be sensible. Entering a new market might be sensible.

As I said, sensible doesn't mean conservative. It means that based on what we currently know we we have a rational reason for taking this action. That rational reason might still contain some uncertainty. In fact, I put my mortgage on the fact it will most likely, certainly Contain uncertainty.

Because there is no marketing when there is no certainty. So what do we know? Before choosing the next step, I like separate in into three things. What do we know?

What do we think? And what don't we know yet? Those categories are incredibly useful. For example, we know website inquiries have fallen 30%.

Good. We think the reason is lower organic traffic. Okay. Do we know that?

Maybe not. Perhaps organic traffic is flat, paid traffic has disappeared. Perhaps traffic hasn't changed us all, and conversions have dropped. Perhaps the form is broken.

It sounds ridiculously simple, but organizations constantly make decisions based on things they think are facts. Someone says in a meeting: our customers don't read email. Do we really know that? Our audience is on LinkedIn.

Do we know that? Price is the reason we're losing deals. Do we actually know that? Our customers want more features.

Do we actually know that? The next sensible step might simply be finding out. Research can be an action because we have a massive bias in marketing towards visible output. Build something, publish something, launch something.

But sometimes the highest value marketing activity is learning. Call ten type customers, listen to sales calls, read lost deal notes, watch users navigate the website, review search behavior, look at what people ask before buying. Talk to the sales team, talk to customer service. None of that produces an advert.

None of it gives you something exciting to show in a Monday meeting. But it can save months of doing the wrong thing. I think some of the best strategic decisions feel frustratingly slow at the start and incredibly fast afterwards. Because once you understand the actual problem, The tactical options, they just become so much clearer.

What if we don't know? There is another reason I like the framework. Because you don't always need to know the answer. You just need the next question.

And if we don't know whether the price is the problem, what's the next sensible step? Talk to people who didn't buy. If we don't know which message resonates, what's next? Test three messages.

If we don't know whether people will use a feature, then what's next? Show them a prototype. If we don't know whether LinkedIn is worth investing in, what's next? Run a small, controlled experiment.

You don't have to bet the entire marketing budget on a theory. Design a test that creates information. Then use the information to choose that next step. Think This is increasingly how I think about strategy.

Not as one enormous decision you make in January, but as a sequence of connected decisions. Decision one creates information, and that information improves decision two. Decision two creates even more information. And that improves decision three.

And over time, your strategy becomes smarter. Which does mean changing the plan. It isn't necessarily evidence that the original plan was wrong. Sometimes it means you've learned something.

And if new information doesn't change your strategy occasionally, I would I'd be more than worried. Because either your original plan was perfect, the ultimate super supernatural, or nobody is paying attention. So obviously, there is a danger at the other end of this. Because you can change too often.

You publish three posts, nothing happens. Change strategy. Run outs for two weeks, nothing happens. Change strategy, right?

Start SEO. Three weeks later, SEO isn't working. Let's change strategy. Now we are not being adaptive, we're just being impatient.

That next sensible step isn't permission to constantly abandon things. Sometimes the next sensible step is keep going. And that is so important because consistency can be a strategic decision. If the evidence says the direction still makes sense, but the outcome naturally takes time, do not mistake waiting for failure.

This is especially true in things like brand building, SEO, content, and trust building. Because not everything delivers immediate feedback. And sometimes the sensible thing is doing the pouring thing again. And again.

And again. And this connects to something else I've spent a lot of time thinking about. The messy middle. And that uncomfortable period between starting something and knowing whether it worked.

It's where confidence drops. It's where the board starts asking questions. It's where somebody forwards an article about a completely different strategy. It's where a competitor appears to be doing something much more exciting.

And suddenly, the plan that everybody agreed on. Four, five, six weeks ago. just looks less attractive. And that is exactly when you need a framework for deciding what happens next.

Not because you blindly stick to the plan, but because you need to distinguish between those key things. This has taken time. And this isn't working. And they can look remarkably similar from the inside.

I'll probably dedicate an entire episode to that, because it certainly deserves one. But the principle is simple. Don't change because you are uncomfortable. Change because you have learned something that warrants a change.

So how do you actually find that next sensible step? I would work through five questions. So question one, what are you trying to achieve? Make this a business answer.

I want to increase revenue from X, I want to improve retention, I want to enter a new market, I want to fill unused capacity, improve profitability, something meaningful and tangible. Question two: What is stopping that happening now? Find the constraint. Is that awareness, trust, conversion, sales, your offer, the retention?

Your internal capacity in the business, or is it something else completely different? Question three. What do we know versus what what are we assuming? Separate evidence from opinion.

I want you to be ruthless here. Question four. What's the smallest useful action that moves us forward? Not necessarily the smallest action full stop, but the most s the smallest, most useful one.

Something that either improves the situation or teaches you something important. And question number five. What would we need to see before deciding again? And this one is the key.

It truly matters. I want you to decide in advance what you're looking for. Otherwise, every result can be interpretated however you want. And humans are extremely good at doing that.

Particularly when we've already spent money. So let's say you're a B2B service business. Revenue growth has stalled. The immediate reaction is we need more leads.

The house the building's on fire. The panic. Okay. But let's work through it first.

What are we trying to achieve? We want to increase revenue by 20%. Fine. Perfect.

What's stopping that? You go and investigate and discover your lead volume is actually pretty stable. Interesting. So what do we know?

You generated 80 inquiries this quarter. They're similar to previous quarters, but the percentage turning into sales has fallen. Now, all of a sudden, the problem has moved. Why?

So we'll go and talk to sales. They say more prospects are comparing you against cheaper competitors. You listen to calls. Prospects repeatedly ask what makes you different.

Now we have something. The next sensible step probably isn't increasing ad spend, it might be clarifying positioning, improving proof, creating comparison content, changing how the offer is presented, giving sales better material. You've now gone from we need more leads to something so much more useful. We need to give existing prospects a stronger reason to choose us.

And that is strategy starting to become clear. What should we stop? That is the final question I would add. What are we going to stop doing to make room for this?

Because businesses are very good at adding priorities, but we're all less good at removing them. Here's our new priority. Great. What isn't a priority anymore?

Absolute silence in the medium room. So now the team has 11 priorities instead of 10. And six weeks later, everybody is completely overloaded and none of them get enough attention. A real strategic decision usually has a cost.

If we're going to put more effort here, something else gets less. If nobody has to give anything up, you probably haven't prioritized. You've probably just added. And personally, I like thinking in roughly 90-day blocks.

Not because it's some magical marketing number. It really, really isn't. But it's long enough to make meaningful progress on something and short enough to retain flexibility. What happens over the next 90 days?

What are we testing? What are we trying to improve? What are we deliberately not focusing on? Then you review.

What happened? What do we learn? What changed? What deserves our attention and focus now?

And the cycle repeats. And this makes strategy feel much less like fortune telling, which is good. Because sadly, us marketeers, we're not fortune tellers. Despite some proposals suggested otherwise, I'm sure.

But what I would do this week, if you're listening to this and your marketing currently feels chaotic, here's the exercise. I want you to get a blank piece of paper and at the top, just write, what is the business trying to achieve? And then underneath, what is currently stopping us? And then, what evidence do we have?

Then, what are we assuming? Then finally, in massive flamin' letters. What is the next sensible step? One thing, not seven.

One. And once you've written it down, ask another question. What are we gonna do to stop or delay so this actually gets done properly? That last part is where strategy really becomes real.

I think marketing gets complicated because there are almost an infinite possibilities. Infinite channels, infinite content, infinite tools, infinite advice. But your resources aren't infinite. Your budget isn't.

Your time isn't. Your team's energy isn't. Your attention definitely isn't. So strategy can simply be a list of everything worth doing.

It has to be a decision about what deserves attention now. Start with the business, understand the constraints. Separate what you know from what you assume. Choose an action that creates progress or creates useful information.

Then learn and decide again. You don't need to know every single move. You just need enough clarity to make the next one. And that in a nutshell is the next sensible step.

And if your marketing currently feels like you've got 20 things competing for your attention, maybe don't ask what else we should do. Just ask that question of what deserves our attention now. Thanks for listening to another episode of Marketing Unzipped. I'm Rob Curtis, and I'll see you in the next one.