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But Doctor, my marketing isn't working..."
I see it constantly: Brilliant entrepreneurs with energy, enthusiasm, and products ready to disrupt their space.
But there is a common philosophy that often gets in the way. It’s the idea that hiring a handful of "gig experts" for discrete tasks—a blog post here, a PR pitch there—will automatically build a company.
Execution is the engine, but Strategy is the steering wheel. Specialists are great, but without an overarching messaging and growth strategy, they are just pumping out disconnected tasks. It’s like buying a billboard in a city where you don't even have distribution yet. The "act" is there, but the result isn't.
The disconnect looks like this:
PR: A major hit that drives traffic to a website that doesn't convert.
Social: Posts that drive "likes" but don't track to a single sales goal.
Content: Sporadic blogs that go nowhere and leave the audience confused.
If your strategy, marketing, and messaging aren't working in harmony, you aren't just wasting money—you’re losing momentum. Marketing shouldn't be a series of "guesses." It should be an integrated system where every part knows what the other is doing.
The 15-Minute Diagnostic
If you’re tired of driving in circles, let’s look at the alignment. Reach out for a quick audit of your current marketing "health." No pitch—just a look at where the leaks are.
#MarketingStrategy #FractionalCMO #StartupGrowth
The network for creativity
Join 1.25M professional creatives like you
Connect with clients, get discovered, and run your business 100% commission-free
Creatives on Contra have earned over $150M and we are just getting started
Related posts
Have you ever got in a position where you were super excited to share your best work but ended up nobody seeing it?
I have got, plenty of times.
Below I'm breaking down the two C's as marketing tactics that play big role in achieving an efficient distribution that the creatives are sleeping on.
1. Curiosity
Based on psychological studies, people do not tend to leave things unread or unfinished, thus have a much higher urge to pay close attention to something they might be afraid to miss out on.
Here's a real example of curiosity hook as a marketing tactic that helped me distribute my work efficiently and ended up blowing up. I used the same principle for this visual below too.
2. Controversy
Embrace Controversy to cut through online noise.
In an era where large percent of content is regurgitated or AI-generated without curation, creators must "pick a fight" by sharing bold, unique perspectives on ideas or philosophies. If you do what everyone else is doing, you're going to get what everyone else is getting, positioning controversy as essential for visibility and authenticity.
I also used this tactic in the visual below, featuring slightly foul language.
Relate your story or tactics how you practice to distribute your work without it being ghosted. 👇🏻
So creativity design
The most profitable brand project I shipped last year took 11 days and didn't include a single new logo concept.
The client had just raised, repositioned upmarket, and watched their sales cycle stretch by three weeks for no obvious reason. They came in convinced they needed a full rebrand. I sat in on two of their sales calls before quoting anything.
In both calls, the rep apologized for the website in the first 90 seconds. In both calls, the prospect went quiet for the rest of the demo.
That's one broken surface costing them deals on a loop.
We skipped the rebrand and locked the new narrative in two days. Rewrote and rebuilt the homepage in Framer in another nine.
The apology disappeared from sales calls inside the first week and that was the entire engagement.
The reason most brand work doesn't move the business is that it's solving the wrong layer of the stack. The bottleneck for a growth stage B2B company isn't usually "the brand" It's one surface, one sentence, one moment in the buyer journey where the story breaks.
Find that moment. Fix that moment. The rest can wait.
Most of the brand work I refuse is the work I could've sold the easiest.:
Hello I am Stella,
I’ve just launched a new online wellness course and I’m looking for an SEO Content Strategist who knows how to drive organic traffic to course landing pages no paid ads no gimmicks.
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