Start with the website
Your website doesn't need to win design awards.
It does need to work.
That sounds obvious, but you'd be surprised how often marketing investment and website quality become completely disconnected.
A business might be spending thousands every month bringing people to a website that's slow, confusing on mobile or difficult to navigate.
Or the website might look fantastic but leave you wondering what the company actually does.
If someone arrives for the first time, they should be able to understand a few things fairly quickly.
What do you do?
Who is it for?
Why should they care?
Why should they trust you?
What should they do next?
If those answers aren't clear, attracting another 10,000 visitors isn't necessarily going to solve anything.
You're just giving another 10,000 people the same confusing experience.
Make sure the structure makes sense
Websites have a habit of becoming messy over time.
That's completely normal.
A new service gets added.
Then another landing page.
Someone starts a blog.
An agency creates a few campaign pages.
Another person changes the navigation.
Five years later, you've got a website nobody would have designed that way from scratch.
The individual pages might be perfectly good.
The problem is how everything fits together.
A sensible website structure helps visitors understand the business and find what they're looking for.
It also helps search engines understand the relationship between your pages.
And importantly, it gives you somewhere sensible to send people when you're running marketing campaigns.
You shouldn't need a treasure map to find an important service on your own website.
Get the basics working properly
Some of the most valuable improvements aren't particularly exciting.
They aren't the sort of thing you're going to announce on LinkedIn.
Pages need to load properly.
Forms need to work.
Mobile visitors need to be able to use the site without constantly zooming in and out.
Broken links need fixing.
Tracking needs to tell you something useful.
Important pages need to be discoverable.
Search engines need to be able to crawl and understand the website.
None of that sounds as exciting as launching a new campaign.
But these things matter because every marketing channel eventually depends on the infrastructure underneath it.
A brilliant campaign sending people to a broken enquiry form is still a broken campaign.
Your message matters just as much
The foundations aren't only technical.
You can have a fast, beautifully built website and still struggle if the message isn't clear.
Sometimes businesses know their own products and services so well that they forget what it's like to encounter them for the first time.
The website ends up talking about methodologies, solutions, innovation and capabilities without actually explaining why any of it matters to the customer.
I'd rather see simple, clear language.
Tell me what you do.
Tell me what problem you solve.
Tell me why you're good at it.
Give me enough confidence to take the next step.
You can always provide more detail further into the website.
Clarity comes first.
Know what's already working
Before adding another marketing channel, it's also worth understanding the ones you already have.
Where are your enquiries coming from?
Which pages are producing them?
What happens to those enquiries afterwards?
Which marketing activity is actually connected to revenue?
Where are people dropping out?
There doesn't need to be a perfect attribution model covering every interaction somebody has with your business.
But you should have enough visibility to make sensible decisions.
Otherwise, you risk cutting something that's quietly working while putting more money into something that isn't.
That's not a marketing strategy.
That's guessing with a budget.
Fixing the foundations doesn't mean waiting forever
There's a danger of taking this idea too far.
You don't need to spend six months making everything perfect before you're allowed to market your business.
There will always be something you could improve.
And sometimes marketing itself is how you learn.
You launch something.
You see how people respond.
You improve it.
You try again.
That's completely normal.
The point isn't perfection.
It's making sure there isn't an obvious weakness undermining everything you're about to spend money on.
If your website is fundamentally sound, your proposition is clear, your tracking gives you useful information and customers can easily take the next step, you're probably in a good position to start scaling.
Make the next pound work harder
I don't think the question should always be:
“How much more should we spend on marketing?”
Sometimes a better question is:
“What would make the marketing we're already doing work better?”
Maybe that's improving an important landing page.
Maybe it's simplifying the customer journey.
Maybe it's fixing technical problems.
Maybe it's changing the way you explain what you do.
Maybe it's finally understanding which enquiries actually turn into customers.
None of those things necessarily increase your marketing activity.
But they can increase the value you get from it.
And once those foundations are working properly, investing more becomes a much easier decision.
You're no longer spending more money hoping it fixes the problem.
You're putting more behind something that's ready to grow.
Better foundations.
Stronger growth.