Why Marketing Focus Beats Marketing Activity Every Time

Over half the marketing directors I coach through Growth Mentor come to me with the same problem, though they rarely recognise it at first. They’re busy. Absurdly busy. Running 12 different campaign types, tracking 47 metrics, posting daily on five platforms, testing new channels, and still finding time to attend every webinar about the latest marketing automation tool.

And their results? Mediocre at best.

The problem isn’t effort. It’s focus. Or rather, the complete absence of it. Most marketing teams think they’re focused because they’re doing something. But activity isn’t focus—it’s the opposite. Real marketing focus means ruthlessly saying no to almost everything so you can say yes to the few things that actually move the needle.

The Traffic Trap: When “Focused” Means Focused on the Wrong Thing

Here’s the perfect example I see constantly: the traffic trap. A B2B marketing team will come to me celebrating 30,000 monthly website visitors, proudly showing me their upward-trending Google Analytics dashboard. They’re “focused” on content that drives impressions and clicks.

Brilliant. Except when I ask about lead generation, the numbers tell a different story. Their bounce rate sits at 85%. Average time on site? 47 seconds. Marketing qualified leads from all that traffic? Maybe 12 per month.

They’ve fallen victim to what Jason Cohen calls the fundamental misunderstanding of focus: doing lots of things poorly instead of doing one thing extraordinarily well. They’re focused on a vanity metric (traffic) that has almost zero correlation with their actual business objective (revenue).

This isn’t theoretical. When I dig into their campaigns, they’re typically running:

• SEO content targeting 200+ keywords
• Paid social on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter
• Email nurture sequences across 8 segments
• Webinar series on 6 different topics
• Partner co-marketing programmes with 4 companies

None of it working particularly well. All of it consuming resources.

Why B2B Marketing Teams Struggle With Focus

The challenge with marketing focus—and marketing prioritisation more broadly—runs deeper than simply having too many initiatives. Three systemic issues make focus nearly impossible for B2B marketing teams:

First, marketing directors face relentless pressure to “test everything.” The dominant narrative in B2B marketing strategy suggests that growth comes from continuous experimentation across channels. Whilst testing is valuable, most teams never progress beyond perpetual testing. They spread £200k across 15 channels instead of concentrating £150k on the three that actually drive pipeline.

Second, there’s the dangerous myth that more campaigns equal more leads. Al Ries and Jack Trout demolished this fallacy in Positioning back in 1981, yet marketing teams still behave as if volume trumps focus. Their research demonstrated that brands win by owning a single position in customers’ minds, not by shouting about everything to everyone. The same principle applies to campaign strategy.

Third, comprehensive reporting actively undermines focus. When your dashboard tracks 47 metrics, you’re not measuring what matters—you’re creating the illusion of control whilst missing the forest for the trees. Mark Ritson puts it bluntly: “Without clear objectives, it’s not strategy.” Most marketing teams have plenty of activity but no coherent strategy because they haven’t identified the one or two metrics that genuinely drive business outcomes.

What Real Marketing Focus Actually Looks Like

True focus isn’t about doing less for the sake of minimalism. It’s about creating space to execute the most important things with the intensity required to actually move business metrics. This is what Greg McKeown calls “the disciplined pursuit of less” in Essentialism—choosing the vital few over the trivial many.

In practical terms, focused B2B marketing strategy means:

Identifying your actual constraint. Not the constraint you assume exists, but the one your data reveals. Is it awareness (top of funnel)? Is it conversion (middle)? Is it retention (bottom)? Build your custom funnel, populate it with real numbers, and let the data tell you where you’re haemorrhaging potential customers. Netflix did this brilliantly when they identified that their biggest leak in 2019 wasn’t subscription conversion—it was getting UK households to watch SVOD at all. So they optimised for watching, not paying. Once households were watching SVOD (and specifically Netflix), converting them to paid subscribers became the obvious next objective.

Ruthlessly prioritising based on impact. Once you’ve identified your constraint, you need a framework for deciding what to do about it. The RICE framework (Reach × Impact × Confidence ÷ Effort) provides a starting point, but the critical insight is simpler: focus your entire marketing budget on the one or two initiatives with the highest probability of fixing your biggest leak. Not spreading budget across 12 initiatives. Not hedging your bets. Concentrated force on the constraint.

Running agile campaigns with clear success metrics. This is where most teams fail. They launch a campaign, let it run for three months, then declare victory or defeat based on vibes rather than data. Focused marketing means defining success upfront (not “engagement” or “impressions”—actual business metrics like MQLs, pipeline contribution, or customer acquisition cost), measuring obsessively, and killing underperforming campaigns after two weeks, not two quarters.

Here’s what this looks like in practice:

1. Build your custom funnel with real conversion data at each stage
2. Identify the single biggest drop-off point (your constraint)
3. Design 3 experiments specifically targeting that constraint
4. Set clear success criteria before launch (e.g., “Reduce demo-to-trial drop-off from 40% to 25% within 6 weeks”)
5. Measure weekly, not monthly
6. Double down on what works, kill what doesn’t
7. Once you’ve fixed that constraint, move to the next one

The Prioritisation Frameworks That Actually Work

Marketing prioritisation frameworks are ten a penny. Most are overcomplicated rubbish designed to make consultants look clever. But two approaches genuinely help marketing teams focus:

The “One Metric That Matters” approach, popularised by Lean Analytics, forces you to identify the single metric that, if improved, would transform your business. Not revenue (that’s the outcome, not the driver). Not traffic (that’s an input, potentially worthless). The actual constraint. For a SaaS company, this might be activation rate. For a B2B services firm, it might be sales meeting conversion. The key is singular focus: this one metric, this quarter, nothing else matters as much.

Jason Cohen’s “Creating Space” framework, which inverts traditional prioritisation. Instead of asking “What should we do?”, ask “What should we stop doing?” When you stop selling to poor-fit customers, you create space for 3× more pitches to good-fit prospects. When you stop tracking every metric, you create space to attack the one metric that matters. When you stop running campaigns across 12 channels, you create space to dominate 2 channels that actually drive pipeline.

The synthesis here is uncomfortable but liberating: you can’t prioritise everything. Prioritisation, by definition, means choosing. As Sylvia Plath wrote in The Bell Jar:

“I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”

Most marketing teams are starving at that fig tree, paralysed by possibility, whilst their competitors pick a direction and move.

From Strategy to Execution: Making Focus Stick

The hardest part of marketing focus isn’t identifying what matters—it’s maintaining that focus when a new opportunity appears, when stakeholders demand you “test” their pet channel, when a competitor launches something shiny, or when your CEO returns from a conference full of ideas.

This is where Derek Sivers’s mountain metaphor becomes invaluable:

Decisions are easy when you have only one priority. Your destination is a huge mountain peak on the horizon. You can see it from everywhere. Yes to that mountain, and no to everything else. You’ll always know where you’re going, and what you’re doing next. All paths go either towards that mountain or away from it. Because of this perspective, problems won’t deter you. Most people look down at the ground, upset by every obstacle. With your eyes on the horizon, you’ll step over obstacles, undeterred.

Your “mountain” is your constraint. The one thing in your funnel that, if fixed, unlocks everything else. Every campaign, every piece of content, every marketing hire should move you towards that mountain. Everything else is a distraction.

Here’s the brutal truth: most B2B marketing strategies fail not because the tactics are wrong, but because teams never commit long enough to make anything work. They test LinkedIn ads for six weeks, see modest results, then pivot to content marketing. They try ABM for two months, don’t see immediate pipeline, then chase the next trend. Focus means giving your chosen strategy enough time and resources to actually work.

Practical focus checklist:

• Review your marketing funnel monthly (not weekly, not quarterly)
• Identify your single biggest drop-off point
• Allocate 70% of budget to fixing that constraint
• Keep 20% for maintaining what’s working
• Reserve 10% for genuine experimentation
• Measure the constraint metric weekly
• Kill experiments that don’t show 10% improvement within 4 weeks

The Contrarian Truth About Marketing Focus

Here’s what the marketing automation vendors won’t tell you: focus is more valuable than tools. A marketing team with clear objectives, a simple funnel, and singular focus on their constraint will outperform a team with the entire MarTech stack 5000 every single time.

The uncomfortable reality is that most marketing teams use “testing” and “agility” as excuses to avoid the hard work of focus. It’s easier to launch a new campaign than to admit your existing campaigns aren’t working. It’s more comfortable to add another metric to your dashboard than to acknowledge you don’t understand what actually drives growth.

But the marketing directors who break through—the ones who consistently deliver 3× better results than their peers—aren’t doing more. They’re doing less, with obsessive intensity.

When I work with Growth Mentor clients on prioritisation, roughly 70% discover their actual problem isn’t execution—it’s the absence of a clear, defensible strategy that dictates where to focus. Once they build their funnel, identify their constraint, and commit to fixing it before moving to the next priority, everything else gets easier.

Because decisions are easy when you have only one priority.

The path forward isn’t complex. Build your funnel. Find your constraint. Focus everything on fixing it. Ignore everything else. It’s not sexy. It won’t win awards. But it will drive growth whilst your competitors drown in their own activity.