The monthly marketing meeting begins.

Website traffic is up 14%.

LinkedIn impressions are up 23%.

Email open rates remain healthy.

There are several attractive graphs. One of them even has an arrow pointing upwards.

Everything appears reassuringly positive.

So the Managing Director asks: “Is the marketing actually working?”

And there’s a brief silence.

Because that wasn’t on the slide.

In this episode of Marketing, Properly!, Sean Makin looks at the questions Managing Directors should be asking their marketing teams, not to become marketing experts themselves, but to make sure marketing is actually helping the business achieve what it needs to achieve.

It starts with a much better question than “What campaigns are we running?”

“What business objective are we trying to influence?”

Because marketing activity only becomes meaningful when you understand what it’s supposed to achieve.

We look at why MDs should ask who their priority customers really are, what the business wants to be known for and whether Sales, Marketing and senior leadership would actually give roughly the same answers.

Then there’s performance.

Don’t simply ask:

“What’s working?”

Follow it immediately with:

“How do we know?”

LinkedIn engagement might be increasing, but is it the right people engaging?

Google Ads might be generating conversions but, are they becoming customers?

The exhibition stand might have been extremely busy, but so is a pub on Friday night.

Busyness isn’t necessarily a commercial outcome.

There’s another question marketing teams should be comfortable answering:

“What isn’t working?”

Not every campaign succeeds. Not every channel performs. Some ideas fail.

A healthy marketing culture should be able to say:

“We tried this. It didn’t work. Here’s what we learned. We’re stopping it.”

That isn’t failure.

That’s good management.

We also explore why Managing Directors should ask what customers are telling the business, where potential customers are dropping out, what Sales thinks of the marketing, where money is being wasted and which activities the team would stop if it had to choose.

And there’s one question that often gets forgotten:

“What do you need from me?”

Because marketing performance isn’t solely the responsibility of Marketing. Leadership needs to provide clarity, priorities, decisions and the freedom to stop low-value activity.

A Managing Director doesn’t need to understand every change to Google’s algorithm or memorise the difference between GA4, PPC, CRO, CTR and CRM.

That’s not the job.

The job is to make sure Marketing is helping the business move in the right direction.

So don’t just ask:

“What have you been doing?”

Ask:

“What are we trying to achieve?”

“What are we learning?”

“What’s working?”

“What isn’t?”

And:

“What are we going to do differently because of it?”

Because the best relationship between a Managing Director and Marketing isn’t one where the MD knows all the answers.

It’s one where they’re asking better questions.

Which, conveniently, is rather the point of this podcast.

Marketing, Properly! - practical marketing thinking for business owners and Managing Directors who want better questions, clearer decisions and marketing that actually contributes to the business.

Hosted by Sean Makin, a Fractional CMO and Strategic Marketing Consultant with over 25 years’ experience in marketing and brand.

Produced in Scotland.