Your marketing is busy. Your team is creating content, running campaigns, and posting on social media with seemingly solid customer-focused strategies. Yet when you check the numbers, there’s a glaring disconnect: all this activity isn’t generating actual revenue.
It’s something we hear often. Many businesses pour resources into marketing efforts without seeing proportional returns. This isn’t just frustrating – it’s expensive.
So, what’s going on? The answer is simpler than you might think.
The fatal flaw in most marketing approaches
Most marketing fails to drive revenue due to several interconnected problems.
First, it lacks strategy – companies jump straight to tactics without a coherent plan. Second, it lacks focus – businesses try to be everything to everyone instead of solving one clear problem for a specific audience. Third, it’s self-centered rather than customer-centric – websites filled with “we” instead of “you.” Fourth, it targets too broadly instead of identifying perfectly profitable prospects.
“So many companies get into business, and we’re trying to grab all the business we can,” says Michael Buzinski, data-centric marketing expert who’s helped over 1,300 businesses overcome growth blockades on Marketing Demystified.
This scattered approach creates a costly chain reaction: complexity leads to inefficiency, which leads to wasted resources, which leads to poor results.
Every time you add a feature to your offering, you increase its complexity. As Mike puts it: “Complexity is inefficient. Complexity creates more need for more people. People are inefficient. So you are now multiplying inefficiencies every time you expand your offering.”
The result? Marketing that keeps you busy but doesn’t fill your pipeline.
Strategy before tactic is the foundation of revenue-generating marketing
Most businesses jump straight to tactics – social media posts, email campaigns, paid ads – without a solid strategy behind them. This lack of focus and clarity leads to companies randomly implementing tactics with no coherent plan. They’re creating social media content, launching email campaigns, and running paid ads, but with no real strategy behind any of it. This marketing strategy vs tactics debate is crucial – but why?
Sound strategy beats blind tactics every time. When you start with tactics, “you’re throwing spaghetti onto the wall and seeing what sticks. When you use strategy, you now know whether or not you’re even supposed to be throwing noodles.”
This requires you to ask yourself the following questions: What problem are we really solving? Who specifically needs this solution? Why should they care?
These questions form the foundation of a strategy-first approach that aligns every marketing activity with revenue generation.
The FOCUS framework is your path to profitable marketing
If you want to implement effective customer-focused strategies, the FOCUS framework is your solution. The answer to unfocused marketing is, unsurprisingly, focus. Mike created the acronym FOCUS: Fix One Clear Urgent Struggle as the foundation that truly drives results.
“If we could get more entrepreneurs to just focus on focus, they would find themselves much more profitable with a lot more bandwidth and a lot less struggles.”
This means identifying:
- One clear customer problem you solve better than anyone else
- Who specifically has this problem (and is willing to pay to fix it)
- Why this problem is urgent enough to prompt action now
Amazon didn’t start by selling everything – they sold books. They mastered one thing before expanding. This principle applies to businesses of all sizes: nail one niche before broadening your scope.
“The very successful people, the people who are sitting there going, ‘I made my first million within the first three years of starting my business and I started from zero’ – those are the people who had one thing for one audience.”
Customer-focused strategies solve one clear problem for one specific audience, you create clarity for both your team and your prospects.
From “I/We” to “You”: The customer-focused strategy shift
Many businesses create marketing that talks endlessly about themselves. Their websites and materials are filled with “I” and “we” statements that focus on the company rather than the customer.
“If you go to your website right now and you have more I’s and we’s than you and your, you have an identity issue because it’s not about you.”
Effective customer-focused strategies flip this dynamic. It focuses relentlessly on the customer’s problems and positions your solution in terms of what it does for them, not how great you are.
“B2B service-based businesses only do one thing. They solve other businesses’ problems… You sell one thing: a solution to a problem.”
So, what should you do? Take action now! Review your website and marketing materials. Count the “I/we” versus “you/your” statements. Then rewrite to put the customer at the center of your story. When companies focus on the customer experience, they can see an 80 percent increase in revenue.
Building your perfectly profitable prospect profile (P3P)
Beyond basic demographic targeting, the most profitable customer-focused strategies identify prospects who are the right cultural fit for your business.
Mike advocates moving beyond simple Ideal Client Profiles (ICPs) to develop what he calls a Perfectly Profitable Prospect Profile (P3P). This includes not just who might need your service, but who appreciates your approach, pays on time, and values your expertise.
“When you don’t have the focus, and then once you have the focus, now it’s like, okay, what’s my identity?” Your identity should attract the right clients and repel the wrong ones.
However, this might seem counterintuitive. Shouldn’t you try to appeal to as many potential clients as possible? Actually, no. The power to say “no” to poor-fit prospects allows you to say “yes” to ideal ones.
“Your time is worth 10 times more than every dollar that you could bring in.” Anytime you say yes, whether it’s a good yes or not, you’re saying no to something else.”
Four action steps to make your marketing more profitable
Want to turn your marketing from activity-focused to revenue-generating? Take these five concrete steps:
- Develop your strategy before selecting tactics: The marketing strategy vs tactics question should always be resolved in favor of strategy first. Determine your goals, audience, and message before deciding on channels and activities.
- Apply the FOCUS framework (Fix One Clear Urgent Struggle): Identify the specific problem you solve better than anyone else, who has this problem, and why it’s urgent enough to prompt action now.
- Shift your messaging from company-centric to customer-centric: Rewrite materials to focus on “you” instead of “we.”
- Create your P3P and evaluate current clients against it: Which clients are most profitable and enjoyable to work with? What do they have in common?
When your marketing focuses on solving one clear problem for the right audience with messaging that puts them at the center, the revenue follows. You’ll spend less, accomplish more, and build a sustainable engine for business growth.
Want these results for your business? Getting there requires discipline and focus. At Growgetter, we work as an extension of your team to connect the dots between your marketing activities and actual revenue growth. Our customer-centric, data-driven approach creates marketing that drives real results. Let’s talk about your journey toward more profitable marketing.