If you run a small to medium business, you probably didn’t start it because you love marketing.
You started it because you’re good at what you do: delivering a product or service you’re proud of.
So, you do what most growing businesses do and scale over time.
This leads you to:
> Hire someone to “do the ads”
> Bring in a freelancer or agency for social media
> Add an SEO specialist and web designer when you can afford it, once you decide to wean off paid advertising.
You end up with several different, often quality, marketing partners but no clearly defined and connected strategy between them.
This is a known issue in marketing that most agencies and freelancers aren’t able (or aren’t willing) to fix.
On the surface, it feels like you’re “covering all the bases.”
And you are. It’s just that often, nothing connects the bases.
What does good look like?
Alongside that, marketing moves fast. New tools, new performance metrics, new ways to appear business critical.
However, with no professional body of marketing, no agreed standards, no license to practice and minimal governance…..
It’s kind of the wild west for marketing.
Without any of this in place, it often falls on the business owner to decipher marketing reports full of data, often designed for complexity.
Performance metrics can be positioned to shine at contract renewal. There are easy metrics to hit and then the ones that actually matter.
It is very easy to suddenly start counting “Users” instead of “Active Users”. Then label it as “Traffic” on a report.
This would appear to be an increase in performance, but it’s not.
Data isn’t sexy and almost no one would notice the change. It may be unintentional or it may be to ensure continuity of contract. Either way…
Did it make you more money? No.
Unless you have time to validate results and a deep understanding of the intricacies of data engineering, you have little choice but to trust what you are told.
Marketeers are financially incentivised to show results, but without a dedicated eye, how do you know the results they show delivered value for your bottom line?
Without highly qualified expertise in place, you may find yourself signing off work you aren’t sure actually….works.
This is often by design.
Many agencies don’t just mark their own homework…they write the quiz, too.
Fragmented Ownership Leaves Gaps
The way businesses scale makes this very easy.
Fragmentation between different marketing channels means there are often multiple teams, all seperately doing very well, but you don’t see the results at year end.
It has become increasingly harder to pinpoint what really works.
This fragmentation likely means:
> Your marketing costs more than it should
> Channels compete with or even conflict with each other
> You’re wasting money with an inefficient strategy
Why does my marketing cost so much?
Let’s take a closer look at the disconnect losing you money
> Real examples of how they cause conflicts
> Why a holistic, 360° marketing view works better
> How a “lead” agency can act like your outsourced marketing director and protect your investment
The Reality: You Have Specialists, But No One Is in Charge
Most SMEs end up with this setup:
> A PPC/ads agency or freelancer running Google/Facebook ads
> A social media agency posting and managing communities
> A web designer/developer looking after the website
> An SEO consultant for long term, sustainable growth
Each is focused on their piece of the puzzle:
> The PPC person wants more clicks and leads
> The social agency wants likes, comments, and followers
> The SEO consultant wants better rankings and traffic. If they are good, they also want revenue and signups.
> The web person wants a faster, nicer looking site.
Does anyone check these clicks, signups and comments target your actual prospective market?
Who is responsible for the big picture?
> Who makes sure everything lines up with your current business goals?
> Who decides what really works across all channels, not just one?
> Who stops one agency’s activity from cancelling out another’s?
Without an all singing, all dancing marketing and data engineering team, the answer is often: no one. Or worse, you. And your skills are most valuable spent setting business strategy.
How Disconnected Agencies Work Against You
Here are some common, real world situations.
1. Paying Twice for the Same Click
Your SEO consultant helps you rank on page 1 of Google UK for “Marketing services in Harrogate.”
Meanwhile, your ads freelancer is bidding aggressively on the same exact term and sending people to a different landing page.
The impact damages performance
> You pay for clicks that you would have received for free, organically.
> SEO learns what content works, but that insight never reaches the ads side.
> Ads knows which keywords converts, but this never reaches the SEO
> Messaging is slightly different on each page, which reduces trust and conversion.
You think “Google Ads are expensive” or “SEO isn’t working” when the real issue is lack of coordination.
2. Beautiful Social Media, Weak Sales
Your social media agency posts great stories and visuals that generate likes and comments.
Your web person has been optimising specific product or service pages to convert visitors.
But:
> Social posts send people to generic pages or even just your homepage.
> The offers or messages on social don’t match what people see when they click through.
> You get “engagement” but not enough leads or sales. It’s not that social “doesn’t work” for your business, it’s that it’s not connected to a conversion strategy.
3. Remarketing That Annoys Your Best Prospects
Your ads partner sets up remarketing so anyone who visits your website gets ads for weeks.
At the same time, your email/CRM tool (eg. MailChimp, Klayvio, HubSpot) nurtures your warmest leads with emails and offers.
Because there’s no central control:
> People who already booked a call or requested a quote keep seeing “Book a call!” ads for days or weeks.
> Recent buyers still see “10% off your first order” ads.
> Prospects feel harassed and confused.
You may blame the platform (“Facebook is annoying”), but the real issue is that no one owns the full customer journey.
4. Website Changes That Break Other Channels
Your web designer redesigns your services page to make it look cleaner and more modern. Those pages were heavily used in your ads and SEO strategies. It’s a good idea in an integrated marketing strategy.
But, because no one is coordinating:
> URLs are changed, but Google Ads and SEO content still point to the old ones → broken links, wasted clicks, increased spend, lowered return on investment for 2 marketing channels.
> The new design looks great but removes key content that helped SEO and answered buyer questions.
Suddenly, you are no longer page 1 in Google for “Marketing services in Harrogate”
> Traffic and conversion drops……and you’re not sure why.
Noone connects the issue
Maybe the SEO blames a Google algorithm update. Whilst this sounds logical, the cause actually was a gap in knowledge between teams.
The problem wasn’t the redesign. It was that the redesign wasn’t aligned with marketing performance across channels, because it’s nobody’s job.
More Money, More Problems
As your business evolves to multiple partners covering different marketing channels, you may decide to streamline with a generalist agency.
The issue then becomes vendor lock in, extortionate pricing models and higher staff turnover leading to reduced access to expertise.
The moment you stop paying, the services provided become very difficult to migrate.
You often have to start all over again from scratch, losing key learnings and often, highly important business intelligence data.
Traction is lost and there is the inevitable opportunity cost.
You pay setup fees for new accounts to replicate what you already had, but with less data. You just needed ownership of them to prevent this.
The new account setup can cause conflicts or overlap if the old ones are left live, which is common.
This causes technical debt that haunts you later with higher development costs and your users data continuing to be sent to the old account, a risk for GDPR.
Why an integrated 360° View Works Better.
A holistic marketing approach treats all your channels, website, ads, social, email, SEO- as parts of one system designed to grow your business. These are levers to pull.
Especially for SMEs, this has huge benefits:
1. One Set of Goals That Actually Matter
Instead of each agency chasing its own KPIs:
> You define business-level goals: revenue, qualified leads, bookings, cost per acquisition, return on investment.
> Every channel is judged by how it contributes to these, not by vanity metrics.
This stops situations like:
> “Our ads look great!” while sales are flat
> “Our rankings are up!” but leads haven’t improved
“Social has better engagement than ever before!” From markets you don’t service.
2. Smarter Use of Data
A 360° view suddenly allows insights to flow between channels:
> Questions customers ask in sales calls or via email become topics for SEO content and social posts.
> High-performing ads become the basis for website headlines and email campaigns.
> Website behavior data informs who to retarget, who to email, and who to leave alone.
Instead of each partner learning in isolation, your business benefits from shared learning, without the cost of a full marketing department.
You turn business goals into reality.
3. Consistent Messaging and Experience
Integrated marketing ensures your business presents as a single voice, not a series of random marketing occurrences.
> The promises you make in ads matches what people actually see on your website.
> Your social content, website copy, and email sequences all tell the same story.
> Customers feel like they’re dealing with one joined up brand, not a collection of disconnected tactics.
This is especially important when you don’t have an in-house marketing team to constantly check everything.
4. Better Use of a Limited Budget
Most SMEs don’t have the budget to waste.
A 360° view helps you:
> See which channels genuinely bring in profitable customers- not just clicks.
> Stop spending in areas that look good on paper but don’t move the bottom line.
> Reinvest into the mix of activities that delivers real, measured results.
Why SMEs Need a Lead Agency (Your “Outsourced Marketing Director”)
So who actually builds and maintains this holistic strategy if you don’t have a full marketing team with a highly experienced, hands on director?
That’s where a lead agency or orchestrator comes in, a partner whose job is to:
> Act like your fractional/outsourced marketing director
> Connect and align agencies and freelancers
> Make sure your whole marketing machine works together to maximise your ROI
Unlike a specialist agency, their primary role isn’t to run just one channel.
What does a Lead Agency do?
> Create the overall marketing strategy
> Understand your business model, margins, and growth targets
> Define your positioning, key messages, and priority audiences
> Set shared KPIs and reporting criteria so you know what good looks like
> Pull data from all partners into a single actionable strategy led by multiple datasets
> Evaluate performance across channels, not in silo
How Does a Lead Agency Do This?
They evaluate your business, assess the wider marketing landscape then coordinate all your partners to get results for the most efficient use of your marketing spend.
> Make sure plans and campaigns support each other
> Empower you to make better budget and prioritisation decisions
> Recommend where to increase or cut spend
> Focus on what delivers the biggest impact for your limited resources
This buys you time and a better return on investment
In practice, this means you don’t have to:
> Translate between “ad speak,” “SEO speak,” and “dev speak”
> Judge five different reports that all say “we’re doing great” (spoiler- great is in the eye of the beholder).
> Work out on your own what is and isn’t working
You have a partner whose job is to see the full picture and to protect your investment.
Think of it like a super technical marketing expert who speaks plain English, dedicated to getting the best result for your business.
What This Could Look Like for Your Business
Imagine this instead of the current chaos:
> They work with you to set clear targets (e.g. “We need 40 qualified leads a month from our target market, at or below £X per lead”).
> They brief your PPC, social, SEO, and web partners from one joined-up plan.
> When the website changes, your ads, social, email and SEO are updated at the same time.
> When a new offer goes live, it appears in your ads, emails, and on your site with consistent messaging.
Each month, you understand exactly what’s working, what isn’t, and what to focus on next.
You still benefit from specialists, but you finally get the results and clarity you expected when you hired them.
Conclusion: Being Great at What You Do Is Not Enough
As a small or medium sized (SME) business, your expertise is your edge.
But with no aligned marketing approach, it doesn’t always reach the right people in the right way.
Multiple agencies and freelancers, working in isolation, can:
> Waste budget
> Create a confusing experience for customers
> Deliver activity without real, measurable impact.
A holistic marketing strategy, driven by a 360° view of your customers and channels, led by a partner who acts as your outsourced marketing director, turns fragmented activity into a focused growth engine.
Insight Metrics 
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