You Can't Hire a Good Marketer If You Don't Know What Good Marketing Is.
Most businesses confuse marketing with copy, design, branding, or taste. In reality, marketing is the discipline of measuring what deserves scarce time and budget.
I saw a post on LinkedIn the other day about some ad on the Tube. I do not know whether the post itself was AI-generated or not, which increasingly feels like a distinction we are all expected to stop caring about, but the sentiment was right:
A 21-year-old is not your marketing department.
This has been me more than once.
For the past 15 or so years, I have often been that 21-year-old.
Or the slightly older, slightly more tired version of that same person.
The one in the small business, startup, founder-led company, or chaotic services firm who somehow ends up doing "marketing," which in practice means some cursed blend of customer acquisition, web development, CRM, analytics, reporting, automations, landing pages, lead routing, sales support, content, positioning, and whatever else is currently smouldering in the corner.
That is how I learned marketing.
Not from a neat org chart. Not from a clean distinction between strategy and execution. Certainly not from sitting in a room discussing brand archetypes while somebody else quietly handled all the consequences.
I learned it by being close enough to the work that if it did not function, I was either fixing it or explaining why it broke.
And the main thing I learned is this:
A lot of businesses are struggling to hire a marketer because they cannot define what marketing is in the first place.
That is the real problem.
Not talent shortage. Not "nobody wants to work." Not "we just have not found the right fit yet."
Most of the time, the business is trying to hire for a function it has never properly defined.
The Hiring Problem Is Usually a Definition Problem
When companies say they want to hire "a marketer," what do they usually mean?
Often, they mean some mashed-together fantasy person who can:
- write strong copy
- design ads
- run paid campaigns
- improve SEO
- build landing pages
- manage a CRM
- produce reports
- define brand
- create content
- manage agencies
- support sales
- understand analytics
- improve conversion
- somehow "own growth"
That is not a job description. That is a distress signal.
It is usually the output of a business that knows it needs help, but does not know where the actual bottleneck is.
So instead of defining the function clearly, it starts naming surface-level tasks. Copy. Design. Ads. SEO. Social. Brand. Website. Content.
Those things all matter.
But they are not the core of marketing.
They are tools. Channels. Inputs. Tactics. Formats. Interfaces.
They are not the underlying function.
And if you do not understand the function, you will hire randomly, judge badly, and then wonder why your "marketer" failed.
You cannot hire well for a job you only understand as a pile of outputs.
That is the first problem.
Most People Confuse Marketing With Decoration
A lot of businesses think marketing is about writing good ad copy, making pretty pictures, choosing the right colours, polishing the website, making the brochure feel more premium, or deciding whether something should be serif instead of sans serif.
All of that can matter.
None of that is the core of marketing.
Those are inputs.
Marketing is what tells you whether those inputs did anything.
That is the distinction that gets lost.
If a founder says, "I know the best way to position the product," that is not marketing. That is a hypothesis.
If a designer says, "This version feels stronger," same story. Hypothesis.
If a consultant says, "I know how to sell this," also a hypothesis.
If I say I know what will work best, same problem.
Marketing begins where opinion is forced to survive contact with reality.
Marketing is not the act of having good ideas. It is the discipline of testing, measuring, and learning which ideas deserve more time, budget, and attention.
That is why I increasingly think the cleanest definition of marketing is this:
Marketing is the system a business uses to measure what actually drives attention, trust, conversion, and revenue — and to feed that learning back into the business so it can act on reality instead of preference.
That is the job.
Not just making things. Not just publishing things. Not just "getting the brand out there."
Implement. Measure. Compare. Learn. Report. Repeat.
Why I Distrust Grand Opinions About Marketing
Part of the reason I am so firm on this is because I have spent enough time in and around small businesses to watch the same theatre repeat itself.
Someone senior says they know the market.
Someone else says the homepage needs a redesign.
Someone from sales says the leads are bad.
Someone from design says it looks off-brand.
Someone from leadership says we need more awareness.
Fine.
Compared to what?
Measured how?
Across which channel?
At what stage?
Against which baseline?
With what downstream effect on conversion, revenue, retention, or margin?
Without answers to those questions, most marketing conversations are just expensive theatre with nicer fonts.
This is also why I find the distinction between "head of marketing," "growth marketer," "brand marketer," "performance marketer," and the rest of the little corporate zoo mildly funny.
Because if you are the person actually responsible for implementing things, tracking them, reporting on them, and helping the business learn what is true, then regardless of what your title says, you are doing the same fundamental job:
You are trying to reduce costly ignorance.
That is marketing.
The Woodworker Problem
The other day I was in a woodworking class, and in that class was someone who is, as far as I understand it, one of the more serious makers of wooden bowls and spoons in the UK. Possibly more broadly. I do not know how global rankings work in the spoon-and-bowl world, but she was clearly excellent.
And I was explaining something that I think gets to the heart of the issue.
A maker can easily assume they know what the centre of their business is.
Maybe they think bowls are the heart of it. Maybe that is what they care most about. Maybe that is what they are best known for. Maybe bowls are where the craft feels most fully expressed.
Fine.
But that does not tell you what role bowls are actually playing in the business.
Because once you have a website, traffic, search behaviour, product pages, and conversion paths, the story can become more interesting.
Maybe spoon-related searches are what bring most people in.
Maybe bowls are what convert.
Maybe spoons attract attention, but bowls generate revenue.
Maybe the reverse is true.
That is already useful.
But the more important point is the constraint underneath all of it:
Her real limitation is time.
She is one person.
She cannot endlessly make bowls, make spoons, create content for both, photograph everything, upload everything, market everything, and then just wait for the universe to reveal itself.
She has to choose where to invest her effort.
And that is not just a solo-maker problem. That is every business.
Larger organisation, same logic. The shape changes. The constraint does not.
Every business has finite time, finite budget, finite attention, finite production capacity, and finite leadership bandwidth.
So the real question is not just, "What sells most right now?"
Because current sales can lie.
Or more precisely, they can reflect your own existing emphasis.
If she spends most of her time making bowls, photographing bowls, uploading bowls, talking about bowls, and marketing bowls, then it is not exactly a revelation if she mostly sells bowls.
That does not prove bowls are what the market most wants.
It may simply prove that bowls are what she has put in front of people.
That is the trap.
Businesses constantly mistake their current allocation of effort for proof of demand.
They market one thing, so they sell one thing, and then they tell themselves the market has spoken.
Maybe it has.
Maybe it has not.
Maybe they have just built a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If the data shows that spoon-related searches resonate more, bring more people in, create more attention, or generate more interest, then spoons may be doing the acquisition work even if bowls are currently getting the credit.
That changes the decision.
Not because spoons are morally superior to bowls, which would be a deranged conclusion, but because marketing is supposed to tell you what deserves more of your scarce time.
That is the point.
Marketing is resource allocation informed by feedback.
What a Good Marketer Actually Does
Once you define marketing properly, hiring gets easier.
Because now you are not hiring for a vague cloud of aesthetic outputs. You are hiring for someone who can help the business do a few very specific things.
A good marketer helps a business answer questions like:
- What is bringing people in?
- Which messages are resonating?
- Which products or services are acting as entry points?
- Which ones are converting?
- Where are people dropping off?
- What deserves more investment?
- What should we stop doing?
- What do we need to test next?
- How do we report this back to leadership, sales, product, or operations in a way that changes decisions?
That does not mean every marketer must personally execute every possible tactic.
It means the core function is diagnostic and operational before it is decorative.
A good marketer might write copy. They might not.
They might run ads. They might not.
They might manage brand, build pages, or work on CRM. They might not.
The point is not the tool. The point is whether they can help the business learn what is true quickly enough to act on it.
The market does not care about your org chart. It only cares whether the system can hear and respond to its signals.
That is why so many hiring processes fail.
The company says it wants "a marketer," but what it really wants is some mix of clearer positioning, better lead flow, improved attribution, stronger conversion, cleaner CRM, more qualified demand, better reporting, and less internal confusion.
Those are not all the same problem.
Until you know which problem you are solving, you are not hiring strategically. You are shopping emotionally.
Why So Many "Marketing" Hires Go Wrong
A lot of hires go wrong not because the person was bad, but because the business hired for symptoms instead of function.
It wanted prettier campaigns when the real issue was poor conversion tracking.
It wanted more traffic when the real issue was weak sales follow-up.
It wanted a better brand when the real issue was that nobody knew which service pages actually generated qualified leads.
It wanted content when the real issue was that the website did not tell you which content created revenue.
Or it hired someone senior to "own marketing" when what it really needed was someone willing to build measurement, fix process, clean systems, and produce feedback loops strong enough to guide decisions.
That is not always glamorous work. But glamour is not the point.
A business cannot make intelligent growth decisions if it cannot tell the difference between identity, attention, conversion, and revenue.
That is what marketing is for.
To tell the difference.
The Part People Find Uncomfortable
Sometimes real marketing says something inconvenient.
Sometimes the thing you are most proud of is not the thing pulling people in.
Sometimes the thing bringing people in is not the thing making money.
Sometimes the thing making money is not the thing that scales.
Sometimes your best-performing page is the page nobody internally cares about.
Sometimes the "less important" product is doing all the acquisition work while the flagship offer stands there collecting the credit.
Without measurement, you cannot distinguish identity from performance.
You cannot tell the difference between what the business wants to be known for and what is actually producing attention, trust, conversion, and revenue.
And if you cannot tell the difference, then you are not making strategic decisions.
You are just reinforcing your own assumptions with post hoc stories.
That is why I think a lot of businesses are not under-marketed.
They are under-measured.
They do not need more opinions.
They need better feedback loops.
So What Is Marketing?
If I had to define it plainly, I would say this:
Marketing is the discipline of discovering what deserves more of a business's limited time, money, and attention.
And the way it does that is through measurement.
Not measurement in the narrow, soulless sense of reducing everything to a dashboard and calling it wisdom.
Measurement in the practical sense of building systems that can tell you:
What happened? Why did it happen? What changed? What should we do next?
That is what allows the rest of the business to act on reality instead of politics, preference, or habit.
So yes, write better copy.
Yes, care about design.
Yes, improve the website.
Yes, think carefully about positioning, brand, and message.
But do not confuse those things with marketing itself.
They are parts of it. They are not the centre of it.
The centre is this:
Marketing is the mechanism by which the business learns what is true quickly enough to benefit from it.
And if you do not know that, you are probably going to struggle to hire a good marketer.
Because you are not actually hiring for marketing.
You are hiring for your confusion about it.