Clients and prospective clients tell me the same thing over and over – they hate spending money on marketing.
It feels like a gamble. They aren’t confident about where the money goes, how it will pay off, or if it’s even worth doing in the first place.
So they hesitate. They delay. Sometimes they avoid it altogether.
Why? Because spending money on marketing stirs up discomfort. It’s an investment that often feels intangible, hard to measure and easy to get wrong. And for many business leaders, the uncertainty is enough to make them queasy.
Misconception: ‘That’s sales, not marketing’
When marketing budgets do come up, I often hear, “Oh, that’s under sales and marketing.” What they really mean is, “We think of marketing as sales.” That’s a mistake I see across industries.
Marketing and sales are not the same thing. Sales closes the deal. Marketing creates the environment where deals happen. Marketing builds awareness, attracts the right people and positions your company to stand out in a crowded market. It’s about storytelling, differentiation and meeting your audience where they are.
When you lump marketing under sales, you shortchange its potential. You miss opportunities to build a long-term foundation for growth. And you stay stuck in a reactive mode, spending only when things aren’t going well, rather than strategically investing in what will drive success.
Why spending on marketing feels risky
It’s natural to feel hesitant about spending money on marketing. For one thing, marketing isn’t always easy to connect to tangible outcomes, at least not right away. And when resources are tight or priorities are shifting, marketing can feel like an easy expense to cut.
But that hesitation comes at a cost. When you underinvest in marketing, you miss opportunities to grow your brand, engage your audience and differentiate yourself from the competition.
Worse, you leave your sales team struggling to work harder without the tools and environment they need to succeed.
How do you overcome the resistance to spending on marketing? It starts by reframing the conversation and focusing on three key principles.
• Define what makes you different: Before you spend a dollar, make sure you understand and can clearly articulate your advantage. What makes your company different from the competition? What unique value do you offer, and why should your audience care?
To do this, you need to go beyond internal assumptions. You need to find out what your customers actually think and feel about you – and how they perceive your competition. This requires gathering insights directly from your audience and aligning those insights with your business goals.
Differentiation is the foundation of every successful marketing effort. If you don’t know what makes you different, you’ll end up blending in instead of standing out.
• Define your right-fit target audiences: It’s not just about who you’re targeting today – it’s about who you should be targeting. Many companies fall into the trap of chasing the same broad audience year after year without reevaluating who their best-fit customers really are.
Take a deep dive into your data. Look at customer behavior, buying patterns and trends across different segments. Then drill down into the characteristics that make your most valuable customers “right-fit” for your business.
By focusing on these right-fit audiences, you can allocate your marketing dollars more effectively, ensuring you’re spending on the people and markets most likely to drive long-term growth.
• Measure what matters: Marketing isn’t a guessing game. It’s measurable, but not in the overly simplistic way some might claim. We don’t buy in a straight line.
The idea that one channel or one campaign gets all the credit for a sale ignores how people make decisions. Even if someone clicks on a pay-per-click ad, they’ve likely been influenced by other channels, visuals and stories along the way.
Instead of looking for one magic metric, focus on the bigger picture. Track key indicators such as brand awareness, engagement, lead generation and conversion rates, but recognize they’re part of a broader ecosystem. Marketing success comes from the cumulative impact of multiple touchpoints working together.
The goal isn’t to assign 100% credit to a single channel. It’s to understand how your marketing efforts combine to influence your audience and drive results over time. This approach not only gives you a clearer picture of return on investment, but also helps you make smarter, more strategic decisions about where to allocate resources.
Stop avoiding the discomfort
If spending money on marketing makes you sick to your stomach, you’re not alone. But avoiding the discomfort doesn’t make it go away. It holds your business back.
Marketing isn’t just an expense. It’s an investment in growth, differentiation and long-term success.
The next time you feel hesitant, pause and ask yourself: Are you putting off marketing because it’s truly unnecessary or because it feels uncomfortable? Then dig into the questions that matter:
What makes us different?
Who are we trying to reach?
How will we measure success?
By embracing the process and taking a strategic approach, you can transform that discomfort into confidence. Spending money on marketing doesn’t have to make you sick. It can – and should – be the smartest investment you make.
This post was originally published on here
