Somewhere between the content calendars, performance reports and endless attempts to keep social media algorithms happy, I wonder whether we’ve occasionally forgotten what marketing was supposed to achieve in the first place.

I’ve been thinking lately about how extraordinarily busy marketing has become, how much time we spend producing things for people to read, watch, click on or scroll past and how we’ve somehow managed to create an entire industry devoted to feeding an insatiable appetite for content, although I’m beginning to suspect that much of this appetite belongs to the people producing it.

There’s certainly no shortage of things to do. Every morning, somewhere, a marketing team is discussing what to post on LinkedIn. Someone is studying a report full of reassuring green arrows, while somebody else is trying to work out why last Tuesday’s post attracted so much attention and Thursday’s barely registered, despite both having been carefully planned, beautifully designed and accompanied by captions that took longer to approve than they did to write.

Meanwhile, there are newsletters waiting to be written, campaigns to launch and coordinate, reels to edit and content calendars that must, under no circumstances, be allowed to develop an empty square.

It wasn’t always quite like this, although I should probably resist the temptation to romanticise the past. Marketing has always had its share of peculiar habits, fashionable theories and people confidently explaining what everyone else is doing wrong.

I remember the excitement when digital marketing started promising that we’d finally be able to measure everything. No more wondering which half of the advertising budget we’d wasted, no more relying on someone’s enthusiastic account of how well a campaign had gone. We were going to have numbers, proper numbers, and we’d know exactly what was happening.

We certainly got the numbers, so many of them now that we seem to spend an extraordinary amount of time explaining what they mean, particularly when they’re not telling us quite what we’d hoped.

Don’t get me wrong, I love data. I’ve built strategies around it, argued for better measurements and spent more hours than I’d like to admit trying to understand what the numbers were telling us.

I’ve also sat through conversations in which everyone was delighted that impressions had increased by some impressive percentage, while nobody seemed especially curious about who we were actually reaching or whether those people had understood a single thing we were trying to say.

A hundred thousand impressions can look wonderful in a report, but they don’t necessarily mean a hundred thousand people have seen your campaign. The same person might have seen it several times and even among those who did, there’s no guarantee that anyone found it particularly interesting or relevant. The numbers are useful, of course, but I’d rather know what they’re telling us before we start celebrating them.

Then there are algorithms. They seem to have developed an odd talent for keeping the marketing profession permanently obsessed.

Just when we’ve figured out what Instagram apparently likes, an announcement arrived that the rules have changed. Videos are being prioritised, or perhaps they’re not. Carousels are performing brilliantly, until suddenly they’re not. We should be posting more often, except now posting too often might actually hurt our reach.

Somebody, somewhere, is selling a webinar explaining precisely what the algorithm wants this week and I’m almost certain another person is preparing one to explain why they’re wrong.

I’ve watched this strange dance for years and sometimes wonder how much creative energy we’ve surrendered to pleasing systems whose workings we can only partly see and whose priorities aren’t necessarily the same as ours.

We experiment with formats, adjust posting times, rewrite perfectly good sentences to make them more engaging and occasionally find ourselves debating whether a particular word in the opening line might affect reach, as though the success of an entire marketing strategy depended on keeping a temperamental machine in a good mood.

Of course, ignoring algorithms altogether would be silly. Distribution matters and understanding how platforms work is part of the job. I spend a considerable amount of time doing precisely that, but there’s something faintly absurd about spending hours trying to work out what Instagram or LinkedIn might reward while giving considerably less thought to what the people we’re hoping to reach might actually appreciate. After all, the algorithm isn’t going to become your customer.

I think about this particularly when I look at business websites, perhaps because a website is often where all that social media activity is supposed to lead.

I’ve seen some extraordinary examples of web design, beautifully considered, technically impressive and full of little details that make you want to keep scrolling just to see what happens next. There are elegant transitions, clever animations and photographs of serious-looking people having what appear to be enormously important conversations in beautifully lit offices.

Occasionally, after several minutes of admiring all this, I realise I haven’t the faintest idea what the company actually does.

Then there’s the other particularly baffling extreme. A business wants to sell you a luxury product, an exclusive service or an entire lifestyle built around the idea of refinement and sophistication, yet its website looks as though someone has bought every conversion trick available and decided to use them all at once.

You’ve barely arrived when a pop-up offers you 10% off in exchange for your email address. You close it, only to be greeted by another inviting you to subscribe to a newsletter. Somewhere in the corner, a little box is flashing, asking whether you need help, while a third interruption would very much like to know if you’re enjoying your experience so far.

I haven’t had an experience so far. I’ve been trying to close windows.

You’re asking potential clients to believe in the quality, exclusivity and value of what you’re offering, but the experience you’ve created feels cheap, impatient and faintly desperate. They haven’t been given a chance to become interested in the product or develop even the beginnings of trust before asking for their name, email address and their undying loyalty.

Collecting leads is great, but surely there’s a moment when an invitation becomes appropriate and that moment isn’t three seconds after someone has landed on your homepage. It’s a bit like walking into a beautiful boutique and having somebody thrust a clipboard into your hands before you’ve even had a chance to look around.

What makes all this particularly frustrating is that there’s often a much more interesting story waiting to be told. Give a founder twenty minutes to talk about what they’ve built, the problems they’ve solved and the work they’re genuinely proud of and you’ll hear a story far more compelling than anything written on their website.

I find myself wondering why none of it is there and sometimes the answer is that the business has changed so much that its marketing simply hasn’t kept up. What began as one service has developed into something quite different, the customers have changed, new expertise has emerged and the company has gradually become a business that bears only a passing resemblance to the one described on its homepage. Yet the website is still enthusiastically promoting the original offer, and everybody continues using the same language they agreed on three years ago because, well, that’s what the company has always said about itself.

I have a great deal of sympathy for this. When you’re close to something, watching it evolve day by day, it’s surprisingly difficult to see how far you’ve travelled. Everybody inside the business understands what it does because they’ve been part of the journey.

The unfortunate detail is that the rest of the world hasn’t.

All it takes is somebody asking a few questions, not particularly clever ones, to uncover the story that should have been told in the first place.

What are you actually doing now? What do your customers come to you for? What are you particularly good at? Why isn’t any of that on your website?

The answers can be wonderfully revealing but also rather uncomfortable, particularly if everyone has just spent six months and a considerable sum of money approving the existing messaging.

Still, I’d rather have that conversation than spend another six months advertising something that no longer describes the business.

I don’t believe that every piece of marketing needs to produce an immediate sale. Some of the most valuable work happens slowly, through familiarity and the accumulation of small impressions that gradually give somebody the confidence that you know what you’re talking about and might be worth having a conversation with.

A person might read something you’ve written today, come across your name again in a few weeks and only get in touch months later, when a problem arises that they remember you discussing. There’s no particularly elegant way to capture all of that in a monthly report, but it happens and it is important.

What I find harder to understand is our tendency to respond to disappointing results by producing more of whatever wasn’t working well in the first place: The campaign isn’t generating enquiries, so perhaps we need another campaign, the website isn’t converting visitors, so let’s drive more traffic to it, social media engagement has dropped and the obvious answer appears to be an increase in posting frequency.

Maybe, but wouldn’t it be worth finding out why the people we’re already reaching aren’t interested?

This is where marketing becomes less comfortable, because the answers don’t always lend themselves to a neat action plan or an impressive presentation. Sometimes the problem is something fundamental, something that requires a business to reconsider how it talks about itself, whom it’s trying to reach or even what it wants to be known for.

That’s harder than approving another month’s worth of content, particularly when everyone is under pressure to demonstrate that things are moving.

I’ve come to think that one of the more unfortunate consequences of our obsession with consistency is that we’ve begun treating the absence of content as a problem in itself.

The blog hasn’t been updated, the newsletter hasn’t gone out, there’s nothing scheduled for Thursday…something must be done.

So we go looking for something to say, not because we’ve noticed anything particularly interesting or have something useful to contribute, but because there’s a space on the calendar and leaving it empty feels vaguely irresponsible.

I’m conscious of the irony of making this observation in the very first article on our brand-new Stellar & Rose site. It hasn’t escaped me but I’d much rather write when I’ve got something on my mind, something I’ve noticed while working with a client or a question that’s been bothering me, than commit to producing three articles a week simply because somebody somewhere has decided that’s what a respectable business blog ought to do. Besides, I suspect the internet has quite enough content already.

Perhaps that’s what I find most curious about all this super busyness. Marketing is supposed to help businesses communicate with people, yet we’ve become so occupied with the mechanics of communication that the people themselves occasionally seem to have disappeared from the conversation.

We know when they’re online, what they’re clicking, how long they spend watching a video and which words are apparently most likely to persuade them to open an email. We have dashboards that can tell us almost anything, provided we’ve decided to measure it.

I wonder how often we simply listen to what they’re saying.

Not every business needs fewer campaigns or a smaller marketing budget. Some need considerably more visibility and others have perfectly good messaging that simply isn’t reaching enough people. I’d be the last person to suggest that marketing can be reduced to a few thoughtful conversations and a nicely worded homepage.

There’s a great deal of work involved in doing it properly and I wish we’d spend a little more time questioning why we’re doing it, particularly when the business has changed or the results are telling us something we’d rather not hear.

As for the content calendar, I’m increasingly inclined to believe that an occasional empty square might be a perfectly healthy thing.

I’m certain the world will survive.

Written by Vanya Milovanovic, Stellar & Rose