Building a marketing function from scratch
What I do in the first 90 days when a business has budget, ambition and no marketing infrastructure to speak of.
Most of the businesses I join don't have a marketing problem — they have an infrastructure problem. Spend is happening, leads are arriving, and nobody can say which activity produced them. Here's the sequence I use to turn that into a function that compounds.
Start with measurement, not campaigns
Launching campaigns before tracking works just buys you expensive guesswork. Before anything goes live I make sure the basics report cleanly and consistently.
- GA4 configured with real conversion events, not pageview proxies
- Server-side or CRM-side lead capture so form fills reconcile with pipeline
- One source of truth for spend, leads and revenue by channel
Fix the destination before the traffic
Almost every audit I run finds more upside in the website and follow-up process than in the media plan. Improving conversion and speed-to-lead lifts every channel at once, which makes it the cheapest work available.
Pick two channels and commit
Thin effort across six channels loses to serious effort across two. I pick the pair with the shortest path to revenue given the buying cycle — usually search plus lifecycle for considered purchases, paid social plus CRO for impulse categories — and hold everything else at maintenance until those are working.
Build the operating cadence
A function is a rhythm, not a document. Weekly performance review, monthly commercial readout, quarterly roadmap reset. The cadence is what stops strategy quietly reverting to firefighting.