I was reading the other day and caught a post about how marketing should be “pure offense.” It’s true that B2B marketing has been laced with new technology but no true sense over the last 20 years.

If you work for a company that doesn’t get marketing, it’s obvious. You spend all your time playing defense and not offense.

(Excerpt from post I read)

1. You stop doing any real marketing and instead spend all your time trying to prove things are working with attribution that 100% shouldn’t need to be proven and are totally common sense.
2. Most of your activities aren’t marketing. It’s digital sales using “marketing channels.” This is because the company mindset about marketing is completely broken – they see Marketing as “Sales Assistance” or “Lead Gen.”
3. You are always behind on your goals (because you have the wrong goals) so you spend all your time trying to keep your head above water. There is zero opportunity to innovate.
4. Companies are so tech, data and metrics obsessed that marketers never spend time with customers, prospects, the market, which ironically is the foundation of effective marketing.
5. They only think about making changes in marketing when things are going wrong, not to capitalize on new opportunities.

Obviously, there are times we must go on defense when unforeseen challenges and issues occur. However, most all the B2B tech companies I have worked with over the years are always on defense. Defending their spends, their processes, metrics, and existence.

Over the last several years I have seen fewer marketing professionals in the field with their customers and prospects to obtain the intel necessary to design programs around how they buy, what they buy and what their future holds. These items are key in putting marketing back on offense. The further away you move from the customer and into the back office, the less opportunity you have to innovate, obtain the unfiltered input to be effective at the product/service development table and be on offense to catch the opportunities to truly catapult your brand.

I’m curious what all my marketing colleagues out there think. Are you on offense or defense? What are you or would you do to change strategies?