What happens to marketing as a business scales

Growth tends to expose things. Processes that were manageable with five customers become difficult with fifty. Decisions that could once be made instinctively need more evidence behind them. And marketing approaches that helped a business get off the ground don’t necessarily continue working as it becomes larger, more complex and more ambitious.

We recently asked business owners and leaders about the biggest marketing challenges they’ve experienced as their companies have grown. We had over 70 responses from businesses across the globe (thank you to everyone who participated!).

Their businesses span hospitality, technology, ecommerce, professional services and property, but their answers had a surprising amount in common.

The challenge wasn’t simply doing more marketing.

It was working out how marketing itself needed to change.

1. The marketing that got you here might not get you there

Several of the businesses we spoke to reached a point where the approach responsible for their early growth started to become a limitation.

For Stingray Villas, Airbnb and word of mouth had initially been enough to generate bookings. But after expanding from one villa to five units, higher staffing and operating costs changed the economics of relying heavily on third-party booking platforms.

As owner Silvia explains:

“The biggest obstacle we faced in growing our business was understanding that the strategies that worked well early on would no longer be successful once we grew.“

That eventually led Stingray Villas to invest in its own website, direct booking capability, email database and a clearer understanding of its target audience.

Manav at FavouriteTable experienced a similar transition. Word of mouth and referrals had supported the business initially, but growth brought SEO, email and social media into the mix – alongside the challenge of deciding where budget and resources should actually go.

For us, his takeaway is an important one:

“Growth didn’t just mean more marketing, but also getting more sharp in what to stop doing.“

That’s a distinction businesses can easily miss; in fact, we’ve seen it first-hand when working with companies of all sizes.

As you scale, the answer isn’t automatically to add another channel, campaign or piece of technology. Sometimes the more valuable question is whether the things you’re already doing still deserve their place.

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A simple way to decide what marketing to prioritise

One of our favourite exercises to do with businesses is something we call the ‘post-it game’. It’s a simple way to step away from the day-to-day noise of marketing and work out what actually deserves your time, budget and attention.

Start by writing every marketing activity you currently do – or think you should be doing – on a separate post-it note. Stick them all on a whiteboard, wall or any empty space where you can see them together.

Then choose the activity you believe has the biggest impact on the business and place it at the top. Work through the remaining post-its one by one, comparing each activity against those you’ve already ranked and moving them around as you go.

For example, you might start with:

• Email marketing campaigns
• Weekly social media posting
• Cold outreach
• Warm outreach
• Web development
• Blog content

Once you consider them based on their actual importance to the business, rather than how visible or time-consuming they are, your priorities might look more like:

1. Warm outreach
2. Cold outreach
3. Email marketing campaigns
4. Blog content
5. Web development
6. Weekly social media posting

The exact order will be different for every business – and that’s the point. There is no universally correct marketing priority list. It may be that your business might get most of it’s sales from social media, and you have little success with your email marketing efforts – so that would naturally be higher on the list.

What the exercise gives you is a clear hierarchy. When time, budget or resource is limited, you know what should be protected first and what can afford to wait.

It can also reveal something even more useful: the activities taking up the most time aren’t necessarily the ones creating the most value.

As a business grows and the number of possible marketing activities increases, having that clarity becomes increasingly important. Because sometimes better marketing isn’t about finding room to do more. It’s about being much more deliberate about what you choose to do – and what you choose not to.

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2. More channels can create more fragmentation

Growth often creates pressure to increase marketing activity. More content, more advertising, more platforms, more campaigns.

But increasing the volume of marketing doesn’t necessarily increase its effectiveness.

Amit from Developers.dev describes the challenge as moving from a relatively simple founder-led approach into a much more fragmented environment:

“If you go from two channels to ten, you may end up with several separate marketing initiatives instead of one continuous story.“

Ulf from Sovyn makes a similar point, describing the risk of businesses falling into “Random Acts of Marketing”: continually producing campaigns and content without enough connection to where customers are in their buying journey.

This is where marketing strategy becomes increasingly important.

Individual channels might each appear to be performing reasonably well, while the overall customer journey remains disjointed. Scaling marketing successfully therefore isn’t only about optimising individual channels; it’s about understanding the role each one plays in moving the right customers towards a commercial outcome.

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3. Knowing where to invest becomes harder – and more important

When marketing budgets are relatively small, imperfect decisions are usually survivable.

As investment increases, the cost of getting those decisions wrong increases too.

That’s why several respondents highlighted the challenge of understanding what is genuinely generating leads, customers and revenue.

Nick from Nine Peaks Media puts it simply:

“The most challenging marketing problem while developing a business is the association of activities with revenues.“

Nick shares exactly the same sentiment as us at The Business Tea, rather than judging SEO purely through rankings and traffic, for example, he advocates looking at leads, conversions and ultimately the profit generated from organic search.

It’s a shift from asking “Is our marketing performing?” to asking “What is this marketing contributing to the business?”

Those aren’t always the same question.

Traffic can increase without revenue following. Lead volumes can look healthy while lead quality declines. It’s something we’ve seen in quite a few businesses ourselves. Advertising platforms can report strong results while the economics of the customers being acquired tell a very different story.

Which leads to another recurring challenge…

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4. Attribution gets messier as the customer journey grows

Marcos from Green Planet Cleaning Services described attribution as the company’s biggest marketing challenge.

When the business was smaller, it was relatively easy to know where customers came from. Once paid search, the website, a booking system and payment processing were all involved, different systems began reporting different versions of performance.

“What changed as we grew was the cost of being wrong. At small spend you can afford to guess. Once the monthly ad budget is a meaningful number, an unmeasured channel stops being a marketing problem and becomes a cash flow problem.“

Marketing measurement shouldn’t exist purely to produce dashboards or to gather a mass of data. As businesses scale, it increasingly needs to help management make decisions about where money should  (and shouldn’t) be invested.

That often means connecting marketing data with CRM, sales, booking or revenue data rather than accepting the version of performance presented by an individual marketing platform. A problem we personally witnessed time and time again at The Business Tea, which is why we started offering tracking and analytics services.

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5. The founder can become the marketing bottleneck

For some businesses, the challenge isn’t channels or measurement. It’s transferring the knowledge that made founder-led marketing effective in the first place.

Jake from EV Cable Hub discovered this when trying to hand marketing activity to other people.

In the early days, he answered questions in owner groups and wrote product pages himself. He understood the terminology customers actually used, the questions behind their questions and the technical nuances of the products.

The difficulty came when the business needed someone else to replicate that.

“What made the work good sat in my head and had never been written down.“

Despite working with agencies and freelancers, around 80% of the content produced still requires technical review.

It’s a useful reminder that outsourcing marketing isn’t simply about finding someone who can write, advertise or produce content. External support is only as effective as the strategic, customer and product knowledge available to it.

Sometimes scaling marketing therefore starts before the handover: documenting customer insights, defining positioning, capturing subject-matter expertise and creating a clear framework someone else can actually work from.

At The Business Tea, we’re super passionate about ensuring continuity is available when it’s needed – so we’re pretty anal when it comes to creating SOPs and documents to help ensure things get done exactly how we’re currently doing them.

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6. Expansion can change who you’re marketing to

Scaling into new locations or customer segments introduces another problem: the assumptions built in one market may not transfer neatly into another.

We’ve witnessed this at quite a few large enterprise companies we’ve worked at when in employment, especially in territories where languages are so nuanced. What worked in the UK market, doesn’t mean it will work in the German or Dutch markets, and visa versa.

Originn Properties experienced this while expanding from Marrakech into Dubai and Jeddah.

As Nassira explains:

“The marketing challenge of expansion usually isn’t volume, it’s that you keep applying market-one logic to markets two and three.“

The company initially used a broadly consistent content and SEO strategy across the three locations, but found that buyers in different markets searched, evaluated properties and responded to trust signals differently.

Their response was to conduct separate keyword research, develop market-specific landing pages and adapt messaging and trust signals to the behaviour of each audience. Good choice. As a marketing agency ourselves, we would have absolutely taken the same approach to this challenge. It would however be also beneficial, to have understood the human nuance to each market too. Whilst keyword research gives you the technical differences, understanding any behavioural or psychological differences can also really influence your marketing approach.

A business moving upmarket, launching a new service or targeting a different type of buyer shouldn’t automatically assume that the messaging, channels and customer journey responsible for previous growth will translate to the new audience.

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7. Marketing capacity doesn’t always grow as quickly as the business

Finally, there’s the practical problem of capacity. This was a very common theme in a lot of the businesses who answered our survey. In fact, it was probably the biggest challenge.

Lee Charlton Photography summarised the general consensus quite nicely, and described marketing repeatedly falling down the priority list because client enquiries, and doing the work (e.g. shoots, editing and delivery etc) naturally came first.

“You either leave it and risk becoming less visible, or end up working late into the evening trying to keep everything moving.“

As a growing business ourselves, we hear you – and you’re not the only one to experience this.

For Musa Art Gallery, the capacity challenge looks different but stems from the same problem. Expansion into three languages, a growing catalogue and multiple international markets dramatically increased the amount of content and SEO work required from a relatively small team.

Both have used AI to reduce some of that workload while retaining human review and expertise. But technology only solves part of the problem.

CEO Thery, advised:

“Keep final edits human, prioritise high-impact pages by traffic and conversion data, and channel budget toward proven markets to protect margins while we build internal capability.“

Good advice – and we absolutely agree with leveraging data to make decisions.

At some point, growing businesses have to decide what marketing capability genuinely needs to sit internally, what can be supported by technology, what should be outsourced and where senior strategic input is more valuable than simply adding additional execution capacity.

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Scaling marketing isn’t the same as doing more marketing

Across all of these businesses, one message comes through particularly clearly. As a company grows, marketing has to mature with it.

The informal approaches that worked initially need to become repeatable. Channel decisions need greater commercial justification. Customer knowledge has to move out of people’s heads and into the wider business. Measurement needs to connect more closely with revenue. And activity that once delivered growth needs to be questioned rather than automatically scaled.

That doesn’t necessarily mean building a bigger marketing department or dramatically increasing spend. In some cases, it means doing less.

The businesses that navigate this transition well are the ones that recognise when marketing has reached its next stage – and redesign the strategy, capabilities and measurement around the business they’re becoming, rather than the business they used to be.

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About The Business Tea

The Business Tea is a marketing consultancy and agency helping businesses make better marketing decisions and turn those decisions into action. From strategy and consultancy through to SEO, paid media, analytics and ongoing marketing support, we bring senior marketing expertise without forcing businesses into a one-size-fits-all agency model.

Whether you’re trying to work out what to prioritise, understand what’s actually driving revenue or need additional expertise and capacity as your business grows, we can help. Click here to get in contact with us today.

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