I recently saw an advert promoting marketing training. It made the bold statement to say that most marketers don’t know how marketing works and most British marketers have no formal training in marketing.
Marketing is one of those professions that many people find themselves in rather than it being their chosen career path. They’ve come to it from any number of avenues, but formal training hasn’t necessarily been part of the mix.
But does it really matter whether they’re trained or not?
In this blog, I’m going to share the real dangers of not having a trained marketer in an organisation, and what businesses are missing out on when marketing is treated as something anyone can do.
Why Training Matters
It’s easy to assume that marketing is largely common sense. After all, most of us consume marketing every day. We see adverts, receive emails and scroll through social media. It can create the impression that marketing is simply about being visible and communicating clearly.
But good marketing is not just communication. It is built on understanding how markets behave, how positioning works, how brands are built over time and how short term activity supports long term growth. It requires an understanding of commercial objectives, customer psychology, competitive landscapes and strategic choice.
Those things are not instinctive. They’re learned.
When someone has been properly trained in marketing, they are not just learning how to post content or write copy. They are learning how to think. They are learning frameworks that help diagnose problems, evaluate options and make deliberate decisions rather than reactive ones.
Without that grounding, marketing decisions often become shaped by opinion or urgency rather than evidence.
The Gap of Having No Trained Marketer
When marketing is led by someone without formal training or strategic understanding, it rarely looks obviously wrong. Activity still happens, budgets are still spent and reports are still produced.
The problem is more subtle and can take time to show.
One of the first issues is that marketing tends to be done for marketing’s sake. It’s not done to target key objectives. It also usually means that tactics are agreed without a strategy in place. Or even worse, people mistake tactics for strategy and the whole thing becomes superficial.
In addition to this, measurement becomes less meaningful as you’re tracking what you can track, not KPIs against key objectives. And these results aren’t being fed back into a strategic plan. There is also often a heavy emphasis on short term activity, with very little thought given to long term brand building.
Over time, this inevitably leads to frustration. Results fluctuate, confidence drops and marketing becomes something that is constantly questioned internally.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard someone say that marketing doesn’t work. But it’s rarely marketing that has failed. It is the absence of a clear, informed strategic approach that is causing the issues.
The Power of Training
Formal training does not make someone perfect. It does not guarantee instant success. What it does provide is a foundation.
Training gives structure to decision making and it helps to separate trend from principle. It makes it easier to explain why certain choices are being made and why others are not. It creates consistency, which in turn builds trust.
When marketing is grounded in proper understanding, activity has context. Decisions, in turn, feel less political and more deliberate, and everyone knows what they’re working towards rather than just being present in the activity.
With training, marketing starts to feel less like guesswork and more like a disciplined investment.
Are Your Results What You’d Expect?
If your marketing is not delivering the results you hoped for, it is worth asking an honest question. Is the issue effort, or is it understanding?
Are decisions being made within a clear strategic framework, or are they being shaped by instinct and pressure? Does the person leading marketing have the training and experience to diagnose what is really going on, or are they doing their best without the right foundation?
These are not easy questions, but they are important ones.
Marketing is a profession. It carries responsibility because businesses invest significant time and money into it. When that investment is guided by proper training and informed judgement, the difference is noticeable.
Invest in Knowledge
At a networking meeting someone once said to me that they were worried about spending more money on marketing as nothing to date had worked. I urged them, as I’m urging you now: don’t just ask a marketer what they can do for you. Ask a marketer why they think this. Ask them to justify why they are proposing what they are proposing.
I’m a heavily trained marketer, and I would never just tell someone what I could ‘fix’ in their marketing. I’d tell them that I would do deep market research to understand their business and their market and then I’d make informed decisions to deliver a strategy that is going to work, for them.
If you recognise elements of guesswork in your marketing, or you feel that decisions are being made without a clear strategic foundation, it may be time to bring in someone who is trained to do this properly.
If you want to stop guessing and start building your marketing on stronger foundations, get in touch. I’d love to explore what that would look like for your business.
