I wrote this in 2017. That's eight years ago, which in marketing years is roughly four trend cycles, two platform pivots, and one complete AI revolution.
And yet.
The three problems I identified then, plans built on assumptions, no sales alignment, sporadic execution, are still the most common reasons marketing doesn't work. I've walked into companies with all three problems this year. The tactics have changed. The underlying dysfunction hasn't.
I've updated this article to reflect what's changed, particularly what AI has done to the random acts problem, and what hasn't. The principles are the same. The urgency is higher.
First published 2017. Still happening. Getting worse.
I've been talking about random acts of marketing since 2017. Back then it was a pattern I kept seeing at B2B companies of all sizes, a collection of tactics dressed up as strategy, activity mistaken for momentum, busy work that felt productive but moved nothing.
Emily Kramer at MKT1 has since built an entire framework around it and she's right, it's endemic. If you haven't read her work on this, you should. But my angle is slightly different, because I work specifically with Series A founders who are about to make expensive mistakes with their first marketing budget. And the random acts problem at that stage has a specific cause that's worth naming.
You've raised. There's pressure to show marketing momentum. The board wants to see activity. Your investors are asking what the marketing plan is. And so you do... things. You post on LinkedIn. You run some Google ads. You sponsor a newsletter. You hire a content agency. You build a webinar series. You redesign the website.
None of these are wrong in isolation. All of them together, without a strategy that connects them, is random acts of marketing.
The deeper problem is that most founders at this stage haven't answered the questions that would make the tactics obvious:
Without answers to those questions, every tactic is a guess. And a collection of guesses is random acts of marketing, regardless of how much it costs.
Here's what's changed since 2018: AI has made random acts of marketing dramatically cheaper and faster to produce. You can now generate a content calendar, write 10 blog posts, create a LinkedIn sequence, and draft an email nurture flow in an afternoon. The barrier to producing marketing activity has essentially disappeared.
Which means the gap between activity and strategy has never been wider. The companies winning right now aren't the ones producing the most content, they're the ones who have done the hard work of figuring out what their buyers actually care about, and saying that thing clearly, consistently, and in the right places.
Authoritative, original content, research reports, specific insights, genuine points of view, is more valuable than ever precisely because everyone else is flooding the zone with AI-generated noise. A single well-designed research program with original data will outperform six months of AI blog posts. We ran one for a client recently with zero paid media and got 300+ registrations, 140 stayed until the end, and 3 sales meetings booked the same week. The report is already being cited by AI search engines.
Before any tactics, answer these three questions:
What is the one motion we're committing to? Not PLG and enterprise. Not content and paid. One motion, matched to how your customers actually buy. Get that right first.
What are the words our buyers use? Not the words we use to describe our product. The words they used when they first went looking for a solution. These are different, and the gap between them is where most messaging fails.
What does a stranger understand about us in five seconds? Read your own homepage as if you've never heard of the company. What do you actually learn? Most founders are shocked by how little survives first contact.
Get those three things right and the tactics become obvious. Get them wrong and no amount of activity will move the needle.
Sarah McIntyre is a fractional CMO working with Series A B2B SaaS founders in ANZ. She helps founders figure out their first marketing motion before spending money accelerating the wrong one. Read The Label is where she writes about what she sees from the outside.
If you'd like a free homepage messaging review — a quick read of what a stranger sees in the first five seconds — book one here.