Marketing, connected to the business.

A company can be doing a great deal of marketing and still struggle to explain how the work fits together.

The website is being updated. Social posts are going out. Sales has presentations and product information. Someone is watching the numbers. Each piece may be competently handled, yet a customer still cannot find the answer they need, or a salesperson is writing an explanation that already exists somewhere else in the company.

When I see that kind of friction, I want to understand the connections. What is the business trying to accomplish? What do customers need to make a decision? Where does the company’s expertise show up in the work—and where does it disappear?

Those questions sit at the foundation of Focus Media Group:

Marketing, connected to the business.

For me, that means giving marketing a clear relationship to leadership priorities, customer needs, the knowledge inside the company, and the people responsible for carrying the conversation forward. Some work helps someone buy. Other work builds understanding, equips a partner, or makes a future conversation more productive. Its purpose should be understood, even when its value takes time to emerge.

How I came to see the connections

I spent nearly a decade in national political consulting, where the difference between connected work and siloed efforts was often obvious. When strategy, messaging, timing, and field execution shared a direction, you could see how each informed the others. What people heard in the field helped shape the message, and the larger objective guided the decisions. When those efforts operated in silos, the gaps were just as visible: individual assignments could be handled well while the work as a whole pulled in different directions. That contrast taught me to look beyond the quality of any one piece and pay attention to how the pieces worked together.

When I returned to my family’s fifth-generation farming operation in southwest Oklahoma, the setting changed, but that relationship between the work and how people understood it remained important. The farm had already adopted conservation practices such as no-till, drip irrigation, and tail-water pits. Through those practices, I was able to help us pursue regenerative certification and strengthen how we positioned and marketed our cotton. That created opportunities to earn a premium when market programs allowed.

The lesson stayed with me: meaningful value can exist inside an operation before the market knows how to recognize it. Making that value visible starts with understanding what is already true, then finding the proof and explanation that make it relevant to someone else.

FMG’s own development brought these lessons into client work. Early assignments often began with social media management—a practical starting point for helping a business show up consistently and share what it knows. Social media can be a valuable tool for making expertise visible, building familiarity, and giving customers and partners a reason to keep paying attention. Its value becomes clearer when we understand what those interactions are meant to support in the larger business.

That might mean helping customers understand a product before they speak with sales, giving a dealer useful material to share, or demonstrating the thinking behind a company’s approach to its work. Those goals should shape the topics we choose, the people we hope to reach, and what we make available when someone wants to learn more. A post can open that conversation; a website resource, a deeper explanation, or a person inside the business can help carry it forward.

The broader content marketing research gives some context to that distinction. In Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs’ Outlook for 2025 research, 89% of B2B marketers reported using organic social media to distribute content. Yet among respondents who rated their overall content strategy as moderately effective or worse, 42% cited a lack of clear goals as a reason it was not more effective. Social media was widely used, while clarity of purpose remained a challenge for many of those struggling to get more from their content. Source: CMI and MarketingProfs, Outlook for 2025.

For me, that makes the business objective the starting point for judging the work. Reach and engagement can tell us whether something is getting attention. We also need to ask whether it is reaching the people who matter, helping them understand something useful, and supporting the relationships or decisions the business depends on. That contribution may develop over time, especially when the goal is education or trust.

As I learned more about the businesses FMG served, those questions expanded the work into marketing direction, websites, content, and resources for sales and partners. Delivering one assignment gave me a closer view of the questions around it—and of how much more useful social media could become when the connections were in place.

These environments have different audiences, pressures, and measures of success. Together, they shaped a habit I bring to FMG: understand the context around an assignment before deciding what good work should look like.

Where useful work gets separated

Disconnection often appears in small, familiar ways.

A sales team develops a useful explanation through repeated conversations, but the website never benefits from it. Customers keep asking the same question, and each salesperson answers from memory. The company has the knowledge; making that knowledge accessible could save effort and give customers a clearer starting point.

Or a website project begins with a list of pages and a visual direction before anyone has established what visitors need to accomplish. A product page might need to help someone compare options, find a specification, or prepare for a conversation. Those are different jobs, and they call for different decisions about information and design.

Sometimes the gap sits between priorities and assignments. Leadership is focused on one audience or opportunity, while the content calendar continues along a familiar path. The people responsible for publishing may be doing exactly what they were asked to do. What they need is a clearer connection to the company’s direction.

These situations are worth examining before adding more activity. They help reveal where existing expertise and effort could become more useful.

Follow one question through the business

Consider a question that can come up whether a company sells products, provides services, or advises other businesses: “How do I know which option is right for me?”

A useful answer starts with understanding what the customer is trying to accomplish. What matters most in their situation? What tradeoffs should they consider? What would make one option a better fit than another? The people answering customer questions every day often already have much of this knowledge. Marketing can help make it available earlier and more consistently.

That understanding can give several pieces of work a shared direction. A social post introduces one factor worth considering. A website article or guide explains the choices, the tradeoffs, and the questions to ask. A salesperson or advisor uses that resource to start a more specific conversation about the customer’s needs, then brings back the questions it did not answer.

For example, if customers tend to compare options on price alone, the content might explain how ongoing costs, service, or suitability affect the decision. The business goal is to help people recognize where the company offers a good fit and understand the value behind its recommendation. That goal gives the social post, the website resource, and the customer conversation a common purpose.

The feedback matters just as much as the initial resource. If the team keeps explaining the same distinction in every conversation, that explanation may belong in the guide. If customers understand the options but remain unsure which fits their circumstances, a practical example or a short set of questions may help them take the next step.

We can then ask whether the work is helping: Is the team using it? Are customers arriving better prepared? Are conversations getting further into their actual needs? Which questions remain? Those observations give us a reason to improve the work and a direction for the next decision.

Staying close to the work

This is why I want strategy to remain close to execution.

Writing a page forces precision. Building a resource reveals missing information. Following a customer’s next step raises questions about ownership and response. The details can change our understanding of the assignment.

My role at FMG is to establish the marketing direction and stay involved as it takes shape, connecting that work with the relevant people and priorities across the business. The relationship needs to fit the company. What should remain consistent is continuity: someone carrying the context from the original question into the work, and bringing what is learned back into the strategy.

A place to begin

You do not need to reconsider every channel at once. Choose an important customer decision, a recurring sales question, or a current business priority. Then ask:

• What do we want this work to help someone understand or do?
• What expertise or proof do we already have that would help them?
• Where should that information appear, and who else could use it?
• Who owns the next step and the feedback it produces?
• What would tell us to continue, change, or stop?

The answers can make an existing piece of marketing more useful. They can also reveal that the next priority is a better explanation, a clearer handoff, or a resource the team has needed for some time.

That is what I want to explore in Field Notes. The social posts will introduce useful questions and ideas. Here, there is room to explain the context, the decisions, the work, and what we learn from it.

FMG grew from the belief that established companies often have valuable knowledge and experience waiting to be put to better use. Understanding that value, deciding where it matters, and carrying it into useful work is the purpose behind marketing, connected to the business.