Mistargeting in Marketing: The Problem Hiding Between Your Marketing Tactics
- Julie Fisher
- 4 days ago
- 7 min read
Your marketing may not be underperforming because the tactics are bad. The problem may be that they are not aimed at the same buyer.
I have been in marketing for a good minute, and one pattern has followed me throughout my career: marketing problems are usually evaluated one tactic at a time.
If a digital campaign underperforms, we look at targeting or creative. If an event does not generate enough leads, we question the sponsorship. If the website is not converting, we look at the page. If sales is not closing enough business, we look at the leads or the sales effort.
Those are all reasonable places to investigate. But when every part of marketing is evaluated separately, it becomes easy to miss a much larger issue.
A business can be doing a lot of marketing and still not be doing it cohesively.
The website may be speaking to one audience while social media has developed its own voice and following. Paid campaigns may be targeting another group, and traditional marketing, events, sponsorships, CTV, email, referrals, and sales may all be working from their own versions about who the business is trying to reach.
Individually, none of those decisions may be wrong.
The problem begins when nobody is looking across all of them and asking whether they are reaching, speaking to, and moving the same intended buyer.
That is where mistargeting in marketing happens.
What Is Mistargeting in Marketing?
I define Mistargeting in Marketing as what happens when the audience a business intends to reach, the marketing created to influence them, the places and channels used to reach them, and the sales effort expected to convert them are not aligned around the same buyer.
This is not simply about choosing the wrong demographic for an ad. Mistargeting can happen across digital, traditional and social marketing, as well as business development and sales.
It happens when the marketing ecosystem stops pointing in the same direction. And, we are now chasing rabbits to get them back in line with business goals and our intended audience segment we want reached.
Too Many Hands Can Pull Marketing in Too Many Directions
One reason mistargeting is so common is that marketing rarely sits in one pair of hands anymore.
An agency may manage paid media. An employee handles social media. A vendor manages SEO.
Someone else is responsible for the website. Leadership approves sponsorships or events. A PR firm looks for media opportunities, while sales and business development are pursuing their own relationships and prospects.
Everyone has a piece of the marketing cookie jar.
That is not necessarily a bad thing. Businesses need specialists, and no one person has to execute every form of marketing. It's asking too much of one person these days with all the marketing options available.
But, the problem begins when the people hired to manage those pieces operate from different ideas of who the business is actually trying to reach.
No one is really on the same page about it and, yet, they believe they are. Why? No one is providing the direction, a.k.a., the marketing strategy with clear, distinct client personas.
You end up with too many hands in the cookie jar. That jar eventually breaks and the cookies along with it.
Each activity may look perfectly reasonable on its own. Together, however, they can create a marketing program that is busy, expensive, and surprisingly ineffective.
Who Is Responsible for Keeping the Marketing Connected?
In theory, this is where experienced marketing leadership should prevent the problem.
A marketing director, CMO, or other senior marketing leader should be responsible for more than keeping campaigns moving, managing vendors, and making sure marketing strategy gets done but the goals stay in place.
The larger responsibility, however, is understanding how all of it connects.
That leader should know which audience segments the business needs to reach, why those buyers matter, where they can realistically be reached, what they need to hear, and how each marketing channel supports the larger strategy.
But having someone responsible for marketing does not automatically mean that level of oversight is happening or is adhered too.
I learned this firsthand as an in-house marketing director for two plaintiff, B2C law firms.
There were multiple channels, vendors, campaigns, advertising decisions, community efforts, and business development activities in motion at any given time. Managing the activity was only part of the job. I had to understand how it all connected and, ultimately, whether it supported the types of clients the firms actually wanted and needed to bring through the door.
That meant looking beyond whether a tactic appeared to be performing and asking harder questions.
Were we reaching the right audience segment? Was the channel capable of reaching them? Did the message fit that buyer? Were the surrounding marketing efforts reinforcing or weakening what we were trying to accomplish?
For example, blogs were being written for Social Security Disability clients, but the law firm had dropped that part of their practice awhile back, told the vendor, but no one before me had followed up to ensure they had shifted the blog content.
They were still writing blogs about it. Would you believe that it took me over a month to get the vendor to comply with providing pertinent blog content? They thought their tactic was correct, not mine...the law firm's Marketing Director.
Yes, we found another vendor after that!
What That Marketing Role Showed Me
Experiences like this sat with me and became one of the many reasons why I eventually established my fractional CMO business.
What I saw inside those law firms was not unique to law firms.
It is common inside small to mid-sized law firms and service-based businesses where marketing has grown over time rather than being intentionally designed as one connected system.
That does not mean the business made poor decisions or lacked good intentions. Quite the opposite. Most marketing efforts are added because someone believes they will help the business grow.
The issue is what can happen when there is no experienced marketing leader consistently making sure the strategy, audience segmentation, channels, messaging, vendors, and sales effort continue pointing toward the right buyers.
Marketing leadership cannot guarantee that every tactic will perform, but it should greatly reduce the likelihood that a business spends money marketing to several different versions of its ideal customer without realizing it.
And before marketing can truly align with sales, marketing has to be aligned within itself.
The audience behind the brand positioning should connect with the audience being targeted through advertising. That same buyer should recognize themselves in the website, content, social media, events, referral strategy, traditional marketing, and other points of contact with the business.
The design of the message will naturally shift in concept per channel. Someone watching a CTV ad is in a different context from someone attending an event, opening an email, or arriving through a high-intent search.
But the buyer underneath the marketing should still connect.
That is the distinction.
Good Tactics Can Still Produce the Wrong Marketing
This is why mistargeting can be difficult to diagnose.
A social campaign may generate strong engagement from people who are unlikely to become customers. An event may be well attended but attract very few ideal buyers. Paid search may generate traffic while the landing page speaks to another market. Direct mail may reach the right geography but carry the wrong offer or message. A referral partner may consistently send leads that do not match the clients the business actually wants.
None of those outcomes automatically means the tactic itself failed. Awareness is always great to gain.
However, the larger question is whether that tactic was connected to the same target as the rest of the marketing.
When it is not, businesses often start fixing individual pieces. They rewrite, redesign, replace vendors, change platforms, spend more money, or add another tactic.
Sometimes all they have done is add another hand to an already crowded marketing cookie jar.
A Simple Way to Look for Mistargeting
You do not need to begin with a massive marketing audit, but you do need to assess whether the same intended buyer is carrying through the marketing system.
Start with two questions:
Who is this actually designed to reach? Not who could potentially respond.
Who is the intended buyer?
Then compare that answer across your marketing channels and sales activity:
If your efforts begin describing noticeably different people, the issue may be larger than one tactic needing improvement.
You may be looking at mistargeting across the marketing system. This exercise may seem daunting, but it is a recommendation to do even when you do have a strong marketing strategy led by a strong marketing leader.
This is not about making every part of marketing identical.
It is about making sure every part of marketing understands who it is ultimately trying to reach and how its role connects to the rest of the effort.
That takes more than managing individual tactics. It takes experienced marketing leadership capable of keeping strategy, audience segmentation, channels, people, and sales connected as the business and its marketing evolve.
When those connections break, mistargeting begins.
And when you can see where they broke, you have a much better chance of fixing the marketing instead of continuing to fix the pieces.
Ready to take the first step towards better business outcomes? Schedule a strategy call to discuss your marketing challenges and discover how a fractional CMO can help you generate quality leads and impact significant change towards financial growth.
Julie Fisher lives in Beaumont, California, and is the founder of Fisher Marketing Services LLC, a leading fractional CMO and marketing consultancy. Julie has over 30 years of B2B, B2C, and B2G account management, SMB advertising, business development, and marketing experience that includes over 7 years of in-house law firm marketing leadership.
Email me at juliefisher@fisher-marketing.com
Connect on LinkedIn: Julie Fisher Fractional CMO
