Observations
How to Manage Marketing if You’re Not a Marketer: A Framework for CEOs
For many executives, marketing can seem like a “black box.” You know it’s vital for growth and allocate significant budgets to it, but you don’t fully understand what’s happening. This lack of transparency can lead to two destructive management styles.
The first is complete detachment. You hire a chief marketing officer and say, “This is your responsibility. I expect results.” This approach is risky because marketing can drift away from real business objectives.
The second style is micromanagement. In an attempt to regain control, you start personally approving post designs, selecting slogans, and deciding which conferences to attend. This demotivates the team and consumes your valuable time.
However, there is a third, more productive path. You don’t need to become a marketer to manage marketing effectively. Instead, you need to become a competent “investor” in it.
Think about it: A good investor doesn’t manage the operations of the companies they’ve invested in. Rather, they clearly understand the company’s business model, define key performance indicators (KPIs), and ask the right strategic questions during meetings to ensure their capital is being used effectively. This is exactly how you should manage marketing.
This article provides a step-by-step framework for implementing this “investor” approach. We will cover three steps that will allow you to maintain full strategic control over marketing without getting bogged down in routine tasks or acting as a “creative director on the side.”
Step 1: Define the “Investment Thesis” (Strategic Focus)
Successful investors don’t start by asking, “Where should I invest?” They ask, “What result do I want to achieve?” The first and most important step in marketing management is defining its strategic focus for the year. This is your “investment thesis.”
As the company leader, your task is to analyze the overall goals and “decompose” them into one clear, measurable marketing objective. Not ten objectives, but one—the one that will contribute the most to overall results.
It should not be an abstract goal, such as “increase brand awareness” or “drive more website traffic.” It should be a concrete business goal expressed in numbers that impact your P&L.
For example: “Our main goal this year is to enter the Far East market. Marketing’s task is to generate 30% of the sales funnel in this region.” Or, “We are losing share in the enterprise segment. Marketing’s task is to generate 50 qualified leads from the TOP500 list.” Or, “Our LTV is declining due to churn. Marketing’s task is to design and implement a communication system that reduces churn by 15%.
Once such a goal is set, magic happens. First, as an investor, you have a clear criterion for evaluating success. Second, your marketing team gains a “North Star.” They can make hundreds of tactical decisions independently—such as which channels to use and what content to create—and constantly ask themselves: “Does this bring us closer to the goal?” This provides both focus and autonomy.
Completing this step accomplishes the most important thing: defining the “what” and “why.” The responsibility of determining the “HOW” remains with the team. This is the foundation of strategic management.
Step 2: Build the “Investor Dashboard” (key metrics)
Continuing the analogy, an investor does not get involved in a company’s daily operational tasks. Instead, they regularly review financial statements, or dashboards with three to four key metrics that indicate the health of the business. Your task is to create a similar dashboard to evaluate marketing performance.
Note: This is not the long, multi-page report with “likes, reach, and CTR” that you might be used to seeing. This dashboard is your personal management tool, where every number is directly tied to money and the business goals you defined in Step 1.
The first and most important metric on this dashboard is customer acquisition cost (CAC). It answers the simple question: “How much money are we spending on marketing and sales to acquire one new contract?” This metric is your primary indicator of the effectiveness of your entire growth engine.
The second metric is the revenue generated by marketing in the sales funnel. It answers the question: “What contribution has marketing made to the company’s future revenue this quarter?” This metric links marketing activity directly to tangible business results.
The third, most strategic metric is the Customer Lifetime Value-to-CAC ratio (LTV/CAC). It addresses a key question of investors: “Are we ultimately earning from the customers we acquire, or are we operating at a loss?” A ratio of 3:1 or higher is generally considered healthy.
You don’t need to know how to set up tracking in Google Analytics or CRM. Your job is to define these metrics as the “gold standard” for reporting and insist that the marketing team prioritize reporting on them above all else.
Once you have this “dashboard,” the magic continues. Conversations about marketing shift from subjective opinions (“I don’t like this shade of blue”) to business-focused dialogues (“Our CAC is rising. Let’s investigate why.”). You will begin managing results, not processes.
Step 3: Hold “Investor Meetings” and Ask the Right Questions
Now that you have a strategic focus and an “investor dashboard” with key metrics, the format of your interactions with the team will change. Your regular marketing meetings will no longer be a “campaign post-mortem”; they will be similar to a board or investor meeting with company management.
Rather than asking, “Why did we choose this banner color?” Instead, you look at your dashboard and ask higher-level, “investor-style” questions.
For example, if you see a rise in CAC, you might ask: “Our CAC increased by 15%. Which hypothesis failed? What did we learn from this experiment? What is our plan to correct it next month?”
When you notice a strong LTV-to-CAC ratio, you initiate a growth discussion: “The LTV/CAC ratio looks very healthy. Is this a signal that we can safely increase investment in this channel to accelerate growth?”
When you hear a complaint from sales, you don’t take it at face value; you verify it against the data: “The VP of Sales mentioned a drop in lead quality. How does this affect our MQL-to-SQL conversion rate? Is the problem with traffic or the qualification process?”
By asking questions like these, you achieve the main goal. You don’t provide tactical instructions in areas where you’re not an expert. Instead, you leverage the team’s expertise to solve business problems, prompting them to analyze data and think like owners. This is true strategic control—without micromanagement.
You Are an Investor, Not a Creative Director
Managing marketing as a non-marketing CEO is not “black magic”; it’s a three-step system. First, define a single strategic focus. Second, agree on three to four key business metrics. Third, regularly review these metrics and ask the right questions.
This framework enables you to fulfill your primary responsibilities: allocating the company’s capital effectively and ensuring that every department, including marketing, works toward the primary goal of profitable growth. Your role is not to approve social media posts. Your role is to ensure the highest possible return on capital invested in marketing.
This framework is the foundation for building a manageable, data-driven marketing system. Use it as a guide and as a basis for your next conversation with your CMO. It will help you start speaking the same business-oriented language and transform marketing from a “black box” into a transparent engine of growth.
