After nearly a decade working with startups and SMBs, and making a bunch of mistakes along the way, I’m starting to believe that most so-called “marketing problems” are really prioritization problems in disguise.
It’s the common pattern: endless back-and-forth about A/B tests, alt tags, blogging, running ads, tweaking CTAs, all driven by whatever an influencer recently said, or by a founder’s gut feeling about what “worked once” in the past.
It’s the reality of doing marketing in small or early-stage teams.
And honestly, it’s understandable: without clear prioritization, everything feels urgent, and everything sounds important.
This post is a collection of thoughts for both founders and marketers who work in small or early-stage teams. The goal is to explore why so many marketing challenges can be traced back to poor prioritization and how fixing that root issue can help untangle things.
Alt text, SEO plugin scores, and the death of sound prioritization
Few things reveal broken prioritization more clearly than watching someone obsess over the smallest, safest task imaginable.
Coming from an SEO background, there’s no better depiction of this at play than with alt tags. The microscopic lever that every beginner in SEO spams to oblivion.
It’s not going to move the SEO-needle. Yet it’s often the thing people spend an absurd amount of time on, right up there with obsessing over SEO plugin scores.
If you have an agency or freelance background, you know the drill:
A client might ask you to optimize their SEO plugin scores to green, expecting that to skyrocket their traffic. Or they might complain that you didn’t do your job because a piece of software says some alt tags don’t include the keyword.
The root issue is simple: When you can’t tell big levers from tiny ones, you default to the tasks that feel safe, familiar, or measurable, or the ones people shout loudest about online.
So people pour time and energy into tasks that won’t affect performance, often based on vague “best practices” or advice they found online. All while the things that could produce meaningful results sit untouched.
And this pattern repeats across every marketing channel.
Prioritization as the differentiator
For anyone who isn’t a marketer, figuring out what to focus on is hard. This is especially true for founders who are juggling a million other things.
Heck, knowing what to prioritize remains a challenge even for the most experienced marketers. And that’s without having to handle payroll and HR tasks you never wanted to learn, or getting sucked into a product rabbit hole due to a customer discovering a bug that only occurs on Windows laptops from before 2015.
And to be frank, we marketers don’t make prioritization easier. The internet is filled with clickbait titles and promises of sending your revenue into hyperspace via three quick tips or one small hack.
Every tool, guru, and course promises a different pot of gold.
A/B test subject lines.
Update old content.
Run ads.
Build backlinks.
Start posting on TikTok.
Pray to the SEO gods while burning two olive leaves with your competitor’s logos hand-drawn on them.
You get the picture.
101 tactics, but they leave you with no strategy and no way of knowing what to do in your specific situation.
And here’s the truth: Most of these tactics can work in the right context.
But what you choose to work on, when you work on it, and how many resources you invest into it, is what ultimately determines whether your marketing moves the needle or becomes a long list of half-finished busywork.
Common prioritization failures
To make this more concrete, and for simplicity’s sake, I’ve listed a few common buckets prioritization failures can fall into.
Strategy-level (wrong goals, wrong direction)
These all relate to higher-level choices, not tasks. This can include things like:
Prioritizing the wrong part of the funnel, like focusing on top-of-funnel content when the actual bottleneck is activation.
Prioritizing the wrong marketing channel, like focusing on Instagram because a founder or employee likes the channel or has “seen results” from it in past ventures, even though the product is a B2B tool sold to finance professionals.
Prioritizing what’s measurable over what matters, like running experiments on button colors because they’re easy to measure, when customers are churning because they don’t understand the product.
Prioritizing “best practices” over situational context, like developing a process to update blog posts every 6 months because it’s “best practice” without any insight into whether those posts are driving meaningful business results.
Absence of strategy, like not considering goals or the impact of any change (basically neglecting the strategy-level entirely) > Just doing stuff and hoping something sticks.
Execution-level (wrong work)
These are failures of what the team actually spends time doing, and in what order.
Prioritizing the micro first, like fixating on the output of social media posts because it’s concrete and easy to complete, with no care for the messaging.
Prioritizing tactics before diagnosing the actual problem, like running ads before fixing onboarding issues, or spending weeks writing content before working on messaging.
Prioritizing execution before defined success criteria, like starting to make website changes without a clear idea of what success looks like, no benchmarks, and/or no way to measure success.
Prioritizing movement over structure, like jumping into tasks or projects without proper planning, sequencing, or prerequisite work, leading to rework, delays, and fragmented execution.
Operational/cognitive (wrong reasons)
Prioritizing urgency over importance, like dropping everything to fix a single customer complaint, small language mistakes, and constant firefighting without consideration for whether it is actually important or something that should be prioritized over other things.
Prioritizing “perfect” over “done”, like endless revisions of blog posts or landing pages before they are tested with real traffic.
Prioritizing copying competitors out of fear of missing out, like rushing to produce similar website content to competitors without considering differentiation, your ICP, or the results this content got them.
Pritizing based on emotion, familiarity, or impulse, like choosing tasks that “feel productive” rather than those that drive outcomes, shiny object syndrome, or sticking with channels that might feel like they worked in the past based on familiarity.
Prioritizing “feeling busy” over progress, like producing heaps of social media posts because “people might read them”, or valuing the number of blog posts produced over the actual results they get/lessons learned.
Why it happens
When spelled out, these things all seem very obvious and easily preventable. However, they happen for a reason.
Uncertainty & stress (goodbye prefrontal cortex)
First, uncertainty and stress are almost always at play. Founders juggling a dozen things, marketers under pressure to produce quick wins.
Stress makes decision-making reactive (goodbye prefrontal cortex). And in that headspace, anything slow, be it analytics, planning, strategy, or something else, feels counterintuitive.
It feels slow. It feels unproductive. When everything seems urgent, preparation feels like falling behind.
Then there’s the fact that marketing is a noisy, often contradictory field. The answer is always “it depends,” everyone gives different advice, and the signal-to-noise ratio is horrible.
In that kind of environment, prioritization quickly gets muddy.
Unpredictability
Another reason is that, unlike engineering or finance, marketing behaves more like a social science.
Cause and effect are rarely clean.
Human behavior is messy.
Outcomes are influenced by a hundred variables you don’t control, from algorithm shifts and timing to mood and market sentiment.
And then there’s the attribution nightmare…
Attribution
Someone sees an ad, then Googles you. They hear about you from a friend, then go straight to your website to subscribe to your newsletter.
Multi-device journeys break analytics.
Consent mode wipes out half your data.
“Direct” traffic is the digital equivalent of “I dunno.”
All of this makes it extremely hard to answer basic questions like:
What worked?
What didn’t?
What should we do next?
It’s no surprise
So it’s no surprise that founders & marketers end up guessing, overreacting, chasing the wrong metrics, or doubling down on the wrong ideas. It’s not stupidity; it’s the reality of operating where data is incomplete, signals are delayed, and feedback loops are messy.
Marketing might be the only function where you can make all the right decisions and still get the wrong outcome… or make questionable decisions and still get rewarded.
And that uncertainty can twist prioritization entirely, even though it’s exactly that uncertainty that makes prioritization all the more important.
Good prioritization can prevent you from overinvesting in things before you know they work, and save you from wasting months and tens of thousands on channels that don’t.
What good prioritization might look like
In an ideal world, we’d put 100% of resources into those things that relieve bottlenecks and drive outsized returns for the business.
But the reality is that we won’t know what these things are for sure until we test them.
This means that there’s no such thing as perfect prioritization.
However, there are some things to look for to see if prioritization is heading in the right direction, like:
You know the bottleneck you’re addressing
Good prioritization starts with a clear diagnosis of where growth is actually stuck. Instead of “doing marketing,” you’re solving one specific constraint (conversions, exposure, activation, churn, etc). Everyone on the team should know the answer to “what are we trying to fix right now, and why?”
You actively choose not to do things
For every campaign/project you say yes to, you can point to the things you’re intentionally not doing. This creates focus, reduces hidden work, and forces tradeoffs instead of pretending you can do everything at once (which, after years of trying, I can tell you from personal experience, you can’t ;).
Constraints drive decisions
You prioritize based on the real limits you’re operating under, be it time, people, skills, budget, data, or distribution. Instead of basing decisions on what you wish you could do, you choose what you can realistically execute well enough to learn from.
High-leverage actions, not constant activity
The work skews toward higher impact actions, not items that simply keep you “busy.” A small number of heavy-hitting decisions or experiments outweigh piles of low-impact tasks. The signal is that you feel momentum from fewer, more meaningful actions, not from producing more artifacts.
Time horizons are longer (6–12 weeks, not 6 days)
You stop measuring everything by whether it can be done before the lettuce in your fridge goes soggy. Prioritization shifts from reacting to whatever happened this week to committing to slightly longer arcs of work where real outcomes are possible. You think in terms of campaigns, experiments, and learning loops, not “whatever crops up”.
A practical way to improve prioritization
There’s no shortage of frameworks for this kind of thing, varying from slightly over-engineered to those designed like someone tried to run a DCF model on which blog post to write next.
They’re useful, but in the early-stage/SMB chaos, most founders don’t have the headspace or the patience for a 37-step scoring matrix. So if you want something simple you can use in the next 30 seconds, try asking:
What’s the biggest bottleneck right now?
(Are we seeing a lot of traffic but few conversions? Lots of people converting, but also high churn? Or just crickets in general?)What stage are we in, and what outcome actually matters?
(validation, traction, scale > What’s the main business goal right now that marketing can contribute to?)
This will give you a good baseline for prioritizing things. Then, for deciding which projects/campaigns to pursue, try the following:
What’s the goal of this, and what would I consider a success?
Is this solving, or does it aim to solve, the biggest constraint in the funnel right now?
Is this the highest-leverage thing I could do right now compared to all other options?
What would an MVT (minimum viable test) look like?
Is this something I can execute well with the resources I have?
What this might look like in practice
Nothing beats a good example, so I’ve drafted two below:
A high-traffic website with low conversions
Let’s say you’re getting plenty of traffic to your site, but conversion rates are poor. Using the questions above, your thought process might look like this:
Biggest bottleneck?
Traffic is strong. The real issue is converting visitors into sign-ups.
Stage & outcome that matters?
You’re in traction mode, so improving activation/conversion is far more valuable than driving even more top-of-funnel traffic.
From there, you evaluate a potential project. In this case, let’s say rewriting the homepage and adding a clearer CTA:
Goal & definition of success?
Increase conversions on the homepage from 0.1% to 0.3%.
Note: Although it’s nice to have very specific goals and targets like these, it’s often the case that the goal doesn’t go beyond “we need to improve conversion rates”. Although that’s not “best practice”, in general, I’ve found it’s not only very common but also good enough to work with.
Does it address the biggest constraint?
Yes, conversion is the choke point.
Is it the highest-leverage option?
In this case, let’s say a homepage rewrite affects 80% of visitors since it’s by far the highest traffic page and also the page people convert on. This means it’s a higher leverage option than, for example, optimizing two blog posts.
What’s the MVT?
Test a simplified headline, a tighter value proposition, and a single primary CTA with an A/B variant before rebuilding the whole page.
Can you execute it with the available resources?
Yes, you can draft copy in a day and push an A/B test live without engineering bottlenecks.
Although far from perfect, by walking through these questions, prioritization becomes less about gut feel and more about systematically unblocking growth. It still might take multiple of these types of projects to actually solve the issue, but at least it ensures you’re working on high-impact tasks.
A SaaS with retention issues
Imagine you’re running a small SaaS product with decent activation but weak retention. Users sign up, try it once or twice, then disappear.
Biggest bottleneck?
Retention. People aren’t sticking around long enough to get real value.
Stage & outcome that matters?
You’re in validation/early traction mode, so improving retention is more important than scaling acquisition.
Now, you consider a big idea: Let’s rebuild onboarding from scratch. This could easily turn into a multi-month project involving design, product, copy, and engineering.
But running it through the questions:
Goal & definition of success?
Increase week-1 retention by 10–15%.
Does it address the biggest constraint?
Yes, onboarding is where users are dropping off.
Is it the highest-leverage option?
Potentially yes, if done correctly and you’re not seeing other glaring retention issues, like reviews mentioning vital features missing, major bugs/conflicts, or similar things.
What’s the MVT?
Although a full rebuild might work great, it’s not the minimum test required to understand whether the onboarding flow is the real issue, nor to test which parts of the onboarding flow might be causing friction.
Instead of a rebuild, a single, lightweight intervention that tests the core hypothesis might be better, like:
- Add one in-app tooltip or “Getting Started” checklist highlighting the key action tied to retention
- Send one triggered email nudging users back to complete that action
- Measure retention impact over a week
Total effort: a few hours, not a few months.
Can you execute it with the available resources?
Yes, no redesign, no new flows, minimal engineering.
By defining an MVT, you avoid a full onboarding overhaul and still get validation on whether onboarding improvements meaningfully move retention. If the test works, then you can justify investing in a larger version. If it doesn’t, you just saved yourself a month of work.
The mess in practice
Before wrapping up, it’s worth saying: this is all messy in practice.
It all seems easy, but the examples above are a lot clearer than 99% of the decisions you’ll likely be making.
Just this year, the times I’ve fallen into the traps and issues outlined in this post can’t be counted on one hand.
The reality is that you’re still going to make impulsive decisions. You’re still going to step on your team’s toes now and then. You’re still going to pick the wrong thing occasionally and only realize it months later after sinking silly amounts of resources into it.
That’s not failure, that’s normal.
The goal here isn’t perfection, it’s simply making slightly better decisions over time and learning from the ones that didn’t land.
The noble quest for the perfect alt tag
Alt tags are both a useful tool that’s genuinely helpful to those using screen readers, and a symbol of thousands of years of wasted human life.
Let’s just say that, if insurance companies started offering alt tag insurance, the premium would be sky high.
So, next time you think about pulling the trigger on keyword stuffing those web accessibility helpers (or any other marketing decision…), take five minutes to consider whether it’s the right thing to do.
After all, if a decision isn’t worth spending a little time making, it’s unlikely to be something worth doing at all.
