KEY TAKEAWAYS
Most marketing fails because it's about the company, not the customer. Three alignment checks separate marketing that works from marketing that doesn't: message-audience fit (does your messaging speak to their problem in their language?), offer-audience fit (are you selling what they want to buy or what you want to sell?), and channel-audience fit (are you showing up where they spend time?). When these three align, marketing becomes something customers lean into instead of something they tune out.
A tech company I worked with had a brilliant problem. They were excellent at what they did, working at the cutting edge of their field. Their blog reflected that reality. Deep dives into architecture. Essays about new frameworks. Thought-leadership pieces on where the industry was heading. Sharp writing. Impressive work. Almost nobody who needed their services was reading it.
Their actual customers were executives. CTOs, Operations directors, CMOs. People who had hired the company because they did not want to make technical decisions themselves. These executives were not in the market for reading about Kubernetes clusters. They were in the market for someone who could take the problem off their plate and make it go away.
When I dug into how this had happened, the pattern made sense. Much of their business came from referrals from other technical people who knew their work and sent clients their way. So they had optimized their content for the referrers rather than for the end customers. They were trying to impress thirty percent of the market while seventy percent of the people who most needed them could not tell from the blog what the company did for a living.
The fix was not better writing. It was a complete reset of who they were writing for. Everything changed. The content moved from technical deep-dives to business-focused topics their customers searched for. Instead of company bylines, articles went out under the names of true experts who had years of experience solving the problems being written about. Same expertise. Different audience. Different language. Different impact.
You Are Not the Main Character
This is one of the hardest shifts for most business owners to make. You are proud of what you do. You should be. But your marketing is not the place to act on that pride.
The StoryBrand framework, developed by Donald Miller, reframes this completely. In the stories we respond to, the protagonist is the hero. In Star Wars, Luke Skywalker is the hero. Obi-Wan is the guide. He shows up at the right moment with exactly what Luke needs to succeed. Your customer is Luke. You are Obi-Wan.
When you turn yourself into the hero of your own marketing, the audience tunes out because they were never asking about you in the first place. When you position yourself as the guide, the content starts working. Your customer sees themselves in the story because the story is about them winning, not about you winning.
Three Alignment Checks
Knowing your audience is the starting point. But knowing them is not enough. You also have to align what you're doing around what you know. In practice, that comes down to three specific kinds of fit.
Message-Audience Fit
Your messaging has to speak to what the audience cares about, in the language they would use themselves. Compare these two versions of the same company. First: "We use cutting-edge technology to deliver enterprise-grade solutions." This sentence will impress your peers in the industry and mean almost nothing to a buyer. Second: "We make your tech problems disappear so you can focus on running your business."
The second version is shorter, less technically precise, and infinitely more effective. Because it answers the question on the buyer's mind: what is in this for me? The first version talks about what you do. The second talks about what happens to them.
Quick test: read your homepage out loud. Count how many times you say "we" or use your company name versus how many times you address the customer's actual problem. If the first number is bigger, your messaging is tilted the wrong way. Rewrite one piece of it to put the customer in the lead role.
Offer-Audience Fit
Are you selling what the audience wants to buy, or what you want to sell? Some companies build products around what the founders find interesting, then spend years trying to convince customers to want it. That is an expensive, slow way to run a company. Other companies build what their customers are asking for.
The trucking company from Chapter 2 went through this. They could have defended the professional email templates they were originally proud of. Instead, they built what their customers wanted: plain-text emails that read like operations information rather than marketing. The business grew because they were selling what customers wanted to buy.
Quick test: call three customers and ask why they bought from you. Compare their answers to how you describe your product on your website and in your materials. Where they do not match, you have an alignment problem worth fixing.
Channel-Audience Fit
Are you showing up in the places your audience spends its time? If your audience lives on LinkedIn and you are posting on TikTok, the quality of the content is irrelevant because nobody who needs to see it is seeing it. The same logic applies to every channel mismatch.
This sounds obvious until you notice how many companies get it wrong. They choose channels based on trends rather than where their audience is. Everyone is on TikTok, so they post there. But their customers are not there. The content goes unseen.
Quick test: ask five customers where they spend time online in a normal week and how they first found you. Compare their answers to where you are currently spending marketing time and money. If the two lists do not match, move your effort.
Want the full framework?
This article is adapted from How to Grow Any Organization by Tom Zandstra. The book covers all three alignment checks in depth with exercises to audit your current messaging, offer, and channels.
Download the free book →Where Small Businesses Get Alignment Wrong
You do not have to be Fortune 500 to get this wrong. I see small businesses making the same mistakes all the time. A beautiful website that is unusable because design was prioritized over navigation. Content that wins compliments from competitors but confuses actual customers. A marketing channel chosen because "everyone is on it" rather than because the audience is there. A tagline that is not converting defended as "on-brand" as if being on-brand mattered more than working.
Alignment is not a one-time exercise. It is an ongoing habit. Check quarterly whether what you are doing out in the world is still serving the people you are trying to reach. Markets shift. Audiences shift. Your assumptions get old.
Run a Quick Audit
Start with your messaging. Read through your homepage, a couple of recent emails, and your most recent social posts. Ask yourself honestly: is this about me or about the person on the other end? If the answer is mostly about you, rewrite one piece to put the customer in the lead role.
For your offer, call three customers and ask why they bought. Compare their answers to how you describe your product. Write down where the two diverge.
For channels, list where you are currently spending time and money. Ask five customers where they spend time online. Move your effort to the overlaps.
You will not get perfect alignment on every axis. You do not need to. The goal is to close the obvious gaps between what you are saying and what your audience needs to hear. Start with the biggest gap. Fix that first. Then move to the next one.
