Over the past few years, I’ve had this recurring moment in my work.
I’ll be in a project, deep in the day-to-day – optimising a Google Ads campaign for example – and I’ll pause to ask something like:
“Why are we spending so much money on a campaign that ends on a webpage that simply doesn’t work?”
And often… there’s no clear answer.
It’s not that people don’t care. Everyone’s doing their best. But strategy – the why behind the work – gets buried.
Why this matters
Recently, I read a paper by Dr. Alessandro Comai that helped me make sense of this.
He looked at hundreds of higher ed job ads and found that even roles with strategic titles mostly focused on tools and execution. Running ads. Managing content. Tracking campaigns.
Very few asked for the ability to align digital work with strategy – or even mentioned that strategy existed.
That resonated. I’m not a marketing director. I work in the trenches. But I’ve seen how often we’re left trying to reverse-engineer the bigger picture from a long list of deliverables.
I wanted to understand more
So I did a deep dive with ChatGPT Deep research – pulling from academic sources and practitioner stories across higher ed and the private sector.
And a pattern became clear:
- In the education sector, marketing hires are often expected to do everything – from content to analytics to events – with little say in direction
- In the business world, teams are very specialised, but they struggle to connect the dots and bring the silos together
- In both cases, there’s a gap between the skills we hire for and the capabilities the organisation actually needs to be successful
What does a lack of strategy look like in practice?
It shows up in small, familiar ways:
- Campaigns run on autopilot, without a clear goal
- Pages get written because “they have to be there” – not because they’re useful
- Teams stay busy, but aren’t sure if what they’re doing is working
So what can we do?
I don’t have all the answers. But if we want to get better at digital marketing, we need to build capability, not just hire for specific skills. Capability lives in teams and how they collaborate and challenge each other, not just in a single person.
Some ways to do that:
- Hiring people who can help us improve the way we work, not just get things done
- Creating breathing room inside roles – space to reflect, test, and adjust
- Writing job ads more intentionally – with clarity about the kind of contribution we actually need
I’ll be talking about this with Dr. Comai
He’s the author of the article that sparked a lot of this reflection and a fellow subscriber to this newsletter.
We’re going live on LinkedIn Monday 13 May at 9:00 CET.
We’ll dig into:
- What higher ed job ads reveal about digital maturity
- The tension between getting things done and getting better
- What practical steps institutions can take to build real capability
If this topic struck a chord — I’d love for you to join us.
