You have been in business for ten, fifteen, maybe twenty years. You have a solid product, a decent reputation, and customers who keep coming back. Then one day you look at your marketing and realise it is a pile of disconnected experiments. A LinkedIn ad here, a brochure reprint there, a sponsorship someone talked you into at a trade show. None of it connects. None of it compounds. And the pipeline has gone quiet.
This is what ad-hoc marketing looks like from the inside. It feels productive in the moment. You are “doing marketing.” But you are not building anything.
How Established B2B Companies Fall Into the Ad-Hoc Trap
New companies plan their marketing from scratch out of necessity. They have no brand recognition, no referral network, no existing pipeline. Every lead has to be earned. So they think about it.
Established companies have the opposite problem. They grew on reputation, relationships, and repeat business. Marketing was an afterthought. Not a primary driver of revenue. When a slowdown hits or a big client leaves, the response is reactive: “We need to do something about marketing.”
That “something” usually looks like this:
- A rushed LinkedIn campaign with no clear audience or message
- A new website designed around what the CEO likes rather than what buyers need
- A trade show booth that cost a small fortune but produced two lukewarm leads
- A content series that ran for three months and stopped once nobody tracked the results
None of these create a lasting asset. There is no shared messaging framework, no lead scoring, no feedback loop between sales and marketing. The results are impossible to measure without a baseline.
And the actual cost is not the budget line item. Every month you spend on one-offs is a month your competitors spend building a lead-generation machine you will eventually have to compete against.
Marketing Is a System, Not a Series of One-Offs
Most B2B companies treat marketing the way they would treat fixing a leaking roof. Something breaks, you patch it. The leak stops temporarily, then it starts again somewhere else.
That mindset works for emergencies. It does not work for generating pipeline.
Three things separate a marketing system from ad-hoc activity:
1. It compounds. A technical guide on pump maintenance written today can still be the reason a prospect picks up the phone six months from now. A clear brand position means you spend less on explaining who you are in every new ad. Ad-hoc activities produce a spike and then nothing.
2. It creates a feedback loop. When marketing runs as a system, you know which activities produce leads, which leads become opportunities, and which opportunities close. That data tells you where to put more resources and where to cut. Without the system, you are guessing every quarter.
3. It aligns sales and marketing. In companies running ad-hoc marketing, the sales team and the marketing team (or the agency, or the freelancer) operate in separate worlds. Sales says the leads are bad. Marketing says the sales team does not follow up. Nobody has the data to settle the argument. A system puts both sides on the same metrics, looking at the same pipeline, with a shared definition of what a qualified lead actually looks like.
Ten campaigns a month mean nothing if they are all pulling in different directions.
Building a Systematic Marketing Approach for B2B
You do not need a big team or a six-figure budget to start. You need a clear structure and the discipline to stick to it.
Step 1: Define Your Ideal Client Profile in Writing
Get this out of people’s heads and into a shared document. Who are the 20% of clients that generate 80% of your revenue? What industry are they in, how large is the company, who makes the buying decision, and what problem were they trying to solve when they found you?
If your sales team cannot answer these questions consistently, your marketing will never be targeted enough to work.
Step 2: Map the Path to Purchase
In most B2B markets, you are not selling to one person. You are convincing a committee of three, five, sometimes eight people over the course of two quarters. Your marketing system needs content and touchpoints for each stage:
- Awareness: Articles and LinkedIn posts about the specific technical problems your buyers face. Write about their headaches, not your company’s mission statement.
- Consideration: Case studies, comparison guides, and detailed service pages that show how you solve it.
- Decision: Proposals, consultations, and proof points (client results, certifications, partnerships) that reduce risk.
Most ad-hoc marketing only covers the first bucket. That means your sales team is doing all the heavy lifting on consideration and decision, with no content to back them up. They end up writing the same explanatory email five times a week.
Step 3: Pick Two or Three Channels and Go Deep
Stop spreading thin across every platform.
For most Dutch B2B firms, you only need to win on LinkedIn, your own website, and email. That is it. You do not need TikTok. You do not need a podcast if your buyers don’t listen to them. Pick the channels based on where your closed deals actually originated, not on what a marketing blog told you was trending.
Step 4: Build a 90-Day Content Calendar
Not a 12-month editorial calendar that nobody follows. A 90-day plan with specific topics, formats, and owners. Every article, post, or email should map to one of the three buying stages above and include a clear call to action.
Assign a single person to own the calendar. If nobody owns it, it will die within six weeks. One owner, one shared document, one weekly check-in.
Check your performance every quarter. Look at what performed and what flopped. Ask the sales team what questions they keep hearing from prospects. Those specific questions become next quarter’s topics.
Step 5: Set Up Measurement From Day One
You need three things in place before you spend another euro on marketing:
- A CRM that tracks where leads come from and how they move through your pipeline.
- Website analytics with goals configured for the actions that matter (form fills, downloads, contact requests).
- A monthly reporting rhythm where sales and marketing sit in the same room and review the numbers together.
If you cannot trace a closed deal back to the campaign that started the conversation, you are still guessing which half of your budget is doing the work.
How to Start the Transition This Month
Don’t try to overhaul everything at once. That usually ends the same way as the last big marketing push: lots of energy for two weeks, then silence.
Start with one action this week: pull your last twelve months of closed deals and write down how each of those clients found you. Referral? Website? Trade show? LinkedIn? If you do not know, that gap alone tells you where to focus first.
Next, take your top three deal sources and ask: are we doing anything intentional and consistent to feed those channels? If the answer is no, you have your first priority.
Then block two hours with your sales lead and agree on three things: what a qualified lead looks like, what information marketing should capture before handing a lead to sales, and how quickly sales will follow up. Write it down. That one conversation will eliminate half the finger-pointing between your sales and marketing teams.
The full system takes three to six months to build properly. But mapping your lead sources takes an afternoon. Start there.
Frequently Asked Questions
Ad-hoc marketing means running campaigns, ads, or content without a strategy or measurement framework behind it. Each activity is planned in isolation, with no connection to a larger business goal or the buyer’s path to purchase.
If you cannot connect your marketing activities to specific revenue outcomes, your approach is ad-hoc. Other signs: no content calendar, no shared sales-marketing metrics, and decisions driven by gut feeling rather than data.
A functional system with defined audiences, mapped buyer paths, consistent content, and proper measurement takes three to six months. You will see early indicators within the first 90 days.
Yes. This approach works better for small teams, since it gives you permission to ignore 90% of the platforms and commit to the two or three that actually produce results.
That depends on how much time your team can dedicate to managing the daily output. Many B2B companies benefit from a strategic partner who builds the system alongside the internal team, rather than outsourcing execution completely.
Your Pipeline Will Not Fix Itself
If your marketing still runs on one-off campaigns and gut decisions, the results will stay exactly where they are.
Book a free marketing audit with Spijkerenco. René will walk through your current setup, show you where the system breaks down, and give you a concrete plan to fix it.
