How To Narrow The Gap Between Marketing and Business Objectives in SMEs
- Performance For Sales
- Nov 3
- 4 min read
“We’re doing marketing — but we’re not seeing the results.”
“The team is busy posting on social media, updating the website, running campaigns… yet growth feels unpredictable and disconnected from all that effort. ”
Sound familiar? If you work with SMEs, you’ll know this story all too well. For many small and medium-sized businesses, marketing has become a collection of activities rather than a managed process. The link between marketing and measurable business objectives often fades, leaving leaders frustrated and advisors searching for ways to prove real value.
We’ve seen this challenge time and time again. The good news? There is a way to close the gap. By introducing structure, measurement, and alignment through The Marketing Performance Framework®, SMEs can finally connect their marketing efforts to commercial outcomes - and as an advisor, you can lead that transformation.
The Growing Disconnect Between Marketing and Business Outcomes
A new Marketing Maturity Report by The Marketing Centre highlights a common problem - SMEs are still “marketing in the dark.”
Two-thirds of small businesses lack a clear marketing action plan.
Only 25% have defined marketing performance measures.
According to Marketing Week, there has been a 20% drop in CEOs who believe marketing has a clearly defined role.
This disconnect between marketing and business strategy doesn’t just make reporting difficult. It limits business growth. Without clarity and structure, marketing becomes a series of disconnected activities rather than a process that drives measurable commercial outcomes.
The solution starts with alignment. By connecting marketing strategy directly to business goals, SMEs can turn activity into impact and create real accountability for growth.
Why Traditional Marketing Measures Are Not Enough
When SMEs measure success purely through short-term metrics such as clicks, impressions, or social engagement, they are only seeing ‘the tip of the iceberg.’
As Marketing Week’s “Iceberg Economics” article explains, “A better alternative would be a holistic framework centred on measuring marketing’s total contribution to commercial value creation.”
In other words, most of marketing’s real value lies beneath the surface in:
brand strength
customer loyalty, and
long-term sales performance.
Focusing solely on instant results means ignoring the deeper commercial value that marketing creates over time. For SMEs, this short-term thinking makes it impossible to demonstrate marketing’s true contribution to business success.
That’s where structure and measurement come in. It can help not only in tracking outcomes, but to connect every marketing action to a business objective.
Introducing The Marketing Performance Framework®
The Marketing Performance Framework® (TMPF) was is ideally suited to close the gap between marketing activity and business outcomes.
It provides a clear visual structure that connects people, process, and performance. Rather than working in isolation, marketing becomes part of a unified management process that supports the wider business strategy.
Using the framework helps SMEs:
Align marketing with business goals.
Build measurable, repeatable marketing action plans.
Define clear roles and responsibilities across teams.
Focus on commercial outcomes rather than isolated metrics.
By making marketing visible and measurable, the framework turns complexity into clarity and in turn, illustrates how marketing drives genuine business growth.
For advisors such as business coaches, marketing consultants, and training providers, TMPF is an essential tool for helping SME clients develop a structured marketing approach that connects directly to performance.
And for those ready to take this online, there is also a tech solution built using the framework - My Marketing Button. This allows users to plan, track, and measure marketing in one convenient place.
Measuring Marketing’s Total Contribution with ROMTI
Love them or hate them, traditional metrics like ROI (Return on Investment), ROAS (Return on Advertising Spend) and ROMI (Return on Marketing Investment) do tell part of the story when it comes to tracking results. But none of them measure the time, effort, and human energy invested in marketing. That’s why Performance for Sales and My Marketing Button introduced ROMTI: Return on Marketing Time Invested.
As My Marketing Button explains, “Let’s report on the time and passion invested by people so they can see the way they are impacting on someone’s business vision and bigger picture.”
ROMTI goes beyond financial data to include how time and behavior influence results. It tracks how marketing contributes to business goals in a more human and motivational way.
When combined with TMPF, this gives SMEs a powerful new way to measure marketing, balancing financial metrics with people-centred insights.
The result is a complete performance picture, showing not just what marketing costs, but what it contributes across time, teams, and outcomes.
Turning Insight into Action
For business advisors and coaches, helping SME clients narrow the gap between marketing and business goals is one of the most valuable outcomes you can deliver.
The Marketing Performance Framework® gives you a proven structure to do exactly that - helping teams stay accountable, strategic, and focused on outcomes that matter.
When marketing is measured through frameworks like TMPF and metrics like ROMTI, its value becomes visible - to CEOs, teams, and customers alike.
The Way Forward
SMEs don’t always need more marketing activity - unless they have nothing in place of course! But that’s a whole other story! They need marketing that works in sync with their business objectives.
By adopting a structured framework, aligning strategy with execution, and measuring total contribution (not just immediate results), businesses can transform how they plan, deliver, and assess their marketing performance.
We help coaches, consultants, accountants and training providers use the Marketing Performance Framework® and My Marketing Button to support their SME clients in achieving measurable business growth.
Contact us today to find out how you can use The Marketing Performance Framework® and ROMTI to align marketing with strategy and close the gap for good.
