In a small marketing team, almost everything can sound important. Social media matters. Branding matters. Events matter. SEO matters. Content matters. Leads matter. The problem is that limited resources do not become unlimited just because every activity has value.
That forced me to think about prioritisation differently. The question was not whether an activity was useful. The question was whether it deserved a larger share of our limited time, attention and budget at that moment.
Prioritisation isn't deciding what's valuable. It's deciding what deserves more of a limited resource right now.
01
Not every channel deserves equal attention
One of the first places I applied this was social media. We could have tried to maintain LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram with equal intensity. On paper, that sounds balanced. In practice, it would have spread a small team across three channels without a clear reason for treating them as equally important.
For our B2B audience, LinkedIn was the stronger fit. That became the primary social channel. Facebook and Instagram were not abandoned, but they were deliberately deprioritised.
Keep every social channel equally active.
Give LinkedIn more attention because it better matched the audience and business objective.
That distinction matters. Deprioritising a channel does not mean declaring it useless. It means accepting that a worthwhile activity can still deserve less attention than another worthwhile activity.
02
Growth needed more of the resource than broad branding
The bigger decision was how to balance lead generation with branding.
My working view was that we were not yet at a stage where we could afford to make broad branding the majority of our marketing activity. We needed to maintain a healthy pipeline of qualified leads for growth.
So I worked with a rough allocation in mind:
- SEO
- Articles and blog content
- Industry events
- Activities that can create qualified opportunities
- Partnership collaborations
- Selected videos
- Industry moments with the right audience
The ratio was never meant to be a universal formula. It was simply a practical way to remind myself where the majority of our effort needed to go.
Branding still mattered. The difference was that I preferred concentrating it around moments where the context and audience were already strong, rather than trying to maintain a large always-on branding programme.
A collaboration around World FM Day with MIPFM is the kind of example I mean. A partnership moment like that gives brand activity a more relevant setting than producing another standalone video simply because we feel we should be doing more branding.
03
The difficult part is saying no to good ideas
We could, in theory, do more branding events. We could make more videos. We could push Facebook and Instagram harder. We could run more awareness activity.
Those are not bad ideas.
But every one of them uses the same finite resources that could otherwise go towards activities more directly connected to qualified leads: events with the right audience, SEO work, useful articles and content that supports demand generation.
Prioritisation is often not choosing between a good idea and a bad idea. It is choosing which good idea matters more right now.
That is what makes prioritisation uncomfortable. It is easy to reject something obviously pointless. It is much harder to look at a genuinely useful idea and still decide that it should wait.
04
The ratio isn't the framework
I would not tell another marketing team to copy a 75/25 split. Their stage, market, budget and objectives may be completely different.
The more useful framework is the sequence behind the decision:
- What does the business need most right now? Growth, awareness, retention, pipeline, launch support or something else?
- Which activities most directly support that need? Not everything needs to carry the same objective.
- What deserves disproportionate resources? Time and budget should reflect priority, not just habit.
- What are we willing to do less of? If nothing receives less attention, nothing has really been prioritised.
Focus is a management decision
In a lean team, the temptation is to prove that marketing can do everything. But trying to keep every channel active, every stakeholder happy and every objective equally represented can leave the team doing a lot without giving anything enough focus to work properly.
I would rather be clear about what matters most now, give it a larger share of the resource, and accept that some worthwhile things will receive less attention for a while.
That does not mean branding is unimportant. It does not mean Facebook or Instagram are bad channels. It does not mean the same allocation should remain forever.
It simply means priorities should change how resources are actually used.