When an account stalls, the instinct is to test new creative, new audiences, or a new platform. More often, the issue is upstream — the positioning is unclear, the offer is weak, or the ideal customer is undefined. Tactics cannot fix that.
Strategy first, channels second
April Dunford's work on positioning argues that positioning is the act of deliberately defining how you are the best in the world at delivering something a well-defined customer cares about. Without that definition, every ad has to do the positioning work itself, which inflates CPLs and erodes win rate.
What a documented strategy includes
- Ideal customer profile: firmographics, role, trigger events.
- Positioning: the alternatives, your differentiated value, and who it matters to.
- Offer: what someone gets, why it is worth the price, and the risk reversal.
- Channel hypothesis: where the ICP is reachable at scale and at what intent stage.
How strategy changes spend decisions
A clear strategy turns budget allocation into a comparison instead of a guess. Spend is not just "how much on Meta vs Google" — it is how much on building demand for the positioning versus capturing existing demand that already matches the offer. Both have a role; the ratio comes from the strategy, not from the platform UI.
Where this is drawn from.
This article references the following publicly available documentation. Always verify against the original source — platform features change frequently.
- [1] April DunfordObviously Awesome — official sitehttps://www.aprildunford.com/obviously-awesome
- [2] Ehrenberg-Bass InstituteHow Brands Grow (overview)https://www.marketingscience.info/research/how-brands-grow/
- [3] IPA / Les Binet & Peter FieldThe Long and the Short of Ithttps://ipa.co.uk/knowledge/publications-reports/the-long-and-the-short-of-it