By: Liza Deckelbaum, Director of PR and Social Media Strategy at Seez
Do you ever look at your marketing metrics and think, this work should be doing more for our business? Many organizations do, often because their agency started with creative instead of context. The typical result is a polished campaign that doesn’t drive the outcomes CMOs are accountable for, like acquisition efficiency, retention lift, revenue contribution, and market growth.
In industries facing rapid change, intensifying competition, shrinking margins, and the pressure to adopt new technologies like AI, that gap becomes even more costly. And, marketing that pivots to keep up often falls flat without a strong strategic foundation.
This is why the organizations winning today are the ones who think like CMOs. CMOs walk into the boardroom speaking the language of business. They anchor every decision in strategy. And they ensure creative work actually moves the metrics that matter.
That’s exactly how we operate at Seez.
Why Strategy Comes First
Too often, agencies skip straight to ideas for campaigns, branding, and ads, without first deeply understanding the current state of the business, knowing where to invest that will provide the greatest ROI or how to harness the power of marketing to accomplish not just marketing goals, but business goals. Business strategy, or business consulting, that underlies marketing work, gives us clarity on questions like:
- Which audience segments justify deeper investment?
- What behaviors move the needle on gross margin, not just top-line revenue?
- How do we balance short-term gains (leads, conversions) with long-term brand value?
This mindset aligns with modern frameworks, encouraging marketers to think beyond mere performance and more toward holistic growth. For example, the Seez approach unifies three disciplines: Business Consulting, Marketing Services, and Performance Services.
Our Business Consulting offering dives deep to pinpoint the root causes of business issues and determine possible solutions. Our Marketing group leverages this knowledge to help brands understand how to be successful and focus on the right priorities to drive growth. And our Performance team uses the data to reveal the best path forward, measure success, and iterate. The data continues to inform business and marketing strategy as a continuous cycle to drive results.
A recent paper highlights how marketing analytics are becoming an essential tool for consultants—enabling them to move beyond surface-level data and uncover what should be done, not just what could be done (IJSRET). While many agencies use analytics to track marketing performance, we use it to solve real business challenges. By starting with a deep understanding of where a business is headed, we’re able to connect insights to strategy—and ultimately, to marketing that drives measurable growth.
What Thinking Like a CMO Looks Like in Practice
Strategic Evaluation Before Tactics
Every campaign, message, or channel must be carefully evaluated and tied to business objectives. Whether it’s launching a new product, growing a vertical, or improving retention, the execution must align with the strategy. When marketing is an operational afterthought or not grounded in the priorities that will drive success, you end up wasting budget.
Resource Decisions Backed by Economics
Knowing a customer’s lifetime value, customer acquisition cost, margin profile, and the unit economics of services or products helps us advise on where marketing dollars should go. We don’t propose tactics in a vacuum.
Measurement Anchored to Business, Not Vanity
We set KPIs that matter: revenue generated, profitability, and retention uplift. We avoid the trap of prioritizing only clicks or impressions. The job is to connect marketing metrics to business metrics while maintaining accountability.
Built for Scale & Adaptability
Markets shift. Tech changes. Consumer behaviors evolve. A foundational strategy-first approach helps us build marketing systems and models that flex without fracturing.
Case Study: How a Cloud File-Storage Innovator Broke Through an Entrenched Market
In the enterprise file-storage landscape, established giants have long dominated the conversation. But one emerging hybrid cloud provider had a different vision, one that promised to simplify infrastructure, reduce costs, and give organizations more control over their data.
The challenge? Turning a powerful technology into a powerful market presence.
To compete, this fast-growing company needed to elevate its stature quickly and communicate its value in a way that resonated with the people who feel storage pain the most: C-Suite and IT leaders.
Understanding the Audience to Transform the Narrative
Enterprise IT teams were battling a familiar list of obstacles: fragmented systems, unpredictable storage costs, complex scaling, and the constant risk of data loss or downtime. The company’s hybrid cloud solution solved those issues, but the market wasn’t seeing the connection clearly enough.
So, we reframed the challenge.
By immersing ourselves in the daily realities of IT and business decision-makers, we crafted a creative platform that made the problem (and the solution) instantly recognizable. We brought file data to life in a visceral way that cut through the noise and showed audiences we understood exactly what they were up against.
The shift in message and market presence drove measurable performance across the business. This helped fuel:
- 54% increase in new customers
- 81% lift in the value of new contracts
- 140% revenue growth
This was more than a brand refresh; it was a market repositioning that helped a challenger company compete on the same stage as long-entrenched category leaders.
A Challenger Brand with Category-Creating Presence
This hybrid cloud innovator was well positioned to accelerate growth, unlock new capital and redefine what momentum looks like in a legacy-dominated space.
Why Seez?
We’re strategic partners with consulting roots and creative wings. At Seez, our process starts with diagnosing and understanding the appropriate paths to address business challenges before we ever write a headline or build a campaign. Our methodology and practices ensure every activation has purpose, every tactic serves strategy, and results stack up.
Investing in marketing services is one thing. Investing in business consulting services, paired with marketing services, is what will set your brand apart from the competition. And if you think like a CMO (like we do), we make sure that investment moves your business forward.
We’re not only here to help you figure it all out, we’re also here to help you develop the strategy to see it through. Let’s chat about how to take your marketing to the next level.