Why Your Head of Marketing is Actually Just Doing Business Development

There are a lot of people heading marketing departments right now who don't actually market.

They do business development. They make connections. They network. They design logos and order stationary. But they don't fundamentally understand modern marketing.

This is especially prevalent in B2B and healthcare. Healthcare is the absolute worst for this. They have people in marketing departments whose entire job seems to be managing the brand's letterhead and making sure the booth at the annual conference looks nice.

That's not marketing.

What Marketing Actually Is

Marketing is where we put out communications about our brand identity. It's about clearly defining who we are, the customers we serve, and exactly what we do for them. The goal is to get people to know who we are and what we do on a mass scale.

It is not just putting up a sign at a corporate event or a networking conference.

We have to live in 2026. We have to use what is available to us with modern technology. Yet, a lot of Heads of Marketing are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on inferior methods—the vintage, relic marketing tactics of yesteryear.

They are severely underutilizing their ability to reach customers on the platforms where those customers actually live: TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

People like GaryVee have been shouting this from the rooftops since 2015. It's 11 years later, and companies are still playing the old game. It's detrimental to their growth.

The Funding Mask

What masks this incompetence? Funding.

In many of these industries, companies are able to procure funding during rounds and just fold that money into the company. Because they have cash flow from investors, they don't feel the immediate sting of their marketing failures.

Because they don't see a direct, immediate result from their outdated marketing efforts becoming fruitful, they assume that marketing as a whole is impotent. They think marketing just "doesn't work in our industry."

That couldn't be further from the truth.

It's like they're using a baseball bat to bunt the ball. They've never actually used it to swing. And because the ball doesn't go far, and it's so hard to get to first base, they conclude that "bats suck."

That's so stupid. That's so dumb.

Reaching High-Value Targets in Their Native Habitat

In B2B sales verticals—whether you're targeting executives, CMOs, CTOs, or hospital administrators—there is just not enough being done to reach high-value targets in their native habitat.

Where is their native habitat? It's when they're on the toilet. It's when they're on a bus ride, or in an Uber. It's when they are scrolling on their phones.

That is the place where you can reach them with the lowest level of friction. Maybe your target CTO likes fishing. They're scrolling fishing accounts, consuming fishing content, and suddenly your video pops up in their feed because that demographic is part of your targeting.

But if you don't have a commercial, an explainer video, or a demo video that is going to (1) get them to pay attention, and (2) communicate what you need them to hear, you lose.

It may take 4, 8, 12, or 15 times to get in front of them before they decide, "You know what? This is worth my time to check out. Let me go to their website."

If your Head of Marketing is still treating video and native social platforms as an afterthought while blowing the budget on conference sponsorships, they aren't marketing. They're just networking with an expense account.