How to Avoid Wasting $50,000+ on Inefficient Marketing: Why You Need Traditional Marketing Research

Rushing In vs. Doing Your Homework

In today’s marketing strategy conversations, there’s a buzz around “move fast and break things.” Startups, including those in healthcare marketing, often rush products to market using rapid-fire digital tactics and endless A/B tests. The appeal is understandable: why spend time on surveys or focus groups when you can launch now and figure it out on the fly? But too often, this trial-and-error approach backfires. As a fractional CMO who’s seen the aftermath, I can tell you that skipping foundational marketing research is usually far more costly than doing it right from the start. Companies that bypass traditional research – like customer interviews, surveys, focus groups, and initial concept testing – often end up learning painful and expensive lessons later on. In fact, lack of market insight is a top reason startups fail. In the high-stakes world of healthcare (where trust, compliance, and patient needs are paramount), these mistakes can be especially damaging.

This post will explore why investing in proper research early beats the “launch and see” mentality. We’ll share real (anonymized) examples of what happens when companies neglect research, insights on the limits of quick fixes (and AI tools like ChatGPT), and practical tips to build research into your marketing plan. The goal is to show that a strategic, research-driven approach isn’t a luxury – it’s a necessity for effective marketing and long-term success.

The Temptation of Trial-and-Error Marketing

It’s easy to see why many startups lean into rapid experimentation. Digital marketing platforms make it simple to run A/B tests on ads, webpages, or emails overnight. Leaders may think, “Why spend weeks on interviews or focus groups (and tens of thousands of dollars) when we can get live data by just launching?” In the era of growth hacking, marketing leaders are often under pressure to show immediate results. A/B testing and quick iteration promise fast answers – and they do have a place. The problem is when they replace strategic marketing research entirely.

The truth is that A/B tests can only optimize what you give them. If your initial concept or messaging is off-base, you’re just testing variations of the wrong thing. You might get small upticks here or there, but you risk missing the bigger insight: that the product or positioning itself might need change. Moreover, a majority of A/B tests don’t even yield significant improvements. One study found only 1 in 7 A/B tests produces a winning result – that’s about 14%. In other words, up to 86% of experiments may tell you nothing conclusive. Those odds aren’t great when real money is on the line.

Without foundational research, teams often end up in what I call “digital trial-and-error-hell" – constantly tweaking ads, changing website copy, targeting new segments at random, and burning through marketing dollars. Yes, you’re getting data, but it’s coming at a high price and in a vacuum of context. It’s like trying to crack a safe by spinning the dial randomly; you might get lucky, but more likely you’ll waste a lot of time. All the while, the clock is ticking and the budget is bleeding. And you have your product out there for the world to see with the wrong messaging. How many customers are you alienating forever?

The Hidden Costs of Skipping Research

Skipping traditional research might seem to save time or money upfront, but it usually creates cost inefficiencies that far outweigh the initial “savings.” One obvious cost is wasted marketing spend. If you don’t truly understand your audience, your targeting and messaging are essentially guesses. That can lead to a lot of squandered ad budget. In fact, marketers themselves admit that a large chunk of their budget is wasted. In one survey, marketers estimated 26% of their marketing budget is wasted on ineffective tactics. Other research is even more alarming – suggesting that due to poor planning and execution, up to 60% of marketing budgets can be wasted. Imagine half your marketing dollars doing nothing for you. When companies skip the research phase, this is exactly what happens: money is poured into campaigns that miss the mark.

Time is another hidden cost. Every failed campaign or inconclusive A/B test isn’t just money lost, it’s time lost – time you could have spent doubling down on what actually works. Repeated trial-and-error causes launch delays and opens the door for competitors to race ahead. For example, if it takes you six months of experimenting to figure out what message resonates with patients or physicians, that’s six months a better-researched competitor could be winning the market. Plus, your staff might not be a variable cost, but their time still costs money. Opportunity cost is huge.

There’s also the cost of misalignment. If you rush a product to market based on gut feeling and it doesn’t meet a real need, you might have to pivot or rebuild features later. That is far more expensive than doing some concept testing or exploratory interviews that could have flagged issues early. It’s common knowledge that “no market need” is the #1 startup killer. For healthcare startups, inadequate market research is frequently cited as a primary reason they falter. The financial and reputational hit of a failed launch can be devastating – from wasted R&D investment to layoffs and lost investor confidence – not to mention the personal toll on the team.

Skipping research can even damage your brand. When marketing communications aren’t based on real insights, they can come off as tone-deaf or confusing. In healthcare marketing, for instance, messaging that hasn’t been vetted with actual patients or providers might inadvertently use the wrong terminology or fail to address the trust factors that your audience cares about. I’ve seen companies burn through thousands on glossy digital campaigns only to find out the positioning was fundamentally wrong – something a few focus groups could have told them. Not only does that waste budget, but it also means restarting marketing efforts from scratch to repair the brand’s credibility.

Lastly, consider morale and internal costs. Launching with great fanfare and then hearing crickets is rough on any team. It often leads to panicked “random acts of marketing” – one week the strategy changes to target a new vertical, next week the messaging changes again – creating whiplash internally. All of this chaotic flailing stems from not having clear insights to anchor the strategy. It’s stressful and inefficient for your marketing team, and it can be avoided by doing your homework upfront.

Bottom line: Skipping research isn’t really skipping a cost; it’s trading an upfront cost for a much larger bill later. You either pay with budget waste, time, or painful course-corrections down the road.

Lessons from the Field: When Skipping Marketing Research Leads to Thousands of Wasted Dollars

Let me share a couple of anonymized client stories to illustrate these costs. As a fractional CMO brought in to fix marketing problems, I often get a front-row seat to what happens when research is ignored.

Story 1 – The Misread Market: A digital health startup (let’s call them HealthTechX) developed a B2C wellness app aimed at helping chronic disease patients track their symptoms. The founders were passionate and assumed they knew the patient’s needs. They skipped formal research and went straight into launching the app with a flashy digital campaign. They poured over $100,000 into Facebook and Google Ads, experimenting with different headlines and creatives in rapid sprints. What happened? Initial sign-ups trickled in, but engagement was abysmal – users were downloading the app and not sticking with it. HealthTechX kept A/B testing their onboarding flow and tweaking the UX, trying to find a hook to improve retention. Nothing moved the needle meaningfully. After months of struggling, they finally decided to consult us.

When I joined as a fractional CMO, the first thing I did was pause the expensive campaigns and go back to basics: talk to the users. We conducted in-depth interviews with a dozen people from the target demographic and ran a few moderated focus groups. The insights were eye-opening. We discovered that the app’s core functionality was fine, but the positioning was way off – the marketing emphasized tracking symptoms, but users said what they really needed was guidance on managing those symptoms day-to-day. In essence, HealthTechX was selling a diary, but what the patients wanted was a coach. No amount of ad optimization would have revealed that nuance. We helped the company adjust the product messaging to focus on personalized care tips and community support, features that resonated with what patients told us. We also identified new partnership opportunities (like integrating with popular patient support forums and healthcare influencers in that disease space) based on the research. The result: within a few months of relaunching with research-driven positioning, user engagement and retention improved dramatically. But remember, this turnaround came only after a hefty sum and precious time had been wasted. That $100k+ in ad spend could have been largely saved if they had invested maybe 10% of that upfront in traditional marketing research to get the concept and messaging right.

Story 2 – The Missing Feature for Doctors: Another client, a healthcare SaaS company we’ll call MediSys, built a platform for medical practices to manage patient referrals. They assumed their software’s selling point – an AI-driven referral matching system – was enough to win clinics over. Eager to scale, they skipped formal market validation and started selling aggressively with a small sales team and online ads, testing various sales pitches on the fly. But conversions were far below expectations; clinics showed initial interest but rarely moved forward to purchase. By the time I was called in, MediSys had cycled through dozens of pitch deck iterations and website copy A/B tests trying to find a message that clicked with clinic administrators. Nothing seemed to work consistently, and the company was burning through cash.

My team stepped in to diagnose the issue. We set up phone interviews with potential buyers (clinic managers and doctors) and even a couple of roundtable discussions with folks in the industry. It turned out the issue wasn’t messaging at all – it was a product feature gap that no one internally had fully appreciated. Clinics told us that while the AI matching was nice, what they really needed was better integration with their existing Electronic Health Records (EHR) systems. That was the deal-breaker. MediSys’s marketing and A/B tests kept highlighting speed and AI, but the target customers kept thinking, “We can’t use this if it doesn’t talk to our patient records system.” Armed with this insight, we advised MediSys to temporarily halt their broad marketing push and work on an integration solution (or at least adjust the marketing to communicate a roadmap for integration). This insight came directly from traditional research methods – plain old conversations – not from any fancy multivariate test. By addressing the real customer need, MediSys eventually revived their sales pipeline and even repositioned their product as a seamless add-on to EHR systems, which became a much stronger pitch. But consider the cost of finding out this critical insight so late: nearly a year of underwhelming sales, thousands spent on ads and sales salaries, and a growing skepticism among the sales team and investors. Had they done some upfront interviews or concept testing with doctors, they could have caught this requirement early and saved a lot of headache.

These stories underline a common theme: skipping research is a false economy. It’s like building a ladder taller and taller (more tests, more campaigns) only to find it’s leaning against the wrong wall. In both cases, foundational research uncovered strategic truths that all the iterative testing in the world hadn’t revealed. And as a fractional CMO services provider, I find that much of my job in these situations is essentially doing late what should have been done first – going back to research to inform a new marketing strategy after the initial strategy failed. It’s a costly redo that can be avoided.

Why Foundational Traditional Marketing Research Matters for Strategy

So what exactly does traditional marketing research give you that on-the-fly tactics don’t? In a word: clarity. Foundational research provides the bedrock for all other marketing decisions. Here are some key areas that early research informs, ensuring your marketing strategy is built on solid ground:

• Positioning and Value Proposition: Research helps pinpoint the true pain points and desires of your target audience. Instead of guessing what value will resonate, you learn directly from customers what they care about. For example, you might discover through interviews that your healthcare marketing app isn’t just about convenience, it’s really about patient peace of mind. That insight lets you position your product in a way that’s compelling and unique. Without research, many companies end up positioning themselves on features that they think are important – but that the market simply doesn’t value as much.

  
  

• Messaging that Resonates: The words, tone, and framing you use in marketing can make or break engagement. Foundational research (like message testing or focus groups) lets you craft marketing messages using the language your audience actually uses and responds to. It helps identify which benefits to lead with and which words trigger interest or trust. This is especially crucial in fields like healthcare, where using the wrong terminology or missing the emotional context can alienate your audience. Insights from research ensure your website copy, ads, and sales pitches hit the right notes from the start, rather than cycling through countless versions via A/B testing to find a half-decent message.

  
  

• Efficient Budget Allocation: When you know where your audience is and what influences their decisions, you can spend your marketing budget much more efficiently. Foundational research might reveal, for instance, that your target customers rely heavily on industry webinars and LinkedIn groups, and barely pay attention to Twitter ads. Or that hospital administrators trust industry whitepapers over flashy social media content. Armed with that knowledge, you can focus your budget on the high-impact channels. This prevents the common scenario of scattering budget across five social platforms and three ad networks just to “see what sticks.” Given how precious marketing dollars are (and how wasteful broad stabs can be), this is a huge advantage. Remember that over a quarter of marketing budget is often wasted on the wrong channels or messages – research helps turn that around by identifying the right places to spend.

  
  

• Product Development & Feature Prioritization: Good marketing isn’t just about external promotion – it loops back into the product itself. Early concept testing and feedback interviews can inform which features or services are most valuable to your customers. By understanding what users really need (as in the MediSys story), you can prioritize product features that will actually move the needle. This means you’re not just marketing better, you’re building a more marketable product. It prevents the scenario of launching a product loaded with features that users ignore while missing the one feature they really want. The result is often a more efficient use of development resources and a product that practically markets itself because it fits the market need so well.

  
  

• Brand and Trust Strategy: This is critical in healthcare and other sensitive industries. Foundational research can gauge perceptions and trust factors in your market. What makes your audience trust one brand over another? Is it endorsements by healthcare influencers and key opinion leaders, a certain credential, or tone of communication? Is there skepticism you need to overcome? By researching these questions, you can shape your brand strategy (from your name and logo to your content voice) to build credibility from day one. Skipping this can lead to branding that misses the mark – for instance, a brand that comes off as too casual when the audience wanted authoritative and caring, or vice versa.

  
  

In short, traditional research informs the “big picture” decisions. It’s the compass that guides all the tactics. A/B testing and digital tweaks work best after you’ve set the right direction – not as a way to find the direction in the first place. Foundational insights help ensure you’re doing the right things, not just doing things right. They give your entire marketing strategy a backbone that’s grounded in reality, not assumptions. Every dollar and every day spent on marketing goes further when guided by real market knowledge.

The Limits of AI for Nuanced Insight (Why ChatGPT Won’t Save You)

In the age of advanced AI, a lot of marketers (especially resource-strapped startups) wonder: “Can’t we just use tools like ChatGPT to get insights, instead of conducting lengthy research?” It’s a fair question – after all, ChatGPT and similar AI can generate ideas, summarize information, and even analyze text data to some extent. And indeed, AI can be a helpful aid in the research process (for instance, parsing survey responses or brainstorming questions). But let’s be clear: ChatGPT is not a replacement for real marketing research or human strategic thinking.

AI models like ChatGPT are essentially prediction machines that draw on existing data (in ChatGPT’s case, patterns from text across the internet). They lack the ability to truly understand your unique market on a deep level. Here are a few critical limitations:

• Lack of Context and Nuance: ChatGPT doesn’t truly understand context, it recognizes patterns. It can easily miss subtleties of human sentiment or the “why” behind customer behavior. For example, it might analyze reviews or survey data and tell you “customers mention price a lot,” but it won’t grasp the nuanced emotional drivers or hesitations behind those mentions the way a live interview would. AI struggles with cultural nuances, sarcasm, or industry-specific meaning that isn’t explicit. Marketing often turns on these subtleties – the kind you can only get from qualitative research and human analysis.

  
  

• Generic or Oversimplified Insights: Because AI draws from general training data, it often produces generic answers. If you ask ChatGPT “What do patients care about in a healthcare app?” you’ll get a generic list: privacy, ease of use, accuracy, etc. That’s fine, but it’s nothing you couldn’t have guessed. It won’t reveal the unexpected insight specific to your product and audience (for instance, in our earlier story it would not have pinpointed “patients want a coach, not a diary”). Moreover, AI tends to oversimplify complex human behavior, potentially leading you down a wrong path with false confidence. If you rely on it blindly, you may end up doubling down on a strategy that sounds plausible in theory but doesn’t hold up in reality.

  
  

• Data Quality and Bias Issues: ChatGPT is only as good as its training data. It doesn’t have real-time knowledge of your customers unless you feed it that data. Even then, interpreting that data via AI can reflect biases. If the data it’s trained on has gaps or biases, the AI’s output will mirror those. For example, if you’re targeting an underrepresented patient group, there might be very little relevant information in the AI’s training data about their needs – leading to inaccurate assumptions. AI might confidently assert something that isn’t actually true for your niche market. That’s dangerous if you take it at face value.

  
  

• No Original Research or Empathy: Perhaps most importantly, AI can’t empathize or ask spontaneous follow-up questions. It can’t read body language in a focus group, or sense the hesitation in a customer’s voice during an interview and then dig deeper. It won’t capture the storytelling and personal anecdotes that often hold the real gems of insight. Those human elements are critical for understanding how to emotionally connect with your audience, especially in healthcare where trust and empathy are huge factors.

  
  

In my experience, some companies tried to short-circuit the research phase by using AI to simulate what their customers might say. The result? A false sense of security. AI might produce a very convincing report or persona outline, but it’s essentially a mash-up of what’s already known widely – it won’t uncover new truths about your specific audience. That’s a job for human-led research.

This isn’t to say AI tools have no value. They can augment your research – for instance, summarizing large sets of qualitative data or suggesting interpretations that a team can then verify. They’re great for efficiency and brainstorming. But they have to be used with caution and always cross-checked against reality. One best practice is to use AI to process data (e.g., summarize 100 survey open-end responses), but then have a human expert interpret those summaries and derive strategy, applying contextual knowledge that AI lacks.

The critical takeaway: Don’t let the convenience of AI lure you into thinking you’ve done “research.” Real strategic insight comes from human-curated understanding – talking to customers, hearing their stories, observing their behavior, and synthesizing that through experience. ChatGPT can assist, but it cannot replace the nuance and strategic depth that traditional research and expert analysis provide.

How to Use Traditional Research Early

Knowing you need research is one thing; implementing it is another. How can you practically integrate traditional marketing research into your early marketing plan without blowing your timeline or budget? Here are some actionable tips to get you started on a research-driven path:

1. Start with Exploratory Interviews: Before you spend a dime on marketing campaigns, spend time talking to 5-10 people who resemble your target customers. These could be informal chats, but have a discussion guide ready. Ask open-ended questions: “What are your biggest challenges with X today?” “How do you currently solve Y?” “What would an ideal solution look like?” In healthcare, for example, if you’re launching a medical device or health app, talk to both the end-users (patients, nurses, etc.) and other stakeholders (doctors, IT admins for hospital tech, etc.). These interviews will often surface red flags and golden nuggets alike – maybe you’ll learn that patients worry more about data privacy than you thought, or that doctors wouldn’t use a tool that isn’t integrated into their workflow (as in the MediSys story). Exploratory interviews are arguably the most high-value research for the cost and time – they can prevent you from chasing the wrong idea early on.

   
   

2. Survey for Quantitative Validation: Once you have some hypotheses from interviews, design a small survey to get quantitative backup. Your survey can validate how widespread certain needs or preferences are. For instance, if interviews suggest that “trust in data security” is a big concern for users of your health app, survey a larger sample to see how many potential users share that concern and how it ranks against other factors like cost or convenience. Tools like SurveyMonkey or Typeform make it relatively easy to run targeted surveys. Yes, surveys take effort (and maybe an incentive budget to get responses), but they provide concrete numbers to inform your decisions. Knowing that, say, 60% of your audience prioritizes integration with existing tools over any AI bells and whistles gives you a clear mandate on what to emphasize. You can also use surveys to test reactions to a value proposition statement or tagline – present a couple of options and ask which one resonates more and why.

   
   

3. Focus Groups or Concept Testing: If you have a prototype, a mock-up, or even just a concept description, get it in front of a small group of representative users before a big launch. This could be a focus group (virtual or in-person) or one-on-one user testing sessions. For example, a healthcare startup could host a roundtable of 5 patients or doctors to walk through the concept and gather feedback. Watch how they react, ask what they like or don’t understand. Focus groups can reveal emotional reactions and group consensus points that surveys might miss. Initial concept testing in a controlled setting will highlight any major tweaks needed in your product or messaging. It’s much better to discover in a focus group that people are confused by your pricing or skeptical of your claims than to discover it after you’ve spent $50k on an ad campaign. Make sure to prepare a few specific questions or tasks for the session, but also let the conversation flow – sometimes the offhand comments are the most enlightening.

   
   

4. Pilot Messaging with a Small Budget: Before rolling out a massive marketing campaign, test your marketing messages on a smaller scale. This can be done by running a small pilot campaign in a contained environment. For instance, you might run a limited LinkedIn ad campaign targeting just one segment of your audience with a specific message that your research suggested would work, or even simpler, use an email newsletter or a forum to gauge interest in your new positioning. Another approach is to create a landing page for the product concept and drive a small amount of paid traffic to it as a litmus test (essentially a smoke test). The key is to use a small budget to validate that your messaging (and the underlying value prop) actually resonates and drives action. Measure the response: click-through rates, sign-ups, inquiries – whatever the desired action is. If it falls flat, revisit the messaging or positioning with the insights gathered, potentially even follow up with some of those who didn’t respond to ask why. The idea is to fail fast and cheaply in a controlled way, rather than in a big, public (and expensive) way. This approach blends traditional research (qualitative insights) with a bit of real-world testing to validate those insights, providing a one-two punch before you go big.

   
   

5. Research Your Channels and Influencers: Not all marketing channels are equal, especially in niches like healthcare. Use research to find out where your target audience actually consumes information and whom they trust. Early on, ask your interviewees and survey respondents questions like “Where do you typically hear about new solutions in this space?” or “Whose opinion do you trust when it comes to [healthcare topic]?” Their answers might point you to industry conferences, specific online communities, or influential figures (e.g., healthcare influencers such as medical professionals active on LinkedIn or Twitter, patient advocacy bloggers, etc.). This is vital because it guides your go-to-market plan. If your research shows that, say, hospital administrators rely heavily on word-of-mouth and industry webinars, then pouring money into generic Google Ads may be less effective than sponsoring a webinar or getting a respected industry figure to endorse your product. By identifying the right channels and influencers early, you can focus your marketing efforts where they’re most likely to gain traction, rather than spreading yourself thin everywhere.

   
   

6. Document and Socialize Insights: This tip is more internal, but very important. As you gather all this research, document the insights clearly and make sure your team (and investors, if appropriate) understand them. Create a simple report or presentation on what you learned – key customer pain points, what messaging works, what doesn’t, who the target really is, etc. This becomes the foundation of your marketing strategy and helps get everyone aligned. It also prevents the HIPPO (highest paid person’s opinion) effect from derailing strategy, because you can point back to “remember, 8 out of 10 customers we talked to said this is their top priority – so let’s stay focused on that.” When everyone is on the same page about the research insights, your marketing execution will be far more consistent and effective.

   
   

By integrating these steps, you essentially build a research loop into your early marketing planning. It doesn’t have to be expensive or painfully slow. You can do a lot even on a scrappy budget – e.g., customer interviews cost next to nothing besides your time, and they can even save you from building features people won’t use or prevent a messaging mishap. The key is to treat research not as a luxury or a one-time task, but as an integral part of how you craft your marketing strategy from the ground up. It’s the best insurance policy against costly mistakes.

Why You Need a Fractional CMO for a Research-Driven Strategy

If you’re reading this and thinking, “This all makes sense, but who in my organization is going to drive this kind of research and strategic planning?”, you’re not alone. Many startups and even growth-stage companies lack seasoned marketing leadership to steer these efforts. This is where fractional CMO services come into play – and why you might need a fractional CMO sooner than you think.

A fractional CMO is essentially an experienced Chief Marketing Officer you hire on a part-time or contract basis. They bring executive-level strategic expertise without the full-time cost of a permanent CMO. When it comes to ensuring a research-driven marketing strategy, a fractional CMO can be a game-changer:

• Strategic Insight and Experience: A fractional CMO has likely seen the fallout from skipping research before (I certainly have, as illustrated in the stories above). They come in with pattern recognition – knowing the common pitfalls and the critical pieces of insight needed for different types of businesses. This means they’ll insist on getting those insights early. An experienced marketing leader will make sure your positioning, messaging, and campaign plans are built on evidence, not just enthusiasm. In essence, they act as the voice of strategic reason on your team, championing the market’s perspective at the decision table.

  
  

• Objective Perspective: As an outsider with broad experience, a fractional CMO can more objectively assess your situation and push for necessary research without internal biases. Founders and internal teams can sometimes be too close to the product; they might assume they are the customer or that they already “know” the market. A fractional CMO often starts by asking, “What do we actually know versus what are we assuming?” They can identify gaps in knowledge and argue for filling them (e.g., “We’ve never actually validated this with customers – let’s do that first.”). This objective view can save companies from dangerous blind spots.

  
  

• Efficient Execution of Research: Knowing the value of research is one thing, but designing and executing it well is another. Fractional CMOs usually have a toolkit of resources and methods for conducting market research quickly and effectively. They might have relationships with research firms or know how to run a lean customer interview program, how to craft survey questions that yield useful data, or how to analyze the findings in a strategic way. Rather than you figuring it out by trial and error, a seasoned CMO can plug in tried-and-true approaches. They’ll ensure that the research phase has clear objectives, is conducted professionally, and yields actionable insights (not just a data dump).

  
  

• Translating Insight into Strategy: One of the biggest challenges is not just gathering data, but translating it into a cohesive marketing strategy (positioning, targeting, channel mix, budget allocation, etc.). A fractional CMO excels at this translation. They can take the jumble of interview quotes, survey stats, and market data and distill it into a clear plan: “Given what we’ve learned, here’s who our ideal customer is, here’s the value proposition that will set us apart, here’s the messaging hierarchy we should use, and here’s how we’ll go to market in phases.” That strategic roadmap is something many teams struggle to create on their own, especially if they haven’t done it before or are stretched thin fighting day-to-day fires.

  
  

• Flexibility and Cost-Effectiveness: The beauty of a fractional CMO is you get top-tier guidance without the full-time salary. For early-stage companies or those in transition (like after a failed launch), this is ideal. You may not need a full-time CMO yet, but you desperately need the strategic course-correction and research-driven planning that a CMO provides. Fractional arrangements let you engage this expertise in a scalable way – maybe a few days a month or a specific project – to lay the groundwork, set up the research, and get the strategy in shape. It’s an approach we use at Orr Consulting to give startups the firepower of strategic marketing leadership exactly when they need it, and it often costs a fraction of the price of continuous trial-and-error marketing mistakes.

  
  

In sum, engaging a fractional CMO is about injecting seasoned strategic thinking into your company at the right time. They serve as the champion for doing things right – ensuring marketing research underpins your decisions – and they equip your team with a solid strategy that can be executed confidently. If you’ve ever found yourself pivoting messaging every other week, unsure why your campaigns aren’t hitting, or realizing you don’t truly know your customer, that’s why you need a fractional CMO. It’s about having someone who’s been there, done that, to steer you onto a research-backed path and set you up for marketing success.

Invest in Research, Reap the Rewards

In the race to capture markets and show quick wins, it’s tempting to cut corners on traditional research. But as we’ve explored, failing to lay a proper foundation of customer insight is a gamble that usually doesn’t pay off. Rushing to market without understanding your market is like flying blind – you might get somewhere, but it’s likely to be the wrong destination, and you’ll burn a lot of fuel along the way. On the flip side, investing time and resources into foundational research early on is one of the smartest moves a company can make. It guides your marketing strategy, making every campaign more targeted and effective. It exposes potential pitfalls in your product or approach before they become expensive mistakes. And in industries like healthcare, it ensures you navigate the nuances of trust, compliance, and complex decision-making with eyes wide open.

Yes, modern tools and agile tactics are powerful – by all means, use A/B testing, use digital marketing, and leverage AI where it helps – but don’t use them as a crutch to avoid the hard but rewarding work of understanding your customers. The most successful marketing strategies blend old-school research with new-school tactics, marrying deep insight with smart experimentation.

If you’re a marketing leader or startup executive reading this, ask yourself: are we truly as informed about our customers as we could be? Are our marketing investments as efficient as they should be, or are we seeing signs of wasted spend and strategy swirl? If the answer is uneasy, it might be time to pause and refocus on your foundation. This is exactly where Orr Consulting can help. We specialize in providing fractional CMO services that bring an outside perspective and strategic rigor to your marketing. We’ll help you conduct the right research, derive meaningful insights, and build a marketing plan that stands on solid ground.

Don’t wait for a costly failure to be the catalyst. You can start making your marketing more research-driven today. Whether you need an audit of your current strategy, guidance on executing customer research, or ongoing strategic leadership, we’re here to help. Let’s ensure your next big idea is built on insight, not guesswork – and that your marketing dollars truly count.

Ready to put research at the heart of your marketing strategy? Reach out to Orr Consulting for a consultation. It’s time to swap trial-and-error for a smarter, more informed approach that will drive real results. Your marketing success story can start with a simple conversation – let’s talk!