A Field Guide for Mid-Market CEOs

What CEOs of mid-market companies should know about marketing.

A guide for CEOs of $20M+ companies who are tired of being sold to.

By Mike Black, Founder, Ignition Canvas

The Territory

Five stations.
One summit.

Each principle is a waypoint. You can read them in order or jump straight to the one you’re sitting with right now.

Plate I. The Territory — Four Stations, One Summit, One Trap.

  • Station
  • Through-Trail
  • Off-Path
01 02 03 04
Trailhead start here
01
Pick a Partner How to choose a marketing agency
02
Ground It in Research Strategy grounded in data
03
Craft a Brand Promise A promise ops can keep
04
Fund What You Measure Measuring marketing ROI
Summit
△
Avoid Shiny Objects the trap · off-path

There is no shortage of marketing advice on the internet. Most of it is bad, and a lot of it is contradictory. Social media and LinkedIn outreach will save you. No, SEO will. No, AI will. No, it’s all about AEO. Run more ads. Run fewer ads. Hire an agency. Fire your agency. Build an internal team.

CEOs complain that agency solutions involve more spend with no business case behind it. It is often just a fancy new trend, which is another shiny object that wastes money. When they build a team, they find that the variety of skills required makes talent hard to find.

I have spent close to twenty years in this work. So I have opinions, and I will not pretend otherwise.

If you are running a middle-market company trying to figure out marketing, here are the five grounding principles I share whenever a CEO asks me. These principles won’t guarantee a good return on your marketing investment, but ignoring them almost guarantees you won’t see one.

The Five Principles

The territory, principle by principle.

Each one stands alone. Read in order for the full guided trail, or jump straight to the question you’re sitting with right now.

⚠ Avoid Shiny Objects

Shiny objects are where marketing goes to die.

The trap isn't just vendors selling you the latest acronym. It's also you, hearing about a success and telling your team to chase it. Both produce the same outcome: a pile of disconnected efforts that nobody can measure.

Read the warning
01 Pick a Partner

The agency that has to upsell you didn't earn the business in the first place.

In some agency relationships, every quarterly business review becomes a sales pitch. The model I believe in is the opposite: we earn the retainer every quarter, or the relationship ends. Watch how a firm behaves before you've signed anything.

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02 Ground It in Research

If a recommendation isn't grounded in data, it's just an opinion.

Most marketing strategy is a smart team in a conference room with a whiteboard. The output is creative, well-designed, and could have been written for any of fifteen other companies in the same industry. Real strategy comes from triangulating customer interviews, competitive analysis, and your internal data.

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03 Craft a Brand Promise

Marketing and sales are a promise that operations has to keep.

Every claim your marketing makes is a check your operations team has to cash. The brand promise isn't a slogan. It's an operational metric, and the only question that matters is whether you're delivering it every time.

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04 Fund What You Can Measure

If you can't measure it, don't fund it.

Most marketing plans never come back in ninety days to ask whether the work actually worked. Before a campaign launches, you should be able to answer four questions about how you'll measure it. If you can't, what you have isn't a recommendation. It's a hope.

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I am writing this as the founder of a firm that does this work, so take it for what it’s worth. But I’d rather you read this and decide not to hire us than read a glossy proposal and hire us for the wrong reasons. We are not a fit for every company, and not every company is a good fit for us.

Your next stage of growth requires research that informs strategy, strategy that drives tactics, tactics tied to numbers, and a partner whose business model doesn’t depend on upselling you.

If that sounds like the kind of work you want to do, my door is open. If it sounds like more rigor than you have appetite for right now, that is also fair, and I would rather you know that before we talk.

— Mike

Frequently Asked Questions

CEOs of mid-market companies, roughly $20M and up, who are tired of being sold to by marketing vendors. It's most useful for CEOs who are skeptical of marketing as a category, have been burned by an agency or a campaign that didn't deliver, or are trying to figure out whether their current marketing investment is working.
No. Each principle stands alone. They build on each other if you read them in order, but you can land on any one of them and get value. If you only have time for one, start with whichever principle matches the question you're sitting with right now.
Depends on the work, the volume, and your bench. In-house is the right call when the work is recurring, when you need someone in the building daily, and when the volume justifies a full-time hire. An agency makes sense when you need depth across multiple specialties (strategy, paid media, SEO, brand) without paying for five full-time people, or when you need outside perspective on what's actually working. Most mid-market companies end up with both — a small in-house team for execution, an agency for strategy and specialist work.
We build marketing strategies for mid-market companies grounded in research, tied to measurement, and aligned with what operations can actually deliver. We work on retainer with a small number of clients at a time. Our oldest relationship is over twelve years.
Most marketing advice is selling you a tactic. This guide is the principles I'd share with a CEO at coffee — what to look for, what to avoid, and how to tell the difference between a strategy and a collection of activities. There's no tactic in it. The tactics come after.
Yes. The form at the top of this page will email you the full guide as a PDF, including all five principles and the closing.


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