They Didn’t Need More Marketing. They Needed a Marketing System.

I recently worked with an outdoor experience business in Milwaukee called Forward Outdoor.

On paper, they already had many of the things you would want in a growing tourism business: passionate founders, a strong product, a genuine connection to their destination and plenty of opportunities for growth. They offer kayaking, paddleboarding, hydrobikes and other ways for people to experience Milwaukee from the water, but what struck me fairly quickly was that their problem wasn’t a lack of ideas. If anything, they had too many.

There were opportunities around corporate groups, local residents, partnerships, events, content, email, paid advertising, new locations and community initiatives. Like many entrepreneurial businesses, the founders could see possibilities everywhere. The difficulty was that the marketing operation hadn’t grown at the same pace as the business.

Different people were doing different things, content was being created, ideas were being discussed, but there wasn’t enough ownership, measurement or structure pulling everything together. The founders were still being dragged into decisions, approvals and follow-up when they should have been spending their time running and growing the business.

It would have been very easy to respond by recommending more marketing. More content. More advertising. More SEO. More partnerships. More campaigns. In fact, nearly all of those things could eventually help them, but adding more activity at that point would only have created more complexity. So rather than beginning with channels or campaigns, I started by trying to understand what was actually getting in the way.

That is a distinction I think marketers sometimes miss. The visible problem may be marketing, but the cause is often something underneath it.

The first job was understanding what they were really selling

Forward Outdoor rents kayaks, paddleboards, paddle boats and hydrobikes, but nobody wakes up on a Saturday morning desperately wanting to rent a piece of equipment. They want to spend time with their family. They want to do something different with their partner. They want to get away from screens, see their city from a different perspective or try something they have never done before.

For many of their potential customers, particularly first-timers, there was another layer. They liked the idea of getting onto the water, but there was uncertainty attached to it. Would they know what they were doing? Would their children be okay? What happened if somebody fell in? What should they wear? Where did they park? Which experience was right for them? These aren’t minor operational questions. They are often the difference between somebody thinking, “That looks fun,” and actually making a booking.

That led us to a much clearer position for the business: Milwaukee’s easiest way to reconnect with nature. It shifted the emphasis away from the equipment and towards what Forward Outdoor could credibly own: accessibility, reassurance, connection and confidence. Their competitors could offer kayaks. They could compete on price. They could copy an offer. It is much harder to copy the way a customer feels about a business.

Once we understood that, the website needed to do a different job too. It could no longer simply tell people what they could rent and where. It needed to help people make a decision. A nervous first-timer or family needed to feel, “I’ll be safe, capable and welcome.” A local repeat customer needed reasons to return and think of Forward Outdoor as part of how they enjoy Milwaukee. A corporate organiser had a completely different set of concerns: Will everybody enjoy this? What happens if it rains? How much work will this create for me? Will choosing this make me look good internally?

Those are three different customers with three different emotional needs, yet businesses constantly try to squeeze people like this through the same generic web page. So part of the work became creating clearer routes through the site, including a dedicated first-time customer experience that directly addresses uncertainty and a much stronger corporate proposition designed around the needs of the organiser rather than simply listing group activities.

There is a broader marketing lesson in that. Removing uncertainty is not just something a tourism business does in its FAQ section. In many cases, removing uncertainty is the product.

Then we found the real bottleneck

Clarifying the brand and customer journey was important, but it still wasn’t the biggest issue. Somebody actually had to own the marketing.

As we dug further into the business, it became clear that two quite different marketing roles had effectively been bundled together. One role was marketing leadership: strategy, measurement, campaign management, reporting, contractor management, CRM, commercial follow-up and building a corporate pipeline. The other was content capture: being on the ground in Milwaukee, taking photographs, filming customers, gathering stories and showing what the experience really feels like.

Those are not the same job. They require different skills, different temperaments and very different amounts of time. Once we separated them, much of the frustration around marketing started to make sense. What looked like an individual performance problem was really a structural problem in how the work had been defined and resourced. That distinction mattered because the solution wasn’t simply to replace somebody and hope the next person magically solved everything. The job itself had to be properly designed first.

This is something I see in growing businesses fairly regularly. An owner hires a “marketing person” and expects them to handle social media, content, strategy, advertising, partnerships, analytics, email, website updates and sales support. The person may be perfectly capable at two or three of those things, but the role itself is impossible. When the marketing underperforms, everyone assumes the individual is the problem when, in reality, nobody ever defined what success looked like.

For Forward Outdoor, the answer was to create clearer ownership. One accountable marketing lead, one shared system, a short weekly meeting, explicit priorities and named owners for each action. Just as importantly, there needed to be a stop list. New ideas could still exist, but they couldn’t automatically become new priorities.

I said something to the founders during the process that has stuck with me: they didn’t have a shortage of ideas; they had a shortage of finished ones. That applies to a lot of businesses.

Marketing also had to become commercial

Another part of the work involved measurement. Forward Outdoor was already using FareHarbor for bookings, but like many experience businesses, the booking system was primarily being treated as the place where transactions happened. I wanted it to become part of the management information for the business.

That meant creating a simple weekly view of the things that actually matter: what sold, where the booking came from, how much revenue was generated, where capacity was being used or wasted and which products were contributing commercially. The objective wasn’t to build some enormous dashboard that everybody would stop looking at after three weeks. It was to create a dependable commercial truth that could inform marketing decisions every Monday.

That also changes the way you think about advertising. It is tempting to turn on Google Ads or Meta because you want more demand, but without understanding capacity, margins, conversion and booking sources, you can easily end up buying traffic without understanding whether it is actually helping the business. Clicks, impressions and reach are useful diagnostic numbers, but none of them pay the wages.

The same thinking applied to the customer database. Forward Outdoor had customers who had already raised their hands and said, “I like this,” yet the relationship could very easily end once they got out of the kayak. So the strategy moved towards building a proper CRM and email system around the customer lifecycle: reassuring first-timers, reducing pre-arrival anxiety, requesting reviews afterwards, encouraging customers to progress from one experience to another, following up corporate enquiries and bringing previous customers back.

For me, this is also where the conversation about OTAs becomes more interesting. OTAs can be excellent acquisition channels, particularly for visitors who may never discover you directly, but they become dangerous when they replace the customer relationship rather than supplement it. The long-term value of a tourism business sits in the audience, reputation and relationships it actually owns.

The content problem wasn’t really a content problem either

Forward Outdoor was also producing content, but I wanted to change the way the team thought about it. Rather than asking, “What should we post this week?” the better question was, “What stories did we create this week?”

An experience business creates marketing material every day. Somebody tries paddleboarding for the first time and realises they can do it. A nervous child ends up loving the water. A couple sees a part of Milwaukee they have never noticed before. A corporate team laughs at the colleague who falls in. A guide tells a brilliant local story. These moments are considerably more valuable than another generic photograph announcing that there is availability this weekend.

The job is to create a system that notices those moments, captures them properly and then uses them more than once. A good customer story can become a short film, a blog article, an email, social content, website proof and even sales material. That allows content to become an asset rather than an endless production treadmill. The strategy therefore moved towards a much more realistic cadence based around founder stories, guide stories, real customer reactions and Milwaukee itself, rather than trying to win an imaginary prize for the number of social posts published each week.

What changed

The outcome of the work wasn’t simply a new tagline or a long strategy document. It was a much clearer operating model for the marketing.

Forward Outdoor had a stronger understanding of what it was really selling, who its priority audiences were and what stopped those audiences from buying. The website had a clearer purpose. Corporate opportunities could be treated as a proper sales pipeline rather than an occasional enquiry. Customer relationships could continue after the experience through CRM and email. Reviews and customer stories became part of the growth engine. Marketing roles could be properly defined, with much less dependence on the founders to keep everything moving.

Most importantly, the next 90 days were narrowed down rather than expanded. Instead of trying to pursue every possible opportunity, the strategy focused on a handful of outcomes around ownership, commercial visibility, website conversion, the owned audience and proof, and two growth engines: first-time customers and corporate groups.

That is the part of strategy I probably enjoy most. It is rarely about producing the longest possible list of things a business could do. Most ambitious businesses already know hundreds of things they could do.

The value is in working out what matters now, what can wait, what the business is actually capable of executing and who is going to own it.

Forward Outdoor didn’t need somebody to walk in and give them another 50 marketing ideas. They needed somebody to look across the brand, customer journey, people, systems, resources and commercial realities and make sense of how they fitted together.

And I suspect there are a lot of growing businesses in exactly the same position. They don’t really have a marketing activity problem. They have a clarity problem disguised as one.