Stop Letting Silos and “Random Tactics” Wreck Your Agency Marketing

May 22

Written By David Hoos

Interview: How Agencies Build an Intentional Growth Engine (Without the FOMO Trap)

Behind the Agency Podcast with Kate Hamilton, Fractional CMO for Agencies (former agency marketing leader)

Watch

Prefer the highlights? Key takeaways and summary below.

TL;DR – Key Takeaways

Core pain: agencies drift into silos + scattered tactics… and it shows up as messy work and frustrated clients.
Root cause: teams get built in “departments” with separate KPIs, and nobody owns the “walk between teams” job.
Fix #1: shared KPIs/OKRs, but translated so each team knows what they own and how it ladders up.
Fix #2: stop worshipping vanity metrics (traffic, list size). If it doesn’t bring the right buyers, it’s noise.
Big insight: strategy isn’t some fancy deck. It’s a source of truth that makes daily decisions easier and your data interpretable.
Practical approach: use a test-and-learn sprint cadence (fast like a startup, but not chaos).
Growth engine rule: don’t wait until referrals slow down. Keep 1–2 evergreen tactics running in the background.
Anti-FOMO: “Be everywhere” is what people say right before they burn out. Pick channels based on where your audience actually is.

Meet the Guest

Kate Hamilton is a Fractional CMO for agencies. She’s led marketing inside multiple agencies and now helps agency leadership teams build aligned, intentional marketing + sales systems that don’t collapse into siloed departments and random acts of marketing.

Her sweet spot: helping agencies move from referral-reliant growth to a repeatable growth engine—without pretending they have a 20-person marketing department.

(Before fractional work, Kate held marketing leadership roles inside agencies and has built sales + marketing functions from scratch.)

Episode Summary

1. How silos quietly form (and why it’s usually not malicious)

Kate’s take is simple: silos often show up as the org grows and adds specialized teams—SEO, content, dev, etc. Each team gets their own KPIs, and over time the incentives drift apart.

The missing piece is often generalists who can translate across teams—the people who keep everyone rowing the same direction.

2. The hidden cost: clients feel it, and delivery gets bloated

Internal tension doesn’t stay internal. Kate points out it often becomes client frustration and project management overhead (“why does it take so many meetings to do anything?”).

“It’s not malicious… it just kind of naturally evolves. And if you don’t recognize it, you can’t get ahead of it.”

3. Shared KPIs help—but only if you ladder them properly

Shared metrics can reduce turf wars, but the key is translation:

Team-wide goal (OKR/KPI)
Department-level metrics that clearly contribute to it
Otherwise teams stay stuck in their own bubbles (SEO does “SEO stuff,” social does “social stuff,” and nobody can explain impact).

4. Why people skip strategy and jump straight to tactics

Kate’s argument: skipping strategy usually comes from:

fear / reticence to commit (strategy forces choices)
not understanding what strategy actually does

Without strategy, teams become reactionary: chasing competitor moves, copying tactics, and running themselves ragged. With strategy—even a simple one—every tactic has a home, and performance data becomes easier to interpret.

5. Vanity metrics: the “junk food” of marketing

This part was fire because it’s so common. Traffic goes up, everyone celebrates… but leads don’t.

Kate calls out how metrics like traffic, bloated email lists, and “we shipped content” can hide the real question: are we attracting and converting the right buyers?

A quick gut-check she mentioned that I love: you want unengaged subscribers to unsubscribe because they muddy the signal.

6. The bridge between scrappy speed and real strategy: sprint thinking

One of the best practical takeaways: you don’t have to choose between “slow planning” and “chaos execution.”

Kate recommends a test-and-learn sprint mentality:

pick one goal
run a focused campaign
review results quickly
double down or pivot

It’s basically A/B testing…but applied to your whole marketing system, not just paid ads.

7. Building an intentional agency growth engine (especially when referrals are strong)

Kate’s warning: referrals make agencies lazy (her word was basically: you “throw everything else out”). Then referrals slow, and you’re starting from zero when you can least afford it.

Her prescription:

Keep 1–2 evergreen tactics running even when things are good
Cover the journey by choosing one small tactic per stage (awareness, nurture, conversion), based on your team size

This is how you build coverage without creating a monster program you can’t maintain.

8. FOMO channels and “make us like Nike” thinking

Kate gave a great example from her recruitment marketing days: clients demanded Snapchat… but their audience wasn’t there.

Same with brands copying Nike’s website or brand moves without understanding the goal behind them. The better move is to reverse engineer the intent and adapt it to your reality.

She also dropped a line I agree with hard: