In September 2023, Shanti Pereira crossed the finish line to win Singapore's first gold medal in 49 years at the 19th Asian Games, the women's 200m sprint in Hangzhou. It was a watershed moment for Singapore sport. But what made the story genuinely instructive wasn't the medal itself. It was how she got there.
Between 2015 and 2022, Pereira's performance had stagnated. The talent was there. The effort was there. What was missing was the right coaching. When she partnered with Luis Cunha, a former Olympic sprinter who had competed across three Games, everything changed. His approach focused on incremental, highly specific improvements: posture, stride mechanics, left-foot drive. Precise, honest, personalised feedback applied consistently over time.
This is exactly what most SME marketing teams are missing. And it's the gap that no amount of new software or AI subscriptions will close on its own.
How a coach changes your marketing game
The principles that made Cunha an exceptional athletics coach map cleanly onto what separates a genuine marketing coach from a consultant who drops in, produces a report, and disappears. Here's what those principles look like in practice.
1. A great coach finds your real weaknesses and tells you what to do about them
Cunha didn't hand Pereira a 40-page biomechanics report and call it done. He identified a specific, fixable issue: her left-foot drive. Then he built a targeted intervention around it. The difference between that and a performance review is enormous.
Most SME marketing teams are drowning in data. Google Analytics, Meta Ads Manager, email open rates, SEO rankings. The dashboards are full. What they lack is someone to look at all of that and say: “Your problem isn't your ad creative. It's the landing page your ads are pointing to, and here's the specific thing that's killing your conversion rate.” That kind of diagnosis requires experience. The pattern-recognition that only comes from having seen the same problem across dozens of campaigns before.
2. A great coach doesn't give you special treatment
One of the subtler markers of a strong coach is consistency. Cunha applied the same technical standards to Pereira that he would to any athlete at her level. No adjustments because she's locally beloved. No leniency because the training environment wasn't perfect. The standard was the standard.
For SME marketing teams, this matters more than it sounds. Without external benchmarks, it's easy to convince yourself that your performance is acceptable because it's better than last quarter. A good marketing coach holds you to the standard of what's actually possible, not just what's possible given your current constraints. That honest comparison is often the most valuable thing a coach provides.
3. A great coach guides you, but makes you do the work
Cunha's job was not to run the 200m for Pereira. His job was to build her capability so that when she was alone on that track in Hangzhou, she had the judgment to execute without him.
This is the critical distinction between coaching and outsourcing. When you outsource your marketing, the expertise leaves with the agency. When you're coached, the expertise stays with your team. In practice, this means a marketing coach should be reviewing your team's actual decisions: the campaign structure they built, the brief they wrote, the AI prompt they used. Correcting in real time. Not doing it for them. Showing them the principle, then watching them apply it.
“The goal of good coaching is to make itself unnecessary over time. If you're still as dependent after six months as on day one, something is wrong.”
4. A great coach puts your interests above their own revenue
This is perhaps the most important one, and the hardest to find in practice. Cunha's credibility came partly from the fact that his recommendations were clearly in service of Pereira's performance, not in service of extending the engagement or justifying his own methods.
In digital marketing, this is rarer than it should be. Agencies have an incentive to keep you on retainer. Tool vendors have an incentive to convince you their platform solves the problem. A genuine marketing coach should tell you when notto buy a tool, when a channel isn't worth your budget, and when the honest answer is that the strategy needs to change, even if that means a shorter engagement.
The 4 Principles at a glance
Diagnose real weaknesses
Precise root-cause analysis, not surface metrics. Like Cunha isolating left-foot drive, not handing back a report.
Hold the same standard
No special treatment. Your performance measured against what's actually possible, not just last quarter.
Guide you, not replace you
Expertise transfers to your team and stays there. The goal is independence, not dependency.
Your interests, not theirs
A real coach tells you when NOT to buy a tool, cut a channel, or extend an engagement.
Why this matters more for SME marketing teams
Enterprise marketing teams have built-in feedback loops: CMOs, channel specialists, peer benchmarks, quarterly business reviews. Even without external coaching, there are enough internal checks that major strategic drift tends to get caught.
SME marketing teams typically don't have this. A team of one to three people, often wearing multiple hats, is the norm. There is no one internally to say “your attribution model is wrong” or “you're optimising for the wrong metric.” Without external coaching, blind spots compound quietly over months and years.
This problem has become more acute with AI tools. The promise of AI-assisted marketing is real, but it's also a force multiplier for whatever strategy is already in place. AI doesn't correct a bad strategy. It scales it. A team producing mediocre content can produce mediocre content faster. A team with poor campaign structure can reach more people with that poor structure, more efficiently.
“AI doesn't correct a bad strategy. It scales it. SME teams that are getting real results from AI fixed their strategic foundations first.”
The SME teams that are genuinely getting results from AI marketing are the ones who fixed their strategic foundations first. Coaching is often the fastest path to that foundation.
Training vs coaching in digital marketing
Training and coaching are not opposites. Done well, they complement each other. But they serve different functions, and understanding the difference helps you know which one your team actually needs right now.
What good digital marketing coaching looks like in practice
Good coaching isn't a monthly Zoom call where someone reviews your dashboards and nods. It has a specific structure:
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Real feedback on live campaigns
Not case studies or hypotheticals. Your actual ad sets, your actual email sequences, your actual landing pages, reviewed against proven frameworks and corrected in real time.
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Strategy sessions, not reporting reviews
The distinction matters. A reporting review tells you what happened. A strategy session tells you why, and what to do differently. Coaching is the latter.
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Accountability that survives a busy quarter
One of the most underrated functions of a coach is holding a consistent standard when the business gets noisy. Without external accountability, good marketing habits are usually the first casualty of a busy month.
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Honest guidance on AI tools specifically
A marketing coach should be able to tell you which AI tools will genuinely add value to your current stack, which ones are solving a problem you don't have, and how to prompt and configure the ones you do use.
About the author
Hendry Goh
Co-Founder · Hackalogy
Hendry is a digital marketing strategist and educator with 15+ years working with businesses across government, technology, and commercial sectors. He holds an MSc in Computer Science from NUS with a specialisation in AI, and combines that technical grounding with hands-on campaign experience across SEO, paid media, content, and analytics.