I recently conducted a survey to learn more about what was holding people back from taking charge of their marketing strategy and the one answer - given in a bunch of different ways - was TIME. I get it.
As a marketing strategist who’s worked on projects for organizations ranging from 1-woman shops, to 60-person nonprofits, to multinational corporations - time is always a problem. For small organizations with little or no marketing staff, this is true times a million. And for good reason!
Marketing feels too big to tackle
If you’re just getting started in marketing, or it’s not your primary job, one of the biggest hurdles is simply knowing where to begin. Maybe you googled “where to start a marketing plan,” looked at the millions of articles telling you to start in different vague places, closed your computer, and decided to go for a walk instead. Understandable!
But kid, you gotta start somewhere. I’ll give you a hint - it isn’t in SaaS stacks or AI or any other shiny object of the digital marketing revolution. It’s with people - you and your audience. And it should always be there. Still, lots of ways to learn more about yourself and your audience. So, here’s what to do next: dedicate time to learn more about both.
This might look like setting aside 30 minutes a week to research ways to get audience insights, it might be talking to one customer a week. The point is to start with this one piece and make the time for it.
You’re already doing a bunch of other stuff
Oh my gosh how I Iong for everyone to know that doing ALL of the digital marketing is not the same as doing good digital marketing.
I remember when Vine and Periscope came out. I was directing marketing communications for Stonyfield at the time and we were just hitting our stride on Instagram and with social ad buys. One of my team members asked if we should get on vine, too, and my answer was a quick and decisive “no.” If we’d had our main social channels on lock, if we had a larger team, if we had a bigger budget, and if we had a target consumer that made Vine the place to be, I would have said “hell yes!”
But we had limited resources, we were already doing Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram full throttle, and I really didn’t think either of those platforms would last. (Anyone wanna take bets on Clubhouse?) So, we got back to making our existing platforms better and let the trend pass us by.
Chances are you’re already doing some form of marketing - from your email newsletter to a moderately tended Insta. Instead of trying to figure out what else you need to do, dedicate that time to doing those things really well first.
Then, of course, there’s all the other work you’re doing - running programs or managing teams or finding funders. Fun fact - that work directly relates to what you should be talking about in your marketing. Your messaging should be on top of everything else you’re doing - it should be about everything else you’re doing. It really is that simple.
Decision makers at the top don’t get it
When asked about their biggest challenge in developing and executing a marketing strategy, one of my survey respondents said “Getting older decision makers to agree to fancy tactics like ‘the internet.’” I LOL’d. A tale as old as time! I can only imagine the prehistoric elders looking at the first cave painting and being like “who wants to look at that mess?”
We forget - a lot - that marketing is scary on a lot of levels. It takes time, costs money, and there’s no guarantee that it will work for sure. But it’s also putting your business out into the world and hoping the world loves you.
In the early days of Facebook, I was working for a company called Irving Oil as their US public affairs director. My Canadian counterpart won a meeting with the executives of Facebook Canada and invited me to join her. It was there, in 2009, I learned that Facebook was not a warm and fuzzy community building platform, but an ad generating machine, and it was going to be an inevitable part of the marketing ecosystem. We had to get in there.
But my GM was not exactly thrilled with the idea. Not because of resources, but because he was afraid someone would say something mean. So, we convinced him that people were already saying mean things - now we could see it, and respond if we needed to. That social marketing wasn’t creating vulnerability but empowerment, it was agreeing to join the conversation and build relationships.
At Stonyfield, on the other hand, I hired a glorious numbers nerd who quantified the ROI of every social ad spend. We parked ourselves in the CEO’s office each time, showed the numbers and asked for more money for the next one. Worked like a charm.
The point is, even our fearless leaders (including you if you’re the one in charge) are humans with their own fears and motivations. To get them to get onboard, you have to take the time to understand what moves them, and come up with requests built to bring them along. That might mean running a beta campaign, finding a quote from their favorite CEO inspiration, or featuring them in a series of posts.
Yes, marketing takes time, but the good news is time doesn’t run out
The thing about marketing is that it’s always happening and always changing. It’s not a set it and forget it kind of thing. But that doesn’t mean it needs to be all consuming. When I work with consulting clients, I always spend a little time on the front end getting to know them - their resources and passions and skill levels. Then, we make plans that start to integrate more sophisticated marketing into what they’re already doing. That might mean giving the interns a new challenge on Instagram every week, or helping a CEO create a system for promoting her thought leadership. These things might not feel groundbreaking, but they kind of are, because they alleviate the pressure to get it all done, all perfectly, all at once.
If you’re someplace that requires marketing, my hope is you’re planning on that place being around for a long time. Marketing is how you make sure that happens, and integrating it into your time, instead of thinking of it as some time gobbling monster, will help you create a strategy that’s sustainable and feels good to put into action.