Kieran and Kip discuss how to build a simple, actionable marketing strategy for 2024. They recommend limiting strategy to three-to-four priorities (ideally three), creating measurable goals, and grounding choices in customer problems and market signals rather than internal politics. They also advise using an invest/divest/keep model to prioritize work and aligning teams by explaining the customer-rooted rationale for decisions.
Chapters
Let me give you my take here. So here's what I really believe. Success is deeply rooted in the things that sound really boring and like, Tell.
Us more, Tell us more.
One of those like things that actually truly matter is being able to create a measurable goal.
A generation of businesses are over strategizing. Today we're going to tell you how to lock down a simple strategy. We're going to tell you how to allocate and plan a budget and how to align all your teams to, to grow beyond your expectations in 2024. Kieran. So I think there's a couple layers to this that actually combine to make marketing magic. I think the first one is a strategy that is simple, that does not have too many components. I actually don't think there's too much strategy. I think there's too many strategies. There's too many like bullet points and items in your strategy. Right.
Like over complicated.
Yeah. So if you want, if you're watching and you want to be like, what do I do and how do I think about this? I think your strategy has to be three to four things. I'm a three thing person, but like, because the fewer things you have, the more focus and magnitude and clarity you can give, whether it's just yourself working on that or it's you and entire.
Team of people working.
And the next biggest mistake I see people make is like, cool. Well, I've gotten from my six big strategies to my three strategic bullets, right? And so an example of that might be like, oh, I'm going to increase brand awareness through paid media. I am going to grow my demand generation through organic search and affiliate marketing. And I'm going to build my own media awareness through investing in YouTube. Could be a whole host of things, right? We're making, making this up, but it would be three kind of statements at that level of detail, right? Like a very simple sentence, right? Where I think most people mess this up is two things. The first thing is they're not clear on the why they're doing those things, right? They're do, they're doing them because their CEO told them they should do them or their board yelled at them or some competitor is doing them versus like, oh, I see what my customers are doing. I see what's happening in the market. And based on those behaviors and changes, I need to do some very specific marketing work.
Right?
And like you and I always would like be like, what do we believe about what it takes to grow over the next year or two years? And so examples of that are like, oh, well, search engines are going to get disrupted by AI, so we need to invest more in video to have a more diversified presence in search. Right. Like, that's like the why behind why you would go invest in a video strategy. Right. So it's not just about having those strategic points, it's about having kind of a companion slide. That is the why or the, the core beliefs that you have as to why you would do this.
That's my working model, which is before we started planning here, what I wrote out was like a precursor to planning, which is the problems that we have to solve for customers and the opportunities we have as a marketing team. And then you kind of ladder that into, like, these are the things I want our planning to solve for. So you actually have some context going into planning in terms of these are the actual things are planning to sell for the three bullet points you called out, I'd be interested. If you think about it the same way, they're kind of like, that's not the entire thing the marketing team are working on, like on older stuff. Right. It's where you want to see some outsized investment. Right. Like, it's like we're going to do all of the other things, like a continuation of the things that are working. But, like, there's three things that we have to nail next year that are truly pivotal to us being successful. Like, that's the bullet points I think you're calling at.
Oh, oh, Kieran, I just, I love what you just said there because along this discussion, we're going to highlight some potholes, some traps you can fall in. One of the biggest strategy traps before we get into budgeting is I'm going to make sure that all of every single person on my team's work is represented in my strategy. That is how to fail.
Yeah, that is exactly right.
Because you're giving no priority, no signal, no magnitude to what you're trying to work on. You're, what you're actually solving for is, oh, I don't want my team to be upset or disenfranchised. And I will tell you right now, anytime you solve for your team instead of the customer, you are set up to fail every time. It is like, I, I, I, I've seen this happen enough that if you are solving for the feelings of your team, you're going to fail. Because I will tell you what will make your team feel great. Working on hard problems and winning like that is how people get satisfaction and enjoy the work that they're doing.
It's kind of like the, you know, invest, divest, keep the same. And that is the right model to run. Right. And I think that one of the things you have to balance is if you're in the divest or even keep the same, it doesn't mean your work is not important and it doesn't mean we do not need to succeed in those things. It just means there's like two to three things that we really have to push on next year. Probably that's where you would spend your time. That's like how I think about it. This is where I'm going to spend the nightside portion of my time. Dig into the weeds here. And they could be either very new things or they could be things that are not working as well as they should, or they could just be like, hey, this thing is working, we need to accelerate that. Or it's a customer problem we haven't tried to solve before. And, but like, you give the context. But to your point, if you're a team that would prefer to see all of the things on the board with equal weight and like the equal amount of like airtime, then you're likely on a pretty unsuccessful team because that's just not how success happens.
I think this is one of the weird psychology things of being a marketer. And one of the very unfair things about being a marketer is that the world expects you to have a massive amount of empathy and understanding for your customer. Right. Know that customer inside and out, understand the experience they want, understand the problems they're trying to solve. Right. But then you have to make pretty brutal and unemotional decisions to deliver on that. Right. Like you have to tell people, like, oh, the work that you're doing is less important than the work this other person is doing. Doesn't mean it's. The work you're doing is unimportant. It means it's less important.
Right.
And that like, that's really hard for humans to do. And that is why I think what you and I have found in addition to be fairly unemotional people, for better and for worse, is when you root everything in the customer and the problem statements, everybody gets on board. Right. When you say, hey, here's what our customers problems are, here's how we think we can solve those problems. That it's not like I, Kip or I, Kieran, think your work is less important or not. It is. Our customers think this work is the most important and we have to do it. Right.
Right. It's a. Yeah, it's, it's context which is really deeply rooted in the customer signal and the kind of the why of those things. And if you can explain those things pretty well, then most people are, most people are fine with that. Like, they get that. That's like, okay, I, I understand why. These are the, the problems to solve. And so if you're listening to this and you're following along, like how, how can I map my planning cycle to this? I think the first thing we're saying is that kind of simplistic strategic doc or simplistic strategy, which is like three to five things, likely three things. I think that's the way you've always done it, deeply rooted in like the customer problems to solve or the opportunities that we have. And again, this is not your entire marketing plan for the following year, but this is the things that you truly need to succeed and probably where you as a leader would spend an outside.
