How Systematic Is Your Marketing?

Are you stuck on the results rollercoaster?

Let’s talk about building simple systems.

To make your marketing predictable and consistent.

It all starts with figuring out how systematic is your marketing right now.

P.S. If you're looking, here are a few things to help you:

- Hang out with 20 marketing directors for 2 days in Orlando, FL at the Momentum conference. You'll walk away with a simple strategy that works, the skills, plan, and confidence to make it happen. ​Click here for details.​

- Download the Marketing Director Roadmap to get the one-page blueprint to succeeding as a marketing director.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

This is the Marketing Director Daily, and I'm Tim Parkin. Today I want to talk about simple systems. Every marketing director needs systems. You probably already know that you need systems. And I want to give you a framework today to help solidify this in your mind and figure out which of the two parts do you need to focus on in order to build better systems for yourself. But first, let's start with a situation that many of us find ourselves in. First, we're buried with tasks. We're overwhelmed by the sheer volume of things we need to think about and do. Every day is filled with way too many meetings, never-ending, overflowing to-do list, and the same with our inboxes, whether that's email or Slack or Teams, there's a constant influx of messages and demands and requests and things to do. And we can't manage it all without the help of systems. There's a quote that says, you don't rise to the level of your abilities, you fall to meet the level of your systems. I think this is so true that we think often that we're superheroes, that we can do everything, that if we just work a little harder, if we just put in more time, that somehow we'll be able to push through and break through, and that we imagine on the other end of the rainbow, there's a pot of gold where we have days without meetings, a to-do list we can actually finish, and an inbox where we can hit inbox zero consistently. And I'm here to tell you and be the bearer of bad news that as I've said before on this podcast, the work is never finished. And so we really need a system to manage this. And without a system, we end up on what I call the results roller coaster. I'm not a fan of roller coasters. In fact, when I was in college, I went on a log flume here in Orlando at Universal Theme Park. And I didn't breathe correctly, or perhaps at all. I turned my head, I held my breath, I went down the log flume, and the rest of the day my side really hurt. I ended up in the hospital with a partially collapsed lung from the pressure, the air pressure from the ride. So I'm not a fan of roller coasters, but if you don't have systems, you'll end up on the results roller coaster, which means your results go up and then they go down and it repeats. And if you're like me, you can get really nauseous on this roller coaster. It's not enjoyable, it's not a thrill ride, it's more stressful and anxiety-inducing than anything else. The results roller coaster is not a fun ride, and yet it's a ride that many of us, that perhaps you are on right now. The results were good last month, but they're not so good this month. The results are looking up, but we know that what goes up must come down. And this roller coaster continues indefinitely until you build systems, until you have systems that can predictably and consistently help you execute and deliver on your marketing so you can get predictable and consistent results. And without systems, it can often feel like you're just spinning your wheels, that you're completely stuck. You need systems, but you don't have the time or take the time to build the systems. But I'm here to tell you that until you do, nothing will change. And so today I want to focus on how to think about this so that we can dive deeper on how to actually build these systems. First, let me tell you that last month we had a discussion around systems, and I gave some practical examples of some of the systems I've built that I use and rely on day-to-day for my marketing, as well as some tools and frameworks and worksheets you can use. So if you'd like a copy of that, send me an email with the word systems and I'll send it over to you. And if you want to not miss a future round table where we talk about these things, go to the website for this podcast, marketingdirectordaily.com, and click the link to register for free for the marketing leader roundtable. Every month we share a bunch of really cool stuff from inside my coaching group called the Advisory Board that you can steal and use to do better marketing. But let's talk about systems. And I call this the system snapshot. It's a graph, and if you're listening to this, I'll communicate how to think about it. There are two axes on the graph. The first is autonomy. Being autonomous means does this happen without you? Can it happen on its own, by itself? The problem is that for most of us, our marketing is not autonomous. It relies on us, the strategy and the tactics both. It relies on our input, on our feedback, on our execution. And this is a problem because if you want to build a system, the system has to operate autonomously. It has to operate on its own. And so we want to think about how autonomous is the marketing you're doing. The second part is consistency. That as I said before, given the results roller coaster, your marketing needs to be consistent every day. It needs to operate like clockwork so that you can have predictable and consistent output results. So these are the two axes, autonomous or autonomy, and consistency. And if you are at the bottom left of my graph here, that's low autonomy, low consistency. Your marketing relies heavily on you, and your marketing is not very consistent. I call that chaotic. And many of you can relate to this. Your marketing every day is chaotic. You're running around like a chicken with its head cut off, chasing the next fire, hoping that by the end of the day you can at least put out all the fires so that tomorrow you can don your firefighter outfit again and fight whatever fires come your way. This is chaotic. And it's not healthy and it needs to change. The next level up is if you have built some systems or some structure around your marketing, perhaps it is a little bit autonomous. You have some autonomy. Maybe you have a team that you delegate work to, maybe you have freelancers or contractors or an agency, but you're able to offload some work and be somewhat autonomous with your marketing. Despite that, it's still not consistent, that it still needs your involvement. It doesn't happen the same time every time. It's not predictable, it's not consistent, it's not reliable. I call this erratic. It's not as chaotic as before, but it's still erratic. It's hit or miss. It's up and down. This is the results roller coaster in action. You're starting to build some systems and processes, and that's good. It's just not consistent yet. On the bottom right of my graph, we have high consistency, low autonomy. This is the opposite end of the spectrum that we were just talking about. You don't have any systems or structure. You don't necessarily have a big team or people you can offload work to. And so therefore, your work is not autonomous. Your marketing is not, has a low degree of autonomy. It's not a system. But it's very consistent. However, the way that you achieve that consistency is through sheer brute force. You put in extra hours, you work late, you go above and beyond, you hand hold your team, you do everything you can to keep things on track. High consistency, low autonomy. This I call being a workaholic. And if that's you, don't despair. You're in good company. I too am a workaholic. It's something I've struggled with my whole life. I'm passionate about what I do, I enjoy the work and I enjoy the challenge. And yet I've had to learn that I need to be able to delegate, that I need to give up some things, that I need to build systems to support me. Because if you're a workaholic, you get burnt out. You get burnt out faster. And you can't stop yourself. So if you're in this place right now, I urge you, for your own health and for the health of those around you, take a step back and think about how can we build systems? And over the next couple of weeks, we'll be talking about that on the podcast here, how to build systems, how to create structure and order from the chaos. But the final quadrant of my graph here is high autonomy, high consistency. This is the goal for all of us. This is my goal for you. How can your marketing be something that gives you high autonomy so you don't have to be involved as much, and high consistency so that it happens predictably every day, day in and day out. This I call being systematic. When your marketing is systematic, amazing things happen. For starters, you can deliver on demand. I think of this like the ice cream machine, the soft serve. You walk up to the machine, you pull the lever, and the ice cream comes out. If the machine's broken, it doesn't, but if it's working, you pull the lever, you get the ice cream. That's delivering on demand. And this is what we need for your marketing. It needs to be such a system that has high autonomy and high consistency that when we need to do something, we can just walk up and pull the lever and get the result that we want, get the outcome that we need. The second benefit of this, of being systematic, is that it runs like clockwork. I've been fortunate to travel quite a bit, and in Europe, the train system is amazing, especially in Germany. It runs like clockwork. The train is never late, it's always on time, if not early, and you can rely on it and depend on it in even the most dire circumstances. One time I was traveling to Amsterdam and we landed and got on a train and the train stopped. I was very shocked because the European train system is very good. We found out the train station was on fire and we were delayed and stuck in the tracks for two and a half hours. Other than that, systems are really good, and trains run like clockwork in Europe. So when you have systematic marketing, you can deliver on demand, your marketing will run like clockwork, and then that frees you up to conduct the concert. You can be the conductor of the symphony. You can tell people what to do, not necessarily how to do it. You can say we need more of that and less of this, and you can reorganize things efficiently and seamlessly because now you're in control, not the marketing controlling you. And this is what I want for you and for everybody in marketing is to be able to do those things, to deliver on demand, to have their marketing run like clockwork, so that you can be the conductor of the concert and call the shots. Marketing is challenging. There's a constant amount of stuff we have to think about and manage and do. And it will always be that way. That will never change. But what can change if you take action and if you make it a priority, is you can build systems, simple systems, systems that will allow you to have autonomy in your marketing and consistency in your marketing. So you can escape the results roller coaster and finally become the conductor of the orchestra. We'll talk more about systems in episodes coming up, but for now, take a minute and just reflect. What does your marketing look like right now? Do you have high or low autonomy and high or low consistency? Is your marketing chaotic? Is it erratic? Are you a workaholic? Or is it systematic? And what's one thing you can do this week, a small action you can take, to head towards the direction of building simple systems.