The Right Way To Do Marketing

Feeling overwhelmed, distracted, and not getting results? It’s probably because you aren’t following this simple 3 step process. Here’s the right way to do marketing.

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 0:02

Hey guys, this is the Marketing Director Daily. I'm Tim Parkin. I wanted to hop on here and talk about one of the biggest challenges that marketers face. If you don't know, I run a coaching group for marketing directors, and we help them get more leads at a lower cost per lead while saving time every week and building systems at scale. And of all the marketing directors that I coach and work with, they all have the same problem, which is a lack of time. They also have a lack of resources, of course, but we all are limited by time. And this has been the big promise of AI, right? That AI will save us all this time by doing all these things for us. But that's not really the problem. The problem is not so much time as it is prioritization. How do you decide what to do in marketing? How do you know it's going to work? Why put in all this effort if it's not going to work? And how do you put all of the effort into the things that you know will work so you can actually get the results that you need? And so I wanted to hop on here today and talk about that. That in project management, in campaigns, and marketing in general, there is a big problem. And I would go so far as to say there's an epidemic of marketers wasting time and effort and budget on things that don't actually work. On things that they shouldn't even be doing. And sometimes it's really hard to know if the things you're doing are working, or if they could work, or if they will eventually work, right? And so I wanted to share with you some thoughts on that and give you a really simple model I've developed to think through this and to make it work for you. So let's share my screen here and walk through what happens in projects, what happens in marketing, and why we're always behind, why we're never making the progress that we want. I call this the project dilemma, but really it's not just projects, as I mentioned, it applies to projects or campaigns or anything in marketing. Anything you're doing or launching or building, this is the problem. And you might have seen this before, but I'll show you my twist on it that will hopefully give you an aha moment and an unlock of how to think about projects, how to think about campaigns, and how to spend your time and energy and budget way more effectively. So in project management, I learned this as being called pick two, because you can have things fast or cheap or good. But the problem is you only get to pick two of those, right? And that's terrible. Fast and cheap means it won't be good because you had to go fast and you couldn't spend a lot to make it good. But if it's fast and good, well, that means it's gonna cost a lot of money, right? Because in order to make it good and to do it quickly, that takes money. Or you could have it good and cheap, but then it's not gonna be fast, right? To build something really good that's really cheap, it takes a lot of time, so it can't be fast. And so you're often left stuck here, wondering, well, how do I circle this square? Or in this case, a triangle, but how do I get all three? How can I have all three? And if you could only pick two, I'm curious which two you would pick. So drop in the chat, what two would you pick? Because I think this is a tricky situation to be in, and unfortunately, it's where most marketers are right now, right? We're told that it should be good, right? We need an ROI on the things that we're doing. And it needs to be fast because we need results now, we can't wait. And it needs to be cheap because you're solo or you have a tiny budget. So this is the marketer's dilemma, really, if you think about it. So drop in a chat if you're watching this, you know, now or later, which two would you pick? Because I'm about to show you what I think is the right solution to this problem. The answer to how you should operate and execute on all of your marketing. And I'm not exaggerating when I say this. This is how we approach all the marketing inside my coaching group for marketing directors called the advisory board, and it's how you should approach your marketing as well. So if you take this triangle and divide it into three layers here, this is the solution to the problem. And at the bottom layer here, I'm gonna do this in red just so you can see it a little bit easier. We want to first validate. And this is key. Validation means testing, proving that this could work for you. Before we invest a bunch of time and money and effort, building a campaign, launching a big effort, building a product or a feature or anything, we first need to validate it. And we want to validate it, as you can see here, fast and cheap. Because the faster we validate it, the sooner we'll know if it could work for us. And the cheaper we validate it, the less money we can waste if it doesn't work. So validation is always the first step. And I'll give you some really good examples about this in just a second. But validation means we're gonna test a bunch of stuff and some of it won't work out. We'll have a bunch of things we try that just don't work. That's life, right? That's marketing. But some things will work out. And when we find things that could work for us that we validated, then we know we have an opportunity there. Then we can move on to the next step. So the first step is to validate. And again, I'll show you some examples of how to validate in just a second. But once you've validated something, then we can move up. And only then can we move up to the next step, which is to optimize. This is huge. This is so important. Notice we've moved up here from validate to optimize. Only after we have proven that this thing could work for us. Not that we saw it on some LinkedIn post, not that we saw it on a little YouTube video where our competitors are doing it. We've actually spent some effort to validate it for ourselves. We've run a test, we've run an experiment, we've got some data that shows it could work for us. Now we can optimize it. And optimizing something means we'll give it a little bit more time and a little bit more effort and maybe a tiny bit more money. We're not spending a lot of time on it, we're not spending a lot of money on it. We're gonna optimize it though, we're gonna dial it in and improve it. You might look at the copy and say, hey, it worked with the validation. How can we improve the copy? Maybe we need a new image, a better image. Maybe that was a sort of test and we need to build out the funnel more. Maybe we need a follow-up email. Whatever it is, how can we optimize the thing to make it a little bit better? This isn't about making it perfect, it's not about the finished product, it's about optimizing it. And let me just pause here because this is huge for most marketers to hear this. If you were to just stop here, you could cut down your overthinking and your perfectionism by a ton, 50% or more. Because most of us as marketers, if we're honest, we overthink everything, right? Like, oh, what if I do this or I could do that, I could do this thing. There's so many options. And then you get in your head, and if you're a perfectionist, you overthink and you want it to be the final result, and it feels uncomfortable to do something half-heartedly, to make it unfinished. And yet that's what this is all about is how do we take massive, imperfect action to validate something, and then once we've validated it, to optimize it. But we're not done yet because there's a third step here, and the third step is at the very top here. Once we've optimized the thing and we've seen it can work even better, and we have it performing even better, then and only then do we scale it up. And scaling something means we spend more money on it, we have more people working on it, and we invest more time on it. This is huge. This is a big discrepancy with all marketers that your CEO, your boss, says, Hey, we have an idea, let's do this. Let's scale it from the beginning. This is gonna be huge. It's the next big thing. And it's your job and my job to push back and say, you know what, let's start here. Step one is to validate. We can't run before we crawl. And crawling is validating. How do we test this first and prove it could work for us? Then how do we optimize it? And then, once we've optimized it, we can have the opportunity and the privilege of scaling it. This is key to help you stop wasting time and money and effort on things that don't work. This is the right way to do marketing. This is, I think, the only way to do marketing. If you want to move faster and get better results, have a higher ROI and not be as stressed out all the time trying to do everything, validate things first. I promise you I'd give you some examples of this, but let me first add some context here. Because in a world of AI where people think that they can prompt things and AI can magically do everything for you, I'm sorry it can't. AI is not there yet. So I want to give you some context here of how this applies in the real world. At the bottom level here with validate, this is when you have to do things manually. We have to put in some effort to test these things. Remember, we're doing it fast and cheap. So it's going to be easy effort, but it still takes manual effort, manual input. You have to think. You might have to use your own hands to do the work. AI or automation is not the right play here. We're just validating things to see if they can work. The next level up from this, this is the optimize level, and this is where you can start to use a machine. This means you can start to optimize it with a machine, use the analytics, use the data, use tools to improve it. But in the beginning, we don't want to do that because the fastest way to move is to not involve any automation, any tools, any technology. It's just to send an email or post something. And I'll talk to you about that in just a second. Then at the scale level, this is where it's all about money, because that's ROI. Scaling is about how do we put more money behind it. And you can see over here, money could mean dollars in terms of ads or investment. It also could mean money of hiring people to help scale us out, or time, which time is money. So that's the levels here of validate, optimize, and scale in this triangle model. And a lot of members of my coaching group have said this one model has changed everything at their company and everything for them with how they approach marketing. And I truly believe this is the right way to do marketing. So take this idea, this triangle, and figure out what's one thing you're working on right now or one thing you're about to work on, and how do you validate it first before you optimize it, before you scale it, before you build the whole thing? How can we validate it first? I'll talk more about that tomorrow on my next uh LinkedIn Live and podcast, but I want to give you a couple ideas real quick. Can you send an email and just ask people, hey, I have this idea, I'm doing this thing, do you want it? Can you make a post on LinkedIn and say, hey, we've got this thing going on, who's interested? Or can you run a really simple, really cheap ad just to see if you get clicks, if people are paying attention at all? All of these are very easy ways to validate something before you build the actual thing. And I do this all the time, and this is what we teach marketing directors how to do. So definitely validate first. You will save a ton of time, you'll save a ton of money, and you'll know actually what works. You'll have the data to show your CEO, to show your boss, hey, we did this thing, we tested, look at the feedback we got, look at the data, look at the clicks, look at the interest. There's something here we should explore it further. Let's move to the next step and optimize it. Check back tomorrow. I'll talk all about how to validate in specific detail with lots of examples that you can steal and copy and use to validate your ideas, your CEO's ideas, and the things you're doing. And guess what? Maybe you're right now, you've already invested in scaling something that shouldn't have been scaled. Maybe you're here. That's the perfect time to step back and say, let's start over real quick and validate it and make sure this can work for us. Just want to remind you, marketing doesn't have to be overwhelming. Marketing can be simple and straightforward. Not easy, but simple. When you have the right approach, when you have the right process, when you follow the right steps. And I believe those steps are to validate first, always, fast and cheap. And only then can we optimize and scale. Once again, I'm Tim Parkin. I run a coaching group for marketing directors called the Advisory Board, where we help you get more leads and lower your cost per lead. We have a ton of fun inside the group. If you'd like the details, send me a message on LinkedIn. Happy to give you those details. Otherwise, connect with me on LinkedIn and follow me for more on my podcast, The Marketing Director Daily. Or here on LinkedIn, I'm starting to live stream as much as I can, a couple times a week, to give you all of these practical tips, tactics, and strategies to help you get more leads. Until next time.