Peter Freeman, MPH
Public Health Strategist & Senior Advisor
Before we begin, let me emphasize a point that will be important to remember as we dive into this marketing discussion: I am not a Marketing Expert. I don’t even play one on T.V. So if you are a seasoned, well-trained marketing professional, this post may not be for you.
Instead, this is for those of you who have found yourself in the unique, and perhaps unexpected, position of managing, creating, and/or implementing marketing initiatives for your company even though your training and experience hasn’t covered this part of business strategy. Perhaps you have started your own business and you have an employee list of one: yourself. Or you may be working for an organization without an official marketing department and you drew the short straw. Perhaps the Director of Marketing just left and, in the interim, you have volunteered to help out because you see this as an opportunity to grow your skill set.
Whatever the reason, this article is for you.
Over the past few months, I have taken on an increased marketing role with Atrómitos. It has been equal parts exciting and mundane, and invigorating and overwhelming. During this time, I have fallen down the rabbit hole of social media research, gotten lost in the archives of web traffic benchmarking, and found myself tangled in the network of marketing gurus who can help me “Increase Revenue With These Five Simple Marketing Steps.”
And while those resources have their time and place, they often left me with more question. How does one “leverage” social media without a more tangible action plan? On the whole, “doubling down on what works” sounds like a great idea, but how, exactly, do you identify what’s working? While knowing the name of the best platform on the market, having a step-by-step tutorial in using it would be divine.
For me, who has come into marketing on the job and without previous training, it all, can feel like a lot. Yet somehow, despite too many hours of research, not enough of what I found felt all that informative to me.
Then I thought, “Well, I can’t be the only one struggling with this.” If you too are struggling, allow me to first say that I applaud your admission – it is not always easy (or allowed) to admit when you don’t have the perfect answer. I am not saying that what follows is the perfect answer or gold standard of marketing. (Though maybe it is? You tell me.) What am I saying, however, is that this article shares how I started and some examples of the tools I have used along the way.
ACTION ITEM #1 – START WITH YOUR OWN DATA
I initially tried understanding which of our marketing initiatives were working based on how well they performed when compared to similar activities of others. I looked up “benchmarks” and “click rates” and “average page views.” While I found some data that looked promising, I realized there were two problems I had to address in order to make those data effective:
- Accurately defining “similar activities”: A lot of businesses engage in marketing activities that, on the surface, look the same: newsletters, social media accounts, websites, and the like. But look under the hood a bit and you will realize that activities do not necessarily result in a clean 1-to-1 comparison across businesses. For example: a newsletter that reviews activities from the previous month has a different purpose than one which advertises events to come. Using social media to advertise your services is done so to a different end than using the account to engage with potential clients to understand their pain points.
- Knowing who to consider the “others”: No, not in the Nicole Kidman way (though it is an excellent movie). What I mean is: who are the businesses, organizations, and/or companies most like you? MailChimp provides a table showing benchmarks for campaigns across industries so that you, in theory, can compare yourself to others like you. The problem is that it is unclear: (i) how each category is defined by MailChimp; and (ii) how each account that uses MailChimp decides to identify itself. This is not an issue specific to MailChimp (and we happily use MailChimp for our newsletter needs); it is pervasive across any attempt to show you how you perform against those like you.
Since I was unable, at the time, to clearly articulate who was most like us and which of their activities were the most similar to ours, I turned inward and started comparing our data to our self. When you think about it, this makes good sense: in the world of performance evaluation, you goal is to improve on where you were before. If you haven’t started by tracking your own data against themselves, it is hard to pinpoint what areas need the most improvement.
So I developed an arsenal of tracking tools (see Figure 1 for an example) to help us follow our data over a month, six months, and a year. Our whole team (this is an important point we’ll return to) takes time each month to track engagement and utilization data across all of our marketing activities, including our newsletter, social media accounts, and website. Though not necessarily fancy or high-tech (let’s be honest: most of them exist in an Excel spreadsheet), it provided a starting point so we could figure out what our baseline was and, therefore, where we wanted or needed to head next.
(Here’s a surprise ending to this section: By tracking your own data, you become more familiar with your own activities and company. This, in turn, helps you to identify who to compare your performance against when you’re ready to look for external benchmarks.)
ACTION ITEM #2 – SET A BUDGET (FOR ALL THE MARKETING THINGS)
I do not like to waste time (or money, for that matter). So when I first began doing marketing things, I would focus on doing them all expeditiously and in the most cost-effective manner. This sounds like a great approach (and one I’m sure your CFO or Accountant will appreciate), but it is challenging to do if you are beginning or learning something new. Embarking on the “new” of marketing wasn’t my challenge; my challenge was not knowing how many resource I had available to understand the “new.”
Like most things you begin, you need to start with the end in mind. That means, you need to know what you can spend before you (should) spend it. This includes not just your direct outlays, like subscriptions, collateral, and office materials, but also resources that may be more difficult to quantify, including your staff time. Some questions you should consider answering include:
- How much time do you have to learn the new things?
- How many hours per week are you allowed to develop new content?
- Who is available to support and how much of their time are you allowed to use?
It can be difficult to know the full extent of what is (or should be) considered a marketing expense. Figure 2 is an example of a budget template, originally developed by HubSpot, that we at Atrómitos used to create our initial marketing budget.
What you are able or willing to invest in terms of time, money, and materials is going to be one of the most important determinants to the development of your marketing strategy and plan.
ACTION ITEM #3 – DO NOT SILO MARKETING
As I stated at the beginning of this article, I am not a Marketing Expert. The closest thing I have to a marketing class in my background is a Business Management course I took while in my MPH program (which, honestly, is not close at all). This resulted in a third dilemma: creating marketing content for an entire company when I was, in fact, not the entire company.
On a philosophical level, at the end of the day marketing is about how you present your organization to the wider market. It is how you communicate your mission, vision, values, and the value that you bring to your clients and the marketplace. That is a fundamental activity that touches on every aspect of an organization. On a more practical level, where there is more than one person at any company, that means that there is more than one opinion on what is/is not working, what opportunities may exist for communicating the organization’s value proposition, and how to do that more efficiently. People consume social media in different ways and they are exposed to different information sources; they are probably not all the same which means their tastes vary. Do not saddle marketing to one person alone in the corner. Bring in ideas from all involved.
In order to be able to fully utilize the creativity and insights of your team, you need to create and maintain an environment where, not only are they encouraged to share their ideas, but it is “safe” to make mistakes. Amy Edmondson, a Professor at Harvard Business School, has highlighted the importance of psychological safety as it relates to innovation. I would suggest that attention to psychological safety is particularly important as it relates to a domain that is so dependent upon (and drives upon) creativity, like communication and marketing; but also where it is an activity outside of one’s training and where staff members are actively engaged in learning and creating. I am reminded of a recent tweet from Josh Weinstein, a writer for the Simpsons, Futurama (and now Disenchantment) on the “secret sauce” for the Simpsons’ creative success: “never shoot down another idea” and “there are no bad pitches. the ‘dumbest’ pitches can lead to greatest jokes/episodes.”
But your team will (generally) only get involved if they’re asked to and if you provide them a way to do it. So first, ask your team. Then, find an easy way to gather their input. In 2021, we at Atrómitos started recognizing themes to drive some of our marketing activities. Every team member is invited to identify themes important to them, and we then discuss and vote on themes once a quarter. We use a modified version of the table in Figure 3 to collect and review the team’s feedback.
GO FORTH AND MARKET
I’m still learning, and will continue to do so for some time to come. And there are definitely ideas I have come up with that did not play out well (and I anticipate more to come). But what I do hope is that through my experience, of tackling marketing as a newbie, you may come to find an approach that helps you get started and keeps you out of the rabbit holes of internet research. In the wise words of my colleague, Tina Simpson, “In any new endeavor often the hardest step is knowing when to stop researching and just ‘do the thing.’”