We have to talk about the grunt work of marketing
On working with teams that don't get it, annoying product managers, and other frustrations
In the last three months, I’ve edited/written and shipped 13 stories, 9 memos, 4 newsletters, and 2 social campaign.
It was great! And I would have done more.
But I’m tired. And it’s not the work itself.
What has actually exhausted me is the in-between, the co-ordination, the administration, the oiling-the-machinery: everything else that marketing is always supposed to do but somehow is never factored into the role itself.
And it’s time we talked about it.
Not for our sake entirely, but for the larger teams we are part of.
Consider a blog of the researched kind. There’s an idea, then perhaps a couple of interviews, then looking things up, finding them, then a rough draft, and rewriting and editing until you have a readable, enjoyable article. That’s the work that is visible, that everyone in your team knows and understands.
Then there’s the rest.
Thinking about the artwork to go with it, the copy that will give it the best chance on social, making sure the links are right and in the places you want them, checking with the people in the piece if they are happy or if they want some changes, making those changes, making sure the CMS doesn’t screw the flow you’ve worked so hard on, and then putting it up on social in a way that it gets shared and read more. Then there’s getting the descriptions right for the blog, the image, and getting all the other SEO stuff done too.
Phew.
And I haven’t even started on the lack of clarity, the back and forth with design, and the sheer lack of understanding of how much time all of this actually takes. And remember that all this time we are still talking about the simplest production process in modern marketing: Writing. If we got into the more complicated marketing operations, we’ll be here all day.
Organisations that have heavyweight product and engineering leadership are the biggest offenders. There’s a reason heads of marketing switch companies way more than their other functional counterparts. There’s a reason we marketers ask each other of CEOs who are trying to recruit us: Does the founder understand marketing?
What we are really asking, in part, is if you’ll understand all the work we have to do, or do you think marketing is an engineering function, dooming us to failure and frustration?
And then there’s also the maintaining. I’ve written about this before:
The writing teams that pump out amazing content and who make sure that the organic numbers never drop can’t do new things. They can’t do new things because writing, editing, and producing high quality content is taxing, cognitively demanding work. It takes all their time to do this well.
The product marketer who makes sure that official presentations remain updated all the time, who edits all the company collateral and makes sure there is not a single mistake when sales folks present, who makes sure product screenshots are updated and absolutely perfect and quirky enough to elicit a smile? All these roles and tasks are important. And all this takes time.
The least that organisations can do is at least try to understand what goes into making good, consistent, solid marketing. If they do, they’ll recognise the level of maintenance involved. And if they understand that, we can make marketing a lot better.
What’s my point here? I’m saying that if the larger team doesn’t understand all of this other labour that goes into making marketing work, it’s a recipe for disaster.
This is exactly why engineers or product managers find it easy to walk over and give us their opinion of what they think marketing should be doing. They see only the surface, they don’t understand all the work that goes into making an idea tick, getting internal agreement to get the organisational resources to do something, and then juggle this new deliverable with all that already needs to be done.
And frankly, I’m tired of explaining it over and over again.
So if you need to have this conversation with your manager, your CEO, or with the annoying PM who turns up at your desk with the ‘why aren’t we doing this?’ question every three days, show them this, and ask them to leave.
You’ve got work to do.