Why simplicity scales
On making it easier to do and measure marketing
This does not seem like a time for a marketing lesson, or even thinking about marketing. I’m stunned by what is happening to my country, and I’m enraged by the apathy, incompetence, and sheer lack of accountability that led us here, and is continuing to lend a smokescreen to those in power. Our people are dying, their desperation is being preyed upon, and surviving seems like an achievement.
We have been wronged.
I write this not only as a way to keep my mind and heart off the tragedy that is unfolding, but also to get off my chest something that has been a constant irritation for me in administration and management: We complicate things.
After the first, cruel lockdown that was imposed on the country, and we started opening up, there were so many rules, and these changed week by week. You could travel, you could not, you needed an e-pass, you did not, you needed an RT-PCR test, you did not. This was not helpful, and remains unhelpful today.
In a crisis, the biggest mistake you can make is confuse people, and the more rules there are, the more confused they will be. And then there’s the implementation of these rules. Policemen and officials had (and have) no idea what to enforce because these rules are changing week on week. How do they know if this particular rule has not changed on their single off day, in which they have to try to rest after a week of stress and watching people suffer?
I have seen this problem of complicatedness in our companies too, and especially in marketing. We measure everything, spend loads of manhours making detailed spreadsheets, and do nothing with them. I say this not because these are not useful, but because the cognitive effort to look at them everyday and make decisions is just too much. And we don’t do it.
A content marketer is supposed to know traffic numbers, which posts have worked well, what has brought in leads, what has shares on LinkedIn and Twitter, what is getting attention from your target market, and then take all this information, process and figure out what to write next, be creative about it, think about how to make it different, align it with your existing content strategy and calendar, and then also make it the best version they can put out, all within aggressive timelines?
Well yes, that’s the job. But every content marketer reading this knows well that doing all of that is impossible, especially if you are part of the one or two person content teams that our startups have. So you do what comes easily and what your manager and company actually measure.
What a waste.
The problem is not that this is wrong, or that it’s inefficient; The biggest issue here is that it doesn’t scale. And modern marketing, as I’ve written before, is an infinite scroll of continuous activity. You go out of that cycle, you become irrelevant.
We can make this easier, and better.
As leaders, the simpler you make measurement, the easier and faster you can scale.
An approach I follow came to me from Paras Chopra, my CEO at Wingify, who gave me the idea of measuring leading and lagging metrics. Remember, this was for an organic-led, small ticket size product, so volume was important.
I had to do a lot of homework to get what we wanted to do right, but once we did, we measured results in very simple terms - output. As head of marketing, I was quality control, and I hired exceptionally good leads of functions. I gave them singular numbers. Here, this is what I want from you and your pod. Hit them. No other goals.
The strategy is mine, the accountability for this strategy is mine. You do this.
This clarity meant that my team always knew what they had to do when they came into work. They knew what I would ask when we had our monthly or quarterly meetings. So they always knew what they were responsible for, no confusion. This made it easy for them to concentrate and execute. It also made it incredibly easy for me to measure their performance. They knew how they had performed, and so did I: It was a single number. We just had to look at it.
That year, we took a new product to almost $3 million ARR.
So think about this when you set up your team’s KPIs, their performance indicators, and what you’ll use to measure their success. The approach I used may work only for a particular kind of product, or might even be outdated now, but the underlying thought process holds: Make it simple, make it scale.
And yes, always remember that the buck always stops with you, the leader who made this strategy. If you shirk that, you ain’t one.