Writing a marketing to-do list on a Monday morning takes a particular kind of optimism.
This is the week you’ll finally sort the CRM segmentation. Update those case studies. Build the nurture sequence. Rewrite that slightly questionable website page. Get the event follow-up out. Maybe even work out what on earth you’re supposed to be doing about AEO.
Then Thursday arrives.
Sales need something for a meeting tomorrow. Somebody’s remembered an event that needs promoting. There’s a “quick” website change that turns out to be a rather sizeable job, and that CRM segmentation task has quietly moved to next week for approximately the seventh time.
We see versions of this all the time. Most businesses have plenty of marketing ideas and a fairly good sense of what needs attention. The website could be better. There’s more value sitting in the CRM. Old prospects could be re-engaged. Reporting needs improving. That automation project everyone started talking about in February could probably do with seeing the light of day.
Finding enough time and the right people to make it all happen is where things get difficult.
Marketing has also become a much bigger job than it used to be.
Website, email, events, content, social media, paid advertising. They’re all still firmly on the marketing agenda.
Now we’ve added CRM management, automation, attribution, AI, AEO, data segmentation, personalisation, video, sales enablement, employer brand, integrations and an ever-expanding collection of technology that’s apparently going to save everyone loads of time once somebody finds the time to set it up.
Somewhere along the way, marketing became a combination of creative department, commercial function, technology team, data analyst and occasional emergency PowerPoint service.
The resource available to deliver all of this haven’t always kept pace.
For an internal marketing team, that creates an interesting problem. Your marketing manager might know exactly what needs to happen strategically, yet spend so much time on delivery that there’s rarely enough space to move the strategy forward. Your marketing executive might be brilliant at content and social while having much less experience untangling a CRM integration or building an automation workflow.
Businesses without an internal marketing team face the same issue from a different angle. Those jobs often land on the desk of a founder, MD, or commercial director who already has another fairly significant job to get on with.
Eventually, things slip.
Anything with a hard deadline usually gets done. The event gets promoted because the date is fixed. The presentation gets finished because somebody needs it at 9 am tomorrow. The LinkedIn post gets published because everyone can see when the company page has gone suspiciously quiet.
The jobs without that immediate pressure tend to hang around.
CRM clean-ups, nurture journeys, reporting reviews, website conversion improvements and content repurposing can all wait until next week. So can taking a proper look at which marketing activity is creating commercial opportunities and which bits you’re still doing because, well, you’ve always done them.
Putting something off for another week rarely feels particularly dramatic. Six months of putting it off tends to become more noticeable.
A growing workload naturally raises the question of whether it’s time to hire.
For some businesses, adding another permanent team member makes complete sense. Marketing can be tricky to resource through headcount alone, though, simply because the work changes so much from one week to the next.
Imagine a fairly normal month. You need somebody to write a case study. Your HubSpot workflow stops doing what everyone thought it was doing. There’s an event coming up that needs creative support. Sales want a new piece of collateral. Your reporting needs reviewing because nobody quite trusts the numbers. Then somebody asks whether your business is appearing in ChatGPT recommendations.
Good luck getting all of that into one job description.
Looking at the expertise you need access to can make the resourcing decision much clearer.
An internal marketer drowning in execution might benefit from somebody taking ten hours of work off their plate and getting it finished. A team that has reached the limits of its technical knowledge might need an experienced marketing technologist for a specific piece of work. A growing business without an internal marketing function may need regular support across several disciplines.
A flexible resource gives you room to respond to each situation as it arises.
Another category of task lurks on the marketing to-do list. Everyone knows it needs doing, although nobody is completely sure how to approach it.
“Build a lead nurture journey” sounds perfectly reasonable in a strategy document.
Then you try to build one.
Who should go into it? What do we actually know about those people? Is that information in the CRM? Is it accurate? What triggers the journey? What should they receive? What happens when they engage? When does sales get involved? How do we stop existing customers from receiving it? Fairly importantly, how will we know whether any of this has worked?
Suddenly the small task has grown arms and legs.
CRM segmentation, attribution, integrations, automation and AI projects can follow the same pattern. An extra afternoon in the diary may still leave the team staring at the same questions. Experience becomes particularly valuable here, especially when somebody has tackled the problem before and knows where the potential complications are hiding.
Marketing teams regularly need additional hands, specialist knowledge and another brain in the room. The exact combination changes depending on what’s happening in the business.
Something strange happens when businesses are under-resourced. Everyone starts picking up whatever needs doing, even if it’s not the best use of their time.
There’s a nice collaborative spirit to that, right up until you realise your senior marketer has spent Tuesday afternoon resizing graphics while your junior executive is trying to decide on CRM architecture because nobody else is available.
Neither is a particularly good use of their time.
Experienced marketers need enough room for strategic thinking, commercial input and the work that will move marketing forward. Junior marketers need opportunities to learn, develop and stretch themselves with the right support around them. Bringing additional expertise into the mix can help everyone spend more of their time where they add the most value.
Extra resource also need a purpose. Nobody needs another 15 social posts simply because somebody suddenly has enough hours available to write them.
One month, the priority could be getting a nurture journey live. The next might involve preparing for an event, cleaning up the CRM, creating a new sales asset or fixing the reporting your board has been questioning for months.
The requirements will keep changing as the business develops, so having resource that can flex around those priorities can be incredibly useful.
Marketing As You Go grew out of seeing these situations play out repeatedly.
Some businesses came to us with capable internal marketers who needed more support. Others had no internal marketing team and a growing list of jobs that needed attention. Some had plenty of marketing resource, with a specific gap in technical expertise. Quite commonly, the requirement changed from month to month.
Marketing As You Go gives businesses flexible access to Marmalade’s wider marketing and marketing technology team, with the support shaped around the work that needs doing.
Access is the important part. You may need a copywriter this month and a designer the next. A HubSpot specialist might be useful for a particular technical problem. There may be times when you want an experienced marketer to look at what you’re doing, challenge the thinking and help set the direction.
Having those skills available can get something sorted this month instead of watching it land on next Monday’s to-do list yet again.
Marketing As You Go also works alongside the people you already have. We give internal teams additional capacity, specialist knowledge and experienced people to bounce ideas around with, giving them more room to focus on the work they were actually hired to do.
Take a look at the jobs that have been there for a while.
Which ones keep moving to next week? What does everyone agree is important without anyone quite owning it? What have you been meaning to improve once things “calm down”? Which jobs are waiting for expertise you don’t currently have internally?
Those tasks usually tell you quite a lot about where the resource gaps are.
Most businesses can think of plenty of worthwhile marketing activity. Turning those plans into action depends on having enough capacity and the right mix of expertise available when you need it.
If the same important job has been migrating from Monday to Monday for longer than anybody would care to admit, it may be time to give your team some help getting it done.
Get in touch with us today to discuss Marketing As You Go and how it can help clear your to-do list.