Marketing isn’t a job you get done and tick off.

Unlike most of our other to-dos, which are a closed system:

  • Receive feedback from client
  • Implement feedback
  • Share
  • Get signed off

Marketing’s system includes the whole of the economy:

  • Write LinkedIn post
  • Post LinkedIn post
  • Macroeconomics
  • Interest rates
  • Someone gives it a like

It’s chaotic.

But chaos shouldn’t put you off. You already navigate chaos, you just don’t always realise it.

The business itself is a chaotic system. Marketing and all these other elements combine together, along with the people you’ve hired and your clients, to create something very hard to predict. Yet, we do predict correctly that it will exist next month and the month after. We predict that by measuring the things we can (the financials and ops) and by using instinct and other intangibles.

Without thinking about it you wake up with a feeling about the mood of your team or the optimism of the market, your own sense of purpose, and whether it lines up with where this whole thing is going.

You trust your instincts about it, and maybe you just don’t have your instincts about marketing yet.

There’s a place you can get to where you just know what’s working and what’s going to work, even in the places that the numbers don’t reach.

There are some things we can measure like clicks on a CTA or number of people on our waiting list, and some other things we have to use instinct on like why a piece of content landed or whether that waiting list is just bots.

Compared with something like sales where you are close to the signals and the impact plays out in signed deals, marketing’s signals are scattered, hard to find and hard to isolate. As the saying goes: half of your marketing works, but no one knows which half.

The danger is that we can be left in a state of paralysis. Abandoning tactics, stopping posting because you can’t see it working.

The mistake isn’t doing marketing that doesn’t work, that’s just part of the job. The mistake is standing still instead of experimenting and learning.

Marketing is ticked off when someone makes an inquiry.

The routes to that are hard to predict until you have a system at scale, and even then, things change.

Get comfortable with the chaos.