Thinly stretched marketers of the world:
Do less.
This is the anthem of Jess Cook, Head of Marketing at Vector, who in a past life scaled marketing at giants like McDonald’s and Kellogg’s. Today, her career is looking less Goliath, more David—she recently skyrocketed Vector’s pipeline growth with just a two-person marketing team in her first 90 days on the job.
Like many of us, Jess has felt the pain of marketing organizations that mistake activity for strategy.
These teams spread their resources too thin across dozens of tactics (and “could we just try…” ad hoc requests), only to end up buried in busywork and divided attention.
As she’s moved from Fortune 500s to a startup, Jess has faced new constraints—something she views as a blessing, not a curse. She believes that marketers achieve breakthrough results when they focus on fewer (as in, three max), high-impact initiatives, rather than trying to do it all.
Key takeaways: The 3 things you need to know about setting your marketing strategy
- Every quarter, you should set three types of strategic pillars:
- One proven tactic
- One calculated bet
- One bold experiment
- Focus 80% of your budget on those 3 pillars to avoid spreading your marketing team too thin
- Connect your marketing initiatives to company-level priorities. This will help you get budget, resources, and the attention of leadership. But make sure you don't overcommit or risk missing important deliverables and goals.
Stop saying yes
Many marketing teams get stuck in a reactive mode, responding to every opportunity they spot and falling into the “say yes to everything” trap.
If you half-heartedly (or half-assedly) execute dozens of initiatives, you end up with a pile of mediocre projects that didn’t get the attention or resources they needed to really succeed. The team gets spread too thin, and you struggle to prove ROI—perhaps leading to budget cuts and reduced organizational influence that just digs you deeper into the reactive cycle.
When you’re on that hamster wheel, setting a narrower focus can bring some much-needed control back to your function. As Jess explains,
When you’re a marketer tied to pipeline numbers, you’re very reliant on someone else being good at their job in order to hit those goals. When so much is out of your control, it’s important to add as many things as you can control into your strategy.
Her way of doing this? Set three key pillars to focus on every quarter—and ruthlessly table everything else. “When I built the budget for H2, I decided I wanted to go all in on three things, and anything else in the budget was to keep the lights on,” she explains.
The “three pillars” you need in every quarterly plan
Pillar 1: Something that already works
Your first pillar should be a successful marketing play that you’ve run before. Because if it ain’t broke…
For Jess, this pillar is content. “We already know marketers are digging the content we’re putting out,” she explains. “They love playbooks with a strong point of view, and they want to continue to consume those.”
For Vector, a contact-based advertising solution, she plans to build out a library around topics like:
This type of pillar lets you squeeze the most out of a proven strategy—and stops you from neglecting what’s already working for you in favor of exclusively chasing the shiny new channel.
Quarterly Marketing Plan
Build your marketing plan using this template. Fill out what pillars you’re going to focus on each quarter, and how they ladder up to your core marketing outcomes.
Pillar 2: A new (but sure) bet
Next, pick a pillar you haven’t fully tested yet, but that you have strong conviction will work.
For Jess, that was paid social. “We already know what pieces of content are a powerful first touch, and we want to capitalize on that,” she says. “We haven’t done paid media yet, so we’ll try putting some money behind the content we’re creating and see if that brings in new opportunities.”
This is a more experimental pillar, and not all experiments succeed. But even if this pillar doesn’t pan out as expected, you’ll learn a lot by committing to it enough to gather the data you need to adjust course.
Not exactly sure where to place your bet? We've put together the Moonshot Matrix that helps you calibrate how much impact and relevance you can expect from your marketing. Hint: aim for the top right quadrant for your boldest bets.
Pillar 3: A bold experiment
Marketing is always changing, and building experiments into your strategic planning will help you stay at the forefront of those changes.
Jess’s next big swing is events. “Really intimate events are big right now,” she explains. “How can we sponsor those? How can we put on something similar?”
She intends to focus on what she calls “sidecar” events, or smaller gatherings built around large events that Vector’s ICP is likely to attend.
“Our startup budget isn’t going to get us a booth at HubSpot’s INBOUND conference right now,” she explains. “But maybe we could curate a group and take them on a ghost tour of San Francisco as a cool, exclusive experience.” This pillar is your chance to flex those creative muscles
Once your pillars are set, aim to spend 80% of your budget on pillar-related activities. Add a “pillar” field to your financial trackers to hold yourself accountable. Create clear criteria for evaluating whether new initiatives fit into your current pillars—and leave good but out-of-scope ideas in the “parking lot” to revisit at a later date.
Experiment to win
As marketing budgets face increased scrutiny and marketers need to clarify ROI, narrowing your focus will help you bring in results that speak for themselves.
You won’t see meaningful success from dozens of half-run projects. What really moves the needle is giving enough time, attention, and budget to a small number of carefully selected experiments.
“We’re going to experiment with our three pillars all through this quarter in hopes of getting the proof points we need to expand parts of our budget next quarter,” Jess explains.
Her hope is that Vector will help marketers run more of these contained experiments, providing them with the data infrastructure to know which pieces of their marketing strategy are landing for which visitors. “Eventually, you should see the most traveled path from first touch to closed won,” she says. “Imagine knowing exactly which content sequences accelerate deals.”
Ideally, your three pillars connect to each other to form your own mini-marketing flywheel every quarter. For example: paid ads drive people to your content; content builds a reputation that makes people want to attend your events; and in-person connections at events can turn into digital connections on social and web.
When your pillars work together like this, you’re not just running three experiments in isolation. You’re building a machine whose whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
