6 Epic Marketing Bottlenecks and How to Overcome them

I wanna build the next buzz feed. I mean, that's really what it is, right? We're just building quizzes. That's good. Yeah, that's good. Yeah. Yeah. We'll come up with some good creative ones. Uh, try to get some of that click bait.

Welcome to the marketing team at one podcast where we have conversations about the issues one person marketing teams face when trying to meet their goals with limited time and budgets. Now, here's your host. Eric and Mike. Mike, good to see you on the couch. It's good to be back on the couch. I like the couch.

Yeah. It's been a little bit of a delay. I know you've missed it. Yeah. You've been in here on your own though, privately. Yeah, I think we, yeah. Yeah. I mean, we all spend time here. I mean, this is, you know about my naps. Oh, I'm merely crying on the couch. Oh, oh, no. Yeah, it's not a i I nap. I don't get to sleep anymore for some reason.

No, I wish I napped, but, but no, I don't, I don't nap in here. I had this weird epiphany recently and I think, I think it came from. Seeing frustrations from people and like, and there wasn't really a pinpointed frustration, but I think it's this idea that I. If you are trying to accomplish big things or you're trying to accomplish a lot of things that maybe you get towards the end of your week and you don't feel like you've made any progress or you just feel like mm-hmm maybe things aren't quite as efficient as they could be, and so I, I.

I, what was really interesting to me is I started thinking about this a little deeper and thought about these like marketing bottlenecks that we see with people we work with, and even internally, like, I mean, we're not immune to any of these, uh, these bottlenecks, but I've. Settle on about six, um, marketing bottlenecks that I think we see in our work.

And, um, so it's kind of a pattern observation. You see just, yeah, there's, there's a ca six different categories of where things either get stuck or run off the rails or there just is friction. Yeah. Or there could be, and to varying degrees, right? Yeah. Like. You might see proficiencies in some areas, and really what you're talking about is like tweaking that last 10% or something like that.

Yeah. But in some cases, maybe if there's nothing there, it could be a huge bottleneck and um, you might not, some people might not even be aware of it. Um, they might be, and sometimes it might just be a collection of all of 'em that, that kind of keep, you keep people from really making the progress that maybe they want to.

That sounds like we could go either really, really deep on these or we could, and I think we've actually touched on a lot of these before. Yeah. But this is a great way to kind of just collect them all up and, and say, beware. Here's six things. I think we could go into a lot of depth in all these things. I think today we, our goal is to hit on some of these bigger points because they're more like business focused.

You could probably pull in a lot of other people. In the business, especially if you're on your own to help address some of these things and help rise the tide for all the boats. And especially as a marketer like that, you can be more efficient in what you're trying to do. And it's interesting 'cause probably in each organization there's a.

The risk that you're gonna outline these six different factors Yeah. Are different with each organization. I mean, sometimes Oh, totally. It's this or it's that. It's, yep. It varies for everybody. It's, yeah, a consistent thing. Well, let's start off like what, what, what's one of the, and these are, are these in any particular order or is it Um, no, no, no, no.

It's a solid, now I got a solid, I'm thinking about, I think there's some that I would probably. I would work on some before I work on the others. Okay. Type thing. Yeah. But I wouldn't, I, I didn't come up with these in any particular order or anything. Um, I'm second guessing it. Maybe I should shuffle the deck and figure out what's most important.

Prioritize. But sometimes you can just list things off. Let, it's okay. Let's just list, let's, let's list this first one. Is probably the most obvious as a bottleneck is just people's time and bandwidth, right? Mm-hmm. Like especially as a solar marketer, you've only got so many finite hours in the day and you're trying to cram everything in, but I think bandwidth is mm-hmm.

A huge bottleneck for a lot of people. Um, you get a scale project or you. Somebody has a new goal or a new endeavor, and all of a sudden it's, wait, who's gonna do all this? Yeah. Or it's just like, oh, we've got some big plans. Mm-hmm. And we've got some tight deadlines and we don't have the team, the, the team, the capacity.

Yeah. Um, I, there's only 24 hours in the day. Mm-hmm. And I think most people need to sleep some of those 24 hours. Varying degrees, right? Yeah. Depending on, I'm at about 14, I don't know about you, but 14 hours of sleep. Yeah. Yeah. That's my, that's my minimum. I last hit that number when I was four months old maybe.

I mean, after that point I was, I probably had some. In my teens, but yeah. No, 14. 14 is probably the, yeah, the 14 and 14. Okay. Yeah. Well, that's lucky for you. You're sleeping for me as well, it sounds like. But anyways, bandwidth is a, is a, is a big concern, right? And so I think there are, there are ways around it, right?

You can try and find more efficient ways to do. Mm-hmm. Things you're doing okay, especially if you're in the thick of it. Like working on those things is really tough. So finding people who can help you either on bits and pieces of things, or taking on full projects. You know, it's really looking outside of yourself and looking for people who can help you with it.

I would say too, one thing to think about is if you're gonna have or try to build people or build a team to help you work efficiently. Yeah, having somebody check your stuff too yeah, is probably a really important per piece of that team. It can be the same person who's doing this or that, but it's always good to send things over and have other people review them.

That extra set of eyes. Yeah, that's really good. Yeah, number one. Okay. Hit me number two. Number two, I would say clarity. Hmm. Clarity's is a big bottleneck. Like it's kind of a vague concept. Mm-hmm. Up first, but it's a little unclear. It's a little unclear. I think what we see when in working with people is that sometimes they're not really, they're not all on the same page with.

Who they're trying to talk to. Mm. Mm-hmm. So who's their audience? You know, we talk about that all the time, but Yep. It's still a lot of people, they don't know who their audience is. They might not even be clear about what their value proposition is to that. Right. To that audience. Um, and they're not necessarily clear how they're gonna say what they need to say mm-hmm.

To communicate that, and then others like it. And it could be clarity between the teams. Right. Like that they're really clear, are on the same page about what the goals are for where they're going. Here's the road we're headed down. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And so, um, so clarity in, in messaging project and campaign goals, that one seems to be like, that could just stop you right immediately.

Like the first thing, it's not like it stops work. But it keeps getting, I think you get in an endless cycle. Mm-hmm. Where you're repeating and you're editing to death and all that stuff, and think rethinking and yeah, maybe we should, yeah. Yeah. And I think that clarity, if you can get that stuff settled early on, can help remove some of the friction that comes in, in clear up.

I would argue, like when I have that kind of clarity around messaging or audience. It, it is a much, much quicker process to get things done, which may alleviate the bandwidth issue we just talked about in a sense. Yeah. Yeah. Because you tend to have so much more clear focus, but it's really, that's work that needs to be done and clarified and everybody understand.

It's not easy though because you have to niche down in a way, or pick that one or two or three persona personas or personalities. Yep, yep. And that's a, that's a tough decision, but the people and the organizations that do that. Smooth sail. Really good. I what I've, it's funny you mentioned that. I've noticed that it's so funny to talk to people in the, in that space.

I don't think people are so aware internally for their own stuff mm-hmm. About what other people are doing at that level of like who they're speaking to and everything like that. Mm-hmm. I think a lot of people look at the big brands. That are, that are like consumer focused, that they're, they're, you know, the apples of the world, right?

They, the apple doesn't care what industry or what, you know, they, they have a target market of course. Right. But it's not as apparent and it's a big broad play, right. Especially small businesses and business to business type things. I don't think people are truly aware or clear that they need to focus more.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Um, to make, make an impact. You sit inside the brain of your customer or your audience. Yeah. And you interpret what you're producing through that filter. And if you've got that clarified in your head and that model in your head to do that with things can really move quickly. And if you get that clarity in there, it just, it does, it's, it kinda just removes the fog.

Okay. So number two is clarity. Clarity. Yeah. What's number three? Assets, materials with some people in the marketing space that're kind of working hand in hand with their sales team, right? Mm-hmm. And the sales team probably has very consistent needs, right? Yeah. That of things that they're trying to sell.

Right? And if you don't have those assets, you're probably burning a lot of your time trying to create those assets for the sales team. Yeah. But even on the other side of it, like assets like photography. Yes. Like we were talking the other day. Yeah. About. How I don't, I don't think people outside of our field realize what a potential time suck.

Oh gosh. Finding the right photo for the right thing or the right illustration for the right thing can be. Yeah. And uh, I think people just kind of think, oh, you can, it's on the internet. You can, you can find something. Just go get it. Yeah. Do you think you've seen millions of stock photos in your life now?

Yes. Is it in the millions easily? Easily probably. I've seen him in one afternoon, man. I mean like it looking for one. Yeah. I mean there's, there's just certain looks and feel for one. Then there's subject matter. Then you gotta make sure there's so many checks that you gotta. Boxes. You have to check, I should say, if you don't have those assets on hand and you have to spend an afternoon trying to find Yeah.

The perfect photo for this thing that your sales team needs. Mm-hmm. It's just, it's that, that lack of assets. And then other, do you have all your brand assets that you need to for everything? Do you have templates? Do you have those types of things that make the job a little bit easier? Yeah, assets are a huge thing.

I think we could probably. We could talk about stock photos for a whole episode. Yeah. It's all, it just speaks to that whole thing again about pre-planning and making sure, like when you start your year, you've got your all new product photos, all new personality editorial type, you know? Yeah. Like just kind of fill out that or add to that pile.

So that it's refreshed and it is something that's easy to go find. Yeah. Okay, so three assets. Assets for sure. Yeah. Okay. Now let's move on to four A plan. Oh, come on. That's ridiculous. Nobody needs a plan. I think knowing where you're going. Yeah. With things, knowing and having an understanding. Even if you are doing all the marketing yourself, but have an understanding of what the goals are for the company mm-hmm.

And what sales needs and everything. And, and being able to have that mapped out. And it doesn't have to be super detailed or anything like that. Mm-hmm. But, but have a plan, have a direction that you're heading is. Gonna remove so much more friction down the road. I mean, it's, it's kind of in the same vein as clarity, I think.

Mm-hmm. But this one's just maybe a little bit more specific. It's like a roadmap in a sense. You could look at it in a roadmap or even a Gantt chart is something that kind of like putting milestones along that. Yeah. Kind of calendaring it out. Or a calendar might be another format that you use for that.

Some people just, most people just use an Excel spreadsheet to be completely honest. The plan part is probably the part where I, I would love. To be better at. You can avoid the, maybe you're spending time on the wrong thing. At the wrong time. Yeah. Type thing. Yeah. Right. So if you have that plan, you can lean, so, and again, that's like, uh, if you're spending all this time on this one thing Yeah.

Over here could be important. I, there's no dis dismissing there. It could be important. Right. But like, is that part of the plan? If you're spending time on this, you're creating a bottleneck. Yeah, elsewhere. So the plan planning helps a lot. It is, I like to think of it as burning calories. I always say that.

Like where, what are we burning our calories on today? Yeah. You know, and it's like you need to look at where you sit in that plan and be very strategic and you may have to bounce front back, forward, back, but at least you know, on that day, that's what needs to be accomplished. So it sounds like the plan really to me, as I argued before.

The plan actually should be the first thing we work on, right? I, yeah, I think like whenever you're kicking off anything, right? Yeah. That like get a general understanding of just basics too. Like I'm not talking about like, at this hour we do this thing. Yeah. And this hour we do this thing, but like, what's, where, what's our goal?

Where are we going? Mm-hmm. Again, this is, there's a lot of overlap here with clarity. Um, yeah. But like, plan this out. What do we need? Upfront, which, what can we get out ahead of right now? Mm-hmm. To move forward more efficiently down the road. I think the way that I'd approach making a plan at the beginning is to really do a first pass.

That's really like a rough sketch. It's almost like drawing, you know, like you do do a real rough sketch with a charcoal, then you go back in with a mm-hmm. Eraser, you know, you just kind of keep adding in more detail. Yep. Go back and keep adding in more detail as you need it. Maybe it's like you've got the plan for the year, then you go back and you refine first quarter, then you take that and you refine down to first month and you refine that down if you need to, you know?

But that might be a way of doing it, just bits and pieces, you know, you can chunk it. Totally. Because yeah, if I look at a whole year of plan of all the, you know, day by day, month by month, uh, yeah. Yeah, that's not no good. Least roughing it. No fun. Yeah, no fun. But you could rough in parts of it. Totally.

Like social media. I want to post every other day or whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Boom. Okay, so that was number. I've lost track. That was number four. Four. Yeah. Geez. We're flying along here. We're really kicking butt. I love it. Number five, Mike, you've got that at one. I think processes is, is another bottleneck or more specifically the lack, a lack of processes.

Right. Okay. I think some of us even have our internal processes that we mm-hmm. Go through that maybe we haven't documented or anything like that. But I think that like knowing that like this happens and then this happens and this happens, and if you're working with a team, it becomes even more important to have those processes in place.

If you don't have them, you're spending a lot more time getting back into. Oh, what do we do next? Or what's the next, how do we move forward? You know? What's it, it's, it's about like more well-oiled machine type, uh, stuff. That infrastructure in a sense, kind of a, a built in approach to how everything goes.

Yeah. In a sense. Yep. Kind of pre-planned. Everybody's done it a million times. It's like, yeah, they practice this. Yeah. They know it by heart. Yeah, exactly. But like, if you're. I think anytime if you, especially if you're doing it for the first time, it's gonna be messy. You're probably not gonna have a process that's gonna take longer Yeah.

Than when you do it. I mean, this podcast is a great example, right? When we first started doing it, it took a lot of time. Yeah. And now we've got all the little steps there and we've got a process to everything, and it helps a ton. And I think for everybody, it's kind of just in our heads. Yeah. That we know the pattern and we know what to expect going into it.

But yeah, building it out at the beginning, I mean, you go into. You know, what's the phrase God laughs at a plan. You know, it's like you plan God laughs. Yeah, yeah. Something like that. It's like, it's, yeah, you, you go in step two, you're like, all right, let's start over. Yeah. That's the fun part of doing stuff, you know, is like just figuring that out and not knowing where it's gonna end up.

Mm-hmm. You have a vision, but. Yeah. Ideally you've, you've got that locked in clearly, but, uh, how you get there sometimes. Yeah. Organic, but if you have some of those things that you can, that you do all the time, which I most people do mm-hmm. To have that process built in there so you're not reinventing the wheel every time.

It'd be good and it's something that you can transfer that knowledge. Yep. Easily. Yep. SOPs, as much as everybody loves to write those, that was five. Five process. Yep. Number six, software. Mm. I think there's a lot of software solutions that can help reduce a lot of bottlenecks. Mm. Some of those, especially if you've got some of the processes down.

Yeah. And you can match that with software to like automate some things or jump things to the next level. Mm. I think software can do, do a, um, make things a lot easier, unlock other. Possibilities. It's a deep, well, there's deep, well, a wide, wide range of things. There's two approaches. I say there's the all soup to nuts solutions, which would be like Salesforce at the highest level, right?

Yep. I mean, that would be something that automates a lot of marketing and, uh, contact management, cr you know, CRM, that's everything. So it does everything for you. But then you can also have kind of customize, take small pieces, and I think that's where. It's a little bit more affordable, let's just say, for small teams and people just getting started, maybe a few free or somewhat cheaper solutions mm-hmm.

To get those all to work together. You know, you can, we bolt 'em all together with make or Yeah. We make Zapier can be Zapier or something like that. Yeah. Um, what other things, when you think of software like and marketing, what, what other things come to mind? I mean, like, uh, I think that. There's, well shoot, well, I'll use video as an example, right?

Mm-hmm. There are so many great like video editing tools and tricks that you can do. The software allows some of these things and the more you, you can get good at utilizing the features of that software mm-hmm. The software can do some of the work for you. A lot of the work for you. Yeah. Setting it up properly at the beginning and then just boom.

I mean, and then especially as AI gets even more and more sophisticated and baked into the software you use for things. Yeah, yeah. It helps. Helps reduce a lot of bottlenecks there too. So, I mean, going back to the stock photo thing, right? Yeah. Like the AI can be, you know. Could be a good solution to the afternoon of browsing through a million stock photos.

True. Like you might get more success out of using an image generation mm-hmm. Tool mm-hmm. To get something closer to what you're looking for. Yep. Um, and that's, that's software. That's all software. And there's things you can do to kind of set up your prompts around that stuff. Totally. When you're using AI that you can build your own GPTs inside of chat GPT, but in like mid journey, you can kind of have your own set of kind of.

Prompts that you've pulled from before where you can get started right back where you left off before. As we talk through a lot of these, there's, you'll see there's a lot of overlap too. Yeah. But like for the, for a software example that kinda leans on the process, right? Like, I figured out a process that I follow mm-hmm.

For writing a la a copy for a landing page. Hmm. And I probably did that for. A year or so, not just kind of intuitively like, kinda like mm-hmm this is what I'm trying to do, this is what I'm going through, and then there's like an awareness, like, and then maybe this is what led to this whole epiphany of, of the bottlenecks and stuff.

Oh, I, I kind of follow this same process. Maybe I could leverage some software to help me out. Mm-hmm. And so back, like you mentioned, a custom GPTI was able to. Help chat. GPT say, this is the process I follow for writing a landing page. Can you help me create a, you know, a custom GPT where I can go step by step through my process?

Don't do it all for me at one time. Yeah, I want more control over it. But enabling it to, um, help follow that process and help me write the landing pages was like. Why didn't I do this earlier? Yeah. This is amazing. Like, and so it was like, but I had to have the process to utilize the software to help, help You need the fundamental foundation help.

Yeah. To understand what you're going for. And I think you had other frameworks in your mind before you were using AI to do these. Yes. Totally. Create these. And so you, that really helped you. It did, for sure. Yeah. Those two, that example right there cleared a huge bottleneck for, for me when it came to creating.

Content and Yeah, and things for the, for website. So it's not just software suites, it's also using and integrating ai. Some of them are integrated into those, but some of them you need to go outside of to kind of get that. And that's where I think AI is really just amazing is not just in imagery, but in concepts, process building.

Its its own GPT in a sense, based on questions. It's already kind of learned from out there. There's just a lot of different ways that you can go about. Doing what we do in marketing. And even another thing, like there's the process in software too. Like if you have a good pro, your process is really settled down, especially when it comes to like project management.

Yeah. That makes, I mean, we've tried out 20 different project management tools over the years, right? Mm-hmm. And I think what we really realized is that it, the, those, the software. In a lot of ways is interchangeable. They all do a lot of the same stuff, right? Yeah. But having the process nailed down and then marrying it with the right software really is is the, where you get things like, well, well it's, you know, when we started with Clickup, which is what we use now, we actually hired a professional like consultant to come in and say.

Uh, basically my takeaway was, yeah, yeah, you can do all these things, but just do these things and you'll have a really well-oiled machine. And that's what it takes is to kind of, but so much of it wasn't like we, we hired somebody to help us with clickup, but they, they weren't talking about Clickup. No.

There was none of it was Clickup related. None of it was, yeah. It was all like, okay, what do you do next? Okay. What's the step here? Yeah. And it was all process stuff. And then, oh, by the way, we'll put this into Clickup. Here's how, or Monday Clickup. Or Basecamp or, you know, they didn't even care what, what, what software we used.

Just having those fundamental like operational structures. Yeah. Process, yeah. Yeah. Really helps a lot. So all six of these really do. They've, they've commingled quite a bit. Yes, yes they do. And that's a, it's a big ball of yarn. I'm gonna throw a monkey wrench in this, this is the bonus section of the podcast.

Got one more I'm gonna throw at you. Okay. Budget

dollars. Dollar bills. Dollars. Yeah. If we had to prioritize. Yeah. Like I talked about in the beginning, that might be the first one because I think if your budget doesn't correlate with your goals, yeah, that's a, that's probably the biggest bottleneck you could have, right? Yeah. Like lack of budget means that you can't get bandwidth help.

Yep. Right? Lack of budget means that you probably can't. I'm looking at our list up here that I wrote down. You couldn't invest in software. I think it's a limiting factor on a lot of the opportunities you have to improve any of those other bottlenecks. Yeah. If you have more budget, I mean, you could throw money at the problem.

There you go. Right. That, that really is true. I mean, that's the perfect example of that phrase. Yeah. But like, if you don't have that, if your budgets are really, really tight, you're, you have to be so good on all the other, other bottlenecks mm-hmm. To really get, get results, I think. Yeah. So, yeah, I think that's a really good one.

I wish I thought of it. I'm jealous. Well, I think what we do is we take for granted that the budgets for small marketing teams are constrained. Yep. So it's, you know, it's, so maybe it was just too obvious. I just wanted to mention it. I think it, no, but I, I, it's, I'm really glad you thought that, that's a huge one, because it could come down to like, well, we want to pay for LinkedIn ads, but we can't afford 'em, or we can only afford this many of 'em.

So is it really worth it? You know, like there's all these other decision tree things that happen when you think about. Some of the limitations. Yeah. But you can't get help with bandwidth with, with no, no budget. Honestly, clarity that sometimes it helps so much to get someone on the outside to help provide that clarity.

Yeah. I think you, you get so stuck inside the bubble. Yep. Having somebody outside the bubble help can help clarify a lot of things. Right. Taking that to the farthest level, paying for interviews or. Like, you know, yeah. Going out and talking to your customers or having em fill out surveys or things like that.

Yeah. Are really, you know, you really need to get that huge, super important budget to buy assets, photos, like pay a photographer to come out and get a bunch of photos, the photos you want that are ready for it, right? Yep. Plan, money, budget. I don't know that the, the budget should be a part of the plan and knowing, I think it is knowing, but I, I, I don't know.

Budget has a direct effect on the plan. Um, but as we just talked about processes, having, you could pay somebody to help you get outside of your own head and help formulate some of the processes. Yeah. And then, yeah, software, like you need budget for software and there's a lot of, a lot of software that you could get.

You could prove the return on investment that like, oh, that's, that's a hundred dollars a month. Yeah. And if you've got a tight budget, that a hundred dollars may seem. Like a lot, but it doesn't free up like. Eight hours of your Yeah. Of your week. Calculate what that eight hours is worth, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Right. It, it, so budget unlocks a lot that you can do there to, and so yeah, I think that's kind of, we draw a big circle around that budget is just all that one is the first one. That's number one. Yeah. So we've started at the end in a sense. So all the things I thought I was all, I thought I came up with something awesome.

And then Eric just like said, step aside son, what about budget? And you're much younger than I'm absolutely perfect. Yeah. Yeah. Nice. Okay. Well let's do a recap then of our six plus our bonus. Yeah. Uh, one. Yeah. You wanna take number one? So bandwidth, your, your limits as a human. Okay. Or as a team to get things done.

One bottleneck. Number two would be clarity. Mm-hmm. Who are you talking to? What are you saying? What are you working on? Mm-hmm. As a team, what are you doing? Um, assets, sales materials, photos, words. All the things that you need to, graphics, logos, pull everything together to map, to make things happen. Yeah.

All the things, right. Number four, plan. Mm-hmm. Where are we going? What are we doing? Who's doing what, um, process. It feeds into the plan a little bit, but yeah. What are the, what are the steps we take every time? Okay. When we do this and then software, what, what's the under what's underpinning a lot of this stuff?

What's the stuff that's enabling us to mm-hmm. Move forward efficiently? And number seven. And number number seven. Yep. Money. Dollar Bills money. Amount of money. Yeah. Yeah. Budget. Cool. Yeah. Well, this sounds like a good place to stop the podcast, Mike. Thank you so much. It's great to see you on the couch again.

No tears. No tears. It's good to be back. Lay down, take a nap. Oh, there he goes. Now he's going into his nap. So we're wrapping it up. Thanks everybody for tuning in and watch. He's going on break. Thank you.

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