This One Word Saved the Campaign (and Sanity)

What's the word of the day? Clarity.

Welcome to the marketing team of 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. Well, Mike, how's it going? I don't know, just kinda stuck in a washing machine can round, round, round.

Well, I mean, I can understand. We kind of had a tough couple of weeks here where. Just kinda lost. Lost the vision a little bit. I think it was a little frustrating where we were kind of, yeah, it was like, it wasn't through any like fault, nobody's fault, like we're all working. Yeah. It was like, there's like something about motion for motion's sake or something like that, but like Yeah, it was busy.

Yeah, but we weren't like. Accomplishing things? Well, we had an internal project that we had set a few of us off on, and I, I feel like there was some sort of, there was a missing part to this, which we felt like we had covered when we had gone over it with everybody involved in the project. But along the way it seems like we had missed some sort of.

Clarity. Yeah. I think when we do, when we were going through this, this is really when it was kind of an awakening for some of these, like we were introspective about it and we looked at mm-hmm. Like, what's going on here? And looked at it as a symptom of like a bottleneck like we've been talking about.

When you're not really clear about a bunch of different things, you, you can just be. Either everybody off in their own direction mm-hmm. Not like working on their own little thing or just like, you just keep questioning yourself, right? Like mm-hmm. Is this the right thing? Is this the right place to go?

And so, and if you're doing that on your own, while other people are working on their things and everything, it's it. You're of course you're gonna have challenges getting the thing done. Yeah. Or get that initiative. You, you, again, you're gonna in encounter one of these bottlenecks that we've been talking about.

Yeah. It's just one of those things that all of a sudden you're like so frustrated and, and we lost sight of what we were ultimately trying to do. Mm-hmm. Like, I think we got, we got a little too deep into. Different, very specific ways of implementing something, but it didn't necessarily meet the, the ultimate like goal of what we were, we were trying to accomplish with what we were doing.

Yeah. Yeah. And then there are a lot of other things. I think we've, we've itemized, we've, we're gonna go over the list of all the different pieces and I think there, there are pieces that a lot of people would probably resonate with when they. Where projects seem to stall or, yeah. Or not stall, but like, just seems way harder than it needs to be.

Like, God, what, why? Why isn't this working or why, you know, like that the. That's me all the time. But like, um, well it seems like those issues come up and they fall into, basically, to me, like two buckets. One would be something around strategy. Mm-hmm. Like this big picture, you know, what are the goals and who's the audience and what's your messaging?

Those are kind of the big three, I would say. Yeah. When you get into the strategy side of it, and then it comes down to there could be that lack of clarity and actual. The tactical doing of the things where it's like, you know, who's a, who's doing what, basically, you know? Yeah. Who's doing it? What and what, what are timelines?

What are more of those, you know, scope. Issues with the project. Um, what are the actual channels that we're gonna go down and, and, and use as our marketing? So that, that's kind of what I saw as I kind of put it into those two big buckets. Yeah. Is like, you know, tactics and strategy. Yeah, it just kinda left us like in, I don't think we took, uh, took stock until later when it, you know, it's down the road and you're like, well, wait a minute.

Wait, what? What happened here? It's a weird thing and it's a strange dynamic that happens because you assume like what? That's what we do every day. Yeah. And some of us do more of other things than some others. And so it's uneven as far as where that's all distributed, as far as the efforts are concerned.

But I think one of the main things that came out of it was like. Wow. I guess we had made a lot of assumptions. We thought people knew, you know, what do you mean? You're not in my head as much as I am in my head all the time. Yeah. So I think today we just talking through some of these like parts where clarity, if you have more clarity in it, it will smooth out.

Mm-hmm. Uh, your marketing efforts. I think that's, that's our goal for the day. Sometimes that clarity needs to be on such a granular level with things that you really do need to dive into the things we're gonna talk about. And we're just gonna basically hit on about five of those points that we talked about, but it's getting into the weeds on that and not making assumptions that even when it comes to like project deliverables.

Well, I think the first, the first thing to be really like ultimately clear on when you're doing everything is like your goals, like. What are you, what are you striving for? Like, what is the purpose of doing all of this? If, if you aren't super clear on that, that you're, you're ultimately gonna be putting a lot of wasted effort in maybe a bunch of different directions mm-hmm.

When you could be pulling on the same rope to towards that goal. Mm-hmm. And I'm not even talking like even internally, like if you're only the only person, right? Like if you're, if you're doing this over here and then this over here, and then this over here, but they're not all. Ultimately in the, in the pursuit of that one goal mm-hmm.

You're spinning your wheels a little bit. Mm-hmm. Right. So like in our case, the, our, our problem case, right. We stated what the goal was, but we didn't necessarily, as we were working on things, keep checking against what the goal of it was. Right. We got a little lost in the, lost in the sauce. Yeah. And looked at, at what are the different.

You know, we got really in the implementation side of things, we started looking, yeah, we started, we got too in love with the implementation stuff and didn't keep looking back to like, well wait a minute, why are we, why are we doing this? Well, and sometimes it gets, uh, the challenge there is like, what's the goals?

Uh, get more sales. Yeah. I mean, I think the more specific you can be the be the better. Right? There's the smart goals framework, right? Like looking at is it specific, is it measurable? Mm-hmm. Like those types of goals are gonna help immensely in in steering things, right? Clarify. But sometimes you might not have those measurements or anything, but the more specific you can be, the better.

Like saying we want to put together an offer. To increase our sales mm-hmm. Is probably not specific enough. No. Right. You need to know, like, like you said, we we're trying to, we're, the initiative is we're putting together an offer. Yep. We know that that's, that's part of what we're doing here. Our ultimate goal here is to sell more of X and we could unpack that a little bit more if we have metrics on how.

What our sales are for that thing. Mm-hmm. We could say, okay, we want to have this many sales by this date. This is our goal that we're, we're right. And we need to stay focused on that and not, not question it. Right. Like this is, it's, this is where we, the goal becomes a filter for everything else you're doing.

Really? Yeah. That's really kind of where we got lost was like, well, this is the goal, but we think we need to change these things and then move outside and change these things to make these things different so that we can, it was just got too broad. Right. But then we started putting all our focus on one of these things that was way out here.

Yeah. Like, oh, here's what, here's what. What's happening? We're talking really vague terms because I guess we just don't wanna get specifics. Can't give away. Trade secrets are very, yeah, super important. Very high level. Yeah, it's very top secret there. Yeah. National defense level stuff, man. Yeah. So, but yeah, I think, I think because we, we, in this case we didn't.

W we only briefly mentioned the goal. Mm-hmm. And why we wanted to take this initiative on, and if we were, instead if that was our compass, if that was north on our compass. Mm-hmm. I think we would've, and we checked in every time as we were working. Is this. In pursuit of this. Mm-hmm. How is this helping serve this goal?

I think we would've, that's one bit of clarity That would've helped us one bit. Yes. Okay. What's another bit of clarity that we could have used? Who are we doing this for? Ideally when, and you use the word strategy, like I, hopefully this is something that's defined at your company level. Yeah. In your marketing efforts everywhere that you have a clearly defined target audience Yeah.

In who you're trying to reach, but having. Having that clearly defined, but also having clarity about. What their needs are, what their problems they're facing, what are the, like, how you can help them. Like the clarity there helps streamline so many other things that you're doing. 'cause you're not, even as if you're doing all this yourself, it makes it, you're not gonna be questioning whether this is the right.

Angle, the right approach. You might a little bit, but you're narrowing the scope of what your questioning might be. I think that's the most important part of this is like, yeah, I know it's for men and women. 18 to 30. Okay, great. You've identified an audience by their persona basically. Yeah. But what about those people specifically, or what problems do those people have that you're trying to solve for?

Yeah. Is the real, real question there. Yeah. And so having that clarity Yeah. Helps, helps in so many different ways. Mm-hmm. But it's again. It's a filter for, for your actions, right? Mm-hmm. That clarity you look through and is this serving this audience? Mm-hmm. No, it's not. Okay, well then we need to, you know, let's not spend time on that.

Let's keep moving. Well, and if you're clear on that too, not only do you become more efficient in what you're doing, 'cause you just have a laser beam focused on fixing that problem, it also opens up the opportunity for creative solutions around that too. Yes. It gets people thinking and that's not that you need to then shift gears, but.

Write 'em down, save those ideas for like, oh, this is a, we're working on this offer now. The next offer we do, maybe we pick from this list of three things that we came up with as we were working on this thing. Yeah. Yeah. So I, the target audience is a huge one. Like, no, having clarity about who you're, who this is all for, and who you're serving, and it's not just a marketing thing.

I think your whole, mm-hmm. Your whole operation should have that. Awareness. Yeah. Yeah. And clarity. Everybody's pulling on the same rope for that whole thing. Yeah. So then there's probably one more last thing, which kind of falls into the same clarity issue as far as strategy. Um, is I, it's kind of foundational stuff that, but I would gr group it all together under the banner of branding.

Yeah. Like, so, um, having clarity about your messaging, like mm-hmm. What you're saying in, in different areas. It. Help streamline your, your efforts so much more, right? Yeah. If you know what your value propositions are, you can, you can, instead of like trying to find new ones, you're just, you're fine tuning your messaging on those, those few value propositions you have instead of like trying to unearth a whole bunch of new stuff.

Yep. You've got that clearly defined, right. Saying who you are. Like that's a really fun, you know, we, I think we see it a lot is that companies sometimes can have a hard time. Describing. Who they are and what they do. Well, the, everybody's tempted to just say, we can do everything for everybody. Yeah. Yeah.

That's terrible. And so, so if you're sitting down and you have to do something where you have to describe who you are and what you do, and do it succinctly, that's not easy. I. No, and it can take a lot of time, and it can, and so you end up, that can be a serious bottleneck if you're not really clear on those things, right?

And so I, that all kind of goes into the messaging bucket of mm-hmm. I would say under, under your brand. But there's also like brand identity stuff, right? If you don't, if you don't have it. If you, you haven't clearly defined some of your identity essentials, um, going a little bit deeper than just a logo, right?

Like what's your, mm-hmm. What, what are your colors that you're using for your brand? What are your, what are the typefaces? If you're not clear on all that stuff and you're. Sitting down in Canva and you're going through the list of, and you're trying to decide what font you're gonna use for this, this thing, you're spending way more time than you need to.

The problem there is that there's so much information and branding given to people every single day. You have to be really very locked in. To making sure that that stuff that you're putting out there is so consistent that there's never a mental loss from one thing to the next to the next. When somebody sees that, they immediately make a connection to your brand, and that's the value of really having a valuable brand and having this full system that you just talked about built out, clarified, and easy to find and use by your team.

Yeah, which is another challenge of course, is just having it, where's the toolbox? I need that wrench. Yeah. Or that logo. Totally. And like I even see it, I think it's still applicable. If you're doing all this yourself, I think it's still applicable there, right? Mm-hmm. Like, like if we're talking about kinda spinning your wheels or we're ultimately looking for marketing efficiency, right?

Yeah. Like trying to be more, when you sit down, you're more efficient at trying to get the job done that you're sitting down to do. Right? Yeah. If you're, if you're not really clear on some of these things, you don't have that toolkit of things and everything. You might not think of it as being inefficient.

You may think of it as being creative and everything, but you're, you might be undermining your ultimate, like what you're trying to do and accomplish with your company's a time and place for that creativity. Exactly right. Let's go back to messaging, because I think that that's a really critical thing that you need to have buy-in from leadership on very.

Early on and it's very hard, like you said. Yeah. And the messaging comes down to phrases, taglines. Word bank stuff. Yeah. I'm gonna use these types of words and I'm gonna have this kind of voice when I'm using it and be very strict in that. Now, the creative fun part of it is going into that set of tools.

Yep. And writing with just that, but tweaking it for this situation or tweaking it for this holiday, or tweaking it for. Putting it as a question or putting it as a, you know, a different format, but really refine and limit how you're using that set of words. 'cause again, just like brand elements, just like colors and fonts, the more you freelance and go off the script, the more confusing everything becomes.

There you go. Your bottleneck. Yeah. It's an internal that, that clarity and especially if you have to. If you're working with somebody else who's approving this or making sure that it all runs, if you have, if, if you're clear, be as a team as what you're trying to say, you're not gonna be have those no multiple revisions.

It's, it's gonna be a lot cleaner, cleaner process. It's easier get buy in on all these core things early. Yep. And it streamlines things later for you. And you may want to just keep building out that word bank or that set of phrases or how you say this about this product or service. Like get all those in the can as totally.

And then all you're doing maybe is just tweaking a word or two here or there and we're moving things, but just then it just, everybody's like, yeah, looks great. Go for it. Yep. Overall. Mm-hmm. If you have an agreement on, on those branding, the, the core brand Yeah. Stuff from, from everybody involved, um, it will streamline well, and developing a brand is something that takes time.

Yep. And it takes a, over the course of, we just finished you, you're kind of still, you're on the tail end of finishing one for a client and it's taken months. And what's good about that process is then they're gonna have that toolkit at the end of the day. But they've also given thought to it over many different days.

You're still working in a small part of your farm. You're not like opening up the whole farm, like to like change the, it's you really just putting a, probably a tweak on something. You're not like starting from scratch with something in that. 'cause you've already, that's the thing you've already narrowed in on a certain area, so it might, so yeah, it's, it just, it helps.

Remove some of the bottleneck that that would be there. Yeah. It's a lot of pre-work, but Yes. So valuable. And it can last for years, you know? Yeah. I mean, some people have those, some organizations I should say, have those for a long, long time. Long time, and that's, that's what's built up their strength and their brand equity.

The strength of their brand is built on those kind of systems. Definitely. You know, so. All right. Sounds like we're getting clearer, Mike. It's, we are. We're real. I think I'm having a clear vision of where this podcast is gonna go. I like it if your strategy bucket Yeah. Is filled with water. It is still nice and clear and you can see the bottom of the bucket.

Love it. Wow. We're good. All right. I don't know how much further we can take this metaphor, but that's, we've got a clear bucket. Our audience has only so much patience for this kind of, yeah. And we're only halfway there. We're only talking about Oh yeah. Strategy and Wow. And the kind of more foundational type clarity.

But wait, but wait, there's more. There's more. Yeah. Enlightened me going back to our challenging project that we just weren't getting anywhere with another place where clarity was needed was really defining what the project was. Okay. So like scope, project definition. Yeah. Like scope, what are, what are we doing?

Yeah. What, you know, so a lot of this goes back to the goal, the overall goals and everything, but like, okay, what, what is the outcome we're trying to get here? Yeah. And being like super clear on that, right? First of, first and foremost, everybody agreeing, here's the thing we're working on. Mm-hmm. This is the project at hand.

Here's. Who's responsible for doing each part? Mm-hmm. Or you what, what's expected at the end of this project. But that sounds hard, Mike. It's yes. I, depending on the project, like you might not know everything. Yeah. You probably don't know everything depending on the scale and the scope of things. But you can say like, Hey, there's.

See that hill over there? Yeah, that little, the tree on the top of that hill. That's where we're going. We don't know what the road's gonna look like on the way there, but we know we're going to that tree on the top of the hill. But you can also assume along the road there's gonna be gravel. There'll be that snake, there's that butterfly that lands on your.

Eyeglasses. Yep. Like you can I start to shape out a lot of the structure of the details of getting to that and, and I, I argue, yes, it's maybe sometimes a little bit of drudgery, but outlining all those different things is, is the sauce as a marketing team, one, you're probably gonna be doing a lot of it yourself, but at least then you don't have to.

Use memory cycles to like, wait, there was that thing that I needed to, oh yeah, I need to get that approved. So in our case, we had kind of a, it was the project actually had mini. Many little projects or tasks. Mm-hmm. Inside of there too. Like clearly defining what some of those are inside of that mm-hmm.

Would've really helped too. Like really getting alignment of like what this piece is and what this piece is and what this piece is. Especially if you've got multiple people working and this person's here, this person's here, this person's here. Clearly defining how those pieces actually meet this overarching project.

Yeah. You know, definition and, and the definition of success for that project. Well, and again, it goes back to checking against the strategy pieces that you've already kind of done all the work around, because that's, I think, where things fall off the rails too, is like, I'm gonna make this thing and I'm gonna go.

Does it keep testing it against that? Yeah. Is it reaching, is it working towards that goal? So if we were gonna kind of recap what mm-hmm. The clarity that we suffered Yeah. In this, right? Like, like really what we were trying to do is we, we probably, we put our, we, we put our focus too wide. Yeah. We went really wide because we weren't clear on a lot of these different.

Pieces that needed to be more clear about. But what we ended up doing is trying to create a new thing. A brand new offer. Yep. For something. Yep. Right. At the same time, we were trying to create marketing for that offer. Mm. And. Build ano like a, A key thing. A key piece that's attached to the marketing, but it was a more specific like lead generator that would be part of the marketing.

We're trying to do all three of those things and different people working on it. Mm-hmm. Yep. In hindsight, what we should have done is got the offer rock solid, taken the offer as a project. Yeah. Been very clear, worked together on that and got that really solidified. Then we could work on the other pieces, but I don't think we got, I think we, we kind of thought that they were all the same thing at one point.

Yeah. Yeah. And we weren't really clear that the, the thing that we really needed to work on was the offer. Yeah. 'cause the problem with that, and this speaks to kind of taking things in the right progression. Yeah. Don't start working on the end product. Yeah, before you kind of do that initial work, you know, because that's, that is exactly what happened was you need to do, 'cause the offer that we had designed or came up with needed some refinement.

Like it wasn't fully baked. It wasn't, it wasn't fully baked. Somebody needed to go and bake it. What was suffering there is that. Yeah, if you s if somebody's not paying attention to some of the other clarity mm-hmm. Other pieces of clarity we talked about like goals and what we're really trying to do that r and d might slip further from.

Yeah. It goes, oh, this looks, this might be better. You know? And at the same time, if you're, so, I think you probably could have that happening over here. Like let's just use an example of a bigger. Bigger team, like let's say there's like 30 people working on this big initiative, right? Yeah. Like you could, you could meet together as a group and say, all right, here's what we wanna be, here's what we wanna do.

We, we've got goals. Mm-hmm. Our goals are clearly defined. We know exactly who this is going for. I could see. Leadership coming in and saying, here's a product that I think we need to create. Mm-hmm. We, we wanna get this done before this timeframe because there's an opportunity coming up. We have to build the plane mm-hmm.

While it's in the air, of course. And build up the marketing because we have to hit the gr hit the ground running here. Yeah. This is really tough. If you're doing like physical products, I'm dealing in the digital like you're piecing together, like Yeah. Thought leadership or you know, your, your thinking or, or expertise.

Something. Yes. Yeah. So no more a service based, let's just say service based. Service based. Okay. Service based thing In this thing. If we're using our clarity checklist here. Yeah. Right. As a le as leaders, it is possible to have somebody working on. The, the offer, the mm-hmm. The deliver, what you're ultimately delivering and the details of that, while the team responsible for marketing, it knows what's going on, you would establish what the goals are for, for that project, you would establish who the target audience is for.

Mm-hmm. You have a general understanding of what the project goals are. This is a, this is a. Service we are designing to meet this audience and it should be at this price point, and it involves these core things. Okay? So you can do that and you can set somebody forth to figure out the details of how that actually gets delivered.

Your marketing knows that this is who we're trying to, who, who we're trying to market to. This is their needs, this is how we're gonna accomplish them. They can work on the marketing side of things, right? Yeah. But if you. You have to have all that stuff at the higher level really clearly defined. Well, this gets to a point I keep thinking and going back to, is usually, you know, we like to say nothing new.

There's nothing new anymore. Yeah, right. Yeah. It's a combination of all things that are existing. That's been the case for hundreds of years. Okay, whatever. But my point in is with that statement, is that. We so often when we're making decisions, you and I are in leadership, so we make these decisions and, and come down off the mountaintop and give the team all of their assignments to do.

And sometimes it's as easy as like, yeah, just copy that one campaign or that one offer. See, it's just like this. And it's so funny and I think this is very common across the universe. How when you start to break things down and say, yeah, we're gonna make the same exact offer, no offer is exactly the same.

The mechanics are around it. Oh, could you just change that one thing? We even run into it when we're scoping projects for clients. Mm-hmm. That come to us with an example and it's like, yeah, we just want the same exact thing. Except for that. And, but then the way that the back, we gotta go, the backend needs to go this way.

And then, you know, like the, those details are the things that are like, they make it unique, but that's the thing that leadership sometimes is guilty of. Not really thinking it through and just assuming that it's just gonna be the smooth sail through the whole thing. Yeah. You know it. I wonder how much of it is your, um, there is nothing new.

Right there, there is nothing new, new out there, right? Nope. But what you're exposed to and what I'm exposed to, yeah. Out in the world and our, our wealth of knowledge and what we've, that we've gained over the years and things we see, they're completely different. They completely shape Yeah. Our understanding of that.

And so there's probably a, a connection that like if we talk between things and we have this, they say, we say. Oh, that's a, that's a citrus. Mm-hmm. And I'm like, oh, that's, that's a lime. And you're like, oh, that's an orange. Mm-hmm. You know? And we go forward and I'm doing my lime work. You're doing your orange work.

Yeah. You know, they're both citrus. Exactly. But you know, like, like that's where, yeah. It's where, I think that's where a lot of that comes from too. So, but there's opportunity there too. That's where you're putting a spin on the thing that's new. Yes, it is. It is. Ultimately, it's not really new, but the implementation of it might be new, your version of it.

Inevitably, it's never like just copy paste. But that's the thing that makes it different, unique, and everybody's situation is. As much as you try to systematize and make it exactly the same as that thing in your head or that thing, you saw the devil's in the details, and that's where, yeah, I mean, yeah, if you don't have clarity, you're making a lot of assumptions.

Yeah. The thing that really works well, just to go back and reiterate this one more time, building out those systems builds trust within your whole team so that when leadership comes down with their hopes and dreams for this new offer. Uh, and makes assumptions at least there's something to test against mm-hmm.

That is already kind of subtle law within your organization. Mm-hmm. So that you can execute 98% of it pretty much on course with all of those unique changes that need to be Yeah. Implemented because your system and your version of it. It is unique and I mean the, this kind of speaks to another one of the, like in our previous episode we talked about other bottlenecks, everything about like bandwidth and everything like that.

But if you have clarity on a lot of these things, it does make it easier to Yeah. Bring in outside, help on, on these things and not have to go back and forth with that outside help. Yeah. All the time. It, it really just helps smooth out. A lot of that helps avoid that like. Spinning wheel of assumptions that you get kind of caught in.

Ugh. I know. And that's where all hopes and dreams go to die. It's like you gotta dive into those details and clarify. And sometimes you don't know right off the, off the bat where those are you, but that's why you kind of have to keep checking in and, and making sure that the whole team is aligned with that stuff as they're working it through.

Yeah. Yeah. So we made a lot of assumptions, I guess when we, A lot of assumptions. Yeah. But you, you know what we got, we did get something out of it. What this podcast, which is I argue, the most important thing, this specific episode of the podcast, I should say, not the podcast in general, not the, not the back catalog of everything else we've done before, but this specific episode, this episode here.

And we have a lot of pieces we can use for something in the future. Next time, next time we kick it back off. We have got our, we'll be just a little bit more clear. Yep. We'll have our things to look at and make sure that we're hitting and checking against it. Yeah. The whole time. Yeah. Let's hope so.

Hopefully that works for other people too. That's why we do the podcast, Mike. Not for us. It's for the audience. It's a little bit for us. Is it? A little bit. I guess it is good therapy. Do you feel better? I mean, you were sitting on the couch. I feel better and I'm not even on the couch. I feel. I feel good.

You feel adequate. That's a perfect word for it. You need to have a t-shirt. Maybe that's, or a hat that just says adequate on it. Like, uh, what's his name on 30 Rock? He always had the, the a different word on the top of his hat. Oh yeah. The writer. Yeah. Adequate one would be perfect. Yeah, he was funny. Yeah.

What is that guy doing though? I wonder if he's still, he's probably a writer, right? I, I assume so. There's a lot of writers that were playing writers on that show. Well, Mike, this sounds like a wonderful place to stop talking and end this podcast and just get to work. Now that we're clear, what do you say?

Yes. I'm gonna go hang out over there. Love it. Alright. Thanks man. See you. Thank you. Thanks for tuning in. For more information and other episodes, subscribe to the marketing team of one podcast on YouTube, apple, or Spotify podcast networks. You can also chat with us on the r slash marketing team of one subreddit or visit marketing team of one.com to learn more.

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