Marketing programs allow you to scale your efforts without stressing your team or sacrificing quality;
The fitness analogy fits here: when you first start going to the gym you can’t lift much, or run fast or far; but if you keep going, you can add more repetitions, weight and distance – and do it in less time
One of the systemic challenges in marketing and PR is the focus on campaigns. Campaigns do have a rightful place in the mix, but we tend to over-invest in campaigns.
Academia often structures undergraduate training around them. The trade publications often focus their reporting on them. Award programs usually center on campaigns too.
The results? Campaigns sometimes become the foundation of marketing activity. This is fraught with drawbacks.
What sort? Campaigns require a lot of setup to get to the execution. It’s heavy lifting.
Research.
Creative briefs.
Planning.
Specs.
Design.
Assets.
Review and approval.
Measurement.
Feedback.
And on and on.
Campaigns are finite too. They start and end. That means the workload cycle repeats. And you start over every single time. That’s the catch because it doesn’t scale. Or at least it doesn’t scale efficiently.
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Build marketing and PR programs
What’s a better approach? Build programs – repeatable, sustainable and scalable programs.
Programs have a starting point but never end. As such, they require many of the same steps as the campaign initially, but you only need that once.
From that point forward the focus is on execution, iteration and improvement. There are deadlines every week, every month and every quarter.
You put guidelines in place on the left and right – limit the number of reviews based on the subject matter – and then empower the team to run forward as fast as they can as long as they stay within the guidelines.
You start with a manageable cadence and add volume as the team gets better at executing. It’s very efficient to begin with and you gain more efficiency as you go, without sacrificing content quality.
Why? The fitness analogy works here. When you first start going to the gym you can’t lift much, run fast or run very far. But if you keep going, you can add reps, weight and distance – and do it in less time.
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Three examples of marketing programs
The best part about programs versus campaigns is that it’s an approach that requires re-tasking, re-structuring, and re-organizing – but not more budget or headcount.
For example, program long-form content – ebook, report, white paper – every month, every other month, or every quarter. You develop a defined process for promoting it – from publication to measurement – and let the program run.
Maybe your team can only handle one ebook a quarter. That’s fine to start with. You can always add more later but get the program running so it just runs without a lot of heavy lifting.
The same is true for webinars, which is a second example. Sometimes teams have better success running moderate panel discussions around topics of interest to buyers. Panels tend to be easier to produce because they don’t require a presentation or too much extra work from the panelists.
Here again, you can scale up over the course of time. You can get both volume and quality as the team improves. I’ve seen marketing teams that produced both a webinar and some style of long-form gated content every single month.
A third example of a program is running a corporate blog like a news site. Publish at least once a week (2-5x is better), do it consistently and on deadline – rather than whenever you get to it. Strive to “cover” your industry the way the news media once did.
Over time you can add volume. I’ve run a corporate blog that published a new post five days a week – it grew to rival industry trades. And that wasn’t my team’s only responsibility. We also did external comms (PR), internal comms, social media and analyst relations.
We develop themes such as these:
- Monday was a thought leadership post;
- Tuesday covered research – first or third party;
- Wednesday was an SME interview (internal or external);
- Thursdays were dedicated to promoting a product or repurposing content; and
- Fridays were dedicated to a “share” – post that features a video, paper, presentation or an idea from an industry influencer.
You can see in the themes we developed are focused on external relationship building – which is a comms team’s mandate. This is also the key to scale because there’s a lot of synergy between those five major tasks we tackled every week.
We put a similar program in place for contributed articles, pitches and press releases too.
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Run campaigns on top of programs
Building out programs like this provides a solid foundation for marketing. You can scale marketing in a natural way without stressing your team or sacrificing quality. It will also help the campaigns you choose to run to perform better because you can and should run campaigns on top of the foundation you’ve built.
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