The Way of The Marketing Engineer

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This is the final part in a series including Welcome to The Machine, The Rise of the Marketing Engineer, and Seige Engines & The Marketing Engineer's Mindset in which we introduced the idea of a Marketing Machine, the Engineers who run them, and how they think differently. Today I'm going to wrap this series up with a set of 23 maxims that I have compiled, generated, or remixed throughout the evolution and emergence of the idea of the Marketing Engineer. I call the list "The Way" because it goes in order here and there, but read it once that way and then use it as you will on your journey as a Marketing Engineer.

Do you have something you think I missed? Do you have something I should add? Respond to this email. Drop into our Discord to chat with the Marketing Machine team directly. Join us IRL for our weekly "Office Hours" sessions: where me and other members of the crew/community hang out to field your questions about marketing, business, technology, whatever's on our minds.

Okay, enough housekeeping, let's do this!

🚀 Adam

1. Mental Models and Mindset

And a new kind of marketer.

Digital distribution changed media. This new media changed the market. And this changed marketing. The Marketing Engineer is the response. We are not developers; we are not programmers; but we understand that marketing has become a scientific discipline.

Marketing Engineers may have many titles. Our responsibilities in the marketing department may be broad, or narrow. (We may even find ourselves in Sales roles! 🤷‍♂️) The idea here is that the following principles can be applied across marketing roles, across teams, products, or verticals. We are not here now to define a title or a role. We are here now to capture a series maxims that add up to a mindset: a way of looking at the marketing discipline which represents this new kind of marketer.

In this document, I'm not trying to teach you any hacks, or tricks, or tell you how this applies to your marketing team or strategy. I'm here to give you a quick set of mental models you can use to build the best marketing machine, and keep it running while the media landscape continues to shift.

2. "The Way"

Documentation is Critical.

There is a note on my desk that says the above for years now. "Documentation is Critical." I write a lot, but that doesn't mean that it's easy. Especially when it comes to basic documentation of processes or practices. I still need the reminder to block the time to document. Its critical to do this work. Write the briefs. Outline the processes. Document your thinking. It helps to process, but it is also critical for scaling and as members join or leave your team. So, I lead with this. The Way exists because I am trying to write down the things at the core of the Marketing Engineer's mindset. You should do the same with your processes and thoughts.

Or, you should contribute to this document. To that end...

The following is a living document. It is meant to be a touchstone for a community of Marketing Engineers. As we take our skills and go into the world, joining different teams, working with different professionals, solving different problems, it can be easy to feel stuck. Even among our own team, we can get so deep on one path that we lose sight of the broader vision. This is why we end this series with a "manifesto". A public declaration of the values of the Marketing Engineer and a document to which we can return that will provide us with a point from which to restart when we feel stuck on a problem.

3. The Heart of a Storyteller

Marketing is about telling a story.

Marketing has always lived where narrative and action collide. So to does the heart of the Marketing Engineer. The point of marketing is to drive business, or at least reach new people, but this is done by telling stories.

We are telling the stories of our offerings, or our businesses, and we are hoping that the people we reach will take action. That action is driven by the story we tell them, and the story they absorb and make their own. For all of the tools and techniques of the modern Marketing Engineer, nothing will beat the right story, well crafted, to speak to your audience. (Delivered, of course, at the right time to answer their question, or remind them of your solution.)

4. The Mind of an Engineer

Marketing is a scientific and technical discipline.

Once we remind ourselves that narrative is still at the core, we can move to the technical discipline. The goal of the Marketing Engineer is to build a marketing machine that will reduce the fickle variability of simply shouting stories into the world.

While we know that storytelling is at the core, we also know that fighting in a conference room about which story is the "right" one to take to market is silly. Instead we build our machine such that we can run tests, collect data at every step, and learn over time which stories resonate.

5. Build Good Tests

You are a scientist.

You can decide if you wear the lab coat or not, but to be a Marketing Engineer is to be a scientist. By this I mean, to be one who is committed to the scientific method as a mode of inquiry. We work with data every day now. Data Science exists because data means that we can run effective tests. To design good tests, we have to think like scientists.

Build in the testing mindset. Allocate budget to R&D if you can pull it off. The only expected return is learning. The truth is, once you get the hang of it, things will pop off of the R&D track, and because you didn't plan their return, they only help the rest of the machine look good. Worst case, you take away the learnings.

Be clear about what you are testing and how you are testing. Avoid vanity metrics and understand which metrics matter at which phase of machine rollout. Design tests to avoid bias introduced by ROI incentives or vanity metrics. Understand the nuance of what you are testing and how your test is built to provide data to answer your question.

A broken test will resulting in useless data. That's at the best. Even worse, it could provide you with data that misleads your strategy down a faulty path.

6. Thinking Growth First

Do not chase growth. Assume it.

Obviously we're chasing growth. That's part of the marketer's job. But in order to build a strong machine you also have to assume success. You have to look not just at the case in front of you, or even the the next quarter or year. What if you 10x this year? What if you do it again the next year?

Statistically, most of us won't find ourselves in this situation, but we should build like it might happen anyway. This is because building for that sort of scale forces you to shift your frame on every problem. It will cause you to build, and then pull forward, the growth you so desire. This is what the engineer realizes. Automation is already moving the needle. AI is going to blow the roof off.

7. Be Process Oriented

Machines execute process.

Always back up to process. For project management, for lead flow, for content creation, for documents like this one. I've covered documentation. One of the reasons documentation is critical is because it forces us to talk about process. Process is what drives software. Machines execute process. Process is what we're able to improve through technology. Process is the crux of any system that can be augmented with technology.

Always review process. Always be willing to slow down the project in order to discuss and refine process. It will cost you time up front, but it is the key to building a future-proof machine. It will also pay dividends over time by multiplying output and efficiency as the machine starts churning.

Build process inflight. If you aren't getting to build from scratch, you can still start to improve process right away just by documenting, and dissecting. Sometimes just asking people about process makes them think about it enough that improvements show up. Onboarding will be your cleanest opportunity to ask the questions that will help you uncover existing hypotheses, assumptions, and tests.

8. Proceed With Intention

Process is built on intention.

Know where you are going. Document it. The key to process is the intention of each process. The key to process is the intention of each step in that process. This doesn't have to be heavy. It doesn't have to be time-consuming. It is a mental model. Watch for intention. Inquire about intention. This is how you will understand processes.

Do we know why a decision is being made? Do we understand how a decision is being made? Yes. Great, move on. No? Ask a few more questions. Take some notes. These will be the multipliers in your machine.

9. Automate Everything

Marketing machines can run themselves.

Okay, not everything, but "everything" is the mindset. Watch for things that can be automated. Automation is how machines execute process in order to multiply force. Once you have processes outlined, and intentions aligned, you can automate. In fact, you have no excuse not to from a technical standpoint.

The modern eco-system of no-code tools (my favorite is Zapier) means that automation is no longer out of the reach of anyone who doesn't know how to write code. Even if you don't have a programmer on your team, or you don't know how to code yourself, you can hook one SaaS tool to another and build remarkably performant and powerful automations for record-keeping, notifications, communications, content generation, and outreach. You can even use these tools to automate conversations with GPT and similar AI models.

10. Build on Stable Foundations

Marketing machine problems compound. Start from first principles.

A Marketing Engineer must always start from the beginning, even when inheriting a mess. Insist on it. Like any discipline of engineering, we must understand that building our machine on a foundation of sand will cause it to shake to pieces under load. When jumping into a project it will be tempting to begin to build on top of what already exists. Sometimes it will be required. As best we can, we need to avoid the temptation to simply graft on to existing mistakes. Take the time to rebuild as you ramp up. Account for this as you set expectations about your onboard.

Plan for the future. Back up and assess processes for simple things like UTM tag use. Look at taxonomies across the board. Make sure analytics are installed properly and set up to produce the best data. Start to establish team practices that presume that sometime in the future you will have to operate at a dead sprint. Establish processes that assume a scaling workload. Do not cut corners early. These are all of the things that will leave you fighting for the last 10% when you need it to make your numbers.

11. Embrace All Touchpoints

Marketing is a journey. Treat it that way.

Sometimes we use the term "customer journey" in a very cavalier way. Here, we take it seriously because it is the right analogy. Each chapter in the epic is another touchpoint as we direct the full story that a customer will internalize. Map your customer's journey. Understand every touchpoint. Understand how each fits into the narrative of the customer and of your brand and product. Something sloppy near the end can upend the entire journey.

From the first moment a customer is aware of your product, until their decision to purchase, and even beyond to their growth into a community member or evangelist, they are inside of your marketing machine. It is the duty of the Marketing Engineer to understand and interact with all of these touchpoints, because all of these touchpoints impact the story of your brand or your product and thus the efficacy of your machine. Greats ads don't matter if your sales collateral is poor. Great sales collateral doesn't matter if the customer onboard is weak. Eventually the customer will experience all stages of the journey, and eventually word will get out that your product is lacking.

12. Know The Whole Machine

Marketing is a holistic discipline.

With an understanding of each of the touchpoints on the journey, we must understand how they fit into the machine. Where are they tracked? Who owns them? How are you testing assumptions and measuring results?

A Marketing Engineer must know all the the pieces of the machine and how they are interconnected. We must know where a customer is in their journey, which communications they have engaged with, which version of our story is resonating, and how this will cause their journey to branch. We must keep the entire system mapped so that we are able to quickly understand the impact of changes, to the system or in the market.

13. Understand Media

Marketing is a content powered discipline. Every company is a media company.

Just as we know the whole machine, we must understand the machine that produces all of the content that adds up to this journey. Modern marketers have known for years that "content is king." Digital tools and distribution have taken this a step further. The new reality is that content is king... and every company is a media company. Now any marketer with a laptop and a smartphone can produce top quality owned content.

This means that a Marketing Engineer must know the ways of content production, at least a little. We must understand the workflows, the intermediate assets, the subject matter experts needed and the time it will take to produce a piece of content. This production process is core to the well oiled marketing machine. You will need to produce content constantly. Do not think of each piece as a one off. Think of each piece as a chance to refine a process that will run over and over. Build what you can in-house, shop out what you can't, but always realize that this single asset isn't the endgame. The endgame is a workflow that will be able to reliably produce content forever. (In theory 😉)

14. Embrace Technology

A marketer must understand the tools.

We must keep up with the latest technology. It can be exhausting to try to keep up with the ever-shifting martech landscape. But a Marketing Engineer must persist. It is critical to understand the state of the art. It's because of technology that our discipline exists, and it is via technology that it will continue to evolve. This means media technology, marketing technology, tracking technology, and even the technology for printing swag.

While we watch broadly, we must also dive deeper only selectively. It can also be tempting to fall too far down a given technology rabbit-hole. Even as marketers we are susceptible to marketing. Part of keeping up with technology is minding the landscape, watching the tides, but knowing which waves are the right ones to try to ride. Not every piece of technology will be relevant to your machine or your market. Not every technology will have an impact on your marketing practice. Those which might will require careful deployment.

15. Make Peace with Change Management

The machine must work for everyone.

(Speaking of deployment.) The Marketing Engineer must realize that the deployment of new systems, new processes, and new technology organization-wise is part of the job. Because this is the case, we must be mindful of the practice of change management. We will often be the driving force behind new media practices, new narratives, new branding, and new tools for tracking our interactions.

When we own the deployment of these tools, processes, and stories, we must realize that adopting new stuff doesn't come as easily to some as it might to us. We are used to adopting new technology as it emerges. Not everyone has as many logins to weird things they're testing as we do. Internalizing new technology, new processes, or new stories takes time and repetition. Even for the smartest people.

Effective change management may often be the true weakest link in the execution of a marketing strategy. We must not get frustrated, but instead must calibrate our expectations and the expectations of our leaders to align with realistic change management timelines. Provide education and support for team members who have more difficultly.

Above all else, we, and our leaders, must lead by example. To the rest of the team, the strongest signal in our arsenal is the social impact when they see you and leaders above them using the tools. Work to incorporate the new tools and stories into presentations. Call out when they are being used.

16. Market Marketing

No one knows what you are doing unless you tell them.

This applies across all departments and functions on a team, but marketing is unique. Everyone is subject to marketing in their daily lives in a way that they simply aren't subject to, I don't know, P&L reports. This means the breadth of assumptions, misconceptions, and misunderstandings about what a marketing department does, and more importantly what the marketing department does for them.

Think of the rest of your company, and the rest of the team as a marketing target. If you don't tell them what you do and make sure they know about your wins, they will make up their own story. Use whatever tools you need. Reports. Dashboards. Internal newsletters. I've even made sure that my bosses are included in ad targeting so that they'll see our ads in their feeds.

17. Track Everything

That which is not measured is not met.

We've already talked about knowing all of our touchpoints. This is one step further. This is where those touchpoints turn into data. When we talk about data, don't get lost in the idea that you need "big" data to be able to do anything. Just knowing to track things, and store them in a place where you can use them is already a leap ahead. Later we'll talk about analysis.

This also includes data on your own process and performance. Finding the data in our own machine is a key tool when it comes to marketing ourselves. Track KPI, track productivity metrics, anything you might be able to watch to understand and improve your marketing machine.

18. Have Patience

Marketing is a discipline of patience.

A Marketing Engineer understands that we are not the hunters. We are the builders. We are not going into the forrest to find leads one at a time. We are building attractions, and weaving tales to bring them to us. Understanding and preaching patience is key.

It will take time to set up your marketing machine, it will take time to optimize that machine, and it will take time for any potential customer to take action. Often this is something for which the Marketing Engineer must fight. But, given the time, the return on investment from this machine will be more stable, and the customers who experience the journey will stick around longer and have better things to say.

19. Do The Research

Marketers must understand the market and their customer.

You must understand your customers. To tell a good story, to match a narrative or a campaign theme to your cusomters you need to understand who they are. There are lots of different ways to being to learn about them. Maybe you don't have access to traditional "market research", but you can still get a sense and try to document who you think your potential users are through surveys, interviews, social media research, and good 'ole Google. This is all reasearch. You should have data to back up findings.

You should also understand the broader market for your product. This will help you align projections. You probably aren't going to massively outpace the growth of your addressable market. You can ask other execs for this information.

20. Be Data-Driven

Marketing Engineers use data to test assumptions.

I once worked with a product guy who used to remind me that, past a point, whatever a founder or product team is working on is just fan fiction. This is also true for marketing. Past a point, we're are just guessing. This is why we need to do research to understand users, and this is why we need data.

Always fall back on data. If you're not sure what the right answer to a marketing question is, ask yourself if you have any concrete data to help answer the question. You might not, that's okay. If it's important enough to test, figure out how to build that test into the machine.

21. Build Community

Marketing does not stop after purchase.

Community is an amplifier. It takes time to build properly, but an engaged community is one of the greatest amplifiers around. It is an amplifier of message, and it's an amplifer of spend. You may think that this is the realm of the customer success team, or something like that, but it is not. This is marketing. You are still telling the story of your brand even after you have closed a sale. Community is the key to Net Promoter Score, it's the key to Lifetime Value, and it's key to churn.

Building a community is different from driving and closing a sale. For a long time, a community project is going to seem like lark to a lot of people. Worse, it may be questions as a waste of money. They'll ask why you're giving away so much content, and not trying harder to convert these people into leads. If it is the right move for your growth, community is an amplifier worth more than any paid media.

Community is an investment in a flywheel that takes a lot of good will to get started, but is the sort of thing that can add up to explosive growth, or at least rock solid retention.

22. Improve Continuously

The Way requires continuous improvement.

Learning counts as work. Continuous innovation is required. Stay curious. Attend conferences. Read newsletters. Join communities. Experiment. Cultivate a culture of curiosity.

You are a marketer, which means you work in media, software, and technology. Those three things are not going to stop evolving. In fact, they will now do so at the pace of AI. We have no choice but to remain informed, to play with the new tools, and to put tests in market that try weird new things. When we rest on our laurels, the sands change below us, and the foundation start to slide.

23. When in Doubt, Reduce Complexity.

If you're stuck, drop some stuff.

If you feel stuck or overwhelmed, reduce complexity. Saying "no" to things is the true skill of the designer, entrepreneur, and the Marketing Engineer. We can do all of the things. We can test all of the things. We must choose which things to focus on mindfully, and with intention. If you feel like you have lost this focus, reduce complexity. Take things off your plate, and build them back up. In building you will find the solution to your problem.

That what I've got...for now!

I'm going to put this here again, because I mean it. Do you have something you think I missed? Do you have something I should add? Respond to this email. Drop into our Discord to chat with the Marketing Machine team directly. Join us IRL for our weekly "Office Hours" sessions, where Mark and I hang out to field your questions about marketing, business, technology, whatever's on your mind.

🚀 Adam