Welcome to The Machine ⚙️

Welcome! If you’re reading this you’ve found the Marketing Machine Newsletter. If you’re reading this on the web, make sure you sign up for the newsletter to get our roundup in your inbox every Friday and deep dives like this one on Tuesdays.

Today we’re kicking off with a bit of a deeper explanation of what we’re doing here. 🚀

The Machine

The name we've chosen for this project is more than just some effective alliteration right in the title. Marketing Machine is the name that we’ve given to a core set of mental models, techniques, gears, and levers that we have successfully deployed thousands of times over twenty years of work at the frontier of digital marketing. In fact, more than a choice, the idea of The Machine emerged organically over time as we talked to clients and marketing leaders about what we were building. So, here we are.

Welcome to The Marketing Machine!

If you’re a marketer or the leader of a company, your marketing machine is very real. It is made up of people, tools, and all the content, data, and outcomes they produce. Ideally, you put money into this machine, and you get a return on that investment in the form of growth, sales, so on. If only it were that simple.

The Marketing Machine methodology is a way of looking at all of those pieces as a holistic system. Like any complex machine, if one part is broken it will impact all the others. The machine must be built in sequence. Improvement is iterative and depends on careful monitoring and feedback. We are here to teach you the ways of the Marketing Machine: how to set your machine up, how to maintain it, and how it evolves and grows in an ever changing tech landscape.

The Gap  

"Attribution is a White Whale."

This is something a senior level marketing executive at a Fortune 500 company once said to me. We were talking about a project they had underway to identify where leads and traffic were coming from. (Who isn't aiming to solve the age old problem of knowing which half of your marketing is working?) This exec's take was that trying to make attribution successful is an impossible and forever project. We love walking into this situation because we don't agree and we get to change some minds.

Over the years we have delivered for countless clients and worked at numerous agencies, startups, and big companies. As the prestige of these positions grew, and our teams grew with them, we always sort of expected our tricks to stop impressing people. But they never did. What’s more, we expected someone to know the tricks already, especially the younger marketers who grew up with digital media in a way we didn’t. This didn’t happen either. It turns out, the things we learned along the way weren’t as intuitive as we thought.

So, back to the White Whale. The fact is that attribution is doable and the things that make it doable are the true magic of digital marketing. But, to make it work you have to think about things the right way. You need to know which parts of the machine to fine tune, and which parts will be impacted by the ripples of these changes. The reality is that the tools exist to solve for something like attribution, but most teams still don't really know how to use them. If they do know how to use them they often fail at maintaining the discipline of process to keep them running. This is the gap, and it's why we're here now: so more people can learn.

A few months ago, we looked up and realized that we were sitting squarely in a gap between knowledge and practice. We're here to help bridge that gap, to help marketers learn to link all of the classes, SaaS tutorials, webinars, and promises of return on investment from various “martech” platforms into a Machine that works for them and their business goals.

Old Habits & Managing Change

Most marketing departments are a bit of a mess right now. To the extent that a marketing department is a “machine” it feels like a machine built on the fly and held together with duct-tape. The tools and methods of the modern marketer are changing so quickly that it’s hard to keep up. Every new tool promises to revolutionize the process. Marketers rack up random certifications as they try to keep up with the latest fad. Inevitably a leader says “wasn’t that new tool supposed to fix this?” The answer is almost always that a new tool layered on top of outdated practices and bad habits, is no better than the old tool. A Machine built on a foundation of sand will shake to pieces as soon as you turn it on.

Because of all of the above factors, we found over and over that our job started with tearing out of a bunch of old habits and old software so that we could live up to the promises we sold when we were hired. This isn’t really marketing, it’s change management, but that's part of the machine, and something we had to learn. The reality of the modern Marketing Machine is that it's constantly changing, because modern media is constantly changing. A marketing campaign is a living thing, just as a Marketing Machine is an evolving set of techniques and tools. This is why our Friday newsletter is a weekly roundup, because keeping up with progress is just as important as the foundational mental models we cover in our in-depth posts like this one.

Change is not a roll out project to be completed, but a forever part of the machine. Machines must be maintained and upgraded. This way of thinking is core to our mindset, and it is one that we think will give marketers hope as they learn. The mess, the change, the new channels, the new tools all become easier when you understand the core set of principles that we are here to teach you. If you’re just starting out, it will help you build a marketing machine that is flexible, scalable and effective. If you’ve got a mess of a department to clean up, it will help you outline a strategy to make changes, and manage them. All building toward the skillset to stand up and run a Machine that will work smoothly and stay in shape over time.

The Rise of the Marketing Engineer

By now, we hope you can see the intention with which we’ve chosen the Machine metaphor. Building a Marketing Machine that works for you isn’t simply a matter of setting up a website and analytics. It is a matter of planning, building, and continued improvement, all with the right mindset, using the right set of tools and techniques. And this gets us to the final thing that we have realized over time and with the evolution of technology, media, and marketing. There is a new kind of marketer out there. We call ourselves “marketing engineers.”

The modern Marketing Engineer is an operative with the heart of a marketer and the mind of a programmer. We are creative storytellers who understand the narratives that will resonate with our customer, but who also know that this story is not simply invented by a conference room full of Don Drapers. Instead this story is rooted out and optimized through trial and error. To the Marketing Engineer, a campaign is a designed experiment that starts with research, hypothesis, and planning. That work feeds into a system of feedback loops and automation which gives us the data to adapt and continue. When the plan turns into action it feels more like science and engineering than weaving a tale and hoping your audience buys it.

Marketing Engineers are data and process driven. They hold their creative vision dearly, but know that the crowd is always right. They test multiple creative options at top of funnel because they know that most often our instincts are wrong and borne of bias that only science can punch through. They know that automations only work with proper planning, but when they do we can understand funnel stage conversion metrics in ways that traditional marketers still claim is impossible. This means that they can set goals for traffic, leads, and conversions more concrete than leadership has ever seen from their marketing team. In this way, Marketing Engineers are leading the future of the modern marketing department.

Learn The Ways of The Marketing Engineer

Does this sound like you? Do you wish your marketing department ran this way or do you want to make sure your upstart team is built on these foundations? If so, then you’ve come to the right place. Regardless of the stage of your career, or the size of your marketing project, we’re here now with the hope that we can change your marketing journey by teaching you the ways of the Modern Marketing Engineer, and giving you a look inside the modern Marketing Machine.

Stick around. Lots more to come.

🚀 Adam

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Oh, also: this 👇😉