New Year, new marketing plans. Hopefully by now you’ve kicked off various activities and you’re waiting to see how those early campaigns are working out.

The other thing I see in marketing departments at this time though is burnout. Everyone is trying to do everything either because there’s no real strategy there (“let’s throw everything at the wall and see what sticks”). Or it could just be bad planning (“the start date for every campaign is the 1st of January”).

Either way, you might soon be revisiting the strategy discussion. Specifically, why are we doing activity A? Can we kill activity B? Is activity A working yet? That activity can quickly turn into navel gazing, when what you need is focus and a way of choosing what you should be really worrying about. To that end, I’ve been using the flywheel model below for years now. The point of the model is that you have a list of metrics and activities you can look at to check whether you would actually doing them and doing well. As a simple example: if nobody is coming to a website to talk, what should you do? Should you hire a content writer? A designer for the website? A product marketer? The diagram and notes below give what I think the “next best” activities, based on splitting the marketing flywheel into five stages.

This first diagram is for senior decision-makers (SDMs). There are no hard and fast rules here, but generally these are people who are less likely to be actually using the product themselves but certainly influence the buying decision heavily.

For each part of the flywheel, I’ve put what I think the most impactful activities. If I only have time to do one thing, what is it? Looking at the first diagram, if you’re brand-new into a market (nobody knows about you) and you’re trying to sell to senior people, where should you spend your money? You must create awareness of the brand first. I nothing else will work without this first. So your first activities have to be things like PR, analyst relations, thought leadership, at some budget for LinkedIn. If you were spending money on complex lead qualification processes, when you have no leads to qualify!, then you’re burning money.

This second diagram spend users. Meaning you are advertising to the people who are actually going to be using the products. That means they’re likely to be more junior and have very different requirements (for example they’re likely to care about usability and less likely to care about long-term financial benefits in the organisation).

Here, the marketing is different. End users don’t read the same things as senior decision-makers. They’re far more likely to do a Google search for a particular problem they’ve just hit a than for an in-depth analyst report.

What does this mean for marketing budget? If there is a community of users, then you need to reach out to them. If not, PPC and SEO crucial. Either way as you get further through the flywheel the product has to be amazing (for end users, there’s nothing you can do in marketing that will overcome an unusable product).

Hopefully this is useful as a way of making sure you’re making a big impact to the start of the year without burning everybody out and without burning through your whole budget by Valentine’s Day. If your plan is to “do everything” then that’s not strategy, that’s a recipe for employee burnout and empty pockets.