The Beat #3: Money Don't Matter 2 Night

Our third dose of marketing street knowledge, we dive into doing more with less

Author

Ian Truscott
February 05, 2023

Welcome to The Beat by Rockstar CMO, delighted you are here. I’m Ian Truscott, and I intend to share a mix of what’s caught my eye from the Rockstar CMO community, the latest discussions from the podcast and our street knowledge blog.

Hello! Thanks again for opening this newsletter.

You may have noticed I am picking the subject line from song titles (which I don’t think any email best practice ninja would recommend), and as I get back into the groove of this stuff, I will try and give each a theme.

This week I am inspired by a conversation with my chum Jeff Clark (experienced B2B marketer and former Research Director at SiriusDecisions/Forrester) on the podcast this week.

We discussed the groundhog day feeling for marketers about being asked to do more with less. Jeff made some great points in our discussion, here are a couple of things I took from our conversation:

  1. Look at what your competitors are doing. Two sides to this coin, if everyone in your industry is pulling the purse strings tight, should you double down and grab that attention? OR, if your budgets are tight and you face a well-funded competitor, is it time to invest in customer marketing and retention?

  2. Look for efficiencies- Jeff has some great examples from his time at SiriusDecisions/Forrester, where organizations saved huge sums by reviewing their martech, but what about your other processes? Could you be more efficient?

  3. Balance internal/external spending - We discussed one of the challenges when budgets get cut; we tend to focus on external programme spending, campaigns and such. This has a disproportionate impact on marketing performance, but we also discussed the balance of outsourcing when cutting internal spending.

You can listen to the whole discussion on the podcast, and this gets me back to the song, and email title as Prince sang in Money Don’t Matter 2 Night:

Just when u think u've got more than enough

That's when it all up and flies away

That's when u find out that u're better off

Makin' sure your soul's alright

Prince - Money Don’t Matter 2 Night

Yep, whatever 2023 might bring you, make sure your marketing soul is alright.

Latest podcast episode

The discussion about doing more with less, plus a wonderful chat about space marketing with Izzy House.

rockstarcmo.com/152-the-do-more-with-less-groundhog-day-space-marketing-with-izzy-and-a-lonely-thought-in-the-virtual-bar-episode

Street Knowledge

Based on the topic of doing more with less, here are some links you might like.

Sales, Savings or Sunshine?

On this theme of evaluating what we are doing as a marketing team, I really liked what Joe Pulizzi shared in his newsletter when thinking about publishing content - will it create sales, savings or sunshine?

www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-im-using-chatgpt-dalle-2-linkedin-joe-pulizzi

How To Scale Your Content Marketing Strategy To Improve Efficiency

On the topic of efficiency, former guest from the podcast Thomas Peham, CMO at Storyblok, published this article on the Content Marketing Institute. He outlines 5 ideas to scale your content strategy with fewer resources by building a content machine.

contentmarketinginstitute.com/articles/scale-content-marketing-improve-efficiency

Tuesday 2¢: Budget, Priorities & Focus

A while back, when I was full-time freelancing, I shared this experience I had with some clients about asking key questions when prioritizing budgets and campaigns, do they create ART?

iantruscott.com/tuesday-2c-budget-priorities-focus

How Much Content Is Enough?

From the Robert Rose archive, (Robert is a regular on the podcast - when I don’t screw up scheduling him!) - An important question if we are looking at doing more with less - how much content is enough?

contentadvisory.net/how-much-content-is-enough

Beware the Martech Industrial Complex

Back to Jeff’s wisdom, one piece of advice he gives when doing more with less is to evaluate your marketing technology. In this article, Jeff outlines 5 steps to evaluate your marketing stack.

rockstarcmo.com/how-to-gain-control-over-your-martech

Splendid, you’ve made it this far, thank you.

Do you have any feedback or suggestions, either for this newsletter or our podcast, then reply to this email or get in touch - I’d love to hear from you.

Have a geat week!

Cheers!

Ian

Ian Truscott | Founder and Chief Bottle Washer | Rockstar CMO

PS: Monday Marketing Mojo

Here is something to get your Monday marketing mojo working tomorrow (as I send this on Sunday), the Prince track I referred to: