The Brief Creative Newsletter
003 - I Think About Gardening The Same Way as Marketing
I realized earlier this week that my approach to both is more or less the same and I like it!
The Spark
This is stuff I'm enjoying out in the world (it's probably not B2B).
There's a new Zelda game... I could probably end the section right here but for context, I spent over over 400 hours cumulatively on the last two Zelda games. They're a Creative's dream! Completely open world, tons of threads to follow, and everything is open to you from the start. You could play for hours, make zero progress, and still feel great about it.
But this isn't like those games! This one is like an old school top-down Nintendo game and the kids love it. So rather than getting sucked into a game where I have to build sailboats and cook food to survive the cold, I'm playing with my kids and we're having a blast. Highly recommend!
The Deep Thoughts
This is what I'm thinking about.
Earlier this week my wife and I had a marathon garden day. What does a marathon garden day look like you may ask. The answer is: we had to run around to our three separate gardens to water, harvest, and clean up. If your next question is: why TF do you have three gardens? Allow me to explain.
The three beds all serve very different but complimentary purposes and I don't know if the gardens subconsciously affected my marketing, if the marketing subconsciously affected the gardening, or if this is one giant coincidence but it makes sense (at least in my head).
We have our home garden, a community garden plot, and we built a garden at our kids elementary school. Here's what they do:
The Home Garden - Experimentation
The home garden is really important because this is our experimental garden. Yeah, we'll grow some of the more common vegetables that we eat in one of the beds but the other two are for us to figure out what does and doesn't work.
An example of that is corn. We'd never grown it before last year so we wanted to see how it would do. We planted a few seeds and they grew really tall, really fast but as soon as they started producing corn the squirrels stole everything. This told us we needed to plant in lower beds, put up cages, and that we could plant a lot of them close together since they generally just grow vertically.
That taught us what we needed to know to plant a ton more and this is what our corn looked like this year.
.jpeg "Glass gem corn")
But this isn't a lesson about growing beautiful corn, it's about marketing.
Any good marketing team needs to set aside time and budget for experimentation. If you keep running the same plays eventually they grow stale and you lose your audience's attention (your team will be miserable too).
Experimentation is how you keep things fresh. Whether it be starting a podcast, building a lead gen tool, or hosting a webinar series, it doesn't matter. You need to create dedicated space to see what resonates with your audience. Back in my "big budget" days I would allocate 15% to experimentation. That meant I wasn't borrowing money from somewhere else. That made experiments safe. It also gave my team confidence in knowing that they were encouraged to try new things to make sure we kept pushing the brand.
The Community Garden - Run Rate
Our town has a community garden with about 40 or so beds that members of the community can use. We have a plot there and we use it very differently than the home garden. Because it's a bit out of the way, it's hard to maintain at times. That makes it perfect for allowing plants to go to seed.
Going to seed means that the plants stop producing fruit and start producing seeds to self sow (where they plant themselves) or for collection (where you plant them)—it's actually a survival mechanism. This is really valuable because we don't want to buy seeds year over year. We want to have our own. The benefits beyond savings is that the plants are already acclimated to our climate so we know how they'll grow. This is what keeps the lights on—meaning this is how we continue to grow more plants and create room for experimentation.
In a marketing context, these are your ads, your landing pages, your always on assets that aren't always the sexiest but they make an impact. This is the run rate work. No one loves it but the thing is you'll never be able to take big jumps if you don't have a safe place to land. Beyond that, this is actually a great source of inspiration for experiments because you know what is and isn't effective.
That said because this work tends to be safe and more easily measurable (remember, it's a survival mechanism) I believe too many marketing teams focus too much of their time and energy here. Yes the work is impactful but it's contribution to revenue is usually incremental at best. To free the team up and enable more experimentation (where there's more opportunity) I'll implement self-service systems and outsourcing. The work still gets done but it requires way less effort.
The School Garden - Volume
So up until this point we've covered experimentation which is about the future, and the run rate work which is based on past success, but what do you focus on today? Today you're looking to move big numbers and that's what we do with the school garden.
We started this to teach the kids about gardening and you know what? They love it! They're always running over to help water, plant seeds or harvest beans.
But we can't feed the kids due to liability reasons so the plan from the start was to educate the kids and then donate to local food pantries. Donating meant we needed a lot of veggies.
See where I'm going with this? Because of our experiments from the home garden and the extra seeds from the community garden, we knew exactly what to plant and how much.
This is no different than how your strategy for the next quarter should work because it's informed by what's worked historically and by the direction in which things are headed.
More practically, your experimentation work will have generated MVPs for a number of different projects. The MVPs that performed are the ones that your team should focus on (the others should get updated or tossed). You'll also continue investing in your self-service systems because your volume plays will eventually keep the lights on. Isn't it funny that one day your experiments will become your run rate work?
This is how these different approaches feed each other (because one flywheel wasn't enough from me this week).
The associated percentages of your budget and resourcing will vary based on where you are in your growth journey but with these three work types supporting each other your primed to maintain the day-to-day impact and set yourself up for success in the future. If you do it right maybe you won't have to farm the land... ha!
