When did marketing get so damn complicated?

When communicating your marketing strategy, Keep It Stupid Simple.

A marketing strategy should be straightforward enough that anyone who's not a marketer can read it and understand what you're doing. And, more importantly, why.

But, every time I open LinkedIn, I see a fancy-looking framework for this and a complicated framework for that.

Don't get me wrong. Frameworks are useful. I use some. I've even created my own, like this one for prioritizing product announcements and this one for creating homepages.

However, I find that most frameworks are overcooked. They make something that should be simple, overly complex. In particular, they make the task of developing and communicating marketing strategy look more intimidating than it actually is.

Yet, we feel we need to use them because complexity looks impressive. It evokes a feeling of, "This must be good. Look at how many components there are to it."

My advice: Keep It Stupid Simple.

And the smaller or earlier-stage your business, the simpler it should probably be.

Below is the "one-pager" I wrote for Equals at a time when we needed to reboot our marketing strategy. It answers three simple questions:

1. What problem are we solving and why?

2. What does success look like?

3. What should we do?

This single page was all we needed to align the exec team and start taking action.

An example of a simple “one-pager” marketing strategy

If you find this approach works for you, try answering a variation of these questions for everything you do to execute your strategy:

1. What are we doing?

2. Why are we doing it?

3. What does success look like?

I do this for every project. Like our first book, The Ultimate Guide to ARR.

An example of a marketing project brief

I find it to be a simple, effective way to get everyone on the same page and move quickly from plan to action. Try it with your next project.

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If you’ve been following us, you might notice we’ve not done everything we said we’d do. And that’s OK. Things changed, new opportunities emerged, and we adapted.

But I can say we’ve checked off a few big things that have had a significant impact, like rebooting our approach to content and moving this blog to Substack. We've also launched world-class product like Dashboards, which won Product Hunt’s Golden Kitty for Data and Security in 2023. And we’ve shared, very transparently, how we think about and build product—like our new charts.

I'm not suggesting this is a gold standard example of marketing strategy. It's definitely not. My hope is that it simply provides a starting point for those of you who don't know where to start. Or for those of you who, like me, are starting to get "the ick" with all the fancy frameworks out there. 🙊

Marketing can be simple. But, simple ≠ easy.