Introducing Scale
Today we’re introducing a fourth layer of our process called Scale. For years we’ve been building a comprehensive marketing operation to formalize everything a small- to mid-market business needs to drive organic revenue, which we call Story, System, Send.
The Story phase documents the vision from the founders or executive team by way of messaging, strategy, and a robust visual identity.
The System phase turns that story into operating infrastructure by way of a website, integrations, and analytics.
Finally, the Send phase distributes those assets into market, mostly through a podcast, since that’s the most effective means of marketing in the age of AI. Reply to this email if you want to know more about why.
Now, we’re turning our attention to the measurement layer underneath each phase to drive quantitative value for our work so our clients can see ROI based on their marketing investment.
We’ve always had an analytics layer and a QC process, but as we’ve grown—and thanks to our clients’ challenging us—we’re now formalizing these insights into a standard, repeatable practice with a dedicated analyst. It’s historically been one of our weakest points, but with these improvements we’re aiming to be an elite marketing team to represent our clients’ businesses with excellence.
The end result is a comprehensive marketing operation, much like a book. That’s why we’re calling our client relationships a “manuscript.” The contents of a manuscript contain a story, of course, but a book is made up of much more than just its contents. There’s paper, binding, typesetting, pagination, front matter, covers, inlays, and so on.
A relationship with our clients has similar elements: There’s a prologue of onboarding and discovery, where we understand the inherited story and turn on all the software machinations to get to work. Then we begin the chapters of documenting the story, building the system, and sending that published story into the world.
Each chapter has a “capstone” to mark when that chapter has concluded and we’re ready for the next. The prologue is marked with a kickoff. Chapter one concludes with a new project we’re working on called a Storybook, a beautifully typeset, embossed hardcover book that codifies the organization’s vision and legacy for all to see. In the age of AI, sometimes what you really want is a tangible thing you can hold in your hand saying, “This is our story.”
But in order for the Scale practice to work well, we needed to lay some groundwork.
First, we developed a system to track everything. It’s impossible to encode the thousand tasks, emails, and software platforms required to run a modern marketing operation. So, we needed a documented approach to our work. We created a coordinate system where each piece of work receives a client acronym, section marker (§) for which chapter and section it falls into, and which funnel stage this is meant for, A1 through A4.
Although modern marketing has less of a traditional funnel than it once did, as some now call it a “dark funnel,” there’s still value in segmenting content and leads through categories like Awareness, Affinity, Action, and Advocacy. More importantly, it’s useful to see what percentage of the cohort is making its way from Awareness to Advocacy. That’s easier said than done, but that’s where we’re headed.
Second, we use agents to tag every task and asset with those coordinates so that other agents can help us understand what content performed well, what didn’t, and what we can do to improve. This system will allow us to analyze at scale, performing experiments based on hypotheses from what we’ve learned with other clients’ content.
Finally, our new analyst Tyrone will be deep-diving into each Partner client’s performance metrics every month to surface ways we can continue to improve every detail of our content and operations.
We’re rolling this out for our clients effective immediately, and we’re excited to see where it leads.
As always, we’re grateful to serve.
