Taking Marketing's Vitals
The 11 Components of a Healthy Marketing System
When growth isn’t meeting expectations, where do you focus time and energy to fix the problem?
If you’re working in a marketing-led business, you might be asking yourself questions like:
Is the content resonating with the audience?
Am I marketing in the right channels?
Do I have the right tech stack?
Is the product positioned wrong?
Is the product itself good enough?
Marketing can so often feel like a black box, and as a former General Manager turned Marketing leader who’s worked with 15+ startups, I see three reasons why.
Marketing is a delicate system. Product, content, brand, and growth marketing elements must work together. If one part of the system is working well, but another isn’t, the whole system falls apart.
Most marketers aren’t system thinkers. Most marketing leaders come up through one marketing discipline—SEO, content marketing, paid social media, product marketing, brand strategy, etc.—and struggle to shake the bias of that discipline as they advance in their careers.
Marketers and stakeholders speak different languages. Sales, finance, and often CEOs all speak the language of the P&L—revenue, sales, acquisition, and profits. Many marketers speak the language of campaigns, creative briefs, impressions, and clicks. Successful marketing leaders translate between these two languages, but when that’s missing, it leads to a lot of misunderstanding on both sides.
Investigating the Black Box
I’ve seen marketing leaders and founders struggle to properly allocate marketing budgets and resources to drive repeatable, profitable growth. It often feels like a game of Whac-A-Mole—as soon as one thing is fixed, you realize something else is broken.
It’s tempting to start fixing the most urgent or obvious problem, but when it comes to the black box of marketing, the only thing I’ve seen work is applying a systems-thinking approach to diagnosing the root cause (or causes).
This post introduces the 11 components of a healthy marketing system. Over the next several posts, I’ll dive deep into each component, outlining how it impacts the overall marketing system and sharing specific questions to help you properly diagnose its performance in your organization.
Before we get into it:
Do all of these steps apply to every marketing team? This framework is relevant for scaling, post-product market fit companies using marketing as their primary growth motion and spending at least ~$2M annually on marketing (including headcount and budget).
Where should I start if I’m early in setting up my marketing-led growth engine? You need a much lighter-weight version of this system that still includes elements from all three pillars. I’ll publish a post that goes into more detail about applying systems thinking to early-stage startup marketing soon!
Checking Marketing’s Vitals
The 11 components are divided into strategy and execution across the four major marketing disciplines: brand, product, content, and growth. Let’s start with the basics:
Brand Marketing tells the story of why your company exists. Rooting your brand in deep customer insights creates an anchor for your content and helps develop an emotional connection with customers that lasts beyond the transaction.
Product Marketing defines who your product(s) are for and what differentiated value they unlock for your customers, creating a foundation for all of your content.
Content Marketing translates your brand strategy and product positioning into content that connects with your customers. (I love Emily Kramer’s analogy of the “fuel” for your “engine”— content marketing is the fuel, and growth marketing is the engine.)
Growth Marketing distributes content to your audience to trigger action. It includes all marketing channels and technical aspects (analytics, attribution, MarTech) that help you deliver your content efficiently and measure its impact accurately.
Here’s how the 11 components shake out:
💖 Brand strategy: Do you have a clearly defined purpose (why your brand exists) and values (principles to guide your brand’s behavior/decision-making) that help your audience understand what you stand for?
🎯 Positioning: Is your product creating differentiated value for a clearly defined target audience?
💬 Messaging: What are the reasons (and the evidence) customers should try your product?
🏛 Pillars: Does all of your content connect back to a few core themes?
📆 Calendar: Do you have a regular cadence of content tied to moments in your customer’s life and your product’s roadmap?
📣 Distribution Advantages: Are you activated in channels that fit your customer, product, and business model?
📊 Growth Model: Do you have clear goals for channel tactics that connect to your broader business goals?
📄 Briefs: Do you have a process for converting content ideas into creative deliverables (copy, visual)?
🎥 Production: Is your content varied & high-quality?
🩺 Channel health: Are your channels following best practices (optimization, creative, measurement)?
🏃♀️ Operating cadence: Do you have robust rituals to track performance to goals, collect learnings, and adapt?
Diagnosing Common Syndromes
So, what do startups get wrong? Across the organizations I’ve worked with, I see a few typical profiles:
Silver Bullet Syndrome: These startups have seen short bursts of success from various tactics and are relentlessly pursuing “the next big idea” but have no repeatable and predictable growth engine. They tend to be underdeveloped across all the fundamentals, with the most significant weaknesses in execution (📄, 🎥, 🩺, 🏃♀️). Their founders tend to be unstructured thinkers who love to host a brainstorm.
Measurement Syndrome: These startups have a rigorous approach to measuring growth and are constantly experimenting but aren’t consistently converting prospects. They have strengths in growth marketing straetgy and execution (📣, 📊, 🩺, 🏃♀️) but come up short in content marketing strategy (🏛, 📆) and brand marketing (💖). Their founders tend to be left-brained operators who are skeptical of the creative parts of marketing and do their best thinking in SQL.
Perfectionist Syndrome: These startups deeply understand their customer and have flawless strategy docs to prove it—but struggle to convert that strategy into a growth engine. They have strengths in strategy across many dimensions (🎯, 🏛, 📣, 💬, 📆, 📊) but need to improve in executing content and growth (8, 9, 10, 11). Their founders tend to be ex-consultants (Matt Lerner calls these founders “overthinkers” in his new book) who thrive during an annual planning meeting.
Beautiful Things Syndrome: These startups churns out high-quality, entertaining, and beautiful content. They have strengths in content marketing strategy (🏛, 📆) and execution (📄, 🎥) as well as brand strategy (💖) but weaknesses in growth marketing (📣, 📊, 🩺, 🏃♀️). Their founders tend to come from large brands with > 90% brand awareness (where the focus was on catchy campaigns rather than building distribution) and light up most in a creative review.
Closing Thoughts
Like any complicated system, if a diagnosis is rushed, it’s easy to focus on fixing the wrong thing.
I know the exhausting feeling of sprinting at a problem, only to fix it and find the system no better off. This is why so many marketing leaders end up burned out or fired, and their counterparts are left feeling even more confused about what marketing is and how to get it to work.
If you want to dive deeper with me into each component:
Why it’s essential
How it plugs into the system
How to take its vitals
Examples of what good looks like
I’d love to hear your thoughts!
Are there any components I've overlooked?
Which of the 11 are you most interested to understand in detail?
Do any of the common syndromes feel familiar to you?
Drop a comment below ⬇️