How a marketing habit survives without you

[Read me if something in your marketing only works when you're in the room.]

For most of the history of lighthouses, the light only turned because somebody climbed the stairs and made it turn. Keepers worked through the night in shifts, winding the clockwork that rotated the lens, trimming the wicks, topping up the fuel and writing every watch into the log. The procedures were written down in painstaking detail. None of that made the light independent of the keeper, because the procedures described the job and the keeper was still the one doing it.

Getting rid of the keeper never came from a better manual. It came from taking away the two things the keeper carried. Over the twentieth century the winding went to electric motors and timers, so the light turned whether anyone remembered or not. The last thing to go was the keeper's own check that the light was working, which went to remote monitoring, so if it failed, someone miles away found out without having to climb anything. Trinity House automated its last manned lighthouse, North Foreland in Kent, on 26 November 1998. (The last six keepers got a proper farewell from the Duke of Edinburgh, which is more than most retired processes get.)

Most early-stage marketing still has a keeper. It's the CEO's weekly LinkedIn post that only goes out because you chase it on a Wednesday. It's the webinar follow-up that happens because you remember, and the win-loss notes that exist because you sit with sales on a Friday afternoon. Each one runs for exactly as long as you do. Then the week you're buried in the board pack, the light goes out and nobody notices for a month.

If you just thought of one, hold on to it.

In Edition 5 I argued that your real strategy is what your team does on Wednesdays, not what the document says, and that what to do with the gap between the two was a whole edition on its own. This is that edition. Caveat first. The gap doesn't close. I found it in all 13 of the marketing leaders I interviewed for my thesis, and the research treats it as the place new ways of working come from. What you can do is move one pattern out of your hands. That's smaller than "fix your marketing operations". It's also the version that stands a chance of surviving a normal Monday.

Why do these patterns need you in the first place? The answer in my research is that the pressure never lets up long enough for anyone to write the pattern down properly, so it lives in whoever runs it. (Usually you. Usually on a Wednesday.)

When I coded my interviews, 69 passages across the 13 leaders described a marketing routine of some kind. Two stories from those interviews are worth a closer look, because between them they cover both things the lighthouse needed.

The first comes from a leader running a marketing team of 22 at a company spending about €5 million a year on marketing before salaries. (This is not, in other words, a scarcity story.) A secondary brand in the company had had no customers until 15 months before we spoke. It had a budget of 500K for the year. New legislation was coming in on 1 January, and the leader could see early on that the brand needed something closer to a million to catch the wave. So they introduced what they called a budget-based growth motion, which tied spend going in to revenue coming out of the funnel. On the strength of that, the brand got a second 500K, and they told me it's now giving the return they wanted. It put a monitor on the light. The people holding the budget could see the return for themselves, which is the whole job of a monitor.

The second comes from the one fractional CMO in my sample, working with a client that couldn't afford another outbound campaign, or a paid one, or much of anything. Going back through the data from the last outbound push, they found around a dozen people who had raised their hand and then fallen through the cracks before ever booking a sales call. Nobody had followed up with them, because there wasn't a sales process that would. The company already had a HubSpot licence, so they built a four-step re-engagement sequence in about two days. Within a day of launching it, two of those people had booked a call, and one was negotiating a deal by the time we spoke. A dozen hand-raisers had been sitting in the dark because nobody was winding the clockwork. Once a sequence was doing the winding, nobody had to remember.

So here's the handover. It's designed to work rather than proven to, so treat it as practice, not a finding.

Pick a single pattern that only runs when you're in the room. If you did the Edition 5 exercise, look at the decisions that didn't reference the deck. Whichever one only happens because you were there is your candidate. Then write down two things, and nothing else.

The first is the single signal that tells you it worked, and the number that counts as the light being on. Not five KPIs. One. Reply rate on the sequence above a figure you pick now. Branded search clicks in Google Search Console back above last month's line. Two meetings booked from the webinar list by the 30th. The second is the date you'll read it.

Then hand the running of it to someone else. That could be a person, a HubSpot sequence, or a calendar invite with a named owner. Judge it only on that signal, on that date. Don't sit in on it. Don't "just check how it's going" on a Tuesday. You aren't handing over the keeper's manual, and you already know how that ends. You're handing over the winding and the monitor.

It won't always work. Some patterns genuinely need you, at least for now. But you'll find out which ones, and that's worth more than another quarter of being the only person who knows the light needs winding.

The full pillar, including how half-built processes can last a long time without ever quite becoming processes, lives at Marketing Routines Under Constraint on gossamergrowth.com.

North Foreland has run without a keeper since 1998. The light still flashes every night, and if it ever stops, somebody miles away gets an alarm. Nobody has to climb the stairs to find out. Your CEO's Wednesday LinkedIn post, meanwhile, is still waiting for you to chase it.