Building an efficient marketing machine: the fuel & the engine
A simple framework for getting the mix of marketing activities correct, the right set of people on your marketing team, and high impact work out the door.
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To build a successful marketing function you need to produce great fuel and craft a well-running engine. Your fuel needs to be custom-made for your engine and your engine needs to be custom-made for your fuel.
This analogy is the simplest way I’ve found to throw away the marketing jargon, ever-changing marketing job titles, and complicated frameworks and explain the mix of things you need to create an efficient marketing function. If you keep the fuel-engine concept in mind, you’ll get the mix of marketing activities correct, the right set of people on your marketing team, and high-impact work out the door.
In this newsletter:
This post is a (sort-of) complement to our newsletter Building B2B Startup Marketing Orgs from 1 to 25+.” You can read either first, but they are better together (much like fuel and engines).
1) What’s the fuel and what’s the engine?
2) How to create a strategy and team based on the fuel-engine concept
2) Fuel-engine fail modes—and how to solve them
4) Opportunities for marketers: jobs and angel investing
What’s the fuel and what’s the engine?
The fuel is all the stuff that you say (out loud, in writing, or visually) to your audience—whether that be short-form copy on a website, a long-form blog post, an image in an ad, or an explainer video. The engine is all of the channels and processes you use to get the fuel out to your audience, plus the tools you use and the metrics you use to track your marketing and growth efforts. When you combine the fuel and the engine, your business grows fast.
But, startups usually over-index on one. Meaning, they spend way too much time creating fuel and sacrifice building out a good engine, or vice versa. This happens through hiring the wrong mix of people and by choosing the wrong mix of marketing activities.
When your fuel-engine mix is out of whack, it holds you back from not only growing and building a brand quickly, but also from diagnosing what’s holding you back. For example, if all you do is create fuel, and it doesn’t drive growth, you might think, “We need a different, better kind of fuel.” That could be the issue, but first you should make sure you have a good engine to distribute the fuel.
The fuel-engine diagram below is not comprehensive, but gives a solid overview of what I classify as “fuel” and what I classify as “engine”. You’ll notice that many things, like sending out an email, involve both fuel (creating the email itself) and the engine (sending the email based on the right marketing automation rules to the right audience).
How to get the fuel-engine combo right through marketing strategy & hiring
Set balanced goals
Make sure your goals balance fuel projects and engine projects, so there’s a clear plan to hit KPIs.
If all of your goals are KPI goals like “drive x qualified leads” you are likely putting too much emphasis on the engine and not leaving time to focus on the fuel as well.
So, make sure you have goals around the project work needed to create the fuel that will drive these qualified leads.
Our newsletter on setting marketing goals goes into more detail.
Use the GACC Brief
Use GACC (goals, audience, channel/distribution, creative) brief at the top of everything you create. Yes, there’s a newsletter on this too.
Writing a GACC ensures you’ve got a solid engine plan for each piece of fuel you create.
Create mini-funnels (engines) for every major piece of content (fuel) you create. This means mapping custom journeys on how your audience will discover your content, what action you want them to take after consuming the content, what happens during sales or onboarding if they came through that piece of content, and what email drips correspond with that content.
Hire the right mix of skillsets/roles
Note: I published my first guide to B2B startup marketing org charts as the first MKT1 Newsletter. Nearly 4 years later, I wrote an update which you can read here.
Some roles mostly create fuel, some roles mostly build the engine, and some do both. The “do both” roles are critical, as these roles make sure the fuel and engine come together to make the vehicle move (these roles are in green in the org chart above).
Build a well balanced team of fuel-focused roles, engine-focused roles, and “do both” roles.
Hire back and forth, 1 fuel focused person, 1 engine focused person, 1 combo person, as you are building an early team. This may not be possible or make sense with every hire, but over time make sure you’re keeping the balance.
Running a campaign, planning a launch, doing a virtual event, etc. involves both fuel and engine skillsets. So, demand gen managers, events managers, and community managers need to have fuel skills, engine skills, and know how to combine the fuel and engine.
Similarly, PMMs (product marketing managers) need to know how to create the right fuel for the right engine.
PMMs are great first marketing hires since they are experts at combining the fuel and the engine
PMMs tend to be able to pinch hit on either the fuel side or the engine side as your team scales (mixing baseball metaphors with car metaphors...who am I?)
PMMs are responsible for understanding the audience, and know what fuel and engine works best for that audience. Newsletter post on the role of PMMs here.
For more on marketers with hybrid skillsets, our newsletter on early marketing hiring talks about pi-shaped marketers (much like T-shaped marketers but with 2 vertical lines) and why they are an asset to your team.
More from MKT1
✂️ Templates for paid subscribers: Paid subscribers can find all templates related to fuel and engine here, including a GACCS brief template with question prompts and examples and org chart templates (to help you create a balanced team) in FigJam.
🧑🚀 Job board: Jobs from the MKT1 community. Paid subscribers can add jobs to our job board for free.
👁️ Related newsletters: GACCS brief, Scaling marketing orgs from 1-25+, Goal setting, Hiring your first marketer
📖 Keep reading: Paid subscribers get access to the rest of this newsletter which explains the 3 fuel and engine fail modes and how to fix them.