Build the System, Not Just the Campaign
This post originally appeared in my Substack newsletter, The Work Behind the Work. Subscribe here.
I always ask myself, when I’m arranging a new bit of marketing, “Will this still be helpful in three months?”
It doesn’t have to be helpful every single time. Certain marketing is meant to be brief – a social post that’s current, a seasonal sale, an announcement of a launch. These are campaigns; they’ve got a start, a middle, and an end. They do what they’re supposed to, then they’re over.
However, too many of the things marketing teams produce fall into this type, not because they were planned to, but just by chance. Work that could be useful for a long time is done as if it’s only for once. Things that could be used again are made for just one campaign, and then aren’t thought of anymore. Ways of doing things that could be made regular are restarted every three months.
The difference between making campaigns and making systems. And – as far as I’ve seen – the teams that make systems are the ones that get ahead in the end – not because they work harder, but because their work builds up.
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
What a system is – and what it isn’t
A system, as I use the word, is any regular structure that produces value without you needing to start from nothing each time.
A list of what to publish is a system. It gives you a pattern for what to publish, when, and where – so you aren’t looking at a blank screen every Monday, wondering what to post.
A series of emails to help new customers is a system. Once it’s made, every new person who comes into your sales line gets a planned series of contacts, without anyone having to send an email by hand.
A store of brand things is a system. It gives the sales team, the marketing team, and outside partners one place to find the latest logos, approved images, product descriptions, and patterns – so no one is working with old files or starting from scratch.
A campaign, on the other hand, is a fixed job. It’s got a plan, a time limit, a list of things to be made, and a final day. Thinking in campaigns asks, “What are we launching this quarter?” Thinking in systems asks, “What pattern can we put in place so that launches get easier as time goes on?”
Both are needed. But most teams do too much campaign work, and not enough systems work – and the lack of balance is what keeps them stuck in the pattern of starting again.
The cost of doing one-off work, again and again
Every time a team makes something from nothing, it incurs costs – time to agree on a plan, time to make the things, time to look at and approve them, and time to get different parts to work together. For a complicated job like launching a product, this can easily take weeks of work from several people.
If the next launch needs the same amount of work because nothing was made into a pattern, written down, or made reusable, the team is paying the cost again in full. And again, the next three months. And again.
Now imagine the other thing. The first launch takes all the worry, but along the way, the team creates a guide to launching that documents the process. They make things that can be changed for the next product. They create an email series that can be updated with new content but doesn’t need to be rebuilt structurally. They create a pattern for social media content that accounts for before the launch, on the launch day, and after the launch.
The second launch is quicker. The third is quicker still. Not because shortcuts are being taken, but because the system is doing work that used to require manual effort.
This is how systems build up. They cut the cost of doing things over time, which leaves room for the team to focus on work that requires original thought, rather than spending half their time on arrangements and the basics.
Where systems are most important
Not everything should be a system. Certain work – a major campaign idea, a leadership article from an executive, a brand collaboration needing special designs – is better when done to order. Forcing those kinds of things into a pattern generally makes them worse.
However, a lot of marketing work – probably more than most groups understand – is the same in its basic structure. The details vary, but the core remains. This is where systems are really helpful.
Social media management: the timing, the types of content, when things are posted, and how they’re approved – these ought to be a system. The individual posts are where the creativity goes. What goes around them is the operation, and it ought to work smoothly.
Product launches. Each launch goes through roughly the same stages: building awareness before the launch, launch materials, and follow-up afterward. The actual content will be different each time, but the schedule, the to-do list, the channels used, and how people are kept informed can be put into templates and then made better, bit by bit.
Sales enablement. The things sales teams require – quick references, success stories, comparisons with competitors, demonstration presentations – all come in predictable forms. A system for making, updating, and sending these things out is much more valuable than making them from scratch whenever someone requests them.
Reporting. If the team uses the first week of every month to make the same report from the beginning, that isn’t analysis – it’s data input. Make the report pattern once, automate what you can, and use the time to understand the data and make suggestions, rather than just how it looks.
Event marketing. As I mentioned last week, trade shows and events follow a repeating structure. A system covering contact before the event, what happens during it, and contact after it – put into templates and improved after each event – will reduce work and increase results.
How to start creating systems
If your group is currently only doing campaigns, moving to systems-based thinking doesn’t require a large change. It needs a habit: when you finish a project, ask two things.
“What did we make that could be used again?” It might be a template, a document explaining a process, the structure of a series of emails, or the format of a creative brief. Something that can be changed for the next time, not thrown away.
“What took so long? Because we didn’t have a system?” This is where you’ll find the opportunities. If the team spent three days just agreeing on the launch schedule, you need a standard launch schedule template. If the social media team recreated the content schedule format from nothing, that format should be saved and improved.
These aren’t revolutionary questions. But if you ask them regularly, after every project, you’ll build up a stock of things you can reuse, processes you’ve written down, and operational shortcuts that grow over quarters and years.
Systems support the work.
I want to make one thing clear: the system isn’t the goal. The work is. The system is there to make the work better, quicker, and more consistent – not to make it overly bureaucratic.
I’ve seen groups make systems that became restraints. Templates so strict that creative work felt like filling in spaces. Approval processeswere so complex that nothing was sent out on time. Handbooks so detailed that they created more work than they got rid of.
A good system is light and easy to change. It handles the recurring tasks, so the group can focus on the tasks that require judgment, creativity, and strategic thinking. If the system is getting in the way of good work, it isn’t a good system – it’s a good idea that went too far.
The goal isn’t to automate marketing. The goal is to stop having to rebuild the support structure every time you want to make something new.
Campaigns end. Systems grow.
If you get one thing from this article, let it be this: every time your team finishes a campaign, ask if anything you made can be turned into a system. A template. A workflow. A structure you can reuse. Something that makes the next time 10% easier.
Do that regularly, and in a year, your group won’t just be making more. They’ll be making more with less work, more consistency, and a growing collection of things and processes that work for you even when you aren’t actively making something new.
That’s what building systems means. Not replacing creative work with templates, but making sure creative work isn’t hidden by operational work that should have been solved once and reused forever.
Campaigns end. Systems grow. Make more of the second.
