What This Blog Is About (and Who It's For)
This post originally appeared in my Substack newsletter, The Work Behind the Work. Subscribe here.
Marketing advice is everywhere; podcasts, LinkedIn posts, frameworks using acronyms – and people who claim to be experts, yet have little real experience. Most of that stuff is meant for those who okay the work, not for the people who do the work. This newsletter is for those who do it.
I’m Dan Taylor. I’ve been in marketing for more than 15 years - I’ve built social media from the ground up, launched products, run campaigns on all sorts of channels, and tried to get the creative, sales, and management sides to all work together, all at once. I’ve done nearly all of this in industries that move quickly and are heavily regulated, so you can’t be vague, don’t get a lot of chances to revise, and the only thing that really matters is whether the work gets finished and makes a difference.
I’m starting this newsletter because I keep having the same conversations – with people at my level, with former coworkers, and with those newer to the field who are trying to get marketing actually to work in the real world – not the world of conference presentations. And what I always get back to isn’t fancy or complex; it’s basic. It’s about how the work actually gets done.
The idea for this newsletter
I’ve come to see marketing as being based on four ideas that fit together. I call them Clarity, Execution, Momentum, and Outcomes. They aren’t steps – they’re a cycle.
Clarity is knowing what the work is for before you start. What does the business really need? Who is this for? What would success be? Most of the time wasted in marketing comes down to a clarity issue that no one addressed at the start.
Execution is about getting things out – not in the ‘work fast and fix later’ way, but in the ‘the work was on time, did what it was meant to, and was the same on every channel’ way. Execution is the least interesting part of marketing, and what keeps some teams from getting results, and others from only making presentations.
Momentum is what you get when your efforts build on each other, and don’t start over every three months, when this quarter’s campaign makes next quarter’s easier. When your collection of content grows into something that gets better, instead of something that becomes old news. Most marketing groups don’t get here because they are always starting over.
Outcomes are the proof – not numbers that look good, not reports on activity – real evidence that the work changed something important. New sales opportunities. How much did the work affect revenue? People are starting to use something. Demand. And – crucially – outcomes aren’t just the end. They’re what make the next round of clarity sharper.
When the cycle works, marketing gets better and better. When any part of it fails, it stops.
What you can expect
Each week, I’ll write a post tied to one of those four ideas. Some weeks will be about overall strategy, some about what to do. Some will be me working through a question I don’t yet have a good answer to. But every post will come from the same place: what I’ve seen actually work, what I’ve seen fail, and what I think people who do the work need to hear.
Here’s what this newsletter won’t be:
It won’t be a report on trends. I’m not going to tell you which platform is “the next big thing” or what the algorithm wants this week.
It won’t be a collection of good things that happened. I’ll talk about mistakes and things I’d do differently, because that’s where most of the learning is.
It won’t be only theory. If I can’t link an idea to actual work, I likely won’t write about it.
Who this is for
If you’re a marketing manager, director, or leader who spends their days trying to get strategy and doing the work to match – and you’re tired of advice that sounds good on stage but doesn’t work in a Monday meeting – this is for you.
If you’re newer to the field and want to know what makes marketing that works different from marketing that seems busy, I think you’ll find something here, too.
And if you’re a company looking for someone who thinks about marketing this way, well, that’s another reason I’m writing. This newsletter is the longest job application you’ll ever read.
Subscribe if any of that makes sense to you. I’ll be here every week.
There’s no shortage of marketing advice out there. Podcasts, LinkedIn threads, frameworks with acronyms, thought leaders with opinions about everything,g and experience in very little. Most of it is written for people who approve the work. This newsletter is for people who do it.
My name is Dan Taylor. I’ve spent over 15 years in marketing — building social presences from scratch, running product launches, managing campaigns across channels, and trying to align creative, sales, and leadership in the same direction at the same time. Most of that work has been in fast-moving, highly regulated industries where you don’t get to be vague, you don’t get unlimited revisions, and the thing that matters most is whether the work actually shipped and actually moved something.
