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Introduces the 90-day roadmap and explains that a marketer's real job is to identify and relieve the business constraint. Uses examples and theory of constraints to show why random tactics waste resources.
You can become a top 1% marketing strategist in the next 90 days, but only if you stop doing what most lazy marketers do.Take last year's campaign, hit duplicate, change the dates, and call it a plan.I have spent 20 years working with brands like Shopify and Canva, helping growth focused marketing teams break that pattern and finally apply the marketing secrets that make the brands millions.This is the 90-day road map you need to follow to become a top 1% marketing strategist.The first step is to actually identify the constraint.Working in a marketing role is not just about doing campaigns.Your job is so much bigger than that and way more valuable.I always say that the job of a marketer is to grow the business.From the boardroom's perspective, it is that simple and that's always been the job.not raising awareness, attention, branding, all of that stuff has to happen along the path to growing the business.
But that's not actually the job.And the mistake that most people make is that they start with just the end goal.I'm supposed to create videos, so I create videos.I'm supposed to post on social, so I post on social.But that's not the value.The value is in relieving constraints to growing the business.That is it.What you need to do is start with finding the constraint.For example, your software company just launched a new feature and you want your current users to start using it.Great.Now, a marketing strategist doesn't say, "Let's do a release campaign for the new feature."They say, "Start with the constraint.What is the constraint to user adoption of this new feature?What is or will get in the way?"And literally, sometimes it feels that no one does this right.Always start with identifying the constraint by reviewing the data.
So don't start from a place of here's an idea or an influencer said to do this or it's time to promote X again or even holidays are always really great for sales so let's do another campaign because it'sa holiday.That's not strategy.AI can come up with all of those ideas.Thinking about the business is where you add unique value.And there's actually a theory on this about why a constraint focus works.There's a book called The Goal written by Elahu M.Goldrat.Jeff Bezos made the goal required reading for Amazon execs.In the book, Goldrat talks about the theory of constraints in a factory.Find the constraint on the assembly line, fix it, and then find the next one after that one's fixed.Seems obvious, right?But do marketers do this?Most don't.In my book, the copy selling system, link below in the description, I take the position that you should build a customer like you build a product.
Try creating customers along an assembly line of marketing.There are moments on that line where the manufacturing process slows or is inefficient and it's affecting everything downstream.You want to fix those moments.Those are the constraints to growth.You fix at the problem, not wherever you feel like you should throw some random solution down.So in the theory of constraints, the business is basically a chain.Find the weak link, fix it.If you fix anything else without fixing the weak link, you are wasting resources, burning cash, destroying employee value.That is a horrible way to do things.It's also wildly common.Someone says, "We should be running more meta ads."And everyone scrambles to do that without going, "Hm, okay, meta ads solve traffic problems and winning back loss leads."Are either of those the weakest links in our marketing chain today?I have experienced this firsthand repeatedly, but more recently when I was consulting with a big tech company.
So, an associate creative director brought me a concept for a new social video campaign and she's like, "What constraint is this video supposed to relieve for the business?"And she's just looking at me with a blank expression.And then she says this to me.Honestly, Joe, nobody is ever going to watch this no matter what.Because at the 3second mark, brand makes us add our logo animation to every video, even ads.They drop off at 3 seconds without fail.It's become a joke.Which means that even if the thumbnail works, the opening hook works, the video has the storytelling power to hold attention, and the landing page is optimized, no one will ever get there no matter what, because the logo willappear and remind them they're watching an ad.And they'll leave because that is bad on social.You have to go to brand and tell them on this ad at least, we are pulling the logo animation off.
We'll test it.It's the most obvious constraint, and they knew it.But she was about to script and produce a video.the company would push six figures of paid media through even though she knew it was wrong for the job.This was not incompetence.She does a good job, but nobody had ever told her that doing the right work was the job.Finding the heart of a growth constraint and resolving it.That's the job.And this really matters because every dollar that is spent anywhere other than the constraint is a dollar that the organization burned just to keep people busy.
Covers days 11 to 30: learning the customer's mind, auditing what is already working, and using outliers to find repeatable growth patterns. Emphasizes more, better, new in that order.
For the next 10 days, look into your constraints before you do anything else.Stop taking the brief at face value.The next step is for days 11 through 20, and it's mind the customer.You may know the core constraint, but do you know why?A builder in Detroit couldn't sell condos to retirees.And the thing blocking every single sale turned out to be a dining room table.Bob Mesa is a genius behind a methodology called jobs to be done which holds that there are four forces acting on every buyer.The push of their current pain, the pull of the new solution, both of which bring the prospect closer to buying.Now those forces are countered by the anxiety of the new solution and the habit of the status quo or the current way.Those get in the way of buying.So push and pull have to beat anxiety and habit or nobody moves.
Bob found the anxiety, removed it and sales followed.So for days 11 to 20, focus on getting into the mind of the customer behind the constraint.Interview five recent customers and rebuild their buying journey timeline like a documentary.What you're hunting for is that dining table moment in your market.So I built you a cheat sheet.It's the six strategy systems that the top 1% wish they had learned sooner.It's free and the link is below in the description.The next step is for days 21 to 30 and it's to audit what's already working.I see marketers chasing the newest trends or the trendier social media channels.But the mistake that they are making is doing that before figuring out why their current wins are actually winning.As marketing strategists, we want to first say what's working, do more of it.So, let's say you're running ads that feature women talking about how hard it is to get by in the workplace.
If those are working, do more of them.Only after you've started doing more of something that works do you ask the next question.Can we do better?Can we do those ads better?Better lighting, better formats, better stories, better hooks.When you're doing more, doing better, and even doing more better, and you can't do any more of any of that, when you've maxed out on those two things, then and only then do you do something new.The strategist rule is this: more, better, new.in that order.You add in a new channel, new format, new AI tool, new consultant, new idea, only if you've maxed out the stuff that's already working.Now, today, the world thinks copywriters execute on someone else's strategy.But the best copywriters have always been and will always be strategists.The strategist's job is to pay attention to what's working that you can then pull as a growth lever.
Audits often reveal outliers you would never otherwise spot.My friend Matt Lerner, who was partly responsible for the early growth of PayPal, did a growth audit and found an interesting outlier.A very small group of PayPal users ramped up their sales from day one of switching PayPal on.This was unusual.They decided to target that small group of outliers and it was huge for growth.Now, this would not have happened had he not done the audit of what's working.When auditing, a marketing strategist asks why something is winning and whether that why is repeatable.to avoid wasting resources and instead to increase growth because every brand new channel resets your learning to zero while auditing stacks wins on wins.So for days 21 to 30, pull your top three converting assets or campaigns from the last 12 months and write one sentence for each.Why it won and whether that is repeatable.
Then look for your outliers, the one small thing that wildly outperformed everything around it and ask can we do more of that?Can we do it better?That's month one done.You now see what nobody else in the building sees.
Explains how strategy becomes real when you place a clear bet and back it with resources. Then shows how to build a swipe file that records why campaigns worked and how they relieved specific constraints.
The next step is for days 31 to 40, which is to place your bet.Insight becomes strategy the moment you wager time or money on it.And there's a billion dollar acquisition from 2016 that proves it.Everyone remembers the Dollar Shave Club launch video.Hilarious.Cheap went everywhere.But the video was the tactic.The bet underneath it was that men would subscribe to cheap razors delivered to their door because the real enemy was overpriced blades locked behind glass at the drugstore.Now, think about that experience for a second.You stand in an aisle, flag down a clerk, wait for them to unlock a case, then pay $22 for razors with 17 blades and a cooling strip.Dollar Shave Club bet against that entire ritual, and that video became the funny announcement for it.When Unilver acquired them for a billion dollars in 2016, Unilver was not buying that video.
They were buying the bet the company made.Skipping this part costs more than you think.Without a named bet, every tactic gets judged by activity metrics.And that's how teams end up posting 16 times a day into the void with no idea whether any of it actually pays off.And there's an uglier layer here, too.A pile of tactics with no bet is exactly what AI produces when you ask it for a marketing plan.It surfaces what typically works, formats it nicely, and calls it a strategy.If that's also what you produce, you and the machine are interchangeable and the machine is cheaper.So when someone tells me our strategy is content marketing or SEO or going hard on LinkedIn, what I actually hear is someone describing a casino table and calling it their hand.Those are channels.Channels are where you place bets.So for days 31 to 40, name your bet out loud in this format.
We believe the bet.So we're betting actual dollar amount for the campaign or project that this move produces outcome.So Dollar Shave Club's version would be we believe men in their 30s don't care about six blades and a cooling pad.So we're betting on a $30,000 video that a $1 razor captures 5% of the market in 3 months.Size the resources up or down based on how much you believe in it.When results come in, you'll know whether the bet paid off instead of whether everyone stayed busy.The next step is for days 41 to 50, build a why it worked swipe file.Everybody needs a swipe file.And if you don't know what that is, this advice will change the trajectory of your career.Amateurs collect great campaigns.Mil.com really good emails, ad libraries.I've even paid for swipe files of old magazine advertisements.
Now, collecting is fine.Great.But a folder of screenshots with no reasoning attached is basically a mood board.And a mood board is just a creative exercise, which is to say not that useful in real life.The advertising industry actually built the right version of this.Les Benet and Peter Field reverse engineered hundreds of documented campaigns from the IPA effectiveness datab bank to figure out why the winners won.and they published it as something called the long and the short of it.One famous finding was this.Top performers split roughly 60/40 between brand building and activation.Records like this exist in most spaces.We've actually worked with a nonprofit that keeps one just for church advertising.A strategist finds out where the winds in their world are documented and gets access to it.Now, this swipe habit is the machine that permanently kills copy pasting.
Think back to the duplicate campaign guy I mentioned at the outset.The marketer who just reuses old campaigns or someone else's ideas because never captured any real reasoning.Capture the reasoning behind every win you study.Then when you've identified a growth constraint, you can shortcut the path to determining how you may relieve that constraint.Just refer to your documented swipe file and see how others have relieved the same constraint.You need to do this during days 41 to 50.And this becomes a weekly ritual for life.Capture one campaign per week and these four lines.The constraint, the bet, the belief it installed, and why it worked.Take Mint Mobile's anti-S Super Bowl print ads, which should be in your swipe file.The constraint was awareness.They needed to capture market share.The bet was spending around a h 100red grand on giant print ads running the same Sunday as $5 million Super Bowl spots.
The belief it installed.Go with a brand that doesn't waste their customers money.In 2 years, you will outthink most VPs of marketing, and that is not an exaggeration.
Focuses on developing a clear strategic point of view, turning insights into memorable claims, and selling the problem before the solution. Also covers how to structure presentations so the room feels the cost of the problem.
In days 51 to 60, you're going to develop one clear point of view.This is one of the big reasons why some marketers get remembered and others get coffee.Snickers sold $376 million more in chocolate bars without changing the product.They changed a sentence.But that change was based on a deep thinky strategy about when their product fit into the lives of their target market, which was young men.Their agency, BBDO, didn't ask, "Guys, what line could sell more candy bars?"Their global head of strategy looked at how men behave around other men and found a corrective behavior among men.When men start acting weird, their friends call them out.And when people are hungry, they start acting weird.That's the actual insight behind you're not you when you're hungry.The insight led to genius execution.One held point of view beat a decade of clever one-offs.
It works for people the same way it works for brands.A consultant named Byron Sharp is hired by huge brands because of his evidence-based thesis.Brands grow when a product is easy to remember and easy to buy, not by focusing on customer loyalty.That point of view runs against decades of beloved theory about punch cards and rewards programs.He held it anyway.And now boardrooms at PNG and Unilver are built around it.Organizations hire and promote the person who's thinking they can predict.And a thesis does exactly that.Mine, which I've said forever, is nobody hires a copywriter to write.They hire them to sell.Copywriters argue with me about that right up until their boss asks why the writing isn't performing.And to be clear, a point of view is different from a niche.A niche is who you serve.A point of view is what you claim.
You can serve any niche and still be forgettable if you claim nothing.Marketing strategists develop insights out of data.A good insight is like a refrigerator.As the late adman Jeremy Bulmore would say, "When you open the door, the light comes on."Insights reveal a hidden human truth you can use.That's the job.In days 51 to 60, complete this sentence and say it out loud in a meeting.Most people believe blank.They're wrong.Here's the truth.Blank.Most people believe their teenage son is in a bad mood all the time.They're wrong.Here's the truth.He's grouchy because he's hungry.If nobody pushes back, sharpen it until somebody does.They need to say, "Oh my gosh."That's when you've got an insight that could change things.In days 61 to 70, the strategist learns to sell the problem before you sell the solution to it.
In the 1920s, Listerine grew revenue from $115,000 to $8 million by selling a disease nobody knew they had.Your buyer's problem is real, so you probably don't have to invent it.But the mechanism is the lesson here.The room has to feel the cost of the problem before your solution can mean anything.Now, think about when you're in a room with a marketer or copywriter who's presenting their work for review.Most of them open with, "Okay, let me show you the campaign."And the room evaluates it like a menu item, politely and cheaply staring at it.Strategists open with the business or customer problem.Size it in the organization's own numbers, make the room sit with it, and only then present the campaign as the relief.They know the boardroom is filled with people who have busy lives, competing distractions, and very little memory of what the reason was for the campaign in the first place.
Strategists don't skip the part of the journey that will make the payoff the campaign make sense.And I know the common reasons against establishing a problem upfront in a review meeting.Everyone already knows the problem, Joe, and we have so many meetings.The room knows the problem exists.Yes, but they have not felt what it costs.They're thinking about the 40 tabs they should be reviewing.Your job is to get them in a room, phones down, and make them feel it because budgets follow feelings.Remember the associate creative director with the video everyone would just skip?This is the move I was preparing her for.Finding the constraint was month one.Walking into that review meeting and making the room feel what a dead 3 seconds costs against six figures of media spend.That's the actual expertise.It's what your CEO is happily paying you for.
And one more thing, especially for the creatives watching, present your work every single time.Tier one campaign or tier three, it does not matter.If people can't get in a room to hear the why behind what you made, ask your manager why you're working on things nobody can prioritize.Until you walk people through your decisions, they will assume you're guessing on gut and they'll treat your work, your salary, and your future accordingly.So during days 61 to 70, restructure your next pitch or presentation deck.Slides 1 through three are the problem quantified in the organization's own numbers, churn, cost to acquire a customer, AOV, flat growth, whatever.Your solution does not appear until someone in the room shifts in their chair because of the problem you have sold them on.
Shows how top marketers report in outcomes rather than activities and why they should bring one recommendation instead of multiple options. Ends with the final challenge to apply the full 90-day roadmap.
The next step is for days 71 to 80.You have to speak in outcomes, not activities.Most marketers are losing every day because they aren't speaking about their ideas in the right way.In 2021, Brian Chesy cut nearly all of Airbnb's performance marketing, including Google ads during co traffic held around 95% of prior levels.and listened to how he reported it to Wall Street as an outcome.He said, "Brand carries us.We don't need to rent our customers back from Google."Then he permanently rebalanced the whole model toward brand.Compare that to how most marketers report.We stopped running Google ads for these keywords because they weren't working.Goodish, but like where's the value?You're allowed to have greater vision than that.You don't have to simplify your decisions down to tactics as if you had no great insight when you did.We're talking about being a fantastic marketer here, not just going with the flow.
A players, top performers, the ones who get promoted and bonuses, the ones who get head-hunted and then start their own high ticket consultancy speak in outcomes and believe that their role is directly tied to important business outcomes becauseit is.This is true even if it's your first day on the job.And before you say it, no, this does not mean promising outcomes.You're placing the bet from month two out loud.We're betting this wins us X because of Y.And here is the leading indicator we will watch.And honestly, if I'm being dead honest, you should stake your reputation on the outcomes of a campaign you run or a project you advocated for.If you can't measure your role, you are replaceable.And if you genuinely feel your organization punishes people for talking this way, that is a culture problem and it belongs in your next one- on-one.
Your boss cannot see what you're quietly doing at your desk.Advocate for yourself because outcome language is the language of the people who fund things, including your next raise.For days 71 to 80, here is what you should be doing.Ban three phrases from your next status meeting.We posted, we sent, we increased awareness.Replace them with which moved this metric by this amount.Even which we now know moves nothing counts.You learn something and that counts as an outcome too.When you speak in real outcomes, actual KPIs, the seauite listens to you and takes you seriously.Don't hide behind the activities you are doing.Step up to the plate and speak to the outcomes you're driving.The last step in our road map is for days 81 to 90, and it is the mistake most marketers make non-stop.They present options when they should bring the recommendation.
If the ideas you're pitching to your boss aren't convincing enough, this is probably why most marketers think they are doing a great thing by presenting multiple options.But presenting options makes you seem like the least informed person in the room.What happens when you give people multiple options is that you're really just outsourcing the decision to the people furthest from the data.Then congratulating yourself for being collaborative.You were not collaborative.You did the work but bailed on the hardest part, the decision.Real rigor is one recommendation backed by data with the rejected paths as footnotes.Then when someone in the room says, "Cool idea, but we've been kicking around this other idea internally.Let me run it by you."You get to say, "Great instinct.We considered something very similar.It's in the appendix with the data on why we killed it."If they still want to run with that after seeing that, that one's on them.
So for days 81 to 90, here is the action step for you.For your next brief campaign, give one recommendation, one supporting win, and one page of paths you considered and why you rejected them presented live in front of the room.You've got a 90-day road map ahead of you.You've got two choices.You can either be the marketer who has a decent reputation, but no growth year after year because you didn't implement any of this, or you can be the marketer who understands the constraints and works through a road mapjust like this one to actually get results.So, which one are you?When this video started, you didn't have the road map.But now you're holding all nine moves and in 90 days, the answer is whatever you decide it is.If you want to be trained this way, the way we train marketers and copywriters at CopyHackers, taken down to the studs and built back up into marketing powerhouses, that link is below in the description.
If this resonated with you, check out my next video to dive even deeper on strategy.