The New Marketing Playbook Nobody Talks About
For twenty years, the marketing playbook has been a race to “more”: more leads, more content, more resources. It was a game of volume that everyone knew how to play. This made the battlefield crowded and expensive. But in the age of austerity, volume is a liability. The traditional approach is failing fast.
The Reality of Austerity in the 2020s
The reality is that in the world of austerity, in the 2020s, the best organizations have taken a hard look at their customer acquisition costs and margins across their go-to-market teams. There’s now a combination of offshore talent and AI to reduce operational expenses.
Reducing operational expenses lowers customer acquisition costs and improves profit margins. This provides greater financial flexibility to redeploy capital on shorter cycles, enabling you to accomplish more within the business.
Why Traditional Playbooks Fail
Traditional marketing playbooks no longer work because if you’re playing the game by the same rules as everybody else, there is no way to distinguish yourself. It’s too crowded, and you do not have an unfair advantage.
You’re hiring very expensive resources. Those resources are not integrating or developing native AI systems to further hyper-accelerate the reduction of the most expensive part of marketing: human capital. So now you have fewer bullets in the chamber to play with and place in areas such as SEO, AEO, GEO, and/or paid media.
Defining the New Execution Model
The new marketing playbook recognizes that strategy is required of you, the leader. Execution has nothing to do with North Americans doing this all day long.
90% of every marketing task can be done either with labor arbitrage, offshore talent, and/or AI. Allowing you to reduce your labor force by magnitudes, typically somewhere between three and ten times reduction in cost. You can then redeploy that capital back into AEO, SEO, or paid media.
The Role of the CMO
The new marketing playbook essentially documents capital allocation. The CMO’s role is to document the vision to Mars. The goals and objectives are to move from point A to point B, then to determine the capital budget, the capital allocation strategy, and the core campaigns to run. Everything after that, including execution, is not handled by the onshore marketing team.
The 10-80-10 Technique
What the marketing leaders do is they employ a technique or a process called the 10-80-10:
- The First 10%: Any project is defined by the CMO or defined by the marketing leaders.
- The Next 80%: The work is done by offshore talent and/or AI.
- The Final 10%: Looping back the marketing leaders to do quality assurance and to ensure that it aligns with their initial goals.
The goal isn’t to do more; it’s to build an engine that does more for you.
What would your business look like with a 10x reduction in execution costs?
