Simplicity in marketing: top techniques

Consider the last project or campaign you delivered. Chances are it didn’t go straight from ideation to finished product in one simple, easy to replicate journey. Instead there may have been meetings about meetings, feedback and opinions from people with no genuine connection to the campaign (but who feel it necessary to overcomplicate the process with their considerations) and a wealth of different documents and presentations to create for stakeholders and investors ‘just in case’ they wanted to be made aware of what’s going on.

We are all guilty of overcomplicating things. With a seemingly endless supply of project management tools and social media platforms, it’s no wonder that marketing can become one of the most overcomplicated and complex areas of a business.

Does a Slack cancel out the use of office email, or do we use both communication modes for different things? Should we use Asana for blog content, but Trello for our agile boards? Do we need CoSchedule and ConvertKit, or will MailChimp and Leadpages allow us to do all this?

Is Google Analytics sufficient, or should we also be utilising Google Search Console? Do we need to update Snapchat once a day or should we focus our attention on Instagram Stories? Is SEMrush better than Backlink.io or should we scrap both in favour of Ahrefs?

These are some of the questions modern marketers are faced with every day, leading teams and tools that often hinder, rather than help, business goals.

Steve Jobs famously admitted he lived by the mantra ‘focus and simplicity’. According to Jobs, “Simple can