Editorial
The Gist
- "Lazy girl" strategy. Embrace a lazy girl approach for efficiency, focusing on impactful actions over quantity.
- Strategic tools usage. Invest in tools and training wisely, balancing technology with human expertise for optimal results.
- Cutting excesses. Regularly assess and eliminate ineffective strategies, focusing on data-driven decisions for marketing success.
As marketers, we’re constantly pushed to do more with less. Now more than ever, an uncertain economy, layoffs and an inability to backfill vacant positions has many marketing teams struggling to keep pace. The pressure to deliver, combined with the lack of resources to do our best work, has many of us feeling like we’re constantly falling behind no matter how hard we try. The burnout is palatable.
It’s no wonder marketing has one of the highest turnover rates, and the average length of stay in a position is just one to two years.
Trend or Fantasy?
That’s why for many of us, the “lazy girl” job trend feels like a fantasy. Doing just enough to be successful and pushing back against hustle culture? That’s blasphemy in an industry where overworking is not only rewarded but expected. Email campaign not performing? Send more mail. Social strategy falling short? Post more content. The assumption is that if something’s not working, it’s because you’re not doing enough.
The truth is this approach can have devastating effects. One more email might send subscribers flocking to the unsubscribe button. And running one more campaign might send burned-out staff flocking to the door.
Related Article: Quality Over Quantity: Why Personalized Marketing Strategies Are the Future
Time for a Reboot
It’s time for a reboot. What if instead of constantly doing more with increasingly less, we could do less, but achieve more? What if we made 2024 the year for “lazy girl” marketing, and it was more successful than ever? Here’s how. Let's take a look at what a lazy girl marketing strategy might look like.
Lazy Girl Marketing Strategy No. 1: Stop Expecting Tools Alone to Save the Day
Too many teams invest in new or new-to-them tools like an account-based marketing (ABM) platform, but don't spend the time and effort to train their staff or hire talent to master it. This almost always manifests in a predictable failure: the team struggles to spin up the platform, they have no time to learn how to leverage it properly, the tool is cut, deemed a failed experiment and the product is given a trash name for ever-more.
But it didn’t have to fail. The mistake was actually buying a tool to fill gaps in staffing and not doing the change management to support it. The reality is the only way a tool can be successful is to prioritize strategy AND invest in the people to operate it. As much as many marketers may fear being replaced by technology, the truth is investing in technology without investing in expertise is a waste of money. Companies must stop viewing talent as a cost center instead of a strategic asset.
Related Article: 6 Best Practices That Will Improve Your Digital Marketing Strategy
Lazy Girl Marketing Strategy No. 2: Focus on Results That Matter
Email opens and click-throughs are vanity metrics, but we use them because they are readily available. But marketers need to focus on tactics that drive leads and conversions — the business KPIs that actually matter.
That means honing your approach based on performance data. I once worked with a client that was trying to refine their email strategy. They had been sending mail to an extensive list, but not getting any traction. We worked with the marketing team to build a targeted message for a specific buyer persona, focused on what truly matters for this specific audience segment.
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But the board of directors freaked out. They saw fewer sends and fewer immediate conversions. However, the long-term trend data showed that the strategy actually converted more people and at higher value. Nonetheless, the board forced marketing to switch back to generic messaging, and engagement went down. Don’t make the same mistake: Ignore vanity metrics and focus on what’s proving to move people down the funnel.
Oftentimes, the campaigns that generate the most volume aren’t the same ones that create the most revenue. For example, if you held a giveaway contest as a lead generation method, you may get 200 leads. But are those going to convert, or did they just sign up because of the giveaway? Instead, a campaign that generates only 20 leads but moves 50% of people down the funnel is a much more valuable use of time and resources.
Related Article: Mastering Personalization in Digital Marketing Strategy
Lazy Girl Marketing Strategy No. 3: Ask, 'What Can We cut?'
I know! Such a foreign concept! Marketers never ask this question — they think the solution is always to do more or add more instead of culling where it counts. That’s exactly how our time, budget and sanity ultimately end up being spread too thin. Paring down requires gathering data to understand saturation points, how channels change over time and analyzing whether you really need to be in that space just because your competitor is, or if your time, money and effort might be better spent elsewhere.
One company I worked with put virtually all its marketing money into trade shows, investing heavily in booth presence, sponsorship, etc. It was a fixture at all the major events. But it never asked the bigger question: Isn’t it the same audience at every show? What if two or three shows are enough, and we shift some budget toward other channels?
Looking at historical data can provide insight into what’s really working and what’s perhaps not worth the investment. This revelation can help you shift time and budget toward more creative strategies rather than staying caught in the same old cycle of spend, wash, repeat. One of the things that hurts companies the most is inertia — the notion that “we’ve always done it this way.” Of course, you need to do what it takes to keep your funnel working, but don’t be afraid to cut what’s not delivering and experiment. Be ruthless. Trust me, the mental barrier is the hardest to overcome.
Related Article: Customer-Centric Marketing Strategy: A Leader's Inside Look
Final Thoughts on Lazy Girl Marketing
Bill Gates famously once said, “Choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.” That’s exactly the kind of “lazy girl” energy marketers need to bring this year.
Marketing efficiency isn’t about figuring out how to do more with less. It’s about achieving more with less, and sometimes that means literally doing less. We may joke about being lazy, but “lazy girl” marketing doesn’t mean lack of effort. It means working smarter, deploying tools that help you better understand which activities are serving you well and which ones might actually be hurting.
It’s time to build the next generation of effective, efficient marketing strategies that cut through the noise. In 2024, don’t do more. Make sure what you do matters more. The lazy girl marketing strategy might just be the ticket.
Besides, laziness is so underrated!
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