✍️ the 3 pillars you need in your marketing plan

Let us guess. This email today finds you under the heat lamp of annual marketing plan and budgeting shenanigans.

So we’re going to start with a “do not”…

DO NOT mistake marketing activity for marketing strategy.

We know, we know. Ugh. Happens so easily. Demands from every direction. From leadership. Departments with their varying needs. Plus, everything is changing so quickly. There’s just SO much to experiment with. It’s fun. Alluring.

But let us remind you where that left you in 2025:
Thin, stretched and almost broken—like cold butter scraped over too much bread.

So the marketing mindset (and framework) we’ve teed up for y’all in this edition?

Do less. Better.

Jess Cook, Head of Marketing at Vector, believes that less is more. 

In past lives she scaled marketing at giants like McDonald’s and Kellogg’s—and more recently, she skyrocketed Vector’s pipeline growth with just a two-person marketing team in her first 90 days on the job. 

How’d she do it? 

“When I built the budget for H2, I decided I wanted to go all in on three things, and anything else in the budget was to keep the lights on,” she explains. 

Three priorities, and no more. Here’s what they should be: 

1. Something that already works. This is the tried-and-true marketing play that’s currently bringing you success. 

For Jess, this was content. The marketers Vector writes for already like their playbooks, so Jess is planning to build out the library. 

2. A new (but sure) bet. This is something you haven’t committed to yet—maybe you’ve just dabbled in it, maybe you haven’t tried it at all—that you have strong conviction will work. 

Jess is opting to experiment with paid social, as a way to drive more attention to the content she’s putting out. 

3. A bold experiment. Build innovation into your marketing function by explicitly making room for the big swings. Each quarter, choose to dedicate some time, attention, and budget to uncharted territory. 

Jess plans to build out Vector’s events strategy, specifically for what she calls “sidecar stunt” events—those small in-person gatherings built around a larger conference. 

Once your pillars are set, aim to spend 80% of your budget on pillar-related activities. Create clear criteria for evaluating whether new initiatives fit into your current pillars—and leave good but out-of-scope ideas in the “parking lot” to revisit at a later date. 

Check out the full 3-pillar framework and use it to fill out your Quarterly Marketing Plan template. Future you will be thankful.

Campaigns that got us talking: Dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster just released their latest large language model…their Twelfth Edition Collegiate Dictionary. “There’s artificial intelligence…and then there’s actual intelligence.”

AI spotlight: OpenAI launched AgentKit, which makes it easier to create multi-step, multi-agent workflows in one place. Our prediction: You’re about to start seeing a lot more apps that actually go and do stuff on your behalf (update your project tracker based on your Slack messages, comparison shop, curate news stories, maybe even all that end-to-end travel planning stuff we’ve been talking about for years but haven’t quite cracked).

Stuff that made us scroll back up: If you woke up tomorrow with a follower count of zero, where would you start to rebuild your audience from scratch? Our co-founder Alex shares his 5-step approach.

When we work with our clients, we like to start at the end. 

Specifically, we like to work backwards from the question: What is the one idea we want the reader to walk away with? 

(And then we lean on subject matter experts to flesh out thoughtful, memorable, data-backed answers to this question.) 

For one client in the financial planning space, the takeaway they wanted to highlight was: There are some financial decisions that can be undone and some that can’t. And even when you can walk back through a door, you might return to a different situation than the one you left. 

Check out the full piece we wrote with them here.

You might be a real one if you’ve ever… Vote here. 

• Launched campaign in an outage

• Asked to "spin something up"

• Rewrote subject line day-of

• Asked to "make it go viral"

Previously we asked you how you’d spend a $50K ad budget. Notably, more of you would opt for collaborations with emerging creators than double down on tried-and-true performance ads. 

(This is the same logic that keeps people at the blackjack table…and that mints the biggest winners.)

You can do an okay job of twenty-five things, or a stellar job at three. 

Guess which route is going to help you prove marketing ROI? 

The projects that move the needle are the projects that get the time, attention, and budget they need to actually succeed. And when you narrow your focus to a few key projects—and table the rest—you start to move strategically, not at random. 

Sometimes the most radical thing you can do as a marketer is simply finish what you started. 

See y'all next time.

— the storyarb writers’ room 🫡

Oh! And another thing… Those fancy, ad-covered, cast-iron columns you see on the streets of Paris? They’re called Morris Columns. Circa the 1870s, they provided a practical solution to chaotic posting of ads across every surface of the city. Today there are over 500 across the city—iconic features of the Parisian landscape. 

(And that’s on literal marketing pillars.)