242. Portfolio Thinking 🧐
How to organize your mind for strategic decisions, multichannel, strategies, and more
Thank you for being part of this newsletter. Each week, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world. You can click the heart button 💙 above or below to share some love. And you can reach out to me anytime at hello@kevanlee.com. I’d love to hear from you.
Links that are worth your time:
I got the chance to share some stories about impostor syndrome with the Moonshot team (my former Buffer colleague Max)
For anyone interested in a numbers deep dive, this post about Net Dollar Retention has given me a lot to think about
Interesting new tool about customer insights, called Avrio. And I love that “Book a demo with Natalie” button.
Hi there 👋
A few weeks back I shared some thoughts around an “alternate MBA” for how I think about my own learning and development. Well, I’m happy to loop you into the latest addition to that curriculum-of-sorts. Along with learning tools like newsletters and e-courses, I’ll be taking part in the initial cohort of On Deck Marketing — a community of high-impact marketing leaders that I can’t wait to learn from.
You can check out the full program here and apply to be included. The first group sessions begin on November 30. If you have any questions, please let me know. It’d be great to participate in this together!
Wishing you a great week,
Kevan
Portfolio Thinking: How to make sense of our complicated marketing world
Sometimes — even though I feel completely guilty about it — my answer to a startup marketing question is “it depends.”
Since we don’t exist in a binary world, since there is so much gray area surrounding our day-to-day work, marketers like you and me are very rarely faced with decisions as simple as “this or that.”
It’s usually “this or that” … “but also there’s these other 100 things over here.”
Rather than feel guilty about not having a clear answer all the time for everything (high standard, I know), I’ve began embracing a mental model that has made things a little bit easier to act on.
Portfolio thinking is a mental model where you categorize the different work you do in such a way as to clarify your thinking and speed up your decision-making.
The model comes from the money world, where portfolios hold your different investments. You may have a portfolio that’s 50% stocks, 25% bonds, and 25% crypto. And these percentages may change over time as your investment strategy evolves.
Same is true with portfolio thinking in the world of marketing.
By bucketing your tasks into discrete groups, you can gain a clearer picture of what is you’re working toward and how you plan to get there.
Let me give you some examples of the most helpful types of portfolio thinking that I’ve come across.
Portfolio thinking for allocating resources
Inspiration: Coca-Cola
The marketing team at Coca-Cola uses this 70/20/10 portfolio thinking to come up with a roadmap for how they decide to create content.
70 percent is Now. These are your everyday marketing activities: low-risk with a moderate-to-high impact that you can feel pretty confident in.
20 percent is New. These are iterations above and beyond your “Now” strategies, or they are new channels that you’re wanting to test out. The ROI for this bucket is long-term.
10 percent is Next. These are high-risk, high-reward activities. Moonshots.
Portfolio thinking for starting a new job
Inspiration: Adam Grenier
This is a type of portfolio thinking that I wrote about when I changed jobs earlier this year. As you may recall, when you step into a new role, you’ll typically find yourself needing to invest in four different areas:
Infrastructure. You need to build the systems and processes that don’t exist yet.
Firefighting. Some things may be on fire. You need to put those fires out!
Development. The core jobs you were brought in to do: developing strategies and executing on them to achieve results.
Experimentation. Driving your area forward with innovative new thinking that keeps your company growing.
Of course, when you’re brand new to a job, you’ll probably find that more of your time is spent on infrastructure and firefighting. As things settle down, you’re then able to shift your portfolio so that you’re investing more in development and experimentation.
Portfolio thinking for investing in a multichannel marketing strategy
Inspiration: Reforge
In their marketing strategy course (highly recommended, btw), the team at Reforge describes a multichannel portfolio that allows you to invest in a number of strategic areas by simply weighing your appetite for risk/reward, long-term upside, and CAC payback.
I’ve taken the lessons from that course and adapted them a bit to how I think about things within my role at Oyster.
Basically, you have three buckets:
Always-on. Validated channels with a low risk and short CAC payback. These are the healthy channels that are working for you today.
Test-and-learn. New channels with a potentially high upside but also higher risk. They have a short CAC payback, which allows you to feel comfortable testing and learning quickly.
Future-proof. Long-term channels that could pay off big
(There’s a fourth bucket, “Not for now,” but it’s always at 0%.)
Depending on the situation you find yourself in, you may need to place more of an emphasis on one bucket than another. For instance, when I was at Buffer, we leaned heavily on the Always-on category because we didn’t have much marketing budget to spend and were fortunate to have some meaningful channels to pull from. At Polly and Oyster, it has been more of a mix where Always-on represents 50-70% of the portfolio, and Test-and-learn and Future-proof split the remaining 30-50%.
Over to you
Have you experience portfolio thinking in your work?
Any scenarios in which you’ve applied it? Any new portfolios you’ve found work well for you?
It’d be great to hear your experience. Feel free to hit reply to share your thoughts.
About this newsletter …
Each week, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world. If you enjoy what’s in this newsletter, you can share some love by hitting the heart button at the top or bottom.💙
About Kevan
I’m a marketing exec who specializes in startup marketing and brand-building. I currently lead the marketing team at Oyster (we’re hiring!). I previously built brands at Buffer, Polly, and Vox.
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