How the Right Tools Can Help Build Good Marketing Habits

There is renewed interest in the long-term value of brand marketing. Much of it stems from the frameworks we already know well. Binet and Field’s ‘The Long and the Short of It’ showed that investment in brand builds sustainable growth. Still, the pressure to justify every marketing dollar persists. CMOs become Chief Revenue Officers. RevOps own the MarTech stack. Marketing is reduced to the parts that can be immediately measured.

The irony is, long-term sustainable growth isn’t created by one campaign or one message. It’s the result of consistent actions. Good marketing habits. The kind of behaviours that get repeated, improved, and institutionalised over time. And those habits are hard to maintain when all the focus is on short-term goals.

Goals Provide Direction, Systems Create Motion

James Clear’s book, Atomic Habits, makes the point clearly: goals don’t change outcomes. Systems do. Often the goal (revenue) is too far from the action (marketing) to be a true motivator. British Olympic cyclists didn’t win a huge haul of gold medals because they stated it as a goal, or because they wanted it more. They built a system that made tiny improvements to every part of their process. The result was compound performance over time.

Marketing is no different. The best-performing teams aren’t always the most creative or best resourced. They are the ones who put in the reps. Who make each social post a little better than the last. Who never miss an opportunity to publish the next client testimonial, improve the clarity of the brand message. It’s not glamorous. It’s hard to attribute revenue. It’s not always recognised. But it works in the long run.

Build Plans That Include Desired Habits

Which brings us back to planning. The best marketing plans aren’t just schedules or budgets. They include systems of behaviour. They break down business goals into activities. They create clarity on priorities. They make definite choices. But they should also outline the habits that marketing needs to reinforce.

This is where a platform like B2B Planr adds value. Yes, it captures strategies, programs, and budgets. But it can also help teams codify the behaviours they want to repeat. Daily, weekly, quarterly. The more visibly these habits are stated, the more likely they are to stick.

This is a short version of an article written by our founder. The full article can be found here: https://www.cmswire.com/author/steven-manifold/