Building a successful marketing function requires both great fuel and a finely oiled engine.
The fuel should be tailored to the engine, and the engine needs to be custom-made to run on that specific fuel.
This analogy is the simplest way I’ve found to explain the functioning of marketing departments.
By keeping the fuel-engine concept in mind, you’ll be empowered to choose the right mix of activities, build the right team, and produce effective results in your marketing strategy.
Let’s clarify the concept of fuel and engine in marketing.
What’s the fuel, and what’s the engine?
Fuel is all the stuff that you say to your audience loud, either in writing or visually. It can be videos, long for-sales pages, blogs, home pages, images, or a short form of copy.
The engine is the channel or mix of channels you use to get the fuel to your audience. The tools and metrics you use to track your marketing effort are also part of the engine.
The race car signifies your business.
The kickstarts are the unscalable tactics for acquiring your first 100 customers.
Turbo boosts are one-off events that accelerate growth temporarily but don’t last.
Lubricants are optimizations that help your race car accelerate. These include increasing conversion, retention, brand awareness, and so on.
But at the very elementary level, when you combine the fuel and engine appropriately, the car starts moving smoothly with no noise. That signifies that your business is growing.
With many Indian companies, I have seen that they over-index on one. This means they spend too much time building the engine but ignore the fuel or vice versa.
This means you are hiring the wrong mix of people or doing the wrong mix of activities.
When you choose to do the wrong sequence of activities, your car breaks down.
Recently, I experienced firsthand how a start-up in Delhi that was planning to become a networking community didn’t take off.
Rather than initially investing in fuel, he overinvested in turbo boosts. They held several meet-up events in 5-star hotels. The Founder had a Nobel vision and invested a good amount of money from his pocket. He didn’t take a single penny from any member.
But, his activity led to zero investment in fuel.
Imagine you’re sitting in the driver’s seat, key in hand, ready to start the engine. As you turn the key, there’s an initial sound—grr-grr—a low, rumbling noise that hints at the engine coming to life. It feels like any second now, the engine will roar, ready to go.
But then… nothing. The engine sputters, the noise fades, and silence settles in. You try again, turning the key with a little more urgency this time. The grr-grr sound returns, teasing you with the sense that the car is on the verge of starting, but it once again fails to catch. Each turn of the key brings the same hopeful noise, yet the engine won’t fully engage, leaving you waiting, caught between expectation and frustration.
So the take is that if you choose the wrong sequence of activities, the racing car crashes or breaks down.
When your fuel-engine mix is not in proportion to what is needed, your business doesn’t grow.
Imagine you focused too much on making fuel, but without the engine, the car won’t start, and you can’t reach your audience. This example shows why your business might be struggling.
If you think the problem is, ‘We need a different or better fuel because this one isn’t working,’ that would be the wrong conclusion for now.
That could be the issue, but first, you should make sure you have a good engine to drive the car and reach the audience.
You’ll see that many tasks, like sending an email, require both fuel (creating the content) and the engine (using the right marketing automation rules to deliver it to the right audience).
How to get the Fuel Engine Combination right?
The first step is to create balanced goals:
- Make sure your goals balance both the fuel projects and the engine projects.
- If all your goals are like “driving X qualified leads,” that means you are focusing too much on the engine and not focusing on fuel.
Hiring.
Some roles focus primarily on creating fuel, others on building the engine, and some handle both.
Those who “do both” are critical. They ensure that fuel and engine work together, making the racing car move.
The Fuel-Engine diagram below is not comprehensive. It intends to give you an overview of what is called “fuel” and what is “engine.”
Let’s take the journey of growing your marketing team from 1 to 20. The discussion of increasing the marketing team from 1 to 20 helps you see how you hire, keeping the fuel engine in balance.
I organize marketing functions into 3 main sub-functions.
Brand Marketing: Who We Are
Product Marketing: What we sell
Growth Marketing: How you sell it
The order above is purposeful.
However, SMEs mostly focus on the reverse order.
Product Marketing: What we sell
Growth Marketing: How you sell it
Brand Marketing: Who we are.
An exception here is if you are a franchisee outlet. A Franchisee gets the Brand from the franchisor.
Let’s dive into building an ideal marketing organization chart.
Balancing fuel & engine across 3 marketing sub-functions.
- Content & Brand aka the Fuel: Responsible for creating fuel (words, design, video, etc) that aligns with your audience and engine.
- Growth Marketing aka the Engine: Responsible for driving full-funnel growth and revenue, and distributing “fuel” across multiple channels–and setting up the tooling, tests, and optimizations (lubricants) needed.
- Product Marketing aka the Foundation: Responsible for doing the research needed to understand your audience, market, product, and positioning, which informs all marketing activities. It also helps with fuel & engine activities that require deep product and audience knowledge, like product launches, sales and partnership enablement, and messaging for campaigns.
Common fuel-engine failures and how to fix them.
Empty tank: All engine, no fuel
If you’re focusing too much on the engine and not enough on the fuel, you might say (or hear) things like:
- “I want to triple leads, so let’s simply boost ad spend, keep the same creative, and avoid hiring more people.”
- “Simply run more outbound campaigns that lead to the demo request page.”
- “I only need a growth or demand generation marketer for the first hire; we can skip product and content marketing for now.”
In each of these cases, you’re focused on the engine but overlooking the fuel needed to drive it.
To achieve scalable, efficient results, you must provide value to your audience—this means creating top-notch content, design, and messaging tailored to the specific channel and audience segment.
Warning Signal: All fuel, no engine.
If you’re focusing too much on creating content without developing the engine, you might find yourself saying (or hearing):
- “I’m unsure whether my web copy is effective since my A/B test is slow to yield results.”
- “No, I didn’t outline a distribution plan for the ebook I dedicated 50 hours to creating.”
- “This quarter, we aim to produce five case studies.”
In these situations, it’s essential to focus not only on creating content but also on distributing it.
Unleaded gasoline in a diesel engine: Mismatch between fuel and engine.
If you’re producing a wealth of valuable content and managing an efficient engine but not seeing results, you probably have a fuel-engine mismatch.
- “These blog posts are driving a lot of traffic, but we’re not getting any conversions.”
- “We rank high for 25 keywords, but they aren’t aligned with our business.”
- “Email 1 in our drip campaign gets great open rates but a lot of unsubscribes.”
If your fuel and engine don’t sync, it suggests either your audience strategy is off, or there isn’t enough team oversight from those who understand how to integrate both.
In either scenario, bringing in a product marketing manager or a leader with comprehensive marketing expertise—who can align the fuel and engine—will likely prove beneficial.
Focus on the fuel-engine balance during hiring, planning, and execution, and your marketing efficiency will significantly improve.