How to Avoid Backseat Marketing

Every marketer has had a run-in with backseat marketing.

The late night email from your boss with ideas for a new campaign. The unsolicited suggestions during meetings from departments that have no experience with marketing. “Have you thought about starting a TikTok account?”

Surely they know how busy you are - how much your department already has on its plate.

So why can’t they just leave you alone and let you do your job?

Believe it or not, most instances of backseat marketing are not malicious. And, at least when it comes to leadership, the perpetrators probably hate it as much as you.

Those late night emails mean they’re spending their nights being worried about your department. They’re afraid something is missing.

Is that fear warranted? Probably not.

More than likely you’ve already considered their suggestions and have been implementing a plan for months that would address those very concerns.

But their fears are based on perception - not reality.

Those fears take root and grow in the gaps between the actions you’re taking and the work you’ve done to communicate those actions.

When they don’t know that their concerns are already being addressed, their mental energy gets shifted to trying to solve the problem themselves.

Having a plan isn’t enough. Telling people you have a plan isn’t even enough. You need to be constantly reminding everyone that you have a plan.

Your plan hasn’t been fully communicated until you’ve taken these five steps:

We have a tendency to let a plan live only in our heads. We’ve done the important work - the thinking work - and we’re ready to put it into action. But it’s not useful to the organization until it can be articulated in a simple and easy-to-understand way.

Get it out of your head and onto a piece of paper. Strip away all of the unnecessary details. Don’t stop until you can get across the most important aspects in a single sentence.

Your plan is a communication tool, so make sure that it’s communicated. Not just to your team, and not just to leadership. Take the opportunity to distribute your plan throughout the organization.

You can do this in a meeting, but try recording a Loom video of yourself talking through the plan.

Telling people your plan isn’t enough. Write it down.

And don’t just write it in an email. Start a document and keep a link to it front-and-center in your project management tools or wherever you do your day-to-day work. Make sure that anyone who might start wondering has quick and easy access to all of the details.

Don’t let your plan rot on a shelf. No matter how strong your plan is, everyone will forget it exists in a week. Don’t let them.

Refer back to your plan (with link) in every email you send about the project. Put it at the top of your monthly reports.

Everyone should get tired of hearing you say, “As stated in our plan…”

Let people know how the plan is unfolding. Are you making progress? Seeing results? On timeline? On budget?

When your project is finished, do a post-mortem. What went right? What went wrong? Share the results of your post-mortem in the same way you shared the plan.