5 | Marketing: How Strategy, Content, and Funnels Actually Work Together

Marketing strategy. Marketing plans. Funnels. Content. Email. SEO. Instagram. Repurposing.

If you've spent years hearing all of these terms and collecting advice about what you should be doing—but still aren't entirely sure how the pieces fit together—you're not alone.

For a long time, I thought getting better at Marketing meant getting better at the individual pieces. I learned Instagram strategies, tried to understand the difference between a Marketing strategy and a Marketing plan, and worked hard to consistently implement what I was learning.

What finally made Marketing feel less complicated wasn't another strategy.

It was understanding the system.

In this episode of Sustainable Foundations, we're zooming out to look at what Marketing is actually responsible for in your business—and why the different pieces of your Marketing need different jobs.

We'll unpack what people actually mean when they talk about top, middle, and bottom of funnel; the difference between a Marketing strategy and a Marketing plan; and why a blog post, Instagram post, email, Pinterest pin, and sales page shouldn't all be expected to accomplish the same thing.

We'll also look at why advice like “turn one blog post into five Instagram posts” makes much more sense when you understand the job of the content first—and why intentional repurposing isn't simply copying the same piece of content across every platform.

I also share some of my own experience with Instagram: how I spent years learning platform strategies without fully understanding where Instagram fit into Marketing as a whole, and why that made every new tactic or strategy feel more important than it necessarily was.

And, of course, we'll talk about AI.

Today's tools can help us research, plan, write, and execute Marketing faster than ever before. That's an incredible opportunity—but faster production doesn't automatically create better Marketing. We still need enough understanding to decide what we're trying to accomplish, what we actually need, and what job we're asking the tool to help us perform.

By the end of this episode, my hope isn't that you leave with more Marketing to do.