🔁 The backlog row that never wins

“We should really get to those emails.”

I was in a Q4 planning session with a client this week, working through the new idea list and backlog, when the same thing came up again. It covers two pieces of work. One is the loyalty program and the referral path that runs off it. The other is the set of onboarding and nurturing sequences meant to deepen subscriber engagement.

The item has been on the list since we planned Q4 last year. It has survived every round since by being important enough to keep and never urgent enough to do.

There always seems to be a new acquisition thing worth doing instead.

Prioritization has been on my mind since last week’s edition, and watching that row move across another quarterly plan sharpened the question that comes after it. What gets prioritized, and does anybody ever decide that on purpose?

Two ends of the barbell

I first learned about the barbell strategy in investing, where Nassim Taleb used it to describe putting your money at the two extremes of the risk range and leaving the middle alone. It transfers neatly to how we choose to invest time and effort in marketing.

At one end is the work of reaching people who have never heard of you. Awareness, new audiences, the whole business of being found.

At the other end is the work of going deeper with the people who already know you. I mean that more broadly than “existing customers”, though they’re the obvious part. It also covers the readers who open everything you publish and have never bought. The consultants who put you on a client’s shortlist. The peers who repeat your ideas in rooms you’re not actually in.

Both ends are part of a balanced plan. But what happens when you’re crunched for time?

The cuts land on the relationship end almost every time, and they rarely arrive looking like cuts. Nobody stands up in a planning meeting and deliberately kills the loyalty emails. The row gets deferred to next quarter, everyone agrees it matters, and then it moves again.

The loop nobody puts in the plan

Give that second end of the barbell real attention and a loop starts turning.

People stay longer and come back more often. They get familiar enough with what you do to describe it accurately and persuasively to peers. And some of them start saying so in public: in a Slack community, in a Reddit thread someone opened about which tool to pick, on a conference stage citing you as the example of “good,” or quietly to a client who asked them for a recommendation.

That is where people who have never heard of you first hear about you.

A lot of the new attention your brand gets now happens this way: someone recommends you to someone else. That means a good share of your new audience reach comes through people who already know you, and that only happens if somebody has spent time building those relationships first.

Which is why splitting a plan into “growth” and “retention” has stopped describing anything real. That split assumed people travel in a straight line from stranger to buyer, and that the ones who already bought sit at the end of it, finished, no need to be addressed again.

If that sounds familiar, it should. It’s the flywheel, more or less, the Loyalty Loop, which has been on strategy slides for a decade. Almost nobody disagrees with it.

So the referral update sitting in my client’s backlog is, by any sensible reading, a machine for producing new customers, too. And it keeps getting postponed so the team can focus on… campaigns aimed at finding new customers.

Why it’s hard, and where to start

I won’t pretend this is an oversight you can fix by caring more. I obviously haven’t been able to push this idea from backlog to production successfully on at least three separate occasions.

Two things make campaigns targeting warm audiences genuinely hard to defend in a planning meeting.

First, they have no clear attributed revenue line of their own, and no number turns red when they’re missing. I recently wrote about how message drift gets de-prioritized in favor of things that visibly break, and this is the same mechanism in different clothes.

The second issue is harder, and more honest. Nobody is quite sure what would work.

“What should we publish to reach more people?” has a hundred answers, most of them easy to test. “What would make someone trust us enough to recommend us to a colleague?” has very few that survive contact with a planning spreadsheet.

The work is under-invested partly because it’s under-specified.

Highlight the issue when you see it

The conversation starter is already in your planning document.

Every team has a carry-over list in their backlog: the items rolled forward time and again. Pull it up in your next session and ask which end of the barbell those items sit on. Then ask what evidence you would accept that the relationship end is working, given that it will never hand you an attributed revenue line.

Some options include: Sales hearing your brand messaging in discovery calls before anyone has pitched. Customers who arrived because somebody vouched for you. Replies from people who have never bought anything. LinkedIn posts recommending your newsletter, unprompted by anything more than a good edition that made people think.

Agree on what counts while the plan is still open for discussion.

***

None of this is an argument against reach. You need the “cold” end of the barbell. A business that only ever talks to the people already close to it runs out of room to grow, and no company can grow on goodwill alone.

What’s worth checking is whether anyone ever chose the split between reaching warm and cold audiences, or whether it arrived on its own, one deferral at a time.

The planning window is open right now, for this quarter and for the year ahead. By November it closes, and the answer becomes next year’s budget. So have the conversation now, while you still can.

Both ends matter,

👌 Handpicked stories for you

Here are some interesting things I stumbled upon this week while reading, writing, researching, and being a generally curious marketing person on the internet:

💼 Three for work

Inside BetterHelp’s ‘repeatable, scalable’ comments-section social strategy | Comments are content, and this is a great example of a brand using them well. BetterHelp went from roughly 4 new followers a day to 450 by commenting on 200 to 350 posts a month and never hard-selling in any of them. Check out the full story for the examples.

How to build content briefs around audience situations | Would you swap the keyword at the top of a content brief for the situation the reader is actually in? Something like “I want to give new candy out for Halloween” rather than “best sweet snacks 2026”. It reminded me of user stories in development, and I want to test it.

Are We Still Marketing to Humans? | We’re in the odd position of writing for two masters now: the person and the model summarising us to them. Contently lists what each one needs: scenes and voice for the human, schema and scannable headers for the machine.

👀 Two for fun

This explanation of a Japanese staple | Vending machines surprised me most when I visited Japan, and the science behind them is equally exciting.

This map of exactly where the shade falls | Useful if you also live somewhere where an hour stroll can still fry you up at 2 pm at the end of summer.

🐈 Weekly cat

Not sure that’s too comfortable?