Improving Your Marketing Strategy with the "One Thing" Rule

Marketing strategy is too often spread thin across multiple channels, constantly switching between tactics without clear priorities. When priorities scatter, teams lose track of the bigger picture and focus on unimportant details.

The result? Teams spend months tweaking campaigns that haven't launched yet while real growth opportunities slip by. While everyone debates whether to use "." or "!" in ad copy, actual revenue opportunities are being missed.

The solution isn't doing more, rather it's identifying your real bottleneck and focusing everything on solving it first.

This article came from extended discussions and sharing of ideas between members of our team across. Special thanks to the team at The Digital Ring who contributed their real-world insights from working with clients on these exact challenges.

Key Takeaways To Improve Your Marketing Strategy

Identify your bottleneck using two simple questions: "What's our main goal?" and "What's the one thing that, if fixed, would make everything else easier?"
Focus resources on your #1 constraint until it's solved rather than trying to optimize everything simultaneously
Go live and optimize based on real data instead of perfecting campaigns in isolation
Set defined feedback cycles (6-8 weeks) before making major adjustments to avoid constant tweaking
Measure what matters for your priority, not every available metric

Problem: Lack Of Priority & Focus = Wasted Effort

Marketing teams often end up spread thin across multiple channels, constantly switching between tactics. As one team member noted, when priorities get scattered, teams will focus on unimportant things and lose track of the bigger picture.

Without a priority, every marketing channel starts to feel urgent. Every item has equal weight. Ultimately it means teams stay busy without being productive.

For example, we've seen this with companies being too concerned about small details on creative assets. Teams get stuck tweaking the creative minutia rather than focusing on the one or two things we need to get right. It only gets trickier when after all this, higher up stakeholders completely disagree on priorities and you have to restart the cycle.

The outcome? After months of back and forth we finally get the ad live, only for it to underperform and come down after eight days.

Everyone's focused on things that, to them personally, are important, but their audience wouldn't even know the difference. While you debate “.” vs “!” real opportunities for growth and revenue are missed.

The solution is to identify your real priority and make sure everyone is onboard. Figure out the one thing actually hindering performance, and you'll avoid wasted effort while making meaningful improvements more frequently.

Identify: Your Bottleneck = Your Priority

You can use two simple questions: "What's our main goal right now?" and "What's the one thing that, if we fixed it, would make everything else easier or unnecessary?" (it’s basically The One Thing applied to your marketing efforts).

Your goal determines where to look, and the bottleneck determines what to fix.

If your overall goal is more leads, you examine your lead-generation channels to find what's being held back. If you need more website traffic, you look at your traffic sources to identify the biggest constraint.

Let’s take a look at this in practice. Your goal is more website leads.

Where’s the constraint? You’re not getting enough organic traffic to optimize your lead funnel with any real data.

What should you focus on? You could tweak landing pages, build lead magnets, or write new content, but remember, the limiting factor is volume of traffic.

So what’s the solution? Assuming you don’t have much content on the site, there’s your answer. Now you just focus everything on content production until website traffic is no longer the problem.

This approach forces the clarity most teams lack. It's about figuring out that central thing you're going after and giving your teams that single, clear direction to point resources towards. Find the real bottleneck and you know exactly where to put your energy.

Identifying your constraint can be simpler than you think, simply look for where your funnel breaks down first. The hard part however is actually focusing on that one thing instead of trying to fix everything at once.

Prioritizing Your Efforts To Make Real Progress

Once you've identified your priority, the next step is simple in practice, but difficult to actually implement. All you need to do is eliminate everything that isn’t your priority.

This goes against most marketing instincts. Teams want to hedge their bets, try multiple approaches, keep all options open.

But here's the reality: it's not required to do everything, especially when you have limited resources. But let’s be real, nobody has unlimited resources so we need to prioritize.

Focus means making hard choices about what not to do, and being able to justify it with the assessments you just did.

Commit to just picking the top 1-2 that are really going to give you the most bang for your buck and reach consistency before you move on.

Practical Tips For Executing Your Marketing Priority

Once you've identified your priority, execution becomes about maintaining focus despite distractions.

Break your priority into manageable pieces. Make sure you're allocating enough hours to achieve whatever your quarterly goals are. Setting milestones instead of overarching large projects so that they're actionable and intentional.

Everything that crosses your desk should pass a simple test: does this support your priority? Making sure whatever projects you're working on align with your overall goal or milestone. If not, cut it ruthlessly.

Principle 1: Go Live and Optimize

In reality "perfect" isn't really something we can achieve, and certainly not through isolated planning. The best way to get closer to "perfect" is to get something out there and start collecting feedback.

As long as your advertising is accurate and approved for use, get it going and edit it along the way. Make changes once you have learnings, using any data you gather as feedback to point you in the right direction.

Avoid overthinking and get the assets out there to test and keep optimizing from there. Any time your marketing materials aren't interacting with prospects and collecting data is wasted time and budget.

Iteration based on feedback beats isolated planning every time. Avoid overthinking and get the assets out there to test and keep optimizing from there. Any time your marketing materials aren't interacting with prospects and collecting data is wasted time and budget.

Principle 2: Define Cycles Before You Change

While iteration is good, you want to avoid making too many changes too quickly as it can kill your ability to progress.

Try to establish your feedback timeline upfront. It can be useful to let the algorithms do their thing for about six to eight weeks (or whatever timeline you decide) before making adjustments. An established “stop-adjust-restart” point prevents constant tweaking and encourages better learning.

It’s also worth noting that even failed tests generate valuable data, so don’t get too hung up on “what if this doesn’t work.”. You're learning what doesn't work and getting closer to understanding what does work. As long as you have reasonable feedback loops, failure solves for itself as you improve performance.

Your performance each cycle isn't always going to be linear or static however. Creative could be performing great one day, and then it becomes stale six or seven months later.

This is why you need regular check-ins. Set defined review periods where you check the pulse of where your campaigns are at any given moment, and adjust from there. Without clear timing on when you'll review and adjust, optimization becomes reactive and it becomes harder to drive progress.

Principle 3: Consider Measurement and Data

You can't optimize what you don't measure—but measuring everything creates noise. Focus on metrics tied to your priority.

Map your funnel from the goal backward. First ask, what counts as success? Setting up your most important leads, bottom of funnel conversions - and mapping that out. Then identify supporting metrics: What are some of those other pieces surrounding it? Contact form submissions, requesting an estimate, scheduling an appointment.

Embrace systematic learning. You just need to be doing more testing and failing and learning. Testing isn't about being right the first time. Start with our best guess, but then learn whether we were closer or not, and adapt and change.

Keep it simple. Focus on metrics that indicate whether your bottleneck is improving, but don't ignore qualitative feedback either. People comment on ads and can be really passionate about things. Sometimes, just finding those little spaces where you can listen and hear what the audiences have to say reveals insights metrics alone can't provide.

The Importance Of Consistency Over Time To Success

The bottleneck approach only works with sustained focus. Sporadic effort generates noise rather than learning. You don’t want to just try things without gathering enough data to improve.

Sustained focus on your bottleneck creates the feedback loop necessary for real improvement. You generate data, learn what works, and iterate based on evidence rather than guesswork.

Think sequential focus, not parallel execution. Master one constraint, achieve consistency, then move to the next bottleneck. This will compound over time. Each solved constraint makes the next one easier to tackle.

Consistency & Iteration For Improving ROI In Your Digital Marketing Strategy

Marketing success isn't about doing more things, rather it's about doing the right things consistently over a long period of time. When you identify your real bottleneck and commit to solving it first, you create the focused effort necessary for meaningful improvement.

The approach is simple:

Find your bottleneck
Focus everything on solving it
Measure progress
Achieve consistency
Move to the next constraint

Sequential focus beats parallel execution every time. Master your bottleneck, then move to the next constraint. This approach builds marketing momentum that compounds over time.

Ready to stop spreading your marketing efforts thin? At The Digital Ring, we've developed this focused approach through years of client work.

If you need help identifying your marketing bottleneck and building a strategy around it, contact us to discuss how we can make your marketing more effective.