The Marketing Garden

How to Build a System That Actually Grows

If you’re a business owner or if you’re in charge of the marketing for a company with fewer than 50 employees, I am willing to bet that at some point your marketing felt more like an anxious improvisation than a well-rehearsed performance. One minute you’re recording a Reel because someone said short-form video is essential, the next you’re Googling what a funnel actually is while staring at your website’s bounce rate. Then you remember you haven’t posted in a week. Or was it two?

Somewhere in your downloads folder, there are six unused content calendars, four abandoned lead magnet templates, and a free checklist that was supposed to make it all make sense. But it didn’t. Because the problem isn’t a lack of effort. It’s a lack of structure.

Most small business marketing is like a puzzle dumped on the floor; you’ve got all the pieces, but no picture on the box. And just when you think you’re making progress, someone hands you a new piece and insists it’s essential. SEO! Email automation! TikTok! LinkedIn carousels! Wait… are we still doing blogs?

It’s no wonder you feel scattered. Because your marketing is likely made up of a hundred different tactics, all floating around with no shared strategy, no unifying message, and no clear way to measure if any of it is actually doing anything.

This isn’t your fault. Most of us were handed fragments. Bits of advice. What worked for someone else. What an algorithm seemed to reward. What that one webinar said would double your leads.

But without a system, all you’re doing is reacting. Trying to water whatever plant is closest to you and hoping something grows.

That’s why I want to offer a different way of thinking about your marketing. Not as a funnel. Not as a series of hacks. But as a garden.

Because a garden has zones. It has rhythms. It makes space for what thrives, it embraces the ebb and flow of seasons, it accepts what fades, what needs composting, and what needs care.

Over the next few sections, I’ll walk you through what I call the Marketing Garden: five core zones that make up a healthy, functional marketing system. This framework isn’t just about what tactics to use. It’s about how to think about marketing in a way that’s calm, intentional, and actually sustainable.

Why We’re Using a Garden (Not a Funnel, Not a Flywheel)

The funnel had its moment. For years, it was the guiding compass for marketing decisions because it helped marketers explain the sales process in a way that felt structured and manageable. The customer would move through a series of stages as predictably as gravity. All you needed to do was pour leads in the top, nurture them in the middle, and watch the conversions come out the bottom. It was clean, linear, and comforting.

But if you’ve spent more than five minutes actually running a business, you’ll know the funnel doesn’t reflect reality. Most customers don’t follow a straight path. They loop back. They binge your content and vanish. They download something, forget about it, then pop back up six months later ready to buy. They follow silently for a year, then message out of the blue. This doesn’t mean that the funnel isn’t relevant. It still has its place in content creation. We just need to shift our perception of how it works by understanding that the real buying journey is messy, emotional, and non-linear.

The flywheel metaphor tried to fix this by reframing growth as momentum. Essentially, just keep pushing, and eventually the system sustains itself. But even that assumes marketing is a machine, when in truth, it’s anything but. It doesn’t run on force. It runs on attention, relevance, timing, care, iteration, and patience. And no amount of spinning makes up for planting in the wrong place to begin with.

Taking this into account, I opted for a garden because (as you’ll see) a garden makes more sense than a funnel or a flywheel. Not just because it’s a gentler image, but because it’s a more honest one. A garden accepts seasonality. It doesn’t promise instant results or infinite yield. It needs tending. Some areas require constant care. Others take time. Some things thrive. Others don’t. You don’t expect to harvest fruit from a plant you’ve only just watered. You accept that good things take time and that sometimes, things fail.

This metaphor also gives you room to think about your marketing holistically. You’re not just “doing content” or “running ads.” You’re growing a system. One that includes strategy, visibility, connection, conversion, and review. One that doesn’t fall apart when a single tactic stops working.

This framework gives you five distinct zones to work with, and a way to see what needs nurturing, what needs pruning, and what you might not have planted yet. It’s not here to give you more work. It’s here to help you see what you’re already doing more clearly, and to figure out where to focus next.

Because clarity isn’t a luxury. It’s what gives all your effort somewhere to land.

The Five Zones of the Marketing Garden

Each of the following sections is a core part of your Marketing Garden. On their own, they’re just individual elements (i.e. individual marketing activities). But together, they help you build a marketing function that can grow with your business.

1. The Soil and Roots – Strategy

Every thriving garden begins with the ground beneath it. Before anything blooms, and long after it’s been harvested, it’s the soil that determines whether growth is possible and whether it will last. It's easy to overlook, mostly because you can't see it. But it’s doing the quiet, foundational work that everything else depends on. And in marketing, that role belongs to strategy.

When most people hear the word strategy, they think of a document. Maybe a brand book, a slide deck, a set of bullet points pulled together at the start of a project. It’s often treated like a box to tick before the real work begins. But strategy isn’t a static asset. Strategy is the layer of understanding that shapes every choice you make. And when it’s missing or underdeveloped, no amount of tactical effort can fully make up for it.

In practical terms, strategy means knowing your position in the market and understanding how your offer fits into your customer’s life. It’s about defining who you serve, what you solve, how your solution stands apart, and why your message will land with the people who need it. When this is done well, it becomes the through-line between your intentions and your execution, not just for one campaign, but for your entire marketing system.

When the clarity that a clear strategy brings to your marketing isn’t there, your actions become guesswork. You’ll see this in your messaging that starts to drift, offers start to shift without direction, and campaigns are launched with the vague hope that something might stick. You end up with effort (a lot of it, in fact) but very little cohesion. And while the work might be technically sound, it doesn’t always lead anywhere meaningful. Everything feels harder than it should be.

That sense of friction, that mental load of constantly rewriting, second-guessing, and spinning your wheels, is a sign that you’re working with shallow soil. You're trying to grow something without first making sure the ground can hold it.

The good news is that weak soil isn’t a failure. It’s a signal. It means it’s time to step back, to revisit the basics, and to give the roots the structure they need. And that structure starts by asking the kind of questions that don’t always come with quick answers. What exactly are we trying to grow here? Who is it for? What difference does it make in their life, not just in theory, but in practice? And are we communicating that clearly across the places where it matters?

The truth is, though, a strong strategy doesn’t guarantee success, but it gives your marketing room to breathe. It helps your message stay consistent even when the format changes. It aligns your team without the need for endless revision cycles. And, maybe most importantly, it gives you a filter, a way to know what belongs in your plan and what doesn’t.

You don’t need a complex framework. You need to know what you’re growing, why it matters, and who it’s for. That’s the work. That’s the soil. Everything else is planted on top of that.

2. The Sunlight – Visibility Channels

Let’s talk about the part of your marketing that tends to take up the most space in your brain: being seen.

Whether it’s social media, SEO, paid ads, PR, or even just word-of-mouth, most of us have internalised the idea that visibility is the goal. You need more reach, more traffic, more followers. You need to “get your name out there”. So you show up where you can. You tweak your Instagram captions, test hashtags, post on LinkedIn, maybe throw a bit of money behind a boosted post. You do what you can with the time and energy you have, and then you wonder why none of it feels like it’s moving the needle.

Visibility is often the most obvious and accessible part of marketing, which is why it gets so much attention. It’s the part people can see… both your audience and you yourself. You can measure it in impressions, clicks, and reach. There’s a dopamine hit to knowing something is “out there”. But there’s a difference between being visible and being ready to be seen.

Just like sunlight in a garden, visibility is powerful, but only when it lands on something rooted. If your strategy is still patchy or your offer is still evolving, then pumping more light into the system doesn’t help. In fact, it might just illuminate what’s unfinished and leave you feeling exposed, or worse, misunderstood.

This is one of the biggest reasons why visibility is the second zone in the garden, not the first. It comes after the soil and roots have been laid. When you’ve done the work of understanding what you’re offering, who it’s for, and why it matters, visibility starts to serve a purpose. It stops being noise. It starts becoming connection.

It also becomes more manageable. You no longer feel the pressure to chase every trend or maintain a constant presence everywhere at once. When your strategy is grounded, you can look at each visibility channel for what it is: not a magic bullet, but a kind of light source. Each one behaves a little differently. Social media might act like afternoon sun; intense and quick to burn, but energising in short bursts. Search engines are more like the slow, steady warmth of morning light, building trust over time, sometimes unnoticed until results quietly bloom. Paid ads behave more like artificial grow lights. They’re targeted, fast-acting, but only effective if you control the settings and know what you’re shining on.

What you’re aiming for is enough light in the right places. Not full exposure everywhere, all the time. Not a floodlight that hits everything indiscriminately. And not a spotlight on something that’s still taking shape. Real visibility is purposeful. It shines on a part of your garden that’s ready. It helps new people discover you because there’s something there to be discovered.

That’s why the metaphor matters. In a garden, light doesn’t make things grow. It creates the conditions for growth if the roots are in place. And not all plants need the same amount. Some thrive in full sun. Others need partial shade. Knowing the difference is part of tending a healthy system. It’s not just about doing more. It’s about noticing what kind of attention each part of your business actually needs, and adjusting your light accordingly.

So if you’ve been showing up consistently and still feel like no one is really seeing you, ask yourself: What are they seeing when they find me? Is this the part of my work that needs light right now? Or am I shining just for the sake of staying visible?

Because when your message is clear, your offer is strong, and your systems are in place, visibility stops being something you chase. It becomes something you direct.

3. The Garden Beds – Content and Nurturing

There’s a moment in every customer relationship when curiosity shifts into connection. It doesn’t happen the first time they see your ad. It doesn’t happen when they glance at your homepage or scroll past your latest reel. It happens in the quiet, steady zone of your marketing… the part most people forget to water.

This is your nurturing content. The garden bed is where relationships take root.

It’s not glamorous, and it rarely goes viral. But it’s the zone that turns strangers into supporters and interested browsers into paying customers. This is where your emails live. Your honest reflections. The behind-the-scenes explainer that didn’t get many likes but made someone forward it to a colleague. The how-to guide that answered the exact question a client was too embarrassed to ask. The welcome sequence that didn’t sell anything at all, but just made someone feel like they belonged.

When you skip this zone, your garden looks full but doesn’t actually feed anyone. You might have traffic flowing in, posts going up, ads bringing people through the gate, but there’s nothing for them to engage with. No roots, no nourishment, no signs of life they can connect with. People might stop by, admire the layout, maybe even bookmark it for later. But they don’t stay. They don’t grow with you. Without consistent care in this part of the garden, the whole system becomes performative; a surface-level display with nothing to support long-term growth.

The garden beds are the part of the garden that needs tending. Not once a season, but routinely. Your newsletter list doesn’t grow if you ignore it for months. Your blog won’t build authority if it’s full of placeholder posts written in a rush. Your audience won’t deepen if your content always keeps them at arm’s length. It doesn’t mean you have to bare your soul or run a weekly email campaign forever. But it does mean you need to show up where your people already are, and say something that matters when you do.

The important thing to remember, though, is that good nurturing content doesn’t perform for attention. It builds trust through clarity, care, and consistency. You will also be happy to learn that this kind of content doesn’t have to be complicated. Sometimes, it’s a thoughtful answer to a common question. Other times, it’s a peek into how you solve problems or why your approach works the way it does. It might be a case study. A story. A resource. A pattern of showing up with something useful, not just promotional.

Think of this zone, the content and nurturing, like raised beds in a real garden. It’s where the care shows. It’s where you decide what’s growing and support it through each stage. Some crops grow fast and need constant attention. Others take months before they yield anything meaningful. But if you never plant anything here (or worse, plant it and abandon it), don’t be surprised when there’s nothing to harvest.

So pause and ask yourself: Am I nurturing the people who already found me? Am I creating paths that help them understand, trust, and choose me, or am I only ever chasing the next new visitor?

The work you do in this zone doesn’t always show up in the analytics straight away. But over time, it becomes the difference between being followed and being remembered.

4. The Fruit – Conversions

If the garden is the system, then the fruit is the outcome most of us are hoping for. It’s the moment where all of the behind-the-scenes work becomes tangible, not in theory, but in someone taking action. In marketing terms, this is your conversion point. Whether that’s a sale, a sign-up, a booked call, or an agreement to move forward, this is where someone makes a decision. A yes.

The challenge is that this part often becomes an obsession for businesses. And rightfully so. When results feel slow or unpredictable, it’s easy to zero in here and assume the issue lies with your offer, or in your pricing, or your website copy. You might rebuild your sales page three times in a week, swap out your payment processor, test button colours, and rewrite subject lines. And while some of those changes might help on the surface, they rarely fix the deeper issue if the rest of the garden isn’t functioning.

You cannot harvest what you haven’t planted and nurtured. If your strategy isn’t clear, if your message is misaligned, if your content hasn’t built trust, then conversions will feel like a fluke. Or worse, a constant fight. It’s not because the fruit zone doesn’t matter; it matters deeply. But it’s the part that depends most heavily on the integrity of everything else.

Still, this is where your systems need to hold up under pressure. It’s where the backend of your business quietly carries the weight of your brand promise. Clear, honest messaging. Seamless checkout processes. Follow-ups that reassure rather than overwhelm your customer. There’s no glory in a launch that brings people in only to lose them at the final step because something felt off or confusing, or hard to follow. The fruit isn’t just about what’s being offered, it’s about how it’s being offered and whether the path to yes feels smooth enough to walk.

That’s the difference between a business that’s constantly convincing people and one that consistently attracts people who are ready. Not because they’ve been pushed through a funnel, but because the garden has done its work. There was light. There was nourishment. There was time. And when the fruit appeared, it was in a place that felt easy to reach.

So if you’re looking at your conversion rate and feeling stuck, the question isn’t just what to fix in your offer. It’s what’s happening further up the system. Are people finding you before they’re ready? Are they landing in your world without clarity? Are they encountering too many steps between interest and action?

Conversion isn’t about turning pressure into purchase. It’s about making the decision feel like the natural next step. The harvest is a by-product of health elsewhere.

5. The Compost – Analysis and Adjustment

Tucked away in the corner of every working garden is something easy to overlook: the compost heap. It doesn’t draw attention. It doesn’t make headlines. But it’s where old material becomes new potential. This doesn’t happen instantly. Nor does it occur neatly. But eventually, through the quiet and very necessary process of breaking things down.

When it comes to your marketing, that corner of your garden that is dedicated to your compost heap is your space for analysis and adjustment. And just like compost, it’s often ignored until there’s a crisis. It’s ignored until the numbers don’t add up, or when the launch flops, or when the leads dry up. It’s only then that someone stops to ask what went wrong. But, building a marketing system that genuinely works means making space for reflection (tending to your compost heap) even when things are ticking along. Actually, especially when things are ticking along.

Your compost heap isn’t about obsessively checking dashboards or watching every single click, though. It’s about creating a habit of learning, which is nurtured in the regular practice of asking: What are we seeing? What’s working? What’s not? And why?

Sometimes the insights are obvious. It could be an email subject line that tanked open rates, or a campaign that brought in reach but no engagement. Other times, it takes a few layers of peeling back to spot the pattern, like noticing that conversions dip every time your content speeds up, or that the leads coming from one platform are consistently less qualified than from another.

When you skip this work, your garden doesn’t die overnight, it simply stops improving. You keep planting in the same spots, expecting different results, and wondering why things feel harder than they should. Composting gives you clarity. It tells you which tools are helping and which ones are just keeping you busy. It lets you stop guessing and start adjusting with purpose.

It’s also the place where you give yourself permission to let go of what isn’t serving you. That service you keep promoting out of habit. That platform you post to out of guilt. That messaging that no longer fits who you are or what you offer. Not everything in your marketing has to stay alive. Some things are meant to be turned under and repurposed.

Done well, this zone is less about data and more about decisions. It’s the difference between reacting and refining, and between hoping and understanding. It’s where marketing stops being a performance and starts becoming a craft. Because the truth is, no matter how good your strategy is or how strong your content feels, if you’re not creating time and space to reflect, you’ll end up stuck in cycles. 

And that’s the real work of the compost pile: giving yourself the tools to grow better, not just more.

Pulling It All Together: Your Full Marketing Garden

You’ve now walked through all five zones of your marketing garden. You’ve explored the quiet depth of strategy to the visible pull of your conversion points, understanding that each part serves a purpose. And when all of the parts of your garden work together, they give your business a marketing system that can actually grow with you, not just keep you busy.

This isn’t about trying to do everything at once, though. That’s a fast track to burnout, not momentum. Instead, it’s about understanding that gardens develop unevenly. Some parts will flourish while others are still settling, and there will be areas you’ve cultivated well and others you’ve barely touched. That’s not a problem to fix. It’s a pattern that you need to notice.

For example, you might have a clear strategy and a message that resonates, but your visibility is weak. Or maybe the visibility is there, but what happens next is murky. People show up, they scroll, but there’s nothing holding them there or encouraging them to move to the next step. Or perhaps you're doing a bit of everything, but everything feels scattered and inconsistent.

That’s why I am encouraging you to look at your marketing like a garden. This is not meant to serve as another plug-and-play formula, and it’s certainly not a rigid set of instructions. It’s a lens. A way to step back from the day-to-day scramble and actually see the shape of your marketing. Because marketing, no matter how big your business, consists of different equally important, interconnected parts. And this way of looking at what you need to do helps to give you a holistic view of where those different parts fit in and support each other. When the work starts to feel chaotic or disconnected, you can return to this way of thinking and reorient yourself. Not to do more, but to make better decisions about where your attention will matter most.

Once you understand the different zones, you can start naming what’s working and what’s missing. That language becomes useful, not just for you, but for your team, your coach, or anyone supporting your business. It turns vague stress into practical planning. You stop chasing every tactic that crosses your feed and start choosing what aligns with your bigger picture.

So take a moment. Imagine your own garden. What’s healthy? What’s been planted but left untended? What’s still just a sketch in your notebook? Maybe you’ve been pouring energy into a visibility strategy, but there’s no real soil underneath it. Or you’ve built an incredible offer, but no one knows it exists. 

Whatever the case, you don’t need to rip everything out and start over. You just need to decide what needs care, right now.