The question isn’t whether marketers are busy, but what their busyness is made of.
The craft is rarely the whole job. In a roundtable discussion about acting, actor Mahershala Ali (known for his roles in the films Moonlight, Green Book and House of Cards) made the point that the acting itself is only a small fraction of the work. The rest is character preparation, waiting on set, hair and makeup, travel, promotion and all the surrounding demands that make the craft possible. He called it ‘the tax’. It’s a good way to think about school marketing too.
Only a small share of a school marketer’s week is spent doing the work school Heads usually mean when they talk about marketing. The work that compounds, clarifies and strengthens. The rest is consumed by internal communication, approvals, production, interruptions, event support and the daily demands of a live school community. Some of that is inevitable. Some of it isn’t. The distinction matters because once the necessary ‘tax’ of the role is mixed up with avoidable drag, the school starts treating all busyness as equally valuable.
The ten percent, or whatever the true fraction is in your school, isn’t simply the part the marketer enjoys most. It’s the part with disproportionate strategic value. This is the work that sharpens the school’s position in the market, strengthens message clarity, improves enrolment flow, protects brand coherence and helps the school make better decisions about audience, timing and emphasis. It’s the work that makes later communication stronger because it gives it shape before it gives it volume. When that work is done well, the school sounds more like itself, wastes less effort and competes with more precision. When it’s starved of time, the school can remain visibly active while growing steadily less clear.
That ten percent isn’t a perk. It’s leverage.
School marketers know this instinctively. Heads often know it too, at least in principle. The difficulty is that school life rarely protects the principle for long. The role gets filled by the week’s urgencies: a draft needs checking, a speech polishing, an event supporting, a staff request framed as a small favour, a parent communication going out by day’s end. None of these tasks are absurd. Some are plainly necessary. But taken together, and repeated often enough, they alter the role. The marketer becomes less a steward of strategic clarity and more the absorber of communication demand.
Tax, drag and leverage
It helps to distinguish between tax and drag. Tax is the work that surrounds the craft and makes it possible. In schools, that includes a good deal of communication support, coordination, internal responsiveness and production work. Drag is different. Drag is what accumulates when the school hasn’t made clear decisions about priority, process and ownership. It appears when too many people can change what’s being produced without consequence, when approvals expand instead of clarify, when requests arrive in fragments, when deadlines are set late but treated as fixed, or when anything vaguely communicative ends up in marketing because the marketer is competent and available. Tax comes with the role. Drag comes with weak design.
Confuse the two, and busy starts looking strategic.
That confusion is costly because it flatters the wrong kind of performance. A marketer who responds quickly to every internal need will often be praised as indispensable. A marketer who protects time for message architecture, enrolment analysis or long-range planning may look less visibly helpful in the moment, even while doing the work that most strengthens the school’s future. Schools rarely say this out loud, but they often reward responsiveness over judgement and output over leverage. The result is predictable. Plenty gets done. Too little compounds.
That is where the Head comes in, not as an observer, but as a player in the scene. The Head does not merely oversee marketing from a strategic distance. They shape the conditions in which marketing either becomes more strategic or more reactive. A late change from the Head isn’t just another change. It resets priority. An ambiguous brief from the Head isn’t just an inconvenience. It teaches the school that interpretation will be done downstream. A habit of dropping in ‘just one more thing’ doesn’t merely add a task. It fragments attention and lowers the odds that the marketer will return to the deeper work with the same quality of thought.
A position description tells only part of the story. In one school, the marketer is given real authority to say no, push back, sequence work and protect strategic time. In another, the same title masks a role that is permanently interrupted, over-approved and answerable to every anxious request. On paper, both schools may claim to value strategic marketing. In practice, only one has created the conditions for it.
The difficulty for Heads is that the distortion is often created by reasonable instincts. Heads want the school to be responsive, relational, timely, polished and calm, while also supporting colleagues under pressure. None of that is misguided. But leadership habits that make sense one request at a time can become deeply unhelpful in aggregate. The marketer’s week isn’t shaped by stated priorities alone. It’s shaped by what the school interrupts, tolerates, rewards and repeatedly asks for.
What matters isn’t whether the marketer is busy, but what that busyness is made of.
Priority fog: Too many requests arrive as though they carry the same weight. The marketer is then left to negotiate importance on the run, rather than working from a clear hierarchy shaped by leadership. When everything feels urgent, the work with the greatest long-term value is usually the first to give way.
Default ownership: The marketer becomes the default owner of anything that looks remotely like communication, even where no real marketing judgement is required.
Production over thought: The role grows production-heavy and thought-light, full of deadlines and outputs but thin on insight, audience work and forward planning.
Responsibility without authority: The marketer is expected to improve clarity and consistency while others retain the freedom to ignore process, bypass priorities and insert late-stage changes without cost.
Fragmented time: Strategic work doesn’t happen in leftover spaces. If planning time is always assumed to be movable because it appears less urgent, the school has already made its decision. It has chosen to consume marketing attention rather than invest it.
These aren’t minor workflow irritations. They’re signals about what the school is really asking marketing to be.
That choice is often invisible because schools are accustomed to measuring marketing by activity. Was the communication sent? The event supported? The publication printed? All of that matters, but it’s not the whole story. A Head should also be asking harder questions: What work in this role actually compounds? What work has drifted into the role because nobody else owns it? What does the school repeatedly interrupt?
Those questions reveal more than another conversation about capacity.
Protecting the ten percent
Protecting the ten percent doesn’t require grand restructuring. It begins with clearer ownership. Not every draft, notice, request or event must pass through marketing. Some tasks can be standardised. Some can be reassigned. Some should be refused. It also begins with clearer authority. A school marketer can’t be asked to act strategically while being denied the ability to sequence work, defend process or challenge unnecessary rework. And it requires protected blocks of thought, not because marketers deserve a quieter life, but because the school needs at least some of its communication effort to be guided by judgement rather than by interruption.
This is where a Head becomes the leader of marketing in the fullest sense. Not by writing the messages or choosing the images, but by deciding what the role is for and what conditions will govern it. If the Head is willing to protect a little more of the right time, simplify a little more of the avoidable drag and insist on clearer ownership around the role, the effect is larger than the hours saved. The school’s marketing becomes more coherent because the school has allowed more coherence to be built upstream.
Every serious role carries a tax. The question for Heads is whether that tax remains the necessary price of valuable work, or whether it has become so heavy that the work with the greatest long-term value is rarely done. A marketer does not need freedom from the grind. The role will never be free of it. But the school does need a better grip on what is true tax, what is avoidable drag, and what work must be protected if marketing is to do more than keep pace with the present.
insight applied
- The marketer’s calendar reveals the school’s real priorities.
- Tax belongs to the role; drag belongs to weak design.
- Strategic time is lost first, then clarity, then leverage.
- Heads don’t distort marketing only by policy, but by habit.