How I Made it in Marketing

Be careful you don’t engage in marketing color by numbers so to speak. It’s easy to get lost in process flowcharts and databases.  You could build out the perfect infrastructure – the right media buys, marketing automation and drip campaigns all set, everything is being properly measured and attributed – yet in all that work it is easy to overlook what that infrastructure should be for. This is ju...

Who is your ideal customer? And how does your brand serve them? Yes, I know you have KPIs to hit this quarter. Leads. Sales. A specific revenue target. And so it can be easy to quickly drill down to targets. But all marketing beings by asking… who is the ideal customer? And how does our brand serve them? So I loved a lesson I recently read in a podcast guest application – ‘Take the time to underst...

Where do you see yourself in five years? I always hated this interview question. It’s not that I’m against planning; it’s that I’m for flexibility. And I don’t want to get trapped in a five-year plan. I try to focus on delivering value today helping people out, and improving my future self for tomorrow, and from there, opportunities naturally arise. So a lesson from this episode’s guest really res...

You can’t do everything. So you essentially have to make some ‘bets,’ for lack of a better word. What is going to have the biggest impact with your audience? Focus your energy and budget there, to make the biggest splash you can. OK, that’s a boring way to say it. So I like how my next guest worded it in his podcast guest application – ‘If you're gonna be a bear, be a Grizzly.’ To hear the st...

In the fast-paced world of marketing, precision can often be a double-edged sword. In our this episode, Kiara Kempski, Vice President of Global Consumer & Vendor Marketing at The Knot Worldwide (https://www.theknotww.com/), shares why sometimes ‘hand-grenade math’—a rough yet pragmatic approach—is more effective than chasing false precision. I discussed forecasting, along with resilience, ente...

How I Made It In Marketing is not about marketing. Not really. It’s about marketers. And the funny thing about marketers is that we’re not just marketers, we’re also human beings. So to succeed as marketers, we also have to be successful humans. Which is why I always love a lesson like – ‘Balance ambition with well-being.’ To hear the story behind that lesson, along with many more lessons and stor...

I like to call it blandvertising. I’m sure you’ve read it and heard it before. There are words. Lots of them. They fill a space – in an ad, on a landing page, in a press release, maybe even in a keynote presentation. You’ve seen these words before if you’re in the target audience. Scalable. Leading. Agile. Enterprise-grade. Full-service. Data-driven. Cross-platform. Seamless. They seem to say some...

“The difficult we do immediately. The impossible takes a little longer.” That quote is from David Ben-Gurion. And it reminds me of marketing. We’re in the digital age, or maybe we’ve crossed over into the AI age. Either way, we don’t have the long deadlines we had when I started my career writing print ads. And that’s just the difficult. What about the impossible ? Well, that is part of our stock...

I’ve been watching the new Steve Martin documentary, and it includes a clip of him accepting the Mark Twain Prize. He calls it “The only significant American award for comedy…except for money.” It reminded me of our own industry, but in a different way. We have many awards for creativity, and I am a creative person so I love them, but ultimately this art we do is a business art. And the ultimate m...

Wherever you are in your career today, you are not necessarily stuck there. I’ve heard time again from guests on How I Made It In Marketing about how they’ve been able to make dramatic, perhaps unlikely career shifts. On the flip side, if you are a hiring manager, do not pigeonhole potential recruits based only on their current experience. For as my latest guest puts it, ‘look past the CV.’ Hear t...

One of my favorite career analogies is the music video for No Rain, by Blind Melon. There’s a girl in a honeybee costume, dancing around, and she’s so sad because no one seems to care or understand.    And then one day, she comes across this field filled with people in honeybee costumes hopping and leaping around. A look of elation crosses her face, and she joins them to dance her best dance. Are...

Whatever it is you’re working on and struggling with, don’t pivot too soon. Make sure you give it enough time to work. For as this episode’s guest explains – resilience pays out. Frank Spitzer, CEO, Pelecanus , shares the story of how he grew his company’s YouTube channel from zero to 100,000 subscribes, along with many more lesson-filled stories. Pelecanus has $250,000 in annual revenue. Spitzer...

Coders are rewarded for writing new features, not for making their code as efficient as possible, Chirstopher Mims recently reported in The Wall Street Journal . According to the article, bloated software raises many risks, and costs the US alone $2.41 trillion due to cybersecurity issues, operational failures, and other problems. It would be easy for me to sit here and point the finger at softwar...

We as marketers, we’re the ones that make the brand promise to potential customers. So it is our job to make sure our companies actually come through on that promise, are consistent with that promise. We are the defenders of the brand. I love a lesson from my next guest – don't be afraid to say ‘no’ if it serves the brand. Which of course sounds good in theory but can be incredibly hard in pr...

Here’s something I get to do as a content writer that I never got to do as a copywriter – I sign my name to my work, and that gets displayed publicly. I’d like to think I was a conscientious writer before, but this makes me 10 times more so. And is a constant reminder that everything needs to be a certain level of awesome – no filler copy. Even when you don’t sign your name to something, it’s diff...

Rebranding. We use that term for companies. But what about for you? What is your current value proposition, and what would you like it to be…no matter where you are in your career? Because as my next guest has learned – it’s never too late to reinvent yourself. Here to share the story behind that lesson, along with many more lesson-filled stories, is Carlos Cantú, CMO, Freepik (https://www.freepik...

You know too much. You know too much. No this isn’t dialogue from a spy movie, I mean in your role as a marketer. You know too much about your product or service or whatever you’re asking your customer to do. And it makes it hard for you to see your advertising and your conversion funnel through the customer’s eyes. Or as my next guest put it in her podcast guest application – Be mindful of the ‘c...

If a podcast plays in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Bit of a cheeky thought experiment, I’ll admit, but here’s one thing I’ve noticed – we marketers don’t always create content for an audience, sometimes the audience is an afterthought. We’re too focused on an algorithm. Or a lead generation goal. Or a calendar. Or a process. So I love this lesson from a podcast q...

Think about the last time you read a piece of content that truly resonated with you. It could have been a news article, a blog post, or even a social media update. Now, consider what made that content impactful. Was it the way it was written, the story it told, or how it connected with your experiences? This brings me to a crucial aspect of marketing – the art of storytelling and the responsibilit...

“We can say that. Sure we can say that.” Oh, I do not like having to utter this phrase in meetings. Because it’s not what you can say, it’s what you should say. I’ve heard so many times ‘we can say that in an ad.’ Or ‘we can write a press release about this.’ Oh, the hubris in that statement. Because we get lulled into false confidence in the four walls of our offices, when we think we can make a...

I remember sitting next to someone at a conference, eating lunch, making small talk. And it came up that his brand had no competition. And I said, ‘wow, what a dream position to be in.’ I was used to working with a competitive sales office, hyper-focused on differentiating from competitors. You know, us vs. them. He said, ‘No, no, no. It’s not a dream position, it’s horrible. When you have competi...

When I was president of my homeowner’s association, it changed my walk through the neighborhood. Before I was on the board, it was – hey, how you doing, talk about sports, the weather, whatever.  But once I was on the board it became – I have an idea, we should have this, this should change, etc. And I’d always say – ‘Great, make it happen. We’re an all-volunteer organization, if you want it to ha...

I started my career as a copywriter, and I learned a key part of my value to any client or any employer was not just the way I shaped words or filled a block with text – it was to advocate for the customer. Take their viewpoint. To this end, being an ‘order taker’ was not going to help me create great copy. Or great marketing. I had to get underneath any requests or feedback I received from a clie...

Any industry, and our marketing industry is no exception, has a pack mentality. We say certain buzzwords and share certain ideas. But we can hear them ad nauseam, to the point where they just wash over us and don’t really mean anything. We nod in agreement at a networking event with a drink in our hand, but do we actually do anything about it the next day? Not really. We’re back to going through t...

In 1957, Vance Packard wrote a book called ‘The Hidden Persuaders,’ about the mysterious arts of advertising, and how advertising agencies research ways to manipulate people. I don’t know about you in your career, but I don’t want to be that guy. The way I see it, companies create value. And in a capitalist society of choice, they need to communicate that value to the ideal customer in a way that...