10 Things I Wish Someone Told Me As A First Time Marketing Leader

This is your chance to learn from my mistakes.

I’ve been a Marketing, Product, and Growth leader at a number of companies, across industries, and at very different stages.

It’s mostly gone pretty well, but I’ve also hit some rough patches and learned some things the hard way.

In this article, we’ll walk through some of my most painful lessons as well as some advice that I think any aspiring Marketing leader needs to hear.

If you’re a Marketing leader or Growth leader, aspiring to be, or just want to learn from someone else’s mistakes rather than making them for yourself, this one is for you.

Let’s start with my background to give you some context.

Before getting into Marketing, I had a “typical” data career path… Data Analyst → Senior Analyst → Manager of Analytics → Director of Analytics, did an evening MBA, and started a Masters of Predictive Analytics, also at night. I loved the career path and planned to keep going deeper in data.

Then I joined a startup and accidentally became a Marketing guy after taking on a “side project” managing the company’s paid search campaigns. I found out Marketing was super fun, and I haven’t looked back since.

My first Marketing leadership role was taking over customer acquisition for a company with a $50M ad budget. Next, I joined a pre-revenue FinTech company as Head of Marketing and the 3rd hire. After that, joined an online notarization startup and quickly pivoted to a Product and Growth role. Then finally found myself at Maven Analytics, where I lead Marketing and Growth.

Here are 10 of the things I wish someone had told me when I was just getting started as a Marketing leader…

1. Hire your weaknesses. Use every new hire as a chance to add a unique skill to the team.

I watched a mentor do this very well. And then I experienced getting it wrong first hand because I didn’t follow her example until later.

Let’s start with where I screwed things up…

The first time I built out a Marketing team, I made a couple of “mini me” hires. I was handing off work on my plate, and thought I needed to replicate myself to do it. Plus I could easily evaluate talent that matched my profile.

Please, don’t do this.

Sure, it helped us scale in the things we were already doing. But it missed out on expansion opportunities. Adding more similar capacity did nothing to help us explore brand new areas and bring diverse skills to the team.

Luckily, I did some reflecting and was able to course correct fairly quickly.

I thought about a mentor of mine who had built a truly great Marketing team. How had she done this?

Perhaps the most important thing she did was being really conscious about hiring her weaknesses and adding brand new skills to the team.

She was awesome when it came to strategy, was super creative, and was really great at knowing the customer. But, she wasn’t super quantitative and she wasn’t a channel marketing expert. So she hired one.

Each time she was hiring someone, she tried to bring in a different type of person who could do the job. The result was a consciously diverse group of people, and it was really effective for the business.

On my later teams, I have tried to adopt this philosophy and I think it’s gone pretty well.

Next time you’re hiring someone, ask “does this person make us better at something we’re not good at yet”?

2. The 80/20 rule shows up everywhere. Don’t try to fight it.

You’re probably familiar with the 80/20 rule, also known as the Pareto Principle, which says that 80% of your outcomes will come from 20% of your activities.

The Pareto Principle shows up everywhere in Marketing.

80% of your new business is probably going to come from 20% of your marketing activities or channels.

As much as I have tried to fight this one, it’s almost always true.

Why try to fight it? In a dream world, you want diversity in all things as a Marketing leader. You don’t ever want all of your eggs in one basket, especially if that basket is somewhat out of your control like a marketing channel you are using to acquire customers. What if that channel changes? What if competition comes in and muscles you out? So yea, of course we would love 10–20 marketing channels with an equal share of new customers coming from each of them.

Time and time again, I have tried to create more balance in the Marketing activities that are driving business. I’ve tried to build more of an even mix portfolio of activities. But I have found it’s usually just not realistic. No matter how hard you try, it’s likely you may find yourself reliant on one, two, or maybe three channels or activities to drive most of the growth of the business. It will feel risky, and you will want to create more diversification, but it’s quite possible you won’t be able to.

My advice here is to continue to try and create that dream diversified portfolio of activities and channels that are working, but to be realistic. Make sure you give those heavy hitters the attention they deserve. Never take them for granted.

When my team and I have messed up, it’s been moving too quickly toward expansion in pursuit of diversification, and not nurturing the established pipelines as much as we should have been.

It’s an unpopular thing to say, but 20% of your team is likely producing 80% of your results. Just like with the marketing activities and channels, you can’t really fight this, no matter how hard you try.

Make sure you know who those 20% of people are, and check in with them regularly to make sure they are happy and feeling challenged and appreciated.

3. Word of mouth is the most valuable acquisition channel. Cultivate it by taking some Product ownership.

Some people think shaping the product isn’t Marketing’s job and they should get out of the Product team’s way.

I’ll give you a couple of counterpoints to that argument:

1. In Marketing, we have a lot of surface area interacting with our potential customers. We get to can hear what they like about the product, what they don’t like about it, who else they are considering, and what pain points they are trying to solve. All of this info is super useful, and we often have access to it as part of our core role.
2. We also tend to be obsessed with understanding how new customers are finding us. Including measuring word of mouth referrals. Understanding how WOM is growing for a business is a great indicator of how much your customers are truly falling in love with your product. Marketing tends to have the best pulse on how this is going.

For these reasons, Marketing tends to have a lot of great feedback to share with the Product team and can and should help shape the product.

Make sure that you build in a process to do this regularly. If you’re lucky, your Product counterpart is already trying to get this set up with you. But you should take some ownership of it too. They will appreciate it.

Why is doing this so important?

Nothing makes the job of a Marketer easier than having a truly great product that customers love.

And nothing grows a company better than truly satisfied customers sharing their happy experiences and driving new business through word of mouth.

All other marketing channels work for a while and then become harder as you scale your business.

Paid advertising? Need to spend more money to acquire more customers? Those auction prices are going up as you scale.

Content marketing? You’ll find that you’ll cap out at some point, regardless of the channels you are playing in.

Word of mouth? This one looks different. As your customer base grows, that’s more referrals. It has a beautiful compounding effect, at least until you have saturated your market.

The other thing you can do is work to promote word of mouth within the product. For example, at Maven Analytics, we issue credentials when students complete course work, and we make it easy and compelling for them to share those credentials online to show off their new skills. This is a form of word of mouth that we have built into the product. Building in growth loops like this is extremely important. If there’s no Growth team at your company, then make sure that either your Product leader or you as the Marketing leader are thinking about this. If no one has it covered, take some ownership.

Let’s talk about how it feels running Marketing for companies with different levels of “word of mouth worthiness”…

I’ve been part of a company where no one knew our name and we grew entirely through paid acquisition. We got a new customer, saved them some money, and then they forgot we existed an hour later. Word of mouth was non-existent, and we started from scratch every time we went to acuire a new customer.

I’ve also been part of companies like Maven Analytics where the customers truly love the product, and where word of mouth is the largest driver of new business because people are so happy they want to share us with their friends and coworkers. In this case, every new customer you acquire leads to word of mouth referral opportunities, so your success compounds. As your customer base grows, they will be referring more and more new customers each month.

I love Maven Analytics and can’t picture leaving. But if I were ever going to leave to join a new company, one of the first questions I would ask a potential employer is “what share of your new customers are coming from word of mouth”. If the answer is a large percentage, it’s going to be a really fun product to work on, and it’s going to make my job as a Marketer much easier.

For more on why word of mouth is so important, check out Sam Altman’s essay: The Only Way To Grow Huge

4. Product market fit isn’t everything. You need channel market fit too. Customer LTV will dictate what channels you can afford to play in.

Everyone loves to talk about companies finding product market fit, but product channel fit is discussed much less frequently, at least outside of growth teams.

It’s not enough to have a product or service your customers want to buy. You have to find channels that work for delivering it to them, and which work economically.

Sounds obvious, sure. But here’s the useful part that a lot of folks miss… the amount of revenue you will get from your customers is going to dictate how you can sell it to them.

What exactly does that mean? Let’s use some examples…

If your product is free or really inexpensive and produces a smaller amount of revenue, then a couple of things are true…

• There won’t be much friction slowing your down when acquiring a new customer (it’s cheap, so it’s easy for them to pull the trigger)
• You can’t afford to spend much to acquire them, otherwise your business would be upside down

This means that certain marketing tactics are off the table, and others are likely to be more effective.

For example, with a free product like Instagram that generates a relatively low revenue per user via ads, a Sales team (probably the most expensive distribution channel you’ll ever see) would be out of the question when trying to acquire new users. Those users aren’t worth it economically. Products like this have to grow on the cheap, relying on virality and SEO. You also don’t need a Sales team because free / low cost products have lower friction and it doesn’t take much to convince someone to sign up or purchase. If it’s free, seeing a friend use it might be enough to get a new user to try it out.

As the LTV gets a little higher like with a meal prep service like Blue Apron, you can start to invest in paid advertising to acquire customers. With more money coming out of the customer’s pocket, it takes a little more to convince them, so growing through virality starts to be less realistic. That’s where you start hitting them with targeted paid ads to convince them how awesome your product is. And because the LTV is higher, you can afford to spend some money to acquire a customer.

For products with a really high LTV, like enterprise software solutions, there is a lot of friction before the purchase. If they’re committing to thousands of dollars a month or year in contracts, they’re going to have a lot of questions and there will likely be a number of decision makers involved. You’re not going to get the job done with paid ads. This is where you need, and can afford, to have a Sales team navigating the purchase process with your buyers.

Where I got this wrong was joining a company to lead Paid advertising only to later realize the customer LTV was too low, and didn’t really support paid at all. It was the first time I had ever worked on such a low LTV product, and it was a really painful lesson for me.

5. There are no “unicorns” that can do everything. You need a diverse team to be successful.

Early in my Marketing journey I had the unfortunate experience of working with a founder who I thought could walk on water.

This guy was a successful founder, had created a great product, built his own website, raised venture money, and had driven his early marketing channels before handing them off to a marketing team.

In my mind, he was a unicorn, who could do literally everything the business needed to be successful.

I really looked up to him and that led to an unrealistic picture of his abilities.

In reality, while he was a truly impressive talent, no one can do it all. We all have strengths and weaknesses, and the most successful among us know where our abilities fall short, and find people to work with who can cover our blind spots.

My advice to you is to understand early, and fully, that Marketing is a team sport.

Don’t try to do everything yourself. Be realistic about where you can crush it and where you should look for help.

And don’t expect to find a unicorn you can hire to solve all of your problems either. It’s not going to happen.

Instead, aim for the most realistic picture you can get of your own strengths and weaknesses, and those of the people on your team, and use that understanding to make the right decisions about which activities to lean into and who to hire next.

6. When it comes to team-rallying KPIs, less is more.

My background prior to marketing was data. So I was used to looking at every metric under the sun.

But when you’re leading an organization, you need to keep it simpler, and come up with a small number of key performance indicators that the team can rally around.

If you try to do too much here, a couple of things happen…

1. It’s easy for people to get overwhelmed by too much data
2. When you’re presented with 10 metrics to watch, it’s hard to focus on the 1–3 that really matter.

So instead of taking the kitchen sink approach, here’s what I would recommend you do instead…

Focus on 1–2 “North Star” metrics that the entire company can feel invested in. For example, at Maven Analytics, we use the total number of active subscribers on the platform.

Then, underneath your North Star metrics, you can go a little deeper with metrics that individual teams can focus on, to show them the levers they can pull to help the business. For example, underneath the total active subscribers North Star, our Maven for Teams Marketing team focuses on new team training accounts signed up, and our Customer Success team focuses on customer retention.

If you don’t believe me, try this out for yourself.

In my experience, you’ll have the most success keeping it to 1–2 high level company metrics that you put on a scoreboard people can see in real-time, and then a small subset of next level metrics for the individual teams to see how much their initiatives are helping.

7. Not everything worth doing will be measurable.

This one was a tough pill for me to swallow coming from a data career and starting my Marketing career in paid ads where things are almost perfectly measurable.

With paid ads, you spend money, you track every click, you see what happens on those clicks, and you know exactly how much revenue you make from those clicks. Measuring and understanding the ROI of your initiatives is relatively simple.

But there are other things you’ll likely do in Marketing that won’t be as easy (or even possible) to measure the ROI of. Here’s an example…

When I started at Maven about three years ago, I split my time pretty evenly between two things… half of it on paid advertising on Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn, and the other half creating organic content for our blog and social channels.

With my background, I expected paid ads to be the thing that would grow the business. It’s always how I had done it before. But that’s not how it went at all.

It was hard for us to get the paid model to work. My read to this day is that an all-access subscription service to learn data analysis and data literacy skills online was a mental model people didn’t have, and with Maven relatively unknown at the time, it was hard to get someone to sign up for a recurring charge with a company they hadn’t heard of. This is exactly what our paid ads were trying to do. Performance was poor. It was a totally upside-down model spending way more than the revenue it brought in. But on the positive side, it was very measurable.

Our content efforts on the other hand were really hard to measure. We spent our energy creating free lessons to help people learn, which we then published on our blog and shared on social channels. People liked the content, and we started to build some pretty big audiences in places like LinkedIn (now 135k+ followers) and TikTok (220k+ followers), and as those audiences grew and potential customers got to know us, our business grew as well. The tricky part here is that we didn’t have the same measurement abilities as we had with paid, so I wasn’t as confident at first. When someone gets to know us on LinkedIn, and then later does a Google Search for “Maven Analytics” or just types mavenanalytics.io into their browser, unless we ask them how they found us (we do not, we didn’t originally) we have no way to attribute that customer to LinkedIn’s efforts. And even today, when we do get some channel-level attribution from asking our customers how they found us, we’ll never know the exact post(s) or other activities that drove them to us on those channels. We know they came from “LinkedIn” but that’s as granular as it gets. The measurement is much more murky. But that’s okay. Organic content and social is still our biggest channel, and is certainly worth doing.

So back to three years ago when we were piloting paid and content marketing with a new online learning product. Even though I couldn’t say with certainty content was the reason our business was starting to take off, it definitely felt that way, and the more our audiences grew on social channels, the more our organic signups poured in. It “felt” like content was winning. Despite not having the perfect click-level measurement I was used to, we made the call to kill all of our paid ad spend and double our efforts in content marketing. I was nervous about it. It was weird to spend so much of our resources on activities that were less measurable. We saved all of the money we had been spending on ads, and not only did growth not slow down, but it actually accelerated as we focused more energy on content.

Do we measure our content strategy today?

Of course we do. But it’s different than we would measure a paid strategy.

When customers sign up, we ask them “how did you hear about Maven Analytics”. They tell us things like “from LinkedIn” or “a YouTube video”. This lets us measure the overall impact of those channels.

In terms of the individual social posts or videos we put out, we are never going to have the ability to measure the customer signups driven by each specific post. It’s not possible. So instead we focus on within-channel traction (how many LinkedIn impressions / engagements does a post get for example) and leave the customer acquisition metrics to be analyzed at the overall channel level via the self-reported data.

My somewhat painful lesson here is that I was expecting to measure content the same way I had always measured paid. And that’s just not possible. If I had to do it over knowing what I know now, I would start measuring content correctly from the start, would be more okay with the murky measurement, and use the more basic data we did have to make a call quite a bit earlier.

8. You will need new skills as a leader.

As an individual contributor in Marketing, it’s all about your own output. What results could YOU produce.

But the skills that got you into a leadership position because of your success as an IC are not going to make you successful as a leader.

You’re going to go through a major shift, and need to focus on what results THE ENTIRE TEAM can produce. This is how you’ll be judged.

When you start to lead the Marketing team and you need to focus on these things…

1. Hiring / building the team
2. Vision / the story
3. Prioritization
4. Mentoring
5. Unblocking your team

Maybe somewhere at the very bottom of the list is the work you’ll still do with your own two hands. But it’s so much more important to leverage yourself with great people, point them in the right direction, make sure they are focusing on the right things, growing, and not hitting any roadblocks that are keeping them from being productive.

Personally, I think doing this well gets really hard if you have any more than 5 direct reports. I’m probably triggering someone with this number, but I think it’s about right. Much bigger than that, and it gets hard to give each person the attention they really deserve, and when you start to spread too thin, it will have negative implications for your team.

9. You will need to delegate more than you are comfortable with.

You got into a Marketing leadership position because you were a good Marketer.

So it’s natural to think about the activities that you do best, keep them on your plate, and hire a team around you that can cover your weaknesses or the activities you don’t like working on.

And this a good approach to get started with.

The problem here is that as you grow your team, if you tendency is to keep activities on your plate, you will have trouble scaling and moving fast.

If this is how you think, I guarantee you will become the bottleneck, over and over.

This is one I have definitely been guilty of. It’s been really hard for me to let go of things I’ve enjoyed working on and have done well with.

But every time I do let go of something, I always think, “wow, I should have done that sooner. Now I have so much more time to think about where we need to be headed next”.

This is the mentality you need to have as much as possible. Keep as little on your plate as possible, so can focus on empowering and unblocking your team members, and setting the vision and priorities for the organization.

The other thing that happens when you become a super delegator is your team members feel more ownership of their work and tend to perform better. With smaller, micro-managed tasks, it’s hard to get excited. But when given an area of ownership, your team members with be energized and excited to deliver great results.

10. You need to learn to think like the CEO, fast.

Earlier in your career as a Marketer reporting to a VP of Marketing or similar, you’ve been shielded from the CEO. You focused on your work, and your VP of Marketing was a shield for you. Now you’re the shield, and the CEO wants results from your team.

Now you’re going to be the one accountable.

Revenue numbers are on the board, and it’s your job to make sure they look great.

There is nowhere to hide anymore. Results are everything, and the buck stops at you.

You have to be thinking about both juicing today’s numbers, and watering the seeds you are planting to deliver results for the next couple of quarters. Balancing this type of short-term and long-term planning can be hard, especially for folks who have had narrow scopes in the past.

You’ll need to think about your marketing activities as a portfolio.

Which channels and activities are driving the most volume today?

Which smaller channels have promise but aren’t of material size yet. How can you nurture them to maturity?

What things could you be doing that you aren’t doing yet?

It’s not necessarily your job to answer all of these questions and execute on everything. But you do have to take ownership that the team is collectively thinking this way, and that the work gets done. And yes, usually it is you answering strategic questions like this, with the help of your team.

Wrapping up: it’s a fun career path that’s rewarding in a number of ways.

If you’re transitioning to a Marketing leadership role or are on the fence about it, know that it can be a really fun and rewarding path.

Especially if you are someone who is competitive, likes having a scoreboard to measure your results, and likes a combination of creative and analytical work, Marketing leadership can be a great fit.

And for everyone reading this, I hope some of these lessons have been useful to you.