How to Lead Your Company to Success as a Lowly Marketing Professional

Like most of you reading this, I went to college.

I graduated.

I got slapped in the face by the real world.

I learned a lot in college. Mostly, they can all be summed up to 3 things: how to procrastinate, how to pass a class by only showing up for syllabus day and tests, and how to drink. None of which are highly sought after skills after graduation. Things like understanding SWOT or how to market intangibles vs tangibles is all B.S. If you really want to prepare yourself for the real world, learn and understand EXCEL. That’s a different topic for a different day.

The classes that I did go to with the professors that would say things like “This is super important and you’ll carry it with you for the rest of your professional career,” is B.S. I’m not saying that they didn’t know what they were talking about, but the marketing landscape changes constantly. To say things like “This is how you do it because this is how it’s been done before,” is a slippery slope and leads to lazy and mediocre marketers. It doesn’t matter if you’re on the business side, data science side, or the creative side; to lead any company to success boils down to understanding and embracing the following. Understand your niche and your product/service, develop a plan and stick to it.

I was fortunate (or unfortunate depending on how much of a pacifist you are) enough to go directly from graduation into a start-up. Let me be the first to tell you, that piece of paper that I had framed and hanging in my shoe-box of an apartment (if you could even call it that) in New York City meant nothing. Before I continue, please know that I highly recommend a college degree for anyone, especially those that work for me. Again, a college degree is important. Get one. Thank me later.

The startup was one of those life’s tough lessons and humbling experiences.

“Cool, you got all As? Take this program and optimize it. Also, we want to decrease our unsubscribe rates by 2% and increase our incoming MQLs by 15%. We want to start marketing to people who are actually interested in our services, so reach out to some agencies for Content Syndication and SEO/SEM. Also, here’s our CRM login. I’ve made you an Admin and you’ll need to create weekly reports on attribution and the lead lifecycle.” Um… I don’t remember that in my college courses… what the hell is an MQL?

This was a conversation I had with an Inside Sales Manager at the first company I was with. I didn’t say the response is it’s written, it was more along the lines of “You got it, I’ll work on it immediately.” Inside sales… I thought I was hired because of my stellar cover letter, GPA and solid marketing knowledge. Here was this salesperson telling me more about marketing in my first day than my entire college career. I didn’t understand half of what she was saying. Humbling.

Understand Your Niche / Understand Your Product

It’s one thing to say in an interview that you know the landscape and did your research. It’s another thing to actually understand it. As a marketer, you are the face and most times the voice of the brand. Own it. If you’re not confident yet, just repeat:

Understand the following about your product or service:

• What is the problem you’re trying to solve?
• How does it fit in the current landscape?
• What benefit does your product bring?
• How is your product unique?
• Why the hell should people care?

Ask to be a part of all conversations. This is especially important in a startup environment. Engineering meeting? — Yep, you’re going to want to know the ins and outs of the product. Sales meeting? — You bet. Legal meeting? — Why not? GDPR is real.

Develop a Plan and Stick To It

A sound plan is the foundation for you to stand on, beat your chest, and say you’re the best. A plan should consist of multiple channels, should be A/B testable, and include multiple tactics.

Social Media

Look, you don’t need me to tell you the importance of social media and how much of an impact it can be to yourself as a person or for the company. Good or bad, you can’t hate social media because it is what it is. Will it be around forever? Hell if I know, but I do know that while it’s here and it is such a big part of our society, ignoring it is doing a disservice to your company.

A sound social media strategy needs to be thoughtful. Don’t post things that don’t matter or aren’t relevant to your company and its audience. I tell everyone at NOVAM that if it doesn’t hit on any of our marketing pillars to either re-write it or get rid of it completely. You don’t see Kraft tweeting about the newest Porsche model.

Consistency is key. If you’re following someone, a company or news, you like to get your information regularly. Remember, people are following you because they are interested in what you are doing or have to say. Make sure it resonates with your audience and is timely. Showing that you care about your communication to the general population as much as you do about the content you’re writing, will create more WOM than any paid display ad will.

Content is King

I’m a firm believer that there is no such thing as too much content. Don’t confuse that with daily email blasts about a new blog or news story. Such a thing can lead to audience fatigue which isn’t a good thing and is what a lot of companies are trying to recover from. It can also lead to higher unsubscribe rates and less Open Rates and CTR.

What I mean is, if your team is willing to create or contribute content, the worst thing you can do is turn them away and not keep it. It doesn’t have to go on your site or have to be posted on social media, but you do want to file it away. You never know when you can use it for content syndication, blog posts, using snippets for social media, PR, the list goes on.

Just make sure the content is relevant to your customers or prospects and is on brand.

Community Engagement

This is something that I (possibly you) never learned in college. We didn’t have Reddit, Telegram, and other community forums that are part of everyone’s daily lives. However, that doesn’t make it any less important or valid because I or you didn’t spend an arm and a leg to learn about.

Today’s audience expects transparency and communication. They expect that if something goes wrong or they have a question they can pick up their phone or go to their keyboard and speak directly to the powers at be. Ignoring the community is ignoring your strongest supporters. Don’t do it. Be active, let people ask questions and ANSWER THEM!

I get asked a lot about how to build trust. It’s simple: be open to criticism, answer questions in a timely manner, and make communication feel like a 2-way street. The worst thing you can do with community engagement is ask questions, ask questions, ask questions, ask questions, but never answer them or offer support. Doing so will make you come off as Big Brother-ish and no one wants to be forced into trusting anyone.

Automation and Personalization

Once you understand automation and how to correctly use it, you’ll wonder why more things in your life aren’t automated to make your every-day life easier. Automation is a great way to give a personal touch to communication with almost zero effort on your part. Someone downloads a piece of content from your website? Follow-up with an email that says “Thank you, Johny!” Offer them similar pieces of content or resources to the one they just downloaded. The worst feeling as a consumer is buying something from someone and feeling like you’re just another dollar for them. It doesn’t matter if you’re a startup or Fortune 100. Everyone expects and should feel like they are your #1 prospect. Just don’t be creepy about it.

Adding a personalized touch to your automation will elevate your communication to the next level. Ask yourself this; when someone calls you or emails you that you don’t know, do you like them to say “Hi, I wanted to speak to you about our toilet paper and what people are doing with it.” Or, would you rather them say “Hey Johny, I wanted to speak to you about our toilet paper and what people are doing with it.”

I, for one, would give that salesperson more time using my name. Add in some other insights, like the whitepaper I downloaded and I’ll listen even longer. Will I buy his toilet paper? Maybe, but the fact that it feels like I’m speaking to someone that has done their research and tailored their pitch to me will lower my guard and give me more reason to be engaged. I’m using research lightly here because all of this information should be captured in your automation/CRM platform. Sure, they’re sales and that’s what they get paid to do. Why should marketing be any different? The answer is, we shouldn’t. If your company isn’t big enough to support an inside sales team or they just aren’t doing it, then do your professional career a favor and lead the charge.

Outside-of-the-Box Thinking

Start thinking outside of the box. Remember when I said ““This is how you do it because this is how it’s been done before,” is a slippery slope and leads to lazy and mediocre marketers?” It’s true. Now, I’m not saying that you need to jump out of planes or write your name/logo in crop circles. I mean, you can and that’s up to you, but what I’m trying to illustrate is sometimes the best marketing can be the most nontraditional. Be a trailblazer, swim upstream and other idioms people use as fillers.

In conclusion, take everything I’ve said with a grain of salt. Just because what I’ve done worked for me, does not mean it’ll work for you. Some of the best marketing ideas I’ve heard of come from people far removed from the practice; but their ideas are fresh and more often than not they’re coming from someone closer to an actual prospect than us marketers. We’re taught that marketing sits on this pedestal or that what we do is some type of black magic (words from my past CTO). We don’t, and it’s not. It’s about understanding your product, developing a plan, and more importantly understanding your audience.