Marketing in Real Life

Over the past few months I’ve built my team at Privy from a one-man show to a group of four that I am extremely proud of and excited to come work with every day. In that process, I talked to a lot of people, lots of whom I liked a lot—even if they weren’t the right fit for this company at this time. (Both of those matter.) Between that experience and my own job searches in the last few years, I’ve been thinking a lot about where the process goes right and where it goes wrong. Along the way, I’ve put together a few takeaways worth sharing for anyone in a similar position. While I haven’t always followed these rules, I certainly try. 1. This company and this time matter. There are lots of really smart people who could be a great hire in a vacuum. But as companies grow and change, so does the skill set needed to be successful. For example, early stage companies need doers who can think but can’t afford people who are unwilling to roll up their sleeves every day (at least for a w...

Wait, when did I become the "slow down" guy? Fast, not flawless. Get shit done. Ship it. Sell it.  All common startup expressions. And I love them all. It's why I began working at startups and something I always prided myself on before I even entered the startup world.  So, why do I feel like I've become the guy who keeps saying "can we just slow down a little?" Other than simply getting older and grayer (I mean more experienced), here are three reasons I've been pumping the brakes a little.  Some things need to simmer to be properly cooked: discuss over coffee, have a conversation without a decision, really listen, think bigger or wider. Big time customers expect more: whether you've officially crossed the chasm or not, when you get those awesome logos that your sales team loves it means you need to treat  them like the enterprises that they are. They didn't buy you because you're a startup, they bought from you to solve a pr...

I f you spend too much time doing your work the way other people want it, you risk losing what makes YOUR work great.  The trick is finding the balance of your own strengths and the needs/process of the people you work. That balance is what lets you create things that both you and your manager are proud of.

Hiring is hard.  Especially in a small company where one under-performer can put a big hole in the ship - the pressure to get it right is immense.  So, how do you know quickly if you've made a good choice for the short term and long term?  Here are three things I look for: They ask a lot of questions: Everyone wants to come in and add value from day one, but good employees know what they know and aren't afraid to get the information they need to get smart fast. While answering all of those questions takes a lot of time it's a good sign that they'll soak it all in and become a source of information for others over time. They set themselves free: New employees can be scared to go to other departments for help. It's human nature to be cautious when going out of the comfy confines of a team, but those are the people who will be advocates for your mission in short order and make themselves an integral part of the entire organization. They are hard on th...

If you have a strategy, a plan, and goals you're doing social media marketing. If not, you're just posting stuff.  Strategy = what do you want people to think or do do differently by interacting with your social posts? How do they connect to your brand? How far afield do you want to go from what you actually "do"? Plan = How many times a day or week are you going to post? Who is going to do it? Where does the content come from? How much of it will be yours v. sharing other people's content?  Goals = How will you know if it's working? What do you expect for audience growth on a weekly or monthly basis? How does that translate into business success for you? If you can't answer all of those questions, you're not really doing social media marketing. But don't get discouraged, posting is way better than nothing and a great step towards becoming a social media marketer!

If you're not always thinking about how to do it better next time, you're just not trying hard enough.  That's the difference between winning and losing in the long run.

"It's not your call." Those are four words that as a leader in a company you really hope you don't have to say. They are hierarchical and demeaning. They imply that one person is less important than another. They also mean that something in the process has broken down.  Sadly, when an issue can not be amicably resolved that's what we are left with.  "It's not your call" is a symptom of a bigger problem that needs addressing. And that's everyone's problem to solve.

No matter how many start up blogs you read, user testing sessions you conduct, market studies you digest... Nothing quite prepares you for the first few weeks of getting real customers for your product or service.  I'm going through it right now and like Stuart Smalley, I look at myself in the mirror every day and offer a positive affirmation because... 1.  All those people who said they could imagine using your product that made you feel awesome and excited... Most of them won't actually do it, or at least not right away. 2. Whatever your acquisition plans are for the long term, they won't work in the beginning.  It's hand to hand combat to get people to jump on board in the beginning and you just have to do things that you know won't scale. 3.  Bugs you pooh-pooed during testing are magnified 1000% when a "real person" can't get through a task.  Oh- and those same "real people" don't care that you're in a Beta. 4. Getting t...

When I was a kid, I wasn't quite as motivated as I could have been.  I wanted to do well but I did a lot of things half way  and then moved on.  Whether it was schoolwork or sports or music it was a trend for sure.   Which led to one of the most enduring conversations that I ever had with my dad.  It was all about effort and concentration. Effort: to do things as hard as I could for as long as it took. Concentration:  to focus on what I was doing and what I was trying to accomplish without being distracted. As I got older - and funnier, obviously - I changed it to be the F word and concentration.  But to this day it's a lesson I practice with everything I do. Thanks Dad!

Last week I spent 4 days at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival – my own personal Mecca full of great food, amazing music, wonderful people, and this year a really cool promotion from Samsung who is now one of the lead sponsors of the event.   My wife and I go to a lot of live music venues and usually find it incredibly easy to avoid and/or forget the on site promotions happening at any given time.   But this one was different.   The people behind it “got” the event they were at and left me wondering if I should abandon my ten+ year relationship with the iPhone for a Galaxy. There were three things in particular I loved about their set up – an interactive tent in the middle of the fairgrounds that made us go back multiple times to experience it. Samsung gave me a good reason to play with the product(s).  The promotion was simple, take a selfie on a Galaxy phone, fill out a quick quiz, and send it to yourself via one of the mail apps.  Then ...

I grew up in Boston in the 80's as a diehard Redsox, Bruins, and Patriots fan.  I yearned for victory because I knew they should be winning.  Close call after close call but our teams never quite got there.  Obviously that all changed with the Pats in 2001, the Sox in 2004, and bruins in 2011.  And those changes in championship stature helped confirm what I had always believed - that if your team worked hard enough and worked with both brains and brawn - anyone could win. This belief is something I've always stood by in my professional life as well.  When I worked for a 5 million dollar research agency, I knew that we could grow enough to become a top 50 firm.  When Constant Contact set out to build a social media tool I knew we could get huge numbers of smb's to use it.  And when I set out to find a job at an awesome early stage startup, I knew I could make it happen . But I guess I never really expected my small liberal arts college to tak...

This is the way the world should work, right?  People who have some financial means helping others chase down the things that are most important to them.   I'll admit that I am what my friend Kate would call - "capitalist hippy" but that notion certainly feels right to me.  It's all of the good parts of the internet wrapped into one.  A meeting of the minds where people can help one another do great things.     So yeah, I'm in on crowdfunding as a concept.   And I'm not alone.  Kickstarter - a site focused on funding creative projects - just announced that over 1 Billion dollars have been pledged on their site. With a B.  Other sites have received massive funding as they go global and extend their platforms.  And I've been able to help my favorite drummer, Stanton Moore, create a new album and support my friend Erin in bringing together an amazing dance show in Brooklyn without having to solely dig into her own pocket...

As a parent of a toddler boy, I've often found myself getting so frustrated, to a place I don't like, that I started doing some real self hard thinking about the causes (it’s the research background!). One of the major realizations I've had is that the frustration is in part because "working" with a toddler goes completely against how I spend most of my day as a marketer. And I know I'm not alone. In fact, I've seen lots of friends and colleagues who work with data struggle with toddler thinking. Don't get me wrong, parenting is obviously hard for everyone, but I wonder if it feels even harder for the modern marketer (or researcher) because of the way we are trained. We take pride in using data to identify what works and modifying what doesn’t. Unfortunately, my little dude seems to fall outside the realm of data integrity. Below are four things that are particularly confounding in our dual roles as parent and professional. 1) It's the journ...

As you probably may saw, Facebook turned ten this week and they've been thanking everyone they can reach for helping them get this far.  Businesses got a thank you note and every user got a cool look back video of their own experience with site.  Kudos on both! As a marketing professional, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Facebook.  Without it I would not be where I am today, and that's a fact.  In truth, lots of my friends wouldn't be and we are all grateful as users and as marketers. When I set up my first Facebook Page for Chadwick Martin Bailey I was just checking it out.  A year later we published research on why people like brands on Facebook and began making our way onto sites like Mashable , eMarketer and Wall Street Journal Online .   As a company we started doing more and more around the evolution of marketing and as a marketing team we were out in front of the whole market research industry. As an individual I secured speakin...

Without much budget, startups have to really be careful about investing too much in technology.  On the other hand, you need to use systems that will scale.   So, having worked recently at a SaaS company I was sympathetic to wanting to make a fair deal when I went searching for marketing on automation software knowing I needed to push a little bit harder than I might be comfortable with.   I'll spare you the three weeks of back and forth after I had decided what system I wanted... But the end result was shocking.  Let's just say I was able to get a discount over 50%.  OVER 50%!  And this was from a market leader.   After I went through stages of delirious laughter, anger about what I had paid in the past, sadness over how willing I was to take 29%, and pride in the deal I just got it hit me that the truth was that list price is a bit f a joke.  And that pushing hard is expected, and pushing really hard is acceptable.   So next time you're buy...

Back in October I started working at an early stage startup and said to myself… “Self, you should write a blog post about what you learn each week.”   Well, I have been negligent to this point but now I’m ready.   Here we go! Most startups I know take immense pride in “bootstrapping” and doing just enough to get investors and potential users excited.   We’re taking a very different tact and building for scale from day 1.   That means being extremely thorough in our product design, buying third party tools that will last, and hiring people who can execute in pre-launch, post-launch, and scaling worlds.    ( LinkedIn talks about this philosophy here .) Product Design:   Don’t just think through some of what might happen, think through all of what might happen. You may not want to build everything today but at least you’re making conscious decisions about what to wait on. Third Party Tools:   Unless you absolutely have to, don’t buy ...

Where I am seeing more and more trouble is the translation of that kind of internal thinking into the customer/user experience.  Especially on products that are not labeled as Alphas or Betas, but that are being sold  or promoted  as fully functional.   (If you’re piecing it together with duct tape behind the scenes, so be it, you can come back for tech debt later.) “Lean Startup isn't about being cheap [but is about] being less wasteful and still doing things that are big.” Simply put, your customers should never know that you’ve but an MVP in market.    That means paying attention to all of the details that create a great customer experience and not skimping on the work. Your marketing website:  Make it look good – I mean, really good.  You want people to know what they are signing up for and how it can help them without having to do a ton of work to find the answers. Your collateral:  Don’t just .pdf an internal w...

There are lots of great articles about how to be a "modern" marketer and even more about how to hire one.  The challenge is that everyone looking for a great job thinks they fit the bill and are eager to spout off catch phrases like Inbound Marketing, Demand Generation, and Content Marketing to impress the uninitiated. While lots of executives at companies of all sizes understand that the marketing landscape is changing, many of them don’t know exactly what they need or what they are looking for. So, how do you know if you or your interviewee fit the bill?     1.      The modern marketer looks at the whole funnel, not just the top of it.   They know the numbers and see acquisition, conversion and retention as their job (note the eMarketer data showing a focus on lead generation).  They think about lead quality not jut lead volume.  And they see working cross-functionally as a blessing, not a hassle. 2. ...

The kind that makes me feel smart.    We all love to be proven correct, right?    It feels good to have an opinion that is supported – even after the fact – by quantitative data.    If you use this type of information effectively, over time more and more of your hypotheses will be proven out unless something fundamentally changes in the marketplace or with what you are selling.   The kind that makes me smarter.   Believe it or not, I love being proven wrong almost as much as I love being proven right.  As a marketer – or person – it’s important to always remember that each of us is just a sample of one.  Our upbringing, our experiences, our mood all dictate they way we consumer information and react to messages.  The value of good quantitative data is that it rules out those personal biases and shows us what most people do, and where to focus our efforts for the biggest impact. Whether you are a researcher, an analyst, a market...

My company has a lot of internal dashboards.  We love metrics and keeping our eyes on them on a daily basis is what helps us be successful.  But lately some of the most important metrics we watch have started being sent around by our interns.  Don’t get me wrong, our interns are great. But is that really the best way to communicate?  Here are three reasons I think the answer to that question is no. 1) Loss of importance.   Again, I love interns but regardless of how great they may be I know that I am more likely to pay attention to something sent by a higher level employee.  Having a senior level person send the metrics also allows r some qualitative color to be added to the numbers. 2) What’s the feedback loop?   If I have a question about what I am looking at I’m not sure who to ask.  Do I ask the intern?  Their manager (if I know who that is)?  The fact that I’m not sure who to follow up with is a problem in itself....