MY APPROACH

Let’s have fun getting stuff done.

How I show up every day

I live my values: empathy, curiosity, hard work, humor & integrity.

In practice, these translate to:

  • Respect everybody. We’re all humans with talents, flaws, fears, and goals. Life and work can get pretty stressful, but it’s vital that we value each other, especially when times get hard.

  • Be honest. Sometimes, mistakes just happen. Coverups don’t. Own up fast so you can get back to work fast.

  • Communicate well. My first love was language: reading, writing, and speaking. Storytelling is an art form and writing well is a game. Whether through words, gifs, or graphs, I communicate with intention and care.

  • Speak plainly. Did you “masticate the triglycerides”? Chew the fat? No! You chatted. (Let’s chat!)

  • Be strategic. Have a vision, make a plan, and learn from the details.

  • Stay organized. Mind reading is for sci-fi, not real life. We all work better when we’re on the same page—and documentation is worth its weight in gold crypto chocolate chip cookies.

  • Work smarter... If you can automate it, template it, or process-doc it, you should. Creativity and job satisfaction flourish when we don’t have to waste time, energy, and patience reinventing the wheel.

  • …AND harder. If you’re not busting your butt for something you believe in, why are you there?

  • Have fun. We each have 168 hours per week to live our lives. Spending 40 together shouldn’t wear us down.

  • Stay curious. There’s always something new to learn.

  • Appreciate each other. Life is short and business is business. It’s worth your time and effort to be human.

The key to successful marketing

Creating a successful business usually looks like this:

  1. Recognize a gap in the marketplace

  2. Create an impressive product or service that meets this need

  3. Communicate that offering’s value when, where, and how your target audience wants

  4. Deliver what you say you will (or more)

  5. Repeat

For marketing to be successful–that is, increase brand awareness, engage potential leads, and connect them to sales–only one thing matters:

Does your offer impress the right people?

If it’s the wrong offer to the right people, your marketing will fail.

If it’s the right people with the wrong messaging, your marketing will fail.

If it’s the right people with great messaging and a lackluster product, your marketing will fail.

If it’s an impressive offer, great messaging, and the right audience, but your teams are too siloed or inefficient to do the marketing well, your marketing will fail.

Successful marketing happens when marketing leaders are empowered-–that is, given the trust, time, and resources—to evaluate the following things:

  • Product. Is it actually a good product? Really? Be honest. Exuberantly marketing an objectively bad product is lying, and potential customers can spot that a mile away. Good marketing relies on a good product.

  • Audience. Have you done the research to understand who your target audience really is, what they actually want, how they prefer to consume information, how long it takes to convert them, etc.? Do you have data-driven personas and customer journeys that product, marketing, and sales all agree on? Good marketing relies on a good understanding of your target audience.

  • Messaging. Are you speaking your customer’s language or the language you think they speak? Or, even worse, the language someone else thinks they speak? The medium is the message, so this applies not only to what you say, but where, when, and how you say it. Good marketing relies on good messaging.

  • Operations. Do your marketers have all the right foundations, but still aren’t delivering results? How well do they work with each other? How well do they work, period? Are they empowered to deliver their best work? Good marketing relies on good team operations.

In short, good marketing is customer centric and data driven. 

It doesn’t matter if it’s SEO, email campaigns, social posts, paid ads, or events. At the end of the day, each of these can be distilled into how well you understand your target audience and how well you offer them what they want.

NOTE: If you read the above and thought, “That’s not realistic for our company/our team/our budget!”, please remember to adjust your expectations of your marketing team, as well. If you want excellent results, empower your marketers to give you those results.

How to create an incredible marketing engine

Most companies that want a more effective marketing team push themselves to do more. More effort means better results, right?

More ads! More web content! More meetings! More hires! More KPIs! 

It’s like building muscles. If you want a strong, muscular physique, you should just lift more heavy things every day until you reach your goals. Do more and you’ll see results faster!

Wrong. 

That’s how you injure yourself and burn out.

In business, “just do more” almost always comes at the expense of quality, analytics, and the mental health of the team.

It’s the opposite of strategic.

It’s doing a lot of work now–-to show leadership some numbers–-but it actually rarely works to scale the business.

To create a sustainable, successful, incredible marketing engine, marketing leaders need to overcome a few tough hurdles:

1. Slow down. 

Yes, this one’s the toughest. 

In the age of AI, when everyone’s competing for attention in saturated spaces, when budgets are tighter and teams are spread thinner, it may sound insane to say “Let’s pause.”

But if you want to do things the right way instead of just doing them, slowing down is the first step.

There’s no magic bullet here, either. Slowing down requires drawing a boundary, then effectively communicating why, what leadership can expect instead, and by when.

Slowing down is how you transform radical expectations from leadership into radical transformation of your results.

2. Be more strategic.

Does your marketing team have what they need from the foundations we talked about earlier? Product? Audience? Messaging? Operations? This is where you start.

Sample questions include:

  • What makes you or your leadership think you don’t have time to do this vital exercise? What does that mean for how you approach being more strategic in the future?

  • Do you have a marketing strategy? Or just tactics? Who sets your strategy? When was it last updated? Does it include this year’s market research, trends, or tools?

  • When did you last interview existing customers? What did you ask them? How did those answers change your approach?

  • How detailed are your style guides and documentation? Can anyone on your team leave for a week with no material consequence to your team effectiveness?

  • How robust are your analytics tools? How clean is your data? Who defines these things? How well do your teams understand their KPI’s? When did you last check?

  • Why did you choose the channels, messaging, and frequency you’re currently using? Is it working? How do you know?

  • Are you expecting certain behaviors from customers on platforms who make money from the opposite behaviors? What changes should you make to your customer journeys based on these expectations?

3. Simplify. 

I’d bet good money that every company finishing the above exercise will eliminate at least one recurring “large” task, if not many more.

Internally, simplify your schedule, your deadlines, and your reporting.

Externally, simplify your messaging, where you show up, and what you expect from the real humans you’re trying to engage with.

It’s the role of marketing leaders to teach company leadership what to expect from good marketing instead of what they’ve learned to expect from “good enough” marketing.