How I Made it in Marketing
Marketers are the artisans of commerce. Our palette is ideas. We ply our craft to facilitate choice. To empower every person creating value in the world – sharing their inventions, their service, their good works. And ultimately, to keep a society built on choice functioning.But also…This is one of the most fun, wildly creative, never-grow-up, 99% boring meetings followed by 1% of sheer creative brilliance, funny-yet-frustrating-yet-fruitful career choices you can make.Let’s explore the dichotomy.In this podcast, Daniel Burstein of MarketingSherpa dives deep into marketers’ and entrepreneurs’ careers to inspire your next great campaign, give you strategies for winning approval on your ideas, and help you navigate the trickiest decisions in your career. The curious, comprehensive style of these interviews allows marketing and business leaders to do what they do best – express themselves to communicate a key lesson.Listen in as we probe marketing leaders about how they crafted campaigns, built their careers, and what they learned along the way. We’ll get deep, we’ll wring insights form our guests to help you, and we’ll have fun doing it.This podcast is not about marketing – it is about the marketer. It draws its inspiration from the Flint McGlaughlin quote, “The key to transformative marketing is a transformed marketer” from the Become a Marketer-Philosopher online course (https://meclabs.com/course/).
Episodes
155 episodes
IT Consultancy Marketing: A marketing and sales team divided cannot stand (episode #155)
Blandvertising [https://marketingexperiments.com/copywriting/writing-meaningful-copy].It’s a word I coined 13 years ago to describe a wishy-washy marketin...
Public Relations and Marketing: Don’t underestimate the soft sell (podcast episode #154)
Some of the best conversations I have with my kids are during filler time. Not the quality time you hear hyped up – just a side conversation over breakfast, or driving to an errand, or putting together Ikea furniture.Marketing and public...
Analytics: Even the most rigorous analysis fails without the right story (episode #153)
I am not a numbers guy. And I’ve been in my fair share of meetings with decks filled with endless charts and data and my eyes glazed over. I’m sure you have as well.So were we the problem? Were we just not captivated enough by the correl...
Online Marketing for SMBs and Digital Agencies: Serving everyone serves no one (episode #152)
The total addressable market. TAM.We sometimes think the bigger the better, right? Hey, it means I can go to potential investors with a more impressive number.But too large a total addressable market can hinder success. As this ep...
Cross-cultural Marketing & Management: Walk the market (podcast episode #151)
Data, data everywhere, but not a drop of insight.Excuse my remixing of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but doesn’t it feel that way when staring at a dashboard sometimes.We have so much data – and frankly, our competitors probably have a...
Real Estate Operations and Marketing: Your brand is only as strong as your frontline experience (episode #150)
I love Delta Air Lines. It’s my favorite airline. Please understand that.Now, that said, when I was a kid, their tagline was ‘We love to fly and it shows.’I would see the tagline on TV ads. I would see it on giant posters in the a...
Customer-First Marketing: To truly be customer-obsessed, respect the customer’s time (episode #149)
I know the pinch when budgets tighten, customers shift, and deadlines close in. Yet, marketers have a superpower: like Superman’s X-ray vision, we see through constraints to the core idea.That is the essence of our craft – not waiting fo...
B2B SaaS Marketing: No progress after Series A without product marketing (episode #148)
Let’s step into these shoes for a minute. You’re the sole marketer at a B2B startup. You’ve been hustling, pitching investors, and finally you close your Series A. Suddenly, you have the budget to make real progress. What do you do next?...
Open-Source Start-up Marketing Strategy: Sometimes you need to poke the snake (episode #147)
I love the movie City Slickers.If you’re unfamiliar, Billy Crystal is a Manhattanite, has a midlife crisis, and goes out West on a cattle drive to try to figure life out.Spoiler alert, the crusty old cowboy teaches him that the se...
How to Build Reddit and Discord Communities That Drive Sales: Music industry secrets that work for any business (episode #146)
Instead of burning budgets on Facebook ads, Talya Elitzer, CEO, Overmind Merchandise [https://www.overmind.co/], grows global merch sales with just seven employees by building worlds, not products.I...
Customer Experience: Great experiences are invisible, but they require relentless alignment (episode #145)
“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”That is a famous quote from Anton Chekhov, and it has informed everything I personally do in writing and marketing. And it’s why I was so excited...
Telecommunications Marketing: Marketing is the chief customer advocate (podcast episode #144)
Yes, the Super Bowl ad. How exciting. The experiential activation with the major influencer. The new branding campaign roll out. So wonderful.But don’t stop there.You could have the most compelling and creative ad campaign, but if...
Trade Association Branding: Formalize the brand and consistency will come (podcast episode #143)
It’s a noisy world out there.So anytime you have that most valuable of things – a small window into your ideal customer’s attention span – are you clear and memorable with your value proposition?Of course, that is all the more com...
Brand Builder: Be human first – people drive brands (podcast episode #142)
Data-driven marketing.That is an oft-repeated phrase in our industry. It’s hard to find a LinkedIn profile that doesn’t make a claim of being a data-driven marketer these days.And while data is helpful, it’s not the only thing tha...
Marketing for Business Services: When the world changed, so did we (episode #141)
Timing is key to successful marketing.If you broke it down, that’s probably a third of it. Right offer to the right prospect…at the right time.But how well do you focus on timing for your personal brand in your own career?Y...
Marketing & Communications: It’s important to ‘take a beat’ (podcast episode #140)
If there’s one word that defines what I’ve seen in the marketing industry in my career, it’s ‘acceleration.’When I started, I was writing print ads in The Wall Street Journal for clients all over the country. So the deadline was when Fed...
Influencer Marketing: Focus on one thing (episode #139)
As an entrepreneur, as a marketer, the world is conspiring to grab your attention and distract you.For example, when I started in this career, there were really only a few channels you could go to. Newspaper. TV. Radio. Direct. Maybe out...
Creative Marketing Leadership: Strike a balance between management and production (podcast episode #138)
Career growth is a funny thing.That is the goal after all right? Junior copywriter, Senior copywriter, creative director, etc.? We all want a career path.But that journey towards something – often people leadership – can also pull...
Authentic Brand Transformation: To build a brand that lasts, consider rebranding a team sport (episode #137)
I’ll tell you what happened in my career before. Maybe you’ve been there, too.There’s a sponsorship, sometimes a fairly high-profile sponsorship, and I have gotten asked to write it about it in an ad or email…but, there wasn’t really a s...
Cybersecurity Marketing: You don’t need to scare people to sell them security (episode #136)
FUD. Fear, uncertainty, doubt.I first learned about this sales and marketing tactic – which is aimed at influencing perceptions by highlighting potential negative outcomes – early in my career when working with big tech companies....
DTC Ecommerce Digital Marketing: Sell outcomes, not products (episode #135)
The artificial intelligence revolution is upon us. Today we see AI doing everything from taking orders in a drive-thru to serving as a pseudo boyfriend or girlfriend.But, according to my most recent guest, more importantly – AI boosts re...
Security Marketing: Customers will tell you how to market to them if you ask them (episode #134)
There are always tough times as you build and grow a startup.So how do you keep a team going when times are tough? ‘Culture is the glue’ my next guest says.To hear the story behind that lesson, along with many more lesson-filled s...
Analytics: Driving business value matters more than perfect models (episode #133)
Want to move up in your organization? Here’s the best advice I’ve gotten in my career – ‘train others to replace you.’Hey, it’s a bit scary. If others can replace you, it’s easy to fire you, right? However, if you’re truly providing valu...
DTC Ecommerce: Your worst friend is still better than your best marketing (episode #132)
I realize everyone who listens to How I Made It In Marketing is not a marketer, per se.Entrepreneurs also listen. Not native to our industry, so to speak, but you still need to know it well enough to get customers…so you can run your bus...
Premium Consumer Goods & Luxury Retail: Happy makes money (episode #131)
Perception changes everything.Think about many of the chores your customers endure in their lives. Or you do personally. The perception of a chore is not positive, right?Take shaving – dragging a sharp metal object across your fac...